Phonological facilitation in picture-word interference experiments: Effects of stimulus onset asynchrony and types of interfering stimuli.

Subjects named pictures while hearing distractor words that shared word-initial or word-final segments with the picture names or were unrelated to the picture names. The relative timing of distractor and picture presentation was varied. Compared with unrelated distractors, both types of related distractors facilitated picture naming under certain timing conditions. Begin-related distractors facilitated the naming responses if the shared segments began 150 ms before, at, or 150 ms after picture onset. By contrast, end-related distractors only facilitated the responses if the shared segments began at or 150 ms after picture onset. The results suggest that the phonological encoding of the beginning of a word is initiated before the encoding of its end. A central concern of current research on language produc-tion is to determine which planning processes are carried out in parallel and which are executed in sequence. For example, one important question is the time course of the access to meaning and form of a word. Whether these two processes overlap in time or represent strictly successive stages and whether feedback is possible from word forms to meanings are highly controversial issues (e.g., Dell & Reich, 1981;