Semantic interference in immediate and delayed naming and reading: Attention and task decisions

0749-596X/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Inc doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.01.004 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Radboud Unive ders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Spinoza Building B.01.05, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 Netherlands. E-mail address: [email protected] (V. Piai). Disagreement exists about whether lexical selection in word production is a competitive process. Competition predicts semantic interference from distractor words in immediate but not in delayed picture naming. In contrast, Janssen, Schirm, Mahon, and Caramazza (2008) obtained semantic interference in delayed picture naming when participants had to decide between picture naming and oral reading depending on the distractor word’s colour. We report three experiments that examined the role of such task decisions. In a single-task situation requiring picture naming only (Experiment 1), we obtained semantic interference in immediate but not in delayed naming. In a task-decision situation (Experiments 2 and 3), no semantic effectswere obtained in immediate and delayed picture naming andword reading using either the materials of Experiment 1 or the materials of Janssen et al. (2008). We present an attentional account in which task decisions may hide or reveal semantic interference from lexical competition depending on the amount of parallelism between task-decision and picture–word processing. 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.