Tatiana^chnur, Assistant Professor of Psychology

The Distractor Frequency Effect in Stroop and Picture-word Interference Paradigms by Jingyi Geng The color naming (Stroop) and picture-word interference (PWI) paradigms play a pivotal role in theorizing about cognitive processes in general, and language production in particular. Despite their assumed similarities, there exist discrepancies. In this study, I compared the effect of distractor word frequency between Stroop and PWI paradigms (in PWI picture naming is faster for high frequency than low frequency word distractors; Miozzo & Caramazza, 2003). In five experiments, I confirm the presence of DFE in both Stroop and PWI paradigms when the naming latencies are longer but the absence of DFE in both paradigms when the naming latencies are shorter and found that when naming latencies are fast, the distractor words are most likely processed to the phonological level by the time targets are named in both paradigms in the last experiment. Thus, my results are consistent with the assumption that the two paradigms operate in the same manner. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express the deepest appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Tatiana Schnur. Her guidance and persistent help were crucial to the completion of this master thesis. In addition, special thanks go to Dr. Niels Janssen. Without his guidance and great suggestions this thesis would not have been possible. I thank my committee members, Dr. Randi Martin and Dr. Jessica Logan. I would like to thank my parents for their financial and never ending support, for the help in my study and for its success. I am grateful the undergraduate research assistants and Sujuan Lin for assisting and helping me in my research.