Disagreement exists about whether color-word Stroop facilitation is caused by converging information (e.g., Cohen et al., 1990; Roelofs, 2003) or inadvertent reading (MacLeod & MacDonald, 2000). Four experiments tested between these hypotheses by examining Stroop effects on response time (RT) both within and between languages. Words cannot be read aloud to produce facilitation between languages...

Within a given language and culture, distinct sensory modalities are often given differential linguistic treatment in ways reflecting cultural ideas about, and uses for, the senses. this article reports on sensory expressions in the Mayan language tzeltal, spoken in southeastern Mexico. Drawing both on data derived from tzeltal consultants’ responses to standardized sensory elicitation stimuli ...

Two experiments explored the hypothesis that colors produce different cognitive learning motivations: red produces an avoidance motivation and blue produces an approach motivation. The avoidance motivation results in better performance on detail-oriented tasks, and the approach motivation results in better performance on creative tasks. To test this prediction, the first study used a signal det...

Ideomotor theory states that motor responses are activated by an anticipation of their sensory effects. We assumed that anticipated effects would produce response-effect (R-E) compatibility when there is dimensional overlap of effects and responses. In a four-choice task, visual digit stimuli called for verbal responses (color names). Each response produced a written response-effect on the scre...

Computational methods have started playing a significant role in semantic analysis. One particularly accessible area for developing good computational methods for linguistic semantics is in color naming, where perceptual dissimilarity measures provide a geometric setting for the analyses. This setting has been studied first by Berlin & Kay in 1969, and then later on by a large data collection e...

A number of recent visual-word recognition and reading experiments have concluded that the upper part of words is more important for lexical access than is the lower part, which conforms with Huey's (1908) observation. Here, we examined whether this phenomenon may simply be due to the fact that words in Indo-European languages tend to have a higher number of confusable letters in the lower than...

Previous analyses of the standard Stroop effect (which typically uses color words that form part of the response set) have documented effects on mean reaction times in hundreds of experiments in the literature. Less well known is the fact that ex-Gaussian analyses reveal that such effects are seen in (a) the mean of the normal distribution (mu), as well as in (b) the standard deviation of the n...

Definition The possibility that naming colors, either in a single instance or habitually over a lifetime, alters. color perception Color perception and color communication When we communicate about the colors of scenes and objects comprising our visual experience, what we see informs our choice of words. A question that has interested many cognitive psychologists is whether the color words we u...

A fundamental issue in psycholinguistics concerns how speakers retrieve intended words from long-term memory. According to a selection by competition account (e.g., Levelt et al., 1999), conceptually driven word retrieval involves the activation of a set of candidate words and a competitive selection of the intended word from this set. Selection by competition explains, for example, the Stroop ...