Abstract :
One important finding with the picture–word interference paradigm is that picture-naming performance
is facilitated by the presentation of a distractor (e.g., CAP) formally related to the picture name (e.g.,
“cat”). In two picture-naming experiments we investigated the nature of such form facilitation effect
with Mandarin Chinese, separating the effects of phonology and orthography. Significant facilitation
effects were observed both when distractors were only orthographically or only phonologically related
to the targets. The orthographic effect was overall stronger than the phonological effect. These findings
suggest that the classic form facilitation effect in picture–word interference is a mixed effect with
multiple loci: it cannot be attributed merely to the nonlexical activation of the target phonological
segments from the visual input of the distractor. It seems instead that orthographically only related
distractors facilitate the lexical selection process of picture naming, and phonologically only related
distractors facilitate the retrieval of target phonological segments.
