Contributions of response set and semantic relatedness to cross-modal Stroop-like picture–word interference in children and adults

Effect of Perceptual Load on Semantic Access by Speech in Children

“…On the cross-modal task with its low perceptual load, results showed significant semantic interference in all age groups, with the magnitude of the interference significantly larger in younger children than in older children. These findings are in line with previous research for the cross-modal picture word and Stroop-like tasks (Hanauer & Brooks, 2003 & 2005; Jerger, Elizondo, Dinh, Sanchez, & Chavira, 1994; Jerger, Martin, & Pirozzolo, 1988; Most, Sorber, & Cunningham, 2007; Seiger-Gardner & Schwartz, 2008; Tazume, 1997). Our results support models of cognitive development proposing that children become more efficient with increasing age in inhibiting irrelevant stimuli and resisting interference (Bjorklund & Harnishfeger, 1990; Dempster, 1992; Tipper et al, 1989).…”

“…Although a lack of significant semantic interference in older children and adults for some conditions has been observed previously (e.g., Hanauer & Brooks, 2005), a failure to obtain semantic effects in the current 10–14-year-olds is clearly atypical. To investigate factors that might be underlying the unusual results in the 10–14-year-olds, we considered the cognitive measures (Table 1A) and the auditory unrelated naming times for individuals in this age group.…”

“…As examples, the tasks utilized slightly different SOA increments (165 vs 150 ms), different numbers of SOAs (2 vs 3), and different talkers (pre-teen vs college student). We can address the possible impact of these methodological differences with evidence from previous studies that investigated the effects of semantic relatedness in children (Hanauer & Brooks, 2003, 2005; Jerger et al, 1994; Most et al, 2007; Seiger-Gardner & Schwartz, 2008; Tazume, 1997). These studies contained larger methodological variations than those between our tasks, for example, the SOAs varied from −500 ms to +500 ms, the number of SOAs within a study varied from 2 to 5; the types of conditions allowed 2 or 3 SOAs to vary across trials (unblocked) or held one SOA constant across trials (blocked), and the utterances included both male and female talkers [our pre-teen talker had a fundamental frequency (202 Hz) that was within the range characterizing female adults (Baken, 1987)].…”

Does verb type affect action naming in specific language impairment (SLI)? Evidence from instrumentality and name relation

“…Recent research has shown that typically developing children may have difficulties deactivating semantic competitors due to poor (not yet adult-like) inhibitory processing skills (Huang & Snedeker, 2011) or in the case of SLI an inefficient suppression mechanism (Andreu, Sanz-Torent, & Guardia-Olmos, 2012;Seiger-Gardner & Schwartz, 2008). Moreover, inhibitory mechanisms are developmentally constrained that is, as children get older they become better at inhibiting inappropriate lexical items from reaching sufficient activation to evoke selection and later retrieval (Hanauer & Brooks, 2005).…”

Neural correlates of audio-visual modal interference inhibition investigated in children by ERP

“…As their reading ability developed, the interference in adulthood annually declined, and did not increase again until at nearly 60 years old. Hanauera et al [11] found that there was a marked interferential effect in naming the picture while the words of the same category presented in the picture-word interferential task by children. However, this effect was not found in adults.…”