Semantic interference is not modality specific: Evidence from sound naming with distractor pictures

Abstract

In three experiments participants named environmental sounds (e.g., the bleating of a sheep by producing the word “sheep”) in the presence of distractor pictures. In Experiment 1 we observed faster responses in sound naming with congruent pictures (e.g., sheep; congruency facilitation) and slower responses with semantically related pictures (e.g., donkey; semantic interference), each compared to unrelated pictures (e.g., violin). In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicated these effects and used a psychological refractory period approach (combining an arrow decision or letter rotation task as task 1 with sound naming as task 2) to investigate the locus of the effects. Congruency facilitation was underadditive with dual -task interference suggesting that it arises, in part, during pre-central processing stages in sound naming (i.e., sound identification). In contrast, semantic interference was additive with dual -task interference suggesting that it arises during central (or post-central) processing stages in sound naming (i.e., response selection or later processes). These results demonstrate the feasibility of sound naming tasks for chronometric investigations of word production. Furthermore, they highlight that semantic interference is not restricted to the use of target pictures and distractor words but can be observed with quite different target-distractor configurations. The experiments support the view that congruency facilitation and semantic interference reflect some general cognitive mechanism involved in word production. These results are discussed in the context of the debate about semantic-lexical selection mechanisms in word production.

The interactive effects of conjoined music and visual art processing

“…In conclusion, the data suggest how semantically incongruent music is automatically and involuntarily processed even if task irrelevant, and how it is able to affect the semantic processing of visual figurative information, besides emotional processing (Jolij and Meurs, 2011). This in turn suggests that music is able to convey well defined and rather sophisticated semantic meanings (Janata, 2004;Koelsch et al, 2004) and that conceptual knowledge is amodal and multisensory in nature (Wöhner et al, 2020).…”

“…In addition, the presentation of an auditory cue that was semantically incongruent with the visual target induced an inhibitory effect, thus concluding that the auditory semantic interference affected early visual processing, due to a cross-modal interaction (Chen & Spence, 2018). According to Wöhner et al (2020) the audiovisual semantic interference effect was due to a competitive selection of amodal semantic-lexical representation involved in both modalities.…”

“…The study's aim was to investigate the influence of the background music, which was task irrelevant and either semantically congruent or incongruent with artwork displayed, on the semantic comprehension of the visual art. As Wöhner and collaborators suggested, semantic interference can occur also across modalities (Wöhner et al, 2020). The authors tested the model proposed by Chen & Spence of cross-modal interactions of pictures, sound, and words.…”