  In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while
ignoring a written or spoken distractor word. Naming times to the pictures are
slowed down by the presence of the distractor word. Various properties of the
distractor modulate this slow down, for example naming times are shorter with
frequent vs. infrequent distractors. Building on this line of research, the
present study investigates in more detail the impact of distractor and target
word properties on picture naming times. We report the results of several
Bayesian meta-analyses, based on 35 datasets. The aim of the first analysis was
to obtain an estimation of the size of the distractor frequency effect, and of
its precision, in typical picture-word interference experiments where this
variable is not manipulated. The analysis shows that a one-unit increase in log
frequency results in response times to the pictures decreasing by about 4ms
(95% Credible Interval: [-6, -2]). With the second and third analyses, we show
that after accounting for the effect of frequency, two variables known to
influence processing times in visual word processing tasks also influence
picture naming times: distractor length and orthographic neighborhood. Finally,
we found that distractor word frequency and target word frequency interact; the
effect of distractor frequency decreases as the frequency of the target word
increases. We discuss the theoretical and methodological implications of these
findings, as well as the importance of obtaining high-precision estimates of
experimental effects.
