  The picture-word interference paradigm (participants name target pictures
while ignoring distractor words) is often used to model the planning processes
involved in word production. The participants' naming times are delayed in the
presence of a distractor (general interference). The size of this effect
depends on the relationship between the target and distractor words.
Distractors of the same semantic category create more interference (semantic
interference), distractors overlapping in phonology create less interference
(phonological facilitation). The present study examines the relationships
between these experimental effects, processing times, and attention in order to
better understand the cognitive processes underlying participants' behavior in
this paradigm. Participants named pictures with a superimposed line of Xs,
semantically related distractors, phonologically related distractors, or
unrelated distractors. General interference, semantic interference, and
phonological facilitation effects are replicated. Distributional analyses
reveal that general and semantic interference effects increase with naming
times, while phonological facilitation decreases. The phonological facilitation
and semantic interference effects are found to depend on the synchronicity in
processing times between the planning of the picture's name and the processing
of the distractor word. Finally, EEG power in the alpha band before stimulus
onset varied with the position of the trial in the experiment and with
repetition but did not predict the size of interference or facilitation
effects. Taken together, these results suggest that experimental effects in the
picture-word interference paradigm depend on processing times to both the
target word and distractor word and that distributional patterns could party
reflect this dependency.
