Functional architecture of naming dice, digits, and number words

Abstract

Five chronometric experiments examined the functional architecture of naming dice, digits, and number words. Speakers named pictured dice, Arabic digits, or written number words, while simultaneously trying to ignore congruent or incongruent dice, digit, or number word distractors presented at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Stroop-like interference and facilitation effects were obtained from digits and words on dice naming latencies, but not from dice on digit and word naming latencies. In contrast, words affected digit naming latencies and digits affected word naming latencies to the same extent. The peak of the interference was always around SOA = 0 ms, whereas facilitation was constant across distractor-first SOAs. These results suggest that digit naming is achieved like word naming rather than dice naming. WEAVER++simulations of the results are reported.

Acknowledgement

I am indebted to Monique van de Ven and Sascha Oberrecht for their help in preparing and running the experiments, and to Antje Meyer, Pim Levelt, Stephen Levinson, Marc Brysbaert, Marjolein Meeuwissen, Anja Ischebeck, Joseph Tzelgov, and Daniel Algom for helpful comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ardi Roelofs

Correspondence should be addressed to Ardi Roelofs, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. [email protected]