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

Resistance to interference from irrelevant auditory stimuli undergoes developmental changes throughout childhood. To determine whether semantic processes or executive demands such as selective attention, working memory and inhibition account for age-related changes in performance on an auditory-visual cross-modal Stroop and a Stroop-like picture-word interference task, children (3- to 12-year-olds) and adults named color blocks (Experiment 1) and pictures (Experiments 2--4) while listening to auditory distractors varying in terms of semantic relatedness to the visual stimuli, stimulus asynchrony (0 ms vs. -500 ms offset) and response set membership. Findings, in Experiment 1, that the cross-modal Stroop effect occurred in young children even when the auditory distractor was presented 500 ms in advance of the color patch support the hypothesis that young children have difficulty resisting interference and inhibiting the distracting stimuli. This inhibition account posits that the irrelevant word enters a phonological buffer and is injurious to color and picture naming if the participant is unable to suppress its representation in time. However, because the color-word distractors named colors which were a part of the response set in Experiment 1 (i.e., the color patches), it could not be determined if the interference effect was due to the semantic relatedness of the auditory distractors to the target colors or to their being members of the same response set. Therefore, in Experiments 2 and 3, using animal and clothing pictures, response set membership varied. In Experiments 2 and 3, the interference effect observed in children, but not adults, depended on the auditory distractors' status as members of the response set and was not associated with semantic relatedness to the visual stimuli. In Experiment 4, with semantically unrelated pictures, adults, but not children, showed greater interference on trials with auditory distractors in the response set. These results indicate that, contrary to results previously reported in the literature, picture-word interference is not exclusively semantically based (Jerger, Martin & Damian, 2002), and that age-related changes observed in the cross-modal Stroop and Stroop-like picture-word interference task involve inhibition of the auditory distractors and the establishment of a response set in working memory.