LAUSR

Semantic context effects are well established using both words and pictures as stimuli. One such effect, semantic interference, is observed in naming latencies when a categorically related distractor word or picture is presented together with a target picture (e.g., dog-LION). Recently, this effect has also been shown to occur when an environmental sound (e.g., a dog barking) is presented as an auditory distractor during picture naming (Mädebach et al., 2017) and when a distractor picture is presented with a target sound for naming (Wöhner et al., 2020). The purpose of the current study was twofold; (1) to replicate the semantic interference effect in the picture-sound interference (PSI) paradigm, and (2) determine whether a semantic interference effect is also observable when distractor words are presented with environmental sounds as target auditory objects for naming, using a novel sound-word interference (SWI) paradigm. We replicated the semantic interference effect in Experiment 1 with environmental sound distractors. Experiment 2 demonstrated significant semantic interference during a SWI paradigm for the first time. We discuss the implications of these results for our understanding of the origin and locus of the semantic interference effect according to current theories of lexical selection.