文摘
We investigated the stages of picture naming with a new children's picture–word task. In Experiment 1, 24 normal children between 5 and 7 years named pictures while attempting to ignore auditory distractors. The relation between the onsets of the distractors and the pictures varied. Naming performance for semantic distractors showed interference when the distractor's onset was before the picture's onset. Naming performance for phonological nonsense-syllable distractors showed facilitation (congruent distractors) or interference (conflicting distractors) at all onset asymmetries. Overall results resembled findings in teenagers (Experiment 2) and previous findings in adults. The nature of linguistic knowledge and the time course of lexical access, as indexed by performance on a picture–word task, is remarkably similar in children, teenagers, and adults.