Orthographic Facilitation and Categorical Interference in a Word-Translation Variant of the Stroop Task

Dutch university students were asked to translate common English words that were preceded or followed by a Dutch distractor word. The distractor word could be orthographically/phonemically related, categorically related, or unrelated to the correct response word. The findings obtained with this task are remarkably similar to results obtained with Stroop-like colour and picture naming. It is argued that the word-translation variant of the Stroop task may become a useful research tool in the study of word recognition, name retrieval, and bilinguality.