Categorical interference and associative priming in picture naming

The presence of a semantic relation between a context word and a target picture hampers picture naming in a picture‐word interference task, but seems to facilitate picture naming in a semantic priming task. This difference in the direction of the semantic context effect is investigated. Experiment 1 shows that stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) alone cannot account for the discrepancy. In Expts 2 and 3, in addition to SOA and category membership, the associative strength between the context word and the name of the target picture is manipulated. The results indicate the presence of two context effects that show different time courses: (1) a categorical interference effect that is only obtained with SOA values close to zero and (2) an associative facilitation effect that decreases with the time interval between context word and target picture and disappears with a small post‐exposure of the context word. As a consequence, a word like ‘dog’, that is both categorically related to the picture of a cat and associatively related to the word ‘cat’, facilitates picture naming at an SOA = −400, has no effect at SOA = 0, and hampers picture naming at SOA = + 75 ms. Implications of these findings for models of picture and word processing are discussed.