Writing words from pictures: what representations are activated, and when?

In three experiments, the nature of the representations involved in written picture naming and the time course of their activation were investigated. French participants had to produce picture names while hearing distractors. In Experiment 1, distractors semantically related to the picture names yielded a semantic interference effect when a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of--150 msec, but not when a SOA of 0 msec, was used, in both spoken and written picture naming. Experiment 2 showed that the semantic interference effect was not located at the conceptual level. In Experiment 3, participants wrote down picture names while hearing semantically related, phonologically related, both semantically and phonologically related, or unrelated distractors, presented at both SOAs. A semantic interference effect was obtained with phonologically unrelated distractors but was eliminated with phonologically related distractors. Facilitatory effects of phonologically related distractors were found at both SOAs. The implications of the findings for written picture naming are discussed.