A developmental study of automatic word processing in a picture classification task.
Second-grade children, third-grade children, and adults judged whether pictures were members of a positive or negative memory set while trying to ignore irrelevant words printed inside the pictures. There were 3 types of picture-word relation. In 1 condition, the words corresponded to the pictures. In a second condition, the pictures and words were incongruent, but the words corresponded to the correct response (e.g., with dog and horse the positive set pictures, a picture of a dog containing the word "horse"). In the third condition, the pictures and words were incongruent and corresponded to conflicting responses. For all 3 subject groups, the type of picture-word relation reliably affected response latencies, indicating that subjects automatically processed the irrelevant printed words.
D000328:Adult; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D005260:Female; D005556:Form Perception; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading