Does articulatory suppression eliminate the effect of phonological similarity on choice reaction time task performance?

Recent studies have found that participants make more errors on choice reaction time tasks, when a verbal distractor task (compared to a non-verbal distractor task) was performed during the instruction phase (e.g., Van 't Wout & Jarrold, 2022, 2023). These findings suggest that language aids the acquisition of newly instructed stimulus-response rules. However, it remains unknown what processes support the acquisition of stimulus-response rules in the verbal distractor task condition. One possibility is that participants rely on non-verbal strategies in the verbal distractor task condition. Another possibility that is participants continue to engage in (but less efficiently so) phonological recoding in the verbal distractor task condition. To examine the latter possibility, this study will manipulate both the distractor task type (verbal or non-verbal, cf. Van 't Wout & Jarrold, 2022), and the phonological similarity of the stimulus names in a task (similar or this similar, cf. Monsell & Graham, 2021). If participants rely on non-verbal strategies in the verbal distractor task condition, then there should be no effect of phonological similarity in that condition (but such an effect should still be found in the non-verbal distractor task condition). On the other hand, if participants do adopt a verbal strategy/engage in phonological recoding in the verbal distractor task condition, then a significant effect of phonological similarity would be present in that condition. In that case, it is possible that the effect of phonological similarity is smaller in the verbal distractor task condition compared to the non-verbal distractor task condition, if the execution of a verbal distractor task interferes with (but does not obliterate) the use of phonological recoding (Norris et al., 2018). unknown other