Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

When naming the ink color of color words, adults and children show Stroop interference (Stroop 1935). Cohen, Dunbar and McClelland (1990) produced a connectionist model that accounted for many of the Stroop phenomena within adults. This paper shows how the paradigm can be extended to show the development of the interference in children as they leam to read. We train a network taking into account the amount of reading practice and attentional skills that would befit a young child to give a prediction of the development of the Stroop effect. These predictions are then tested using a picture-naming Stroop study with two groups of 8 year olds of differing reading ability. The results support the model, suggesting children initially show reverse Stroop interference that with practice becomes normal Stroop interference.