Handedness was determined according to the Edinburgh Inventory (Oldfield 1971). The four female subjects were controlled for their hormonal status. Participants provided their informed consent in accordance with procedures approved by the Freiburg University Ethics Committee. Materials For the picture names of 140 concrete black-and-white drawings

(Snodgrass and Vanderwart 1980), 140 digitally recorded auditory distractors with speech durations between 400 and 800 msec (mean 600 msec) Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical were created. For each of the four conditions, 35 combinations of a picture and its distractor word were constructed. Picture names and distractors were simplex German words, and each of them occurred only once to avoid repetition effects. There was no difference between

pools regarding the following linguistic parameters Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical (one-way analysis of variance [ANOVA], all Fs < 1.0, P > 0.4): Speech duration of distractors, visual complexity and familiarity of pictures (Genzel et al. 1995), as well as spoken lemma frequency (CELEX German database [On–line] 2001) and word length measured by number of phonemes and syllables for distractors and pictures. Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Pictures were chosen from a diversity of semantic categories and balanced as far as possible (for more details on methods, see Abel et al. 2009a). The linguistic similarity between distractor word and target picture was varied in four experimental conditions. The distractor had a word form relation (i.e., sharing at least two onset phonemes, the syllable number, and Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the stress pattern) in the phonological condition (P; distractor Karte/card, target Katze/cat), an learn more associative-semantic relation in the associative condition (A; distractor monkey, target banana), belonged to the same semantic category in the categorical condition

(C; distractor lamp, target candle), or had no relation in the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical unrelated condition (U; distractor kiwi, target bed). Apparatus Auditory and visual stimuli were delivered by Presentation 10.0 (http://nbs.neurobs.com). Presentation of auditory distractors and recordings of naming responses were performed via MR-compatible sets of micro- and headphones. The headphones featured efficient gradient noise suppression (MR confon, Magdeburg, Germany; http://www.mr-confon.de). A dual-channel, noise canceling fiber optical microphone system in combination with OptiMRI noise reduction software (Optoacoustics many Ltd., Or-Yehuda, Israel; http://www.optoacoustics.com) yielded digital audio files with high signal-to-noise ratio and high speech quality. Procedure After a 5-min training session with practice items to get used to the task, two consecutive fMRI sessions of 70 trials (300 image volumes = 11 min) were performed. Each trial started with an auditory distractor that lasted for about 600 msec (mean, range 400–800 msec).