Stroop Interference and Background Context in Western Monolingual Speakers: A Foundation for Bilingual and Cross-Cultural Studies

Abstract This study investigates whether visually salient background information affects interference control in a Stroop task among monolingual Western young adults. Motivated by research linking bilingualism and cultural context to differences in cognitive control and attentional breadth, the study examines how background color manipulations, designed either to semantically reinforce incorrect responses or to act as visual distractors, affect accuracy and response times. Participants completed four variants of a modified Stroop task, with vocal responses recorded and analyzed for both correctness and speed of response. Across conditions, participants maintained high accuracy, and only small, statistically nonsignificant increases in response times emerged under greater contextual complexity. These findings suggest that, for this monolingual Western participant sample, background contextual cues exert minimal influence on Stroop interference and attentional allocation. These results offer both a methodological and empirical baseline for future comparative work, particularly studies investigating whether bilingual experience or culturally shaped attentional styles heighten or attenuate susceptibility to contextual interference in cognitive control tasks.