MacLeod reviews the literature of the Stroop effect in his article.

The Stroop
effect occurs when the processing of one stimulus interferes with the processing of
another in the brain. Specifically, in the colored-word experiment, the word
processing would surpass the color processing, resulting in the difficulty of
recognizing the color.
The author gives a background of the experiment and shows the effort in digging
deeply into the phenomenon that made by hundreds of scientists following Stroop.
One of the interesting findings is that if the word has a meaning of something related
to color (e.g. lemon), then the Stroop effect still exists, but the strength reduces a little
bit. This reduction effect becomes even stronger as the word becomes less associated
with colors. In addition, there are many different types of the Stroop test instead of
using color. Images, directions, number of objects and position of letters would be
interfered with by word processing as well.
While Stroop concludes that the effect occurs because the processing of words is
faster than colors, MacLeod and Dunbar found the processing speed cannot explain
everything. Scientists have found different explanations for this phenomenon. Some
argue that it is the strength of pathways that determines the word processing is easier
than color naming, because the word-color pathway is practiced much more than the
name-color pathway. Others argue that since the brain focuses on more certain and
outstanding stimulus in the environment, the presence of words would excite the brain
more and the color naming would be inhibited. The other group using a
psycholinguistic model to provide the explanation. They claim that the color naming
is more complexed and cannot be directly processed, but the processing of words is
simple and intuitive. Thus, recognizing color is more time-consuming.
The author concludes the importance of Stroop effect that helps identify brain
area functions and improves our understanding of cognitive process.
I am amazed by the fact that even though a word is upside down, it still
influences the naming of the color. Although it takes more time to process the rotated
word than color, participants are still interfered by the meaning of the word which
slows down their color recognition time. I’m wondering why the language processing
is so powerful that it takes effect even in an unusual situation. Also, it is interesting to
bring the reverse word condition in other explanations of the effect mentioned in the
article. For example, if we practice reading normal words many times and have a
strong brain pathway for reading, then how could we recognize a reverse word
without practicing? If we need to take one more step to recognize color than normal
words, what will happen when the word is reversed? It might indicate that language
processing is always the first step to consider. There is an experiment showing that the
second-language speaker would avoid some heuristic, the brain becomes more
‘rational’ when it is reading a non-native language. This second language effect may
influence the Stroop effect as well. The effect might not occur in whom just leaned the
new language, but has an impact on whom are frequent in the learned language.