Categorizing chairs and naming pears: category differences in object processing as a function of task and priming

Four experiments are reported examining the locus of structural similarity effects in picture recognition and naming with normal subjects. Subjects carried out superordinate categorization and naming tasks with picture and word forms of clothing, furniture, fruit, and vegetable exemplars. The main findings were as follows: (1) Responses to pictures of fruit and vegetables ("structurally similar" objects) were slowed relative to pictures of clothing and furniture ("structurally dissimilar" objects). This structural similarity difference was greater for picture naming than for superordinate categorization of pictures. (2) Structural similarity effects in picture naming were reduced by repetition priming. Repetition priming effects were equivalent from picture and word naming as prime tasks. (3) However, superordinate categorization of the prime did not produce the structural similarity effects on priming found for picture naming. Furthermore, such priming effects did not arise for picture or word categorization or for reading picture names as target tasks. It is proposed that structural similarity effects on priming object processing are located in processes mapping semantic representations of pictures to name representations required to select names for objects. Visually based competition between fruit and vegetables produces competition in name selection, which is reduced by priming the mappings between semantic and name representations.     

Semantic interference effects on naming using a postcue procedure: Tapping the links between semantics and phonology with pictures and words.

Five experiments are reported in which a new technique for assessing the processes involved in mapping semantic representations onto name information in simple naming tasks was used. This technique, the postcue naming procedure, requires participants to name 1 of 2 potential target stimuli after they receive a relevant selection cue. Naming performance is slowed when the 2 potential targets are semantically related, relative to when they are unrelated. Effects on picture and word targets are of equal magnitude, providing these 2 types of stimulus are intermingled in the experiment. When words are presented alone, semantic interference is abolished (although evidence for lexical processing of words can be demonstrated). The effect on picture naming is also eliminated when the interfering stimulus has to be categorized rather than named. These results suggest that the locus of the interference is in the processes mapping semantic information onto names. These processes seem to be shared by pictures and words when the semantic processing of words is induced. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Theoretical analysis of the cognitive processing of lexical and pictorial stimuli: Reading, naming, and visual and conceptual comparisons.

This article reviews the research literature on the differences between word reading and picture naming. A theory for the visual and cognitive processing of pictures and words is then introduced. The theory accounts for slower naming of pictures than reading of words. Reading aloud involves a fast, grapheme-to-phoneme transformation process, whereas picture naming involves two additional processes; (a) determining the meaning of the pictorial stimulus and (b) finding a name for the pictorial stimulus. We conducted a reading-naming experiment, and the time to achieve (a) and (b) was determined to be approximately 160 ms. On the basis of data from a second experiment, we demonstrated that there is no significant difference in time to visually compare two pictures or two words when size of the stimuli is equated. There is no difference in time to make the two types of cross-modality conceptual comparisons (picture first, then word, or word first, then picture). The symmetry of the visual and conceptual comparison results supports the hypothesis that the coding of the mind is neither intrinsically linguistic nor imagistic, but rather it is abstract. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Episodic effects on picture identification: Implications for theories of concept learning and theories of memory.

The effects of differences in study processing on free recall of picture names and on generalization in picture identification were investigated. Experience with degraded pictures produced poorer subsequent free recall of picture names than did naming intact pictures. For the test of picture identification, pictures that were identical to a studied picture, pictures that shared a name with a studied picture (same name), and new test pictures were presented, and the amount of clarification required to identify a picture was measured. Experience with degraded pictures produced better subsequent identification of identical test pictures but poorer later identification of same-name test pictures than did naming intact pictures. The importance of these episodic effects for theories of concept learning and theories of memory is discussed. It is argued that distinctions between memory systems (e.g., episodic-semantic) must be couched in terms of a theory of concept learning and that the data are inconsistent with a simple distinction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociations among implicit and explicit memory tasks: The role of stimulus similarity.

Compares the effect of picture fragmentation level at study on performance on a variety of implicit and explicit memory tests. Consistent with previous research, a moderately fragmented study picture produced the most learning on the implicit memory task of picture fragment completion (Exp 1) and speeded picture identification (Exp 4). In contrast, an intact study picture produced the most learning on the implicit memory task of naming intact pictures (Exp 3). These results suggest that performance on 2 implicit memory tasks can be dissociated by differences in visual similarity between the study and test forms of a stimulus. More surprising, parallel effects were observed in recognition memory. Recognition memory was best when fragmentation levels of the study and test pictures matched (Exp 2) or were comparable (Exp 1). In contrast to many results in the literature, recognition memory was acutely sensitive to surface form differences. The results are discussed in terms of 2 types of study-test similarity, stimulus similarity and process similarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Information processing in Stroop-like picture naming tasks by preschool children

This study examined the difference between preschool (6-year-olds) children and adults in semantic information processing in line-drawn picture naming, using two types of Stroop-like picture naming tasks. In Experiment 1, voices (i.e., lexical information), and in Experiment 2, pictures (i.e., semantic information) were used as distracters. Subjects were asked to name target pictures as quickly as possible, ignoring distracters. To clarify the effect of semantic relations on the amount of interference, four types of target-distracter semantic relations were used as experimental conditions: same stimulus (SS), same category (SC), different category (DC), and control (C). To investigate the time course of processing, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between target and distracter was varied. The results indicated that the patterns of reaction time showed more remarkable difference between children and adults in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2. These results were discussed on the basis of Glaser and Glaser (1989)'s model in which semantic memory and lexicon were separate.     

Masked repetition and phonological priming in picture naming

We report a series of picture naming experiments in which target pictures were primed by briefly presented masked words. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the prior presentation of the same word prime (e.g., rose-ROSE) facilitates picture naming independently of the target's name frequency. In Experiment 2, primes that were homophones of picture targets (e.g., rows-ROSE) also produced facilitatory effects compared with unrelated controls, but priming was significantly larger for targets with low-frequency names relative to targets with high-frequency names. In Experiment 3, primes that were higher frequency homophones of picture targets produced facilitatory effects compared with identical primes. These results are discussed in relation to different accounts of the effects of masked priming in current models of picture naming.     

Effects of foveal priming and extrafoveal preview on object identification.

The results of three different experiments suggested that the relation between an object in the fovea on fixation n and an object subsequently brought into the fovea on fixation n ?+?1 affects the time to identify the second object. In Experiment 1 we extended previous work by demonstrating that a previously seen related priming object speeded the time to name a target object even when a saccade intervened between the two objects. In Experiment 2 we replicated this result and further showed that the benefit on naming time was due to facilitation from the related object rather than inhibition from the unrelated object. In addition, naming of the target object was much slower in both experiments when there was not a peripheral preview of the target object on fixation n. However, because the effect of the foveal priming object was greater when the target was not present than when it was present, priming did not appear to make extraction of the extrafoveal information more efficient. In Experiment 3, fixation times were recorded while subjects looked at four objects in order to identify them. Fixation time on an object was shorter when a related object was fixated immediately before it, even though the four objects did not form a scene. The size of the facilitation was roughly comparable to that in several analogous experiments where scenes were used. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Picture perception: Effects of luminance on available information and information-extraction rate.

Three experiments with 255 undergraduates and a 4th in which the author and 2 colleagues served as Ss showed that complex visual stimuli—pictures and digit arrays—were remembered better when shown at high luminance (LM) than at low LM. Evidence was found for the possibilities that lowering LM reduced the amount of available information in the stimulus and that lowering LM reduced the rate at which the information was extracted from the stimulus. When stimuli were presented at durations short enough to permit only a single eye fixation, LM affected only the rate at which information was extracted. Decreasing LM by a factor of 100 caused information to be extracted more slowly by a factor that ranged, over experiments, from 1.4 to 2.0. When pictures were presented at durations long enough to permit multiple fixations, however, LM affected the total amount of extractable information. In a 5th experiment, with 4 undergraduates, converging evidence was sought for the proposition that within the 1st eye fixation on a picture, LM affects the rate of information extraction. If this proposition is correct and the 1st eye fixation lasts until some criterion amount of information is extracted, then fixation duration should increase with decreasing LM. This prediction was confirmed. (32 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Facilitation of unattended semantic information in Alzheimer's disease: Evidence from a selective attention task.

Processing of unattended semantic information was examined in 13 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 23 normal controls (NC) using a selective attention, priming task. Two vertically aligned pictures of objects served as primes, and object names were targets. Participants were instructed to attend to only 1 picture, defined by color, in the prime display. NC participants showed facilitation only for target items that were the name of the attended prime picture, but AD patients showed facilitation from the attended and unattended prime pictures. Two accounts of these data posit a deficit in the initiation of the selection component of selective attentional processing in AD. On the basis of spotlight theories, a 3rd account posits a deficit in AD patients' ability to adjust the scope of the selection "beam." Last, facilitation of attended and unattended information may be due to crosstalk between accurately selected and unselected information. Implications of the activation of irrelevant information to language function in AD are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sex bias in the naming of stimulus persons.

Researchers often use sex-typed names (e.g., John vs Joan) to identify stimulus persons' sex, assuming that such names communicate sex only. In fact, however, such names also create impressions that have little or nothing to do with sex. Study 1 analyzed the age connotations, intellectual-competence connotations, and attractiveness of sex-typed names used in 230 published studies on sexism and fear of success. On each of these variables, the literature was pervasively confounded in a manner favoring male stimulus persons. Study 2 found that the name biases reported in Study 1 were positively correlated with outcome measures in a sample of sexism studies, but only when names were presented with limited other information. Possible causes of the bias are discussed, and recommendations for naming stimulus persons are presented, including a list of male names and female names matched on several key variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of name retrieval during multiple-object naming: Evidence from extrafoveal-on-foveal effects.

The goal of the study was to examine whether speakers naming pairs of objects would retrieve the names of the objects in parallel or in sequence. To this end, we recorded the speakers’ eye movements and determined whether the difficulty of retrieving the name of the 2nd object affected the duration of the gazes to the 1st object. Two experiments, which differed in the spatial arrangement of the objects, showed that the speakers looked longer at the 1st object when the name of the 2nd object was easy than when it was more difficult to retrieve. Thus, the easy 2nd-object names interfered more with the processing of the 1st object than the more difficult 2nd-object names. In the 3rd experiment, the processing of the 1st object was rendered more difficult by presenting it upside down. No effect of 2nd-object difficulty on the gaze duration for the 1st object was found. These results suggest that speakers can retrieve the names of a foveated and an extrafoveal object in parallel, provided that the processing of the foveated object is not too demanding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memory for odors and odor names: Modalities of elaboration and imagery.

This study examined memory for common odors and odor names that were encoded with visual, verbal, and olfactory elaborations. In the first experiment, subjects elaborated olfactory stimuli by processing a picture of the odor's source, a name for the odor, or both. Two control groups were also included: One group was presented only with the odors, and another group was presented only with odor names. One week later, all subjects were given both a free recall test of odor names and an olfactory recognition test. In general, the elaboration groups outperformed the control groups, with the visual and verbal elaboration group demonstrating the best performance. In a second experiment, olfactory imaginal encoding of odor names was compared with visual imaginal encoding of the same names to measure the relative efficacy of same versus different modality encoding on later stimulus recognition. The results showed that olfactory imaginal encoding aided later recognition of odors, and visual imaginal encoding aided later picture recognition. It is suggested that different modalities contribute unique and mnemonically independent information to episodic memory performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for models of lexical access.

Do nonselected lexical nodes activate their phonological information? Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were asked to name (a) pictures whose names are cognates, in the 2 languages (words that are phonologically similar in the 2 languages) and (b) pictures whose names are noncognates in the 2 languages. If nonselected lexical nodes are phonologically encoded, naming latencies should be shorter for cognate words, and because the cognate status of words is only meaningful for bilingual speakers, this difference should disappear when testing monolingual speakers. The results of Experiment 1 fully supported these predictions. In Experiment 2, the difference between cognate and noncognate words was larger when naming in the nondominant language than when naming in the dominant language. The results of the 2 experiments are interpreted as providing support to cascaded activation models of lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Which words are activated during bilingual word production?

Whether words are or are not activated within the lexicon of the nonused language is an important question for accounts of bilingual word production. Prior studies have not led to conclusive results, either because alternative accounts could be proposed for their findings or because activation could have been artificially induced by the experimental paradigms. Moreover, previous data only involved target translations, and nothing is known about the activation of nontarget words in the nonused language. The picture–picture interference paradigm was used here, since it allowed the activation of nontarget words to be determined without showing stimuli that could artificially activate the nonused language. Proficient Spanish–Catalan speakers were presented with pairs of partially overlapping colored pictures and were instructed to name the green picture and ignore the red picture. In Experiment 1, distractor pictures with cognate names interfered more than distractor pictures with noncognate names. In Experiment 2, facilitation was observed when the names of the distractor pictures in the nonused language were phonologically related to the names of the target pictures. Overall, these results indicate that nontarget words are activated in the nonused language, at least in the case of proficient bilingual speakers. These results help researchers to constrain theories of bilingual lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Proper-name processing: Are proper names pure referencing expressions?

Theoretical models of proper-name processing have been primarily derived from studies of people's names; however, they are thought to generalize to all classes of proper name. Five experiments are reported that use repetition priming to compare different classes of proper names. It was found that for people's names and landmark names, (a) production of a name in response to seeing a picture primed a subsequent familiarity decision to the same item's written name and (b) similarity, making a familiarity decision to an auditory presentation of a name primed a familiarity decision to the same item's written name. No comparable facilitation was found for the country-name stimuli. The presence of this specific facilitation was attributed to the nature of connectivity between conceptual and lexical representations. Theoretical views that proper names are unique, meaningless labels and that they are pure referencing expressions are evaluated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abstract phonological structure in language production: Evidence from Spanish.

In this study, 4 experiments were carried out to investigate if segmental and structural information are represented separately in phonological encoding in speech production. In Experiments 1 and 2, a picture-word interference paradigm was used. Participants had to name a picture while a word was auditorily presented 150 ms after the onset of the target. In Experiments 3 and 4, participants had to read aloud lists of printed words (inductors) and then had to name a picture. Results of the first 3 experiments indicate that naming latencies are faster when target and interfering stimulus (in the first 2 experiments) and inductors (in the 3rd) share the same abstract phonological structure. The 4th experiment showed that the priming effect observed previously is due to facilitation of the first-syllable structure, supporting the notion that an abstract syllabic structure is used in phonological encoding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pictorial mnemonics for phonics.

Evaluated whether picture mnemonics help prereaders learn letter–sound associations in 2 experiments with 20 1st graders (Exp I), 30 preschoolers, and kindergartners (Exp II). Pictures integrating the associations were compared with disassociated pictures and with a no-picture control condition. Ss in the integrated-picture group learned 5 letter-sound associations (e.g., f, /f/), each represented by a picture whose shape included the letter (e.g., letter f drawn as the stem of a flower) and whose name (flower) began with the letter's sound. Ss in the disassociated-picture group learned letter–sound associations with pictures having the same names as the integrated pictures, but drawn differently—without letter shapes. Ss in the control group learned associations with picture names but no pictures. Prior to letter–sound training, all groups were taught how to segment the initial sounds of the picture names. Results reveal that Ss taught with integrated mnemonics learned more letter–sound associations and also more letter–picture associations than did the other 2 groups, which did not differ. Integrated pictures were effective because they linked 2 otherwise unconnected items in memory. It is concluded that the shape of letters included in pictures reminded learners of previously seen pictures with those shapes whose names began with the relevant letter sounds. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Asymmetric aging effects on semantic and phonological processes: Naming in the picture-word interference task.

In 2 experiments, participants named pictures while ignoring auditory word distractors. For pictures with homophone names (e.g., ball, distractors semantically related to the nondepicted meaning (e.g., prom) facilitated naming by top-down phonological connections for young but not for older adults. Slowing from unrelated distractors and facilitation from phonologically related distractors were age invariant except in distractors that were both semantically and phonologically related. Only distractors semantically related to the picture interfered more for older than younger adults. These results are inconsistent with age-linked deficits in inhibition of irrelevant information from either internal or external sources. Rather, aging affects priming transmission in a connectionist network with asymmetric effects on semantic and phonological connections involved in comprehension and production, respectively. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological codes are used in integrating information across saccades in word identification and reading.

A major issue in reading is the extent to which phonological information is used in visual word perception. The present experiments demonstrated that phonological information acquired on 1 fixation from a word in the parafovea is used to help identify that word when it is later fixated. A homophone of a target word, when presented as a preview in the parafovea, facilitated processing in the target word seen on the next fixation more than a preview of a word matched with the homophone in visual similarity to the target word. This facilitation was observed both in the time to name an isolated target word and in the fixation time on the target word while silently reading a sentence; the preview was virtually never consciously identified in either task. Because the visual similarity of the preview to the target also plays a part in the facilitative effect on the preview, however, codes other than phonological codes are preserved across saccades. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)