Naming times for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures
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Naming times for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures JOAN GAY SNODGRASS and TANYA YUDITSKY New York University, New York, New York This paper reports the results of two experiments. In the first, voice-key naming times were collected and in the second, keypress naming times were collected for 250 of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) pictures. The resulting naming times and correct naming rates were well predicted in multiple regression analyses by one or another measure of codability (name or concept agreement) and by age-of-acquisition ratings collected specifically for this study. Voice-key responses appeared to be somewhat more sensitive indicators of naming difficulty, although keypress responses did remarkably well. The Appendix presents the age-of-acquisition ratings, the trimmed vocal and keypress naming times, and the correct naming rates from the two experiments for the 250 pictures. The cognitive operations underlying picture naming have long been of both theoretical and practical interest. Cattell (1886) first noted the fact that reading words was faster than naming pictures, and speculated on the processes that made word reading faster than picture naming. The reading advantage has generally been attributed to one of two processes: (I) the highly overlearned association between stimulus and response produced by much practice, and (2) the fact that in many languages, pronunciation of the word can be accomplished via a fast, grapheme-tophoneme translation process. Theios and Amrhein (1989) reviewed the literature on word reading versus picture naming and concluded that differences in practice cannot account for the word-reading advantage. Rather, they argued that the word-reading advantage relies on the fact that words can be read on the basis of their orthography alone, without access to the meaning code. In contrast, picture naming is usually assumed to require access to meaning. One approach to studying the processes underlying picture naming has been to vary individual item characteristics and observe which characteristics affect picture naming. Oldfield and Wingfield (1964, 1965) selected 26 pictures that varied widely in Thorndike-Lorge (1944) name frequency and found that naming latency was negatively correlated (r = - .80) with log frequency. Goodglass, Theurkauf, and Wingfield (1984) replicated this finding. Carroll and White (1973a, 1973b) argued that age of acquisition might be a more predictive variable than word
frequency in picture naming. Carroll and White (1973a) obtained ratings of age of acquisition for 220 picturable nouns, and then obtained naming latencies for the pictured forms of these nouns from a separate group of subjects (Carroll & White, 1973b). They showed that age of acquisition accounted for naming latencies even better than Kucera-Francis (1967) word frequency and was the only significant variable in a multiple regression. Recently, Morrison, Ellis, and Quinlan (1992) showed that age of acquisition accounted for the original Oldfield and Wingfield (1965) data better th
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