Determinants of naming latencies, object comprehension times, and new norms for the Russian standardized set of the colorized version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures

Body-object interaction ratings for 3600 French nouns

Body-object interaction (BOI) measures the ease with which the human body can interact with the concept represented by a word. This research focuses on two main objectives: first, to establish French norms for the psycholinguistic variable BOI, and second, to investigate the contribution of BOI to language processing in French. We collected BOI ratings for 3600 French nouns from participants through an online platform. The inter- and intrastudy reliability of these new ratings indicate that the ratings are robust. We then aimed to determine the role of BOI in word recognition. A hierarchical regression analysis was conducted using lexical decision reaction times (RTs) as the dependent variable. BOI was found to be a significant predictor of lexical decision latencies, beyond the contribution of word length, frequency, orthographic distinctiveness, and imageability. Contrary to previous findings in English, higher BOI values were associated with longer RTs in French, indicating an inhibitory effect of BOI on French word processing. Methodological differences may account for this divergent result. Taken together, the results of this study show the independent contribution of BOI to word recognition in French. This supports the notion that sensorimotor information is a crucial component of language processing. By providing a reliable and sizable BOI database for French nouns, we offer a valuable resource for psycholinguistic and language processing research. This research underscores the complex relationship between language, cognition, and sensorimotor experiences, advancing our comprehension of language processing mechanisms.

Complementary auditory and Visual Naming Tests: Revised and updated for ages 16-55 years

Objective: Historically, naming has been assessed with visual object naming; however, we have found that auditory description naming significantly enhances lateralization and localization of dysfunction. We previously published auditory naming (ANT) and complementary Visual Naming Tests (VNT) for young adults, and recently developed these measures for children (ages 6-15 years) and older adults (ages 56-100 years). Here, we update the original stimuli and more rigorously norm the tests for ages 16-55, addressing prior limitations. Methods: Test stimuli were selected based on item characteristics and preliminary screening, eliminating those with less than 90% name agreement. A sample of 178 healthy individuals ages 16-55 years were administered the updated ANT and VNT, and other standardized measures, either in person (n = 114) or via telehealth (n = 64). Results: With no effect of age, yet a significant influence of education, education-based normative data are provided for accuracy, tips-of-the-tongue (i.e. delayed, accurate responses plus correct responses following phonemic cueing), and an aggregate Summary Score. Internal and test-retest reliability coefficients were reasonable (.67-.90). Conclusions: These measures provide updated and improved naming assessment for ages 16-55 years, contributing to a contiguous set of naming tests for school-aged children through elderly adults. Compared to the original ANT and VNT, these measures were designed to have stimuli longevity, and offer reduced item burden and evidence-based recommendations for performance measures with the greatest clinical sensitivity. The addition of these measures enables continuity in assessment across the age span, facilitating longitudinal assessment related to disease progression or therapeutic intervention.

The Multilingual Picture Database

The growing interdisciplinary research field of psycholinguistics is in constant need of new and up-to-date tools which will allow researchers to answer complex questions, but also expand on languages other than English, which dominates the field. One type of such tools are picture datasets which provide naming norms for everyday objects. However, existing databases tend to be small in terms of the number of items they include, and have also been normed in a limited number of languages, despite the recent boom in multilingualism research. In this paper we present the Multilingual Picture (Multipic) database, containing naming norms and familiarity scores for 500 coloured pictures, in thirty-two languages or language varieties from around the world. The data was validated with standard methods that have been used for existing picture datasets. This is the first dataset to provide naming norms, and translation equivalents, for such a variety of languages; as such, it will be of particular value to psycholinguists and other interested researchers. The dataset has been made freely available.

Picture naming in bilingual and monolingual Chinese speakers: Capturing similarity and variability

Picture-naming latency differs across languages in bilingual speakers. We compared the effects of key psycholinguistic variables on picture naming among two groups of Chinese bilingual speakers and Mandarin monolingual speakers. First, we asked bilingual and monolingual speakers to estimate the age of acquisition, familiarity, visual complexity, name agreement, and imageability of a set of object and action pictures in Mandarin and Cantonese. Next, we recruited 60 Cantonese-English speakers, 50 Mandarin-Cantonese bilingual speakers, and 30 monolingual speakers who named the object and action pictures in Cantonese and Mandarin, respectively. We observed variability in the effects of item-level characteristics among groups, suggesting an interaction between item-level and individual-level characteristics as predicted. This variability was higher in bilingual speakers who spoke similar languages (Mandarin-Cantonese) in comparison to those speaking more distant languages (Cantonese-English). Our results suggest that monolingual norms and bilingual norms capture the same amount of variability; however, grammatical class interactions with other variables are explained differentially by the bilingual and monolingual norms. We discuss the implications of our findings in terms of norming studies for timed picture naming and effects of bilingualism on language processing.

A Systematic Review of Normative Studies Using Images of Common Objects

Common objects comprise living and non-living things people interact with in their daily-lives. Images depicting common objects are extensively used in different fields of research and intervention, such as linguistics, psychology, and education. Nevertheless, their adequate use requires the consideration of several factors (e.g., item-differences, cultural-context and confounding correlated variables), and careful validation procedures. The current study presents a systematic review of the available published norms for images of common objects. A systematic search using PRISMA guidelines indicated that despite their extensive use, the production of norms for such stimuli with adult populations is quite limited (N = 55), particularly for more ecological images, such as photos (N = 14). Among the several dimensions in which the items were assessed, the most commonly referred in our sample were familiarity, visual complexity and name agreement, illustrating some consistency across the reported dimensions while also indicating the limited examination of other potentially relevant dimensions for image processing. The lack of normative studies simultaneously examining affective, perceptive and semantic dimensions was also documented. The number of such normative studies has been increasing in the last years and published in relevant peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, their datasets and norms have been complying with current open science practices. Nevertheless, they are still scarcely cited and replicated in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The current study brings important theoretical contributions by characterizing images of common objects stimuli and their culturally-based norms while highlighting several important features that are likely to be relevant for future stimuli selection and evaluative procedures. The systematic scrutiny of these normative studies is likely to stimulate the production of new, robust and contextually-relevant normative datasets and to provide tools for enhancing the quality of future research and intervention.

IMABASE: A new set of 313 colourised line drawings standardised in French for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, age-of-acquisition, and imageability

We provide normative data for a new set of 313 colourised line drawings. The drawings were standardised on name agreement (N = 60 participants), image agreement (N = 34), conceptual familiarity (N = 36), age of acquisition (N = 35), and imageability (N = 35). Objective visual complexity measures are given for the pictures, and objective word frequencies are provided for the modal names of the drawings. Reliability measures for the collected norms are very high. There are high levels of agreement between the names given by the participants and the drawings and comparative analyses indicate that the distribution of name agreement scores is very similar in both our own database and the MultiPic database (Duñabeitia et al., 2018). A novel "picture-choice task" used to assess name-image agreement (N = 30) reveals that the great majority of the IMABASE pictures that are also present in MultiPic are rated as providing better pictorial representations of the corresponding concepts. Finally, most of the correlations are comparable with those reported in other normative studies on colourised drawings. The whole set of pictures is freely available from https://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/~lead/imabase/ and the norms are available as Supplementary Material.

The China Image Set (CIS): A New Set of 551 Colored Photos With Chinese Norms for 12 Psycholinguistic Variables

Normative image sets are widely used in memory, perception, and language studies. Following the pioneering work of Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), a number of normalized image sets with various language norms have been created. However, original image sets that are carefully selected to accommodate Chinese culture and language are still in short supply. In the present study, we provided the China Image Set (CIS), a new set of photo stimuli with Chinese norms. The CIS consists of 551 high-quality colored photo stimuli that cover 21 categories and are normalized on 12 different variables, including name agreement, category agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, object manipulability, manipulation experience, color diagnosticity, shape diagnosticity, image variability, age of acquisition, image agreement, and within-category typicality. Of the 12 variables, shape diagnosticity and manipulation experience with the object depicted in a stimulus are the two newly introduced and normalized variables. Multiple regression analysis reveals that name agreement, age of acquisition, image agreement, shape diagnosticity, and image variability are the most robust determinants of picture naming latency. Our normative dataset of the high-quality photo stimuli offers an ecologically more valid tool to study object recognition and language processing within Chinese culture than has previously been available.

Picture perfect: A stimulus set of 225 pairs of matched clipart and photographic images normed by Mechanical Turk and laboratory participants

The present study provides normative measures for a new stimulus set of images consisting of 225 everyday objects, each depicted both as a photograph and a matched clipart image generated directly from the photograph (450 images total). The clipart images preserve the same scale, shape, orientation, and general color features as the corresponding photographs. Various norms (modal name and verb agreement measures, picture–name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and image agreement) were collected separately for each image type and in two different contexts: online (using Mechanical Turk) and in the laboratory. We discuss similarities and differences in the normative measures according to both image type and experimental context. The full set of norms is provided in the supplemental materials.

MultiPic: A standardized set of 750 drawings with norms for six European languages

Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic .

Color Image Norms in Mandarin Chinese

The present study comprises two parts, an object picture naming task and rating tasks, and reports naming latencies and norms for 435 color images in Mandarin Chinese. These norms include name agreement (%), H-value, concept agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, age of acquisition (AOA) based on adult ratings, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, word frequency, and word length. We examined correlations between the norms and explored the internal structure among these correlative variables by a factor analysis. Four factors were extracted, which accounted for 74.86% of the total variance. These data were analyzed to identify variables with significant contributions to naming latencies using multiple regression analysis, including norms of name agreement (%), familiarity, word frequency, concept agreement, AOA, and object agreement. These variables explained 54.70% of the total variance of naming latencies. This work presents a new set of photo stimuli and a large set of normalized variables. We expect that this study will provide useful materials for further researches.

Predictors of photo naming: Dutch norms for 327 photos

In the present study, we report naming latencies and norms for 327 photos of objects in Dutch. We provide norms for eight psycholinguistic variables: age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, image agreement, objective and subjective visual complexity, word frequency, word length in syllables and letters, and name agreement. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses revealed that the significant predictors of photo-naming latencies were name agreement, word frequency, imageability, and image agreement. The naming latencies, norms, and stimuli are provided as supplemental materials.

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and visual word recognition

We collected sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,659 French words in adults. Sensory experience for words is a recently introduced variable that corresponds to the degree to which words elicit sensory and perceptual experiences (Juhasz & Yap Behavior Research Methods, 45, 160-168, 2013; Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, & Gullick Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64, 1683-1691, 2011). The relationships of the sensory experience norms with other psycholinguistic variables (e.g., imageability and age of acquisition) were analyzed. We also investigated the degree to which SER predicted performance in visual word recognition tasks (lexical decision, word naming, and progressive demasking). The analyses indicated that SER reliably predicted response times in lexical decision, but not in word naming or progressive demasking. The findings are discussed in relation to the status of SER, the role of semantic code activation in visual word recognition, and the embodied view of cognition.

Written object naming, spelling to dictation, and immediate copying: Different tasks, different pathways?

We report an investigation of cross-task comparisons of handwritten latencies in written object naming, spelling to dictation, and immediate copying. In three separate sessions, adults had to write down a list of concrete nouns from their corresponding pictures (written naming), from their spoken (spelling to dictation) and from their visual presentation (immediate copying). Linear mixed models without random slopes were performed on the latencies in order to study and compare within-task fixed effects. By-participants random slopes were then included to investigate individual differences within and across tasks. Overall, the findings suggest that written naming, spelling to dictation, and copying all involve a lexical pathway, but that written naming relies on this pathway more than the other two tasks do. Only spelling to dictation strongly involves a nonlexical pathway. Finally, the analyses performed at the level of participants indicate that, depending on the type of task, the slower participants are more or less influenced by certain psycholinguistic variables.