Examining the influence of picture format on children's naming responses

Cumulative semantic cost without successful naming

Accessing semantic information has negative consequences for successive recovering attempts of similar information. For instance, in the course of picture-naming tasks, the time required to name an object is determined by the total number of items from the same category that have already been named; naming latencies increase proportionally to the total number of semantically related words named previously. This phenomenon is called cumulative semantic cost (or interference). Two picture-naming experiments with children (4–11 years old, 229 participants) investigate whether having successfully named the previous within-category items is a necessary condition for the cumulative semantic cost to appear. We anticipated that younger children would have a larger rate of nonresponses compared with older children, reflecting the fact that younger children have not yet consolidated many lexical representations. Our results confirmed this prediction. Critically, we also observed that cumulative semantic cost was independent of having successfully retrieved previous within-category lexical items. Furthermore, picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a nonresponse showed the same amount of cost as those picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a correct naming event. Our findings indicate that it is the attempt to retrieve a lexical unit, and not the successful retrieval of a specific lexical unit, that causes semantic cost in picture naming. This cost can be explained by a mechanism of weakening the semantic-to-lexical mappings of semantic coordinate words. The findings are also discussed in the context of retrieval-induced forgetting effects in memory recall research.

PicPsy: A new bank of 106 photographs and line drawings with written naming norms for Spanish-speaking children and adults

The use of pictures as experimental stimuli is a frequent practice in psychological and educational research. In addition, picture-naming task allows the study of different cognitive processes such as perception, attention, memory and language. Line drawings have been widely used in research to date but it has begun to be highlighted the need for more ecological stimuli such as photographs. However, normative data of a photographic set has not been published yet for use with children. We present PicPsy, a new standardized bank of photographs and matched line drawing. We collected written picture-naming norms for name agreement, unknown responses, alternative names, familiarity and visual complexity. A total of 118 native Spanish-speaking children in grades 3-4 participated in the study. For comparison purposes, 89 adults were also included in the study. Child and adult performance was highly correlated, but we found significant age group differences in all variables examined except for visual complexity. Researchers and teachers could benefit from using the new standardized bank reported here which is published under public domain license. The data and materials for this research are available at the Open Science Framework, https://osf.io/nyf3t/.