Abstract
Picture naming has become an important experimental paradigm in cognitive psychology. Young children are more variable than adults in their naming responses and less likely to know the object or its name. A consequence is that the interpretation of the two classical measures used by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) for scoring name agreement in adults (the percentage of agreement, based on modal name, and theH statistic, based on alternative names) will differ because of the high rate of “don’t know object” responses, common in young children, relative to the low rate of “don’t know object” responses more characteristic of adults. The present study focused on this methodological issue in young French children (3–8 years old), using a set of 145 Snodgrass-Vanderwart pictures. Our results indicate that the percentage of agreement based on the expected name is a better measure of picture-naming performance than are the commonly used measures. The norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
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This study was supported by a grant from the French Ministère de la Recherche (ACI Cognitique 2000). The pictures used in this study belong to our normative database and are available online (http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/Banque_images/). The authors are grateful to local school inspectors, teachers, parents, and children for their cooperation and to Monica Baciu for her very helpful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. We are also grateful to Debbie Gauchoux for her comments on our English.
Note—This article was accepted by the previous editor, Jonathan Vaughan.
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Cannard, C., Blaye, A., Scheuner, N. et al. Picture naming in 3- to 8-year-old French children: Methodological considerations for name agreement. Behavior Research Methods 37, 417–425 (2005). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03192710
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03192710