Picture naming

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Abstract

Picture naming has become an important experimental paradigm in cognitive psychology. To name a picture can be considered an elementary process in the use of language. Thus, its chronometric analysis elucidates cognitive structures and processes that underlie speaking. Essentially, these analyses compare picture naming with reading, picture categorizing, and word categorizing. Furthermore, techniques of double stimulation such as the paradigms of priming and of Stroop-like interference are used. In this article, recent results obtained with these methods are reviewed and discussed with regard to five hypotheses about the cognitive structures that are involved in picture naming. Beside the older hypotheses of internal coding systems with only verbal or only pictorial format, the hypotheses of an internal dual code with a pictorial and a verbal component, of a common abstract code with logogen and pictogen subsystems, and the so-called lexical hypothesis are discussed. The latter postulates two main components: an abstract semantic memory which, nevertheless, also subserves picture processing, and a lexicon that carries out the huge amount of word processing without semantic interpretation that is necessary in hearing, reading, speaking and writing.

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      As such, words in nearly all cases3 are abstract representations that have an arbitrary relationship with their corresponding objects. Words carry the essence of objects, abstracting the stimulus into its basic, invariant properties and omitting incidental details (Amit et al., 2019; Amit et al., 2019; Glaser, 1992; Paivio, 1991; Pinker, 2003; Rim et al., 2015). The emergence of language and the shift from pictorial to verbal communication was a major development in human phylogeny and ontogeny.

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    I am grateful to Margrit O. Glaser for many helpful discussions and her assistance in formulating this text. The help of Hanne Bonnelycke in all questions concerning English usage is gratefully acknowledged. Furthermore, I thank Wido La Heij and an anonymous reviewer for many substantial suggestions to improve this article.

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