Developmental picture norms: Relationships between name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity for child and adult ratings of two sets of line drawings

Abstract

Developmental differences in name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity in response to line drawings of common objects were obtained from children and adults. Sixty-one pictures were taken from the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised and 259 pictures were taken from the set normed for adults by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980). Although there were some differences between the two sets of pictures, the present results replicated the relative independence of these three measures, which was reported by Snodgrass and Vanderwart for adults. Children and adults showed substantial agreement on the names of the pictures. Although the children's ratings were lower on all measures, the differences were trivial for most pictures. We concluded that judgments offamiliarity, complexity, and the names ofline drawings of common objects are based primarily on information processing accomplished prior to age 7. 371Cognitive psychologists have shown an increasing interest in the operations involved in the encoding, storage, and retrieval of pictorial stimuli. Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) addressed the paucity ofwell-eharacterized experimental picture sets by developing and norming a set of 260 line drawings of familiar concepts.Developmental investigations would also benefit from the use of standardized picture stimuli. For instance, Hitch and Halliday (1983) and Hulme, Silvester, Smith, and Muir (1986) studied the word-length effect, whereby longer words and their pictured symbols are recalled less often than their shorter counterparts (Schiano & Watkins, 1981). Hitch and Halliday found that 6-year-01ds did not exhibit this effect for pictures, whereas Hulme et al. reported the effect in children as young as 4 years old. However, Hitch and Halliday used a set of line drawings as their stimuli, whereas Hulme et al. chose color pictures taken from prereading books commonly used by young children. Clearly, it would help in interpreting studies like these if the same set of pictorial stimuli were employed, and if the attributes of those stimuli that might be rele-The authors wishto thank Charles L. Brown for computer programming, and Barry Dunayerand Margaret Cramer for data collating.

A new set of 272 pictures for psycholinguistic studies: Persian norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, and age of acquisition

“…Consistent with the findings reported in previous studies (Berman, Friedman, Hamberger, & Snodgrass, 1989;Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980), the results of the present study showed a negative correlation between conceptual familiarity and visual complexity, indicating that conceptual familiarity increased when the picture was visually simpler. This correlation might have been influenced by the effect of the degree of conceptual familiarity on speech production stages.…”

Use it or lose it? SES mitigates age-related decline in a recency/recognition task

“…Pictures of common objects were used as stimuli (from [2,13,59]). Four sequences (involving a rotation of the stimuli between recency and recognition trials) were used and were counterbalanced across participants.…”

Speaking in multiple languages: Neural correlates of language proficiency in multilingual word production

“…The pictures were selected on the basis of Videsott et al: Neural correlates of language proficiency 9 existing standardized picture sets (Snodgrass and Vanderwart 1980, Berman et al 1989, Cycowicz et al 1997, and the "International Picture Naming Project" of the CRL, University of California/San Diego, http://crl.ucsd.edu/~aszekely/ipnp/) on the principle that stimulus objects should unequivocally express a lexical concept (Indefrey and Levelt 2000), reducing subjective interpretations as much as possible and admitting only one precise and well-defined answer as word output. In order to avoid repetition effects (Kiefer 2005b), object pictures were presented only once in the experiment and hence were not repeated as stimulus in another language.…”