Perseverant responding in speeded naming of pictures: It's in the links.

Abstract

Data are reported on picture naming under speeded deadline conditions. In Experiment 1, more errors were made in response to pictures with low-relative to high-frequency names, indicating that the deadline constrained name selection. In addition, subjects often made prime-related perseverative errors, in which they misnamed target pictures by giving them the names of related pictures that had been named previously (primes). In Experiment 2, prime-related perseverative errors did not occur at a greater than chance level when subjects categorized rather than named prime pictures. In Experiment 3, these errors did not occur at a greater than chance level when subjects first named related prime words. It is concluded that prime-related perseverative errors reflect persistent activation in the mappings connecting semantic representations of pictures to name representations. The relevance of the findings for models of picture naming and the use of the deadline technique for decomposing the picture-naming process are discussed. This work was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain. Experiments 2 and 3 were reported to the Experimental Psychology Society, London, January 1990.We would like to thank T. Carr, M. Smith, and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

Motivation and semantic context affect brain error-monitoring activity: An event-related brain potentials study

“…In accordance with previous studies (e.g., Damian et al, 2001;Schnur et al, 2006;Vitkovitch and Humphreys, 1991), we showed that pictures were named slower and responses were more erroneous in the context of the same-category items than in the context of items from different semantic categories. This semantic interference can be accounted for by competition between coactivated lexical entries in the same semantic context.…”

The inconsistency of consistency effects in reading: The case of Japanese Kanji.

“…Despite the fact that participants were instructed to try to "beat" the deadline, all reaction times were included in the analyses, provided that the words were pronounced correctly. This is the procedure used in other experiments with speeded naming of either words (Strain et al, 1995) or pictures (Vitkovitch & Humphreys, 1991). In all other respects, the procedure was identical to that in Experiment 1.…”

Timed picture naming: Extended norms and validation against previous studies

“…This is a parallel effort in English, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese, part of the continuing project "Cross-Linguistic Studies of Aphasia." In this regard, we are particularly interested in studies showing that the kinds of naming errors produced by aphasic patients can also be elicited in normal adults forced to name pictures under perceptual degradation (Laws, Leeson, & Gale, 2002) or under increasing time pressure (Vitkovitch & Humphreys, 1991;Vitkovitch, Humphreys, & Lloyd-Jones, 1993). In the present study, the partici-pants were asked to name the stimuli as fast as possible without making mistakes, and parameters were set to avoid inducing a speed/accuracy trade-off.…”