Psycholinguistic norms and face naming times for photographs of celebrities in French

Abstract

A set of 105 photographs of celebrities has been standardized in French on distinctiveness, proper name agreement, face agreement, age of acquisition (AoA), and subjective frequency. Statistics on the collected variables for photographs are provided. The relationships between these variables have been analyzed. Face naming latencies have also been collected for the photographs of celebrities, and several multiple regression analyses have been carried out on naming latencies and percentages of tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomena. The main determinants of naming speed included AoA, face agreement, and name agreement. In addition, AoA, together with distinctiveness and face agreement, reliably predicted the percentages of TOTs. The norms, photographs of the celebrities, and spoken naming latencies corresponding to the celebrities are available on the Internet at norms.celebrities.googlepages.com and should be of great use to researchers interested in the processing of famous people.During the last 2 decades, psycholinguistic norms have been collected for a variety of stimuli: drawings of objects (e.g., Berman, Friedman, Hamberger, & Snodgrass, 1989; Bonin, Peereman, Malardier, Meot, & Chalard, 2003; Kremin, Hamerel, Dordain, De Wilde, & Perrier, 2000;Martein, 1995; Snodgrass & Vanderwart,1980), photographs and drawings of actions (Bonin, Boyer, Meot, Fayol, & Droit, 2004; Cuetos & Alija, 2003;Fiez & Tranel, 1997; Masterson & Drulcs, 1998; Schwitter, Boyer, MOot, Bonin, & Laganaro;2004;Szekely et al., 2005), and, more recently, celebrity names (Smith-Spark, Moore, Valentine, & Sherman, 2606). Norms for objects have been collected for different languages and communities as well as for different populations. For instance, the most frequently used database-namely, the one developed by Snodgrass and Vanderwart, which contains 260 blackand-white drawings of objects-has been standardized in British English (Barry, Morrison, & Ellis, 1997), French (Alario & Ferrand, 1999), Spanish (Sanfeliu & Fernandez, 1996, Icelandic (Pind, JOnsclOttir, TryggvadOttir, & JOnsson, 2000), and Chinese (Yoon et al., 2004). Norms have been made available to the research community for two main purposes. The first is that norms make it possible to control for a variety of potential variables that may affect performance when designing factorial experiments. For example, Alario and Ferrand's collection of French norms for the Snodgrass and Vanderwart drawings of objects has made it possible to design experiments that test the influence of both age of acquisition (AoA) and lexical frequency on picture naming latencies while controlling for many other relevant variables involved in picture naming, such as the visual complexity of the pictures, the codability of the pictures (name agreement), and the conceptual familiarity of the objects depicted by the pictures (e.g., Bonin, Fayol, & Chalard, 2001). The second is that the availability of norms allows researchers to test precise hypotheses about the levels of processing that are involved in speci...

First learned words are not forgotten: Age-of-acquisition effects in the tip-of-the-tongue experience

“…Furthermore, the two experiments reported here replicated previous studies identifying other relevant variables on the TOT phenomenon. For instance, pictures and definitions with less consistency in the words they elicit (i.e., higher H statistic scores) are more prone to TOT states, replicating previous observations with common nouns (Mitchell, 1989) and proper names (Bonin et al, 2008). We also observed that TOT probability increases with long words in the naming-to-definition task, consistent with Hanley and Chapman's (2008) study on proper names (for similar evidence with common nouns in a population of dyslexic children, see Hanly & Vandenberg, 2010).…”

“…For instance, in a normalized naming study of a set of photographs of celebrities, Bonin, Perret, Méot, Ferrand, and Mermillod (2008) observed that AoA predicts the percentages of TOTs. Another study showing some indirect, not conclusive, evidence for the relation between AoA and TOTs is that of Kittredge and colleagues (2008).…”

Russian norms for name agreement, image agreement for the colorized version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures and age of acquisition, conceptual familiarity, and imageability scores for modal object names

“…The rate of TOT states on objects in Russian was 0.37%, which is lower than the rates obtained in the previously mentioned studies (i.e., English [0.74%], French [0.62%], and Spanish [1.98%]). Overall, the percentage of TOTs is less than that generally found for proper names (e.g., 17% in the French normative study of Bonin et al, 2008). Table 3 shows the descriptive statistics for name agreement scores obtained in Russian, alongside those obtained on the same set of pictures by Rossion and Pourtois (2004) in French and Dimitropoulou et al (2009) in Modern Greek.…”

“…In some cases, norms collected for a set of stimuli at a given period of time within a given language and/ or community may need to be updated. This is especially true for photographs of celebrities (Bonin, Perret, Méot, Ferrand, & Mermillod, 2008), because individuals who were famous at a particular time may become less so as time passes (or the reverse may occur). The same phenomenon may, however, also be observed in the case of objects, since some items that were very familiar in the past (e.g., a tape recorder) may no longer be so, while the opposite development may also occur (e.g., an iPad).…”

Ratings of age of acquisition of 299 words across 25 languages: Is there a cross-linguistic order of words?

“…A review of 54 publications revealed that the majority of the subjective AoA studies did not state the exact form of the question at all Alario & Ferrand, 1999;Alonso, Fernandez, & Díez, 2015;Bakhtiar et al, 2013;Barry et al, 2006;Bird et al, 2001;Bonin, Boyer, Méot, Fayol, & Droit, 2004b;Bonin et al, 2003;Bonin, Perret, Méot, Ferrand, & Mermillod, 2008;Cameirão & Vicente, 2010;Cuetos et al, 1999;Cuetos et al, 2012;De Deyne & Storms, 2007;Della Rosa et al, 2010;Dimitropoulou et al, 2009;Johnston, Dent, Humphreys, & Barry, 2010;Lyons et al, 1978;Manoiloff et al, 2010;Marques, Fonseca, Morais, & Pinto, 2007;Moors et al, 2013;Moreno-Martínez et al, 2014;Nishimoto et al, 2005;Nishimoto, Ueda, Miyawaki, Une, & Takahashi, 2012;Raman et al, 2014;Schock, Cortese, Khanna, & Toppi, 2012;Schröder, Gemballa, Ruppin, & Wartenburger, 2011;Sirois et al, 2006;Stration et al, 1975;Tsaparina et al, 2011;Vinson et al, 2008;Walley & Metsala, 1992;Winters, Winter, & Burger, 1978). In the remaining articles, the wording BWhen do you think you learned this word?^is most frequently used (e.g., Auer & Bernstein, 2008;Barca et al, 2002).…”