Semantic Effects in Word Naming: Evidence from English and Japanese Kanji

Abstract

Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as a way of testing the generality of the findings across orthographies. The results replicated the earlier findings that readers were slower and more error prone in reading low-frequency exception words when they were low in imageability than when they were high in imageability (Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995). This result held for both English and Kanji even when age of acquisition was taken into account as a possible confounding variable, and the imageability effect was stronger in Kanji compared to English.Most current models of visual word recognition and naming assume the existence of at least two processing routes for the pronunciation of written words. That is, upon presentation of a printed word, phonology is retrieved through a lexical-semantic pathway (or network) as well as assembled through a spelling-sound mapping process (see, e.g., the computational models of

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

“…A final observation concerns the high correlation between familiarity and imageability. This finding, however, is not particularly surprising, given that the two variables are thought to be reliable indexes of semantic code activation (Cuetos & Barbon, 2006;Shibahara et al, 2003).…”

“…Imageability corresponds to the ease with which a mental image can be generated in response to the presentation of a written word. Imageability is thought to index semantic richness and is often used to investigate the activation of semantic codes in lexical-processing tasks (e.g., Cortese, Simpson, & Woolsey, 1997;Cuetos & Barbon, 2006;Shibahara, Zorzi, Hill, Wydell, & Butterworth, 2003;Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995. As is described below, we followed the same procedure as Paivio, Yuille, and Madigan (1968) to collect the norms for the picture names.…”

Planning levels in naming and reading complex numerals

“…In particular, whereas the effects are obtained in the lexical decision task, they are typically absent in reading aloud. In reviewing the literature, Shibahara, Zorzi, Hill, Wydell, and Butterworth (2003) suggested that, so far, only imageability has been shown to have an effect on reading latencies (e.g., Strain et al, 1995). However, imageability seems low in the case of complex numerals, so an effect of this factor was not to be expected in our experiments.…”

Word naming and psycholinguistic norms: Chinese

“…Other variables, such as initial phoneme of a syllable, age of acquisition, homophone density, and phonological frequency, have only recently been examined and shown to be important (Chen, Wang, Wang, & Peng, 2004;Liu, Zhang, & Shu, 2006;Ziegler, Tan, Perry, & Montant, 2000). Finally, semantic-level variables such as imageability and concreteness have also recently been found to be important in the processing of Japanese Kanji (Chinese characters; Shibahara, Zorzi, Hill, Wydell, & Butterworth, 2003), as well as in word naming and lexical decision in Chinese (Chen & Peng, 1998; see also Q. Zhang & Zhang, 1997).…”