The Mental Representation of Brand Names

Gontijo, Possidonia F. D.; Shi, Zhang

doi:10.4324/9781003064411-2

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…An excellent scenario to test this hypothesis is by using brand names, as they are generally written in the same case, either lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). Consistent with this idea, Gontijo and Zhang (2007) employed a number of brand names that were usually written in uppercase (e.g., GUCCI) in a lexical decision experiment and found faster response times to uppercase than lowercase brand names (e.g., GUCCI faster than gucci). More recently, Perea, Jiménez, et al (2015) employed brand names usually written either in lowercase (adidas) or uppercase (IKEA) and asked participants whether the item was a brand name or not.…”

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confidence: 91%

“…A similar advantage of the usual letter-case of words has been reported with acronyms (i.e., FBI is recognized faster than fbi; Seymour & Jack, 1978) and proper names (Mary is recognized faster than mary; Peressotti, Cubelli, & Job, 2003). While all these experiments suggest that the identification times of words are modulated by their usual letter-case, a potential shortcoming is that the mental representations of brand names, acronyms, and proper names may be different from that of common words (see Gontijo & Zhang, 2007).…”

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Are You Taking the Fastest Route to the RESTAURANT?

Perea

Marcet

Vergara-Martínez

2018

Experimental Psychology

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Most words in books and digital media are written in lowercase. The primacy of this format has been brought out by different experiments showing that common words are identified faster in lowercase (e.g., molecule) than in uppercase (MOLECULE). However, there are common words that are usually written in uppercase (street signs, billboards; e.g., STOP, PHARMACY). We conducted a lexical decision experiment to examine whether the usual letter-case configuration (uppercase vs. lowercase) of common words modulates word identification times. To this aim, we selected 78 molecule-type words and 78 PHARMACY-type words that were presented in lowercase or uppercase. For molecule-type words, the lowercase format elicited faster responses than the uppercase format, whereas this effect was absent for PHARMACY-type words. This pattern of results suggests that the usual letter configuration of common words plays an important role during visual word processing.

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Are You Taking the Fastest Route to the RESTAURANT?

Perea

Marcet

Vergara-Martínez

2018

Experimental Psychology

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“…Notably, visual letter similarity effects are also strong when presenting the misspelled logotypes in plain format (e.g., using Times New Roman; Perea et al, 2022 ), thus suggesting that the lexical representations of brand names may retain some perceptual elements (see Perea et al, 2021 , for a comparison of transposed-letter effects in brand names vs. logotypes). Indeed, brand names are identified faster when presented in their typical letter case (e.g., IKEA faster than ikea; amazon faster than AMAZON; see Gontijo & Zhang, 2007 ; Perea et al, 2015 ). In contrast, this pattern does not occur for common words: PHARMACY, although often capitalized, is no more readily identified than pharmacy (Perea et al, 2018 ).…”

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One more trip to Barcetona: on the special status of visual similarity effects in city names

Perea

Labusch

Fernández-López

et al. 2023

Psychological Research

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Previous research has shown that, unlike misspelled common words, misspelled brand names are sensitive to visual letter similarity effects (e.g., is often recognized as a legitimate brand name, but not ). This pattern poses problems for those models that assume that word identification is exclusively based on abstract codes. Here, we investigated the role of visual letter similarity using another type of word often presented in a more homogenous format than common words: city names. We found a visual letter similarity effect for misspelled city names (e.g., was often recognized as a word, but not ) for relatively short durations of the stimuli (200 ms; Experiment 2), but not when the stimuli were presented until response (Experiment 1). Notably, misspelled common words did not show a visual letter similarity effect for brief 200- and 150-ms durations (e.g., was not as often recognized as a word than ; Experiments 3–4). These findings provide further evidence that the consistency in the format of presentations may shape the representation of words in the mental lexicon, which may be more salient in scenarios where processing resources are limited (e.g., brief exposure presentations).

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