Predictors of photo naming: Dutch norms for 327 photos

Characterizing language production across modalities

ABSTRACTThis study investigates factors influencing lexical access in language production across modalities (signed and oral). Data from deaf and hearing signers were reanalyzed (Baus and Costa, 2015, On the temporal dynamics of sign production: An ERP study in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Brain Research, 1609(1), 40-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2015.03.013; Gimeno-Martínez and Baus, 2022, Iconicity in sign language production: Task matters. Neuropsychologia, 167, 108166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108166) testing the influence of psycholinguistic variables and ERP mean amplitudes on signing and naming latencies. Deaf signers' signing latencies were influenced by sign iconicity in the picture signing task, and by spoken psycholinguistic variables in the word-to-sign translation task. Additionally, ERP amplitudes before response influenced signing but not translation latencies. Hearing signers' latencies, both signing and naming, were influenced by sign iconicity and word frequency, with early ERP amplitudes predicting only naming latencies. These findings highlight general and modality-specific determinants of lexical access in language production.

Polish norms for a set of colored drawings of 168 objects and 146 actions with predictors of naming performance

In this study, we present the first database of pictures and their corresponding psycholinguistic norms for Polish: the CLT database. In this norming study, we used the pictures from Cross-Linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLT): a set of colored drawings of 168 object and 146 actions. The CLT pictures were carefully created to provide a valid tool for multicultural comparisons. The pictures are accompanied by norms for Naming latencies, Name agreement, Goodness of depiction, Image agreement, Concept familiarity, Age of acquisition, Imageability, Lexical frequency, and Word complexity. We also report analyses of predictors of Naming latencies for pictures of objects and actions. Our results show that Name agreement, Concept familiarity, and Lexical frequency are significant predictors of Naming latencies for pictures of both objects and actions. Additionally, Age of acquisition significantly predicts Naming latencies of pictures of objects. The CLT database is freely available at osf.io/gp9qd. The full set of CLT pictures, including additional variants of pictures, is available on request at osf.io/y2cwr.

The impact of intellectual disability and sport expertise on cognitive and executive functions

Our aim was to identify the suitability of three assessment tools (i.e., Flanker test, Updating Word Span, and Color Trails Test) for future inclusion in the classification process of elite Paralympic athletes with intellectual disability and to assess the strength of the relation between Executive function (EF) and intelligence. Cognitive and EF assessments were performed on 59 participants, divided into four groups according to their cognitive level (with versus without intellectual disability) and sport expertise (athlete versus novice). Inhibition and working memory update skills were implicated in people with intellectual disability. For set-shifting, a more nuanced picture was observed. Strong associations between EF and intelligence was found in people with intellectual disability. Working memory updating and set-shifting are relevant EF skills to assess in the context of elite sport; however, culture-free alternatives for the Updating Word Span test are needed, and alternatives to the Color Trails Test, less reliant on literacy skills are required.

Developing psycholinguistic norms for action pictures in Cantonese

The purpose of this study was to establish psycholinguistic norms for 249 action pictures in Cantonese, a language with few norms available. We provide normative data for rated visual complexity, rated age of acquisition, name agreement, word frequency and rated familiarity in this study. Forty participants were recruited to participate in both timed picture naming and rating experiments. The linear mixed effect analysis revealed that familiarity, visual complexity, and name agreement were significant predictors of action naming in Cantonese. However, AoA did not show any significant effect on action naming, which is consistently observed in previous studies of action picture naming in Chinese. The possible explanation for null effect of AoA on naming latency are discussed. This set of psycholinguistic norms in Cantonese could serve as a valuable resource for future psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies in Cantonese.

Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS): Dutch Names for 1400 Photographs

We present written naming norms from 153 young adult Dutch speakers for 1397 photographs (the BOSS set; see Brodeur, Dionne-Dostie, Montreuil, & Lepage, 2010; Brodeur, Guérard, & Bouras, 2014). From the norming study, we report the preferred (modal) name, alternative names, name agreement, and average object agreement. In addition, the data base includes Zipf frequency, word prevalence and Age of Acquisition for the modal picture names collected. Furthermore, we describe a subset of 359 photographs with very good name agreement and a subset of 35 photos with two common names. These sets may be particularly valuable for designing experiments. Though the participants typed the object names, comparisons with other datasets indicate that the collected norms are valuable for spoken naming studies as well.

RealPic: Picture norms of real-world common items

Pictures are often used as stimuli in several fields, such as psychology and neuroscience. However, co-occurring image-related properties might impact their processing, emphasizing the importance of validating such materials to guarantee the quality of research and professional practices. This is particularly relevant for pictures of common items because of their wide applicability potential. Normative studies have already been conducted to create and validate such pictures, yet most of them focused on stimulus without naturalistic elements (e.g., line drawings). Norms for real-world pictures of common items are rare, and their normative examination does not always simultaneously assess affective, semantic and perceptive dimensions, namely in the Portuguese context. Real-world pictures constitute pictorial representations of the world with realistic details (e.g., natural color or position), thus improving their ecological validity and their suitability for empirical studies or intervention purposes. Consequently, the establishment of norms for real-world pictures is mandatory for exploring their ecological richness and to uncover their impact across several relevant dimensions. In this study, we established norms for 596 real-world pictures of common items (e.g., tomato, drum) selected from existing databases and distributed into 12 categories. The pictures were evaluated on nine dimensions by a Portuguese sample. The results present the norms by item, by dimension and their correlations as well as cross-cultural analyses. RealPic is a culturally based dataset that offers systematic and flexible standards and is suitable for selecting stimuli while controlling for confounding effects in empirical tasks and interventional applications.

A Systematic Review of Normative Studies Using Images of Common Objects

Common objects comprise living and non-living things people interact with in their daily-lives. Images depicting common objects are extensively used in different fields of research and intervention, such as linguistics, psychology, and education. Nevertheless, their adequate use requires the consideration of several factors (e.g., item-differences, cultural-context and confounding correlated variables), and careful validation procedures. The current study presents a systematic review of the available published norms for images of common objects. A systematic search using PRISMA guidelines indicated that despite their extensive use, the production of norms for such stimuli with adult populations is quite limited (N = 55), particularly for more ecological images, such as photos (N = 14). Among the several dimensions in which the items were assessed, the most commonly referred in our sample were familiarity, visual complexity and name agreement, illustrating some consistency across the reported dimensions while also indicating the limited examination of other potentially relevant dimensions for image processing. The lack of normative studies simultaneously examining affective, perceptive and semantic dimensions was also documented. The number of such normative studies has been increasing in the last years and published in relevant peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, their datasets and norms have been complying with current open science practices. Nevertheless, they are still scarcely cited and replicated in different linguistic and cultural contexts. The current study brings important theoretical contributions by characterizing images of common objects stimuli and their culturally-based norms while highlighting several important features that are likely to be relevant for future stimuli selection and evaluative procedures. The systematic scrutiny of these normative studies is likely to stimulate the production of new, robust and contextually-relevant normative datasets and to provide tools for enhancing the quality of future research and intervention.

PicPsy: A new bank of 106 photographs and line drawings with written naming norms for Spanish-speaking children and adults

The use of pictures as experimental stimuli is a frequent practice in psychological and educational research. In addition, picture-naming task allows the study of different cognitive processes such as perception, attention, memory and language. Line drawings have been widely used in research to date but it has begun to be highlighted the need for more ecological stimuli such as photographs. However, normative data of a photographic set has not been published yet for use with children. We present PicPsy, a new standardized bank of photographs and matched line drawing. We collected written picture-naming norms for name agreement, unknown responses, alternative names, familiarity and visual complexity. A total of 118 native Spanish-speaking children in grades 3-4 participated in the study. For comparison purposes, 89 adults were also included in the study. Child and adult performance was highly correlated, but we found significant age group differences in all variables examined except for visual complexity. Researchers and teachers could benefit from using the new standardized bank reported here which is published under public domain license. The data and materials for this research are available at the Open Science Framework, https://osf.io/nyf3t/.

Examining the influence of picture format on children's naming responses

Digital photography has facilitated the use of more ecological stimuli than line drawings as experimental stimuli. However, there is lack of evidence regarding the effect of the picture format on children’s naming agreement. The present work investigated whether the format of presentation of the pictures (line drawing or photograph) affects naming task performance in children. Two naming task experiments are reported using 106 concepts depicted both as a photograph and as a matched drawing delineated directly from the photograph. Thirty-eight and thirty-four Spanish-speaking children from 8 to 10 years old participated in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, respectively. We examined name agreement measures (H index, percentage of modal name, and alternative responses) and subjective scales (familiarity and visual complexity). The results revealed a significant main effect of format in all of the variables except for familiarity, indicating better name agreement indices and higher visual complexity values for the photograph format than for the line drawing format. Additionally, line drawings were more likely to produce alternative incorrect names. The implications of these findings for psychoeducational research and practice are discussed.

Concreteness norms for 1,659 French words: Relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and word recognition times

Words that correspond to a potential sensory experience-concrete words-have long been found to possess a processing advantage over abstract words in various lexical tasks. We collected norms of concreteness for a set of 1,659 French words, together with other psycholinguistic norms that were not available for these words-context availability, emotional valence, and arousal-but which are important if we are to achieve a better understanding of the meaning of concreteness effects. We then investigated the relationships of concreteness with these newly collected variables, together with other psycholinguistic variables that were already available for this set of words (e.g., imageability, age of acquisition, and sensory experience ratings). Finally, thanks to the variety of psychological norms available for this set of words, we decided to test further the embodied account of concreteness effects in visual-word recognition, championed by Kousta, Vigliocco, Vinson, Andrews, and Del Campo (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 140, 14-34, 2011). Similarly, we investigated the influences of concreteness in three word recognition tasks-lexical decision, progressive demasking, and word naming-using a multiple regression approach, based on the reaction times available in Chronolex (Ferrand, Brysbaert, Keuleers, New, Bonin, Méot, Pallier, Frontiers in Psychology, 2; 306, 2011). The norms can be downloaded as supplementary material provided with this article.

Italian norms and naming latencies for 357 high quality color images

In the domain of cognitive studies on the lexico-semantic representational system, one of the most important means of ensuring effective experimental designs is using ecological stimulus sets accompanied by normative data on the most relevant variables affecting the processing of their items. In the context of image sets, color photographs are particularly suited to this purpose as they reduce the difficulty of visual decoding processes that may emerge with traditional image sets of line drawings. This is especially so in clinical populations. In this study we provide Italian norms for a set of 357 high quality image-items belonging to 23 semantic subcategories from the Moreno-Martínez and Montoro database. Data from several variables affecting image processing were collected from a sample of 255 Italian-speaking participants: age of acquisition, familiarity, lexical frequency, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity. Lexical frequency data were derived from the CoLFIS corpus. Furthermore, we collected data on image oral naming latencies to explore how the variance in these latencies could be explained by these critical variables. Multiple regression analyses on the naming latencies show classical psycholinguistic phenomena, such as the effects of age of acquisition and name agreement. In addition, manipulability was also a significant predictor. The described Italian normative data and naming latencies are available for download as supplementary material.

Thai Norms for Name, Image, and Category Agreement, Object Familiarity, Visual Complexity, Manipulability, and Age of Acquisition for 480 Color Photographic Objects

Normative databases containing psycholinguistic variables are commonly used to aid stimulus selection for investigations into language and other cognitive processes. Norms exist for many languages, but not for Thai. The aim of the present research, therefore, was to obtain Thai normative data for the BOSS, a set of 480 high resolution color photographic images of real objects (Brodeur et al. in PLoS ONE 5(5), 2010.  https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010773 ). Norms were provided by 584 Thai university students on eight dimensions: name agreement, object familiarity, visual complexity, category agreement, image agreement, two types of manipulability (graspability and mimeability), and age of acquisition. The results revealed comparatively similar levels of name agreement to Brodeur et al. especially when unfamiliar items were factored out. The pattern of intercorrelations among the Thai psycholinguistic norms was comparable to previous studies and our cross-linguistic correlations were robust for the same set of pictures in English and French. Conjointly, the findings extend the relevancy of the BOSS to Thailand, supporting this photographic resource for investigations of language and other cognitive processes in monolingual, multilingual, and brain-impaired populations.

Picture perfect: A stimulus set of 225 pairs of matched clipart and photographic images normed by Mechanical Turk and laboratory participants

The present study provides normative measures for a new stimulus set of images consisting of 225 everyday objects, each depicted both as a photograph and a matched clipart image generated directly from the photograph (450 images total). The clipart images preserve the same scale, shape, orientation, and general color features as the corresponding photographs. Various norms (modal name and verb agreement measures, picture–name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and image agreement) were collected separately for each image type and in two different contexts: online (using Mechanical Turk) and in the laboratory. We discuss similarities and differences in the normative measures according to both image type and experimental context. The full set of norms is provided in the supplemental materials.

Color Image Norms in Mandarin Chinese

The present study comprises two parts, an object picture naming task and rating tasks, and reports naming latencies and norms for 435 color images in Mandarin Chinese. These norms include name agreement (%), H-value, concept agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, age of acquisition (AOA) based on adult ratings, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, word frequency, and word length. We examined correlations between the norms and explored the internal structure among these correlative variables by a factor analysis. Four factors were extracted, which accounted for 74.86% of the total variance. These data were analyzed to identify variables with significant contributions to naming latencies using multiple regression analysis, including norms of name agreement (%), familiarity, word frequency, concept agreement, AOA, and object agreement. These variables explained 54.70% of the total variance of naming latencies. This work presents a new set of photo stimuli and a large set of normalized variables. We expect that this study will provide useful materials for further researches.