Abstract
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.
Highlights
IntroductionPictures play an important role in psychoeducational assessment, intervention, and research
The results showed that pictures were named more accurately when a particular word represented by a picture was frequent and familiar, when the picture had low subjective visual complexity, and when the image agreement was high
A Shapiro–Wilk test of normality was significant for the name agreement measures (p < .001), and non-significant for both subjective scales, familiarity (W = 0.98, p = 0.272), and visual complexity (W = 0.99, p = 0.766), indicating that data might be deviated from normality in name agreement measures but not in subjective scales
Summary
Pictures play an important role in psychoeducational assessment, intervention, and research. Picture naming is a very frequently used task because it allows for exploring various cognitive processes such as perceptual processing, activation of semantic information, lexical selection, name retrieval, and motor planning (see Bonin et al, 2015; Humphreys & Riddoch, 2006; Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer, 1999; Riddoch & Humphreys, 2001; Roelofs & Ferreira, in press). Pictures—as opposed to written stimuli—could be the only option when conducting researching with pre-reader kindergarten pupils. One important line of research, which has provided well-controlled stimuli for picture naming tasks, consists of normative studies. Norms offer information on the variables of central relevance that influence naming performance. A pioneering normative study is the one reported by Snodgrass & Vanderwart (1980). This consisted of 260 black-andwhite line drawings with norms for name agreement, image agreement
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