Abstract
The present study examines similarities and differences in the processing of drawings and their corresponding names. For this purpose, students were asked to determine as fast as possible the identicalness of two pictures as opposed to the identicalness of their written Hebrew names. Twenty-eight Hebrew native speakers from the fifth grade participated in the experiment. Findings suggest that the human information processing system optimizes the processing of information (words, drawings, etc.) according to specific task requirements or task constraints. Stimulus type per se does not seem to determine the depth of its processing, nor does it seem to directly trigger particular modalities of encoding (perceptual, linguistic, semantic). Finally, the findings warrant the conclusion that superiority effects related to the processing of written words and pictorial stimuli reflect artifacts of task requirements rather than inherent characteristics of stimuli.
Highlights
Questions regarding the processing of written words as opposed to pictorial stimuli have been the impetus of a vivid line of research for more than a century
In each condition (PI and name identical (NI)), both for monosyllabic and bisyllabic words, half of the pairs built from two identical words and half of the pairs built from two different words were presented in print; the other half were presented in a cursive typescript
A significant interaction, F[1,27] = 6.70, p < .05, between level of processing and stimulus type indicated that the discrepancy in processing speed between physically identical (PI) and NI conditions was more marked for drawing pairs than for word pairs
Summary
Questions regarding the processing of written words as opposed to pictorial stimuli have been the impetus of a vivid line of research for more than a century. Findings from a more recent experiment designed to track differences in the processing of pictures and words challenges the assumption that the naming of pictures involves two consecutive processing phases (Job & Tenconi, 2002) In this experiment, the researcher used a paradigm with an ordinary naming condition and a combined categorization/naming condition. A similar speed of processing difference was predicted between drawings with monosyllabic and bisyllabic names, given that, in the course of processing their identicalness, their linguistic properties become automatically revealed (Job & Tenconi, 2002) If, retrieving their names is restricted to instances where it is explicitly required (i.e., asking participants to determine whether two drawings rhyme), processing the identicalness of drawings in the present study should prove insensitive to syllabic length
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