FACILITATION IN NAMING AND CATEGORIZING REPEATED PICTURES AND WORDS

Ss named or categorized a picture preceded sometime earlier by itself or by its verbal label as well as a word preceded by itself or a pictorial counterpart. The extent to which the 2nd item benefited from prior processing was a function of the mode of the 2nd item, the mode of the previous occurrence of the concept, and the task. Results of the naming task of Exp I (36 undergraduates) suggest that words are more generic, in that they tended to facilitate processing of subsequent occurrences of the concept regardless of the mode of the 2nd occurrence, whereas pictures tended to facilitate only subsequent pictures. In fact, reading a word was not faster after having just named a pictorial representation of that concept. Exp II (48 undergraduates) explored, and ruled out, the possibility that this failure to find facilitation was the result of an inhibitory mechanism. In general, the data are consistent with the idea that pictures and words consult the same semantic system for their interpretation but that words activate a more generic set of semantic information than do pictures. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved). © 1979 American Psychological Association.