Stimulus sets are valuable tools that can facilitate the work of researchers designing experiments. Images of faces, and line drawings of objects have been developed and validated, however, pictures of animals, that do not contain backgrounds, have not been made available. Here we present image agreement and quality ratings for a set of 640 color images of animals on a transparent background, across 60 different basic categories (e.g. cat, dog, frog, bird), some with few, and others with many exemplars. These images were normed on 302 participants. Image agreement was measured both with respect to the proportion of participants that provided the same name as well as the H-statistic for each image. Image quality was measured both overall, and with respect to the accuracy of participants’ naming of the basic category. Word frequency of each basic and superordinate category based on the English Lexicon Project (Balota, et al., 2007) and the HAL database (Kucera & Francis, 1976) are provided as are Age of Acquisition (Kuperman, Stadthagen-Gonzalez, & Brysbaert, 2012) data.

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Oral mimicry is thought to represent an essential process for the neurodevelopment of spoken language systems in infants, the evolution of language in hominins, and a process that could possibly aid recovery in stroke patients. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we previously reported a divergence of auditory cortical pathways mediating perception of specific categories of natural sounds. However, it remained unclear if or how this fundamental sensory organization by the brain might relate to motor output, such as sound mimicry. Here, using fMRI, we revealed a dissociation of activated brain regions preferential for hearing with the intent to imitate and the oral mimicry of animal action sounds versus animal vocalizations as distinct acoustic-semantic categories. This functional dissociation may reflect components of a rudimentary cortical architecture that links systems for processing acoustic-semantic universals of natural sound with motor-related systems mediating oral mimicry at a category level. The observation of different brain regions involved in different aspects of oral mimicry may inform targeted therapies for rehabilitation of functional abilities after stroke.

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