The present study reports timed norms for 435 object pictures in Mandarin Chinese. These data include naming latency, name agreement, concept agreement, word length, and age of acquisition (AoA) based on children's naming and adult ratings, and several other adult ratings of concept familiarity, subjective word frequency, image agreement, image variability, and visual complexity. Furthermore, we examined factors that influence the naming latencies of the pictures. The results show that concept familiarity, AoA, concept agreement, name agreement, and image agreement are significant predictors of naming latencies, whereas subjective word frequency is not a reliable determinant. These results are discussed in light of picture naming data in other languages. An item-based index for the norms is provided in the Table S1.

Many studies have analyzed the properties of objects that influence picture naming speed. These studies are important for developing cognitive models of object recognition and naming and for the study of lexical processing in the brain (Bates et al., 2003;Székely et al., 2003). Up until the late 1990s, research on the key factors affecting picture naming speed was limited to that done in English. However, there has been a steady increase in studies investigating timed picture naming in other languages including Dutch (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994;Severens, Van Lommel, Ratinckx, & Hartsuiker, 2005), French (Alario et al., 2004;Bonin, Chalard, Méot, & Fayol, 2002;Bonin, Peereman, Malardier, Méot, & Chalard, 2003;Chalard, Bonin, Méot, Boyer, & Fayol, 2003;Kremin, Hamerel, Dordain, De Wilde, & Perrier, 2000;Schwitter, Boyer, Méot, Bonin, & Laganaro, 2004), Icelandic (Pind & Tryggvadottir, 2002), Italian (Dell'Acqua, Lotto, & Job, 2000), Japanese (Nishimoto, Miyawaki, Ueda, Une, & Takahashi, 2005), and Spanish (Cuetos, Ellis, & Alvarez, 1999;Sanfeliu & Fernandez, 1996). All of these studies investigate naming of objects using line drawings first published by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) and locally collected normative data. According to a review by Alario et al., the key variables that predict picture naming latency across languages are name agreement and rated age of acquisition (AoA). Bates and colleagues compared languages in a study of picture naming in Bulgarian, English, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, and Mandarin (Putonghua). Their data confirmed the importance of name agreement but also revealed a robust effect of printed-word frequency across languages. Bates et al. did not, however, consider the full range of variables for each of the languages examined; for example, they did not consider the effect of rated AoA on picture naming in Chinese. The primary aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of key variables-including AoA-on picture naming in Mainland Chinese speakers.Name agreement has a significant impact on timed picture naming that is independent of the effects of correlated variables such as word frequency, familiarity, and AoA in all languages. Name agreement can be measured in several ways, but the most common way is to determine the proportion of speakers who assign the target name to a pictured object. Another method is to measure the number of names given to a picture across participants. On both measures, pictures of objects that elicit different namesfor example, gun/pistol/revolver-have lower name agreement than do those that elicit a single name. If an object has more than one alternative name and participants do not all give the same name to a given picture, retrieval of any one of those names will be slowed. Pictures with a single dominant response are named more quickly and more accurately than pictures with alternative responses. This robust effect is possibly due to competition for tar- 335Copyright 2007 Psychonomic Society, Inc. We report normative data collected f...

This study examined compound awareness in relation to Chinese children's vocabulary acquisition and character reading. Two aspects of compound awareness were investigated: the ability to identify the head of a compound noun and the ability to construct a new compound word from familiar morphemes. The compound awareness tasks, along with rapid automatized naming (RAN) and phonological awareness tasks, were administered to 29 first graders and 30 second graders in Mainland China. Results show that (1) compound awareness develops relatively early among Chinese children and improves with age, (2) compound awareness explains unique variance in vocabulary and character reading, after controlling for age, RAN, and phonological awareness, and (3) the contribution made by compound awareness to vocabulary is much larger than the contribution made by phonological awareness. These results demonstrate that compound awareness plays a central role in Chinese children's literacy development, particularly in vocabulary acquisition.

The effect of bilingualism on the development of phonological awareness of Chinese children was investigated in 2 studies comparing bilingual speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin with monolingual speakers of Mandarin. Cantonese-speaking children had developed more advanced onset and rime awareness by 2nd grade as they learned Mandarin in school and became bilingual. Bilingualism seemed to accelerate the development of phonological awareness. But the advantage had mostly disappeared by 4th grade. On the other hand, in the 1st grade, Cantonese-speaking children had more advanced tone awareness than Mandarin-speaking children. This was likely because Cantonese has a more complicated tone system than Mandarin.

The research reported in this paper investigated the effects of semantic relatedness of words (closely related vs. distantly related) and morpheme type (free morpheme vs. bound morpheme) on young Chinese children's homophone awareness, an aspect of morphological awareness, in two experiments. The first experiment was a cross-sectional study including 39 children in a beginning kindergarten class, 39 children in an intermediate kindergarten class, and 36 children in a senior kindergarten class. The second experiment was a 7-month longitudinal study involving 43 first graders and 50 second graders at the beginning of the study. In both experiments, the children judged whether orally presented words shared the same morpheme or contained homophonous morphemes. The results suggest that homophone awareness emerges in Chinese children in the kindergarten years. Children's morpheme identification is facilitated by the semantic proximity of words that share a morpheme, and awareness of free morphemes is developed before that of bound morphemes. Furthermore, although semantic relatedness is the most prominent factor in kindergarten, its effect varies as a function of morpheme type in the early primary grades. Our research sheds light on the developmental course of morphological awareness and the factors that influence it.Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in language. In all languages, morphemes are combined in a rule-based manner to form morphologically complex