On the relationship between reading, listening, and speaking: It’s different for people’s names

Abstract

Two experiments are reported that tested predictions derived from the framework of face, object, and word recognition proposed by Valentine, Brennen, and Bredart (1996). The findings were as follows: (1) Production of a celebrity's name in response to seeing the celebrity's face primed a subsequent familiarity decision to the celebrity's printed name. The degree of repetition priming observed was as great as that observed when a familiarity decision to the printed name was repeated in the prime and test phases of the experiment. (2) Makinga familiarity decision to an auditory presentation of a celebrity's name primed a familiarity decision to the same celebrity's name presented visually. The magnitude of cross-modality priming was as great as the magnitude of within-modality repetition priming. This result for people's names contrasted with the effects observed in lexical decision tasks, in which no reliable cross-modality priming was observed. The results cannot be accounted for by previous models of face and name processing. They show a marked contrast between processing people's names and processing words. The results support the framework proposed by Valentine et al. (1996).The implications for models of speech production, perception, and reading are discussed, together with the potential of the methodology to elucidate our understanding of proper name processing.Models offace recognition have been developed by analogy to models ofvisual word recognition. Hay and Young (1982) and Bruce and Young (1986) explicitly derived the notion ofa face recognition unit, which was postulated to mediate recognition ofa familiar face, by analogy to Morton's (1979) logogen model ofword recognition. A logogen is an entry in a mental lexicon that represents a specific known word. The logogen model included a single stage of lexical access for speech production (output logogens) that was separate from modality-specific representations for word recognition (input logogens). The assumption of separate lexical representations for recognition and production of words is typical ofcurrent models ofword recognition (see, e.g., Ellis & Young, 1988;Seidenberg, 1988). As a result ofthe analogy with visual word recognition, it has been assumed that production ofpeople's names involves a single stage ofaccess to a phonological representation that is separate from the representations required to recognize a printed or written name (see, e.g., Burton, Bruce, & Johnston, 1990;Valentine, Bredart, Lawson, & Ward, 1991).In contrast, models of speech production assume that lexical access involves two stages. The message to be articulated is formulated in a nonlexical conceptual system. This research was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (Grant R000234612). Correspondence should be addressed to T. Valentine, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London SEI4 6NW, England (e-mail: t.valentine@gold.ac.uk).-Accepted by previous editor, Geoffrey R. Loftus The first stage ofle...

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“…One explanation which has yet to be dismissed is the ''phonological completeness'' hypothesis (Brown & Watson, 1987), which suggests that the pho-1 In the most recent version of Levelt's model (Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999), a slightly different meaning of lemma is used. Here the term refers purely to a representation of syntactic information rather than to the original definition of syntactic and semantic information that most people have adopted (e.g., Wheeldon & Monsell, 1994;Valentine, Hollis, & Moore, 1998). We do not attempt to evaluate the details of the different models that currently exist, but simply attempt to interpret our data in terms of two stages of speech output.…”

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“…As such, this account resembles accounts of object naming, although clearly the nature of the semantic information stored will differ (e.g., Barry, Johnston, & Scanlan, 1998). However, some recent interactive activation and competitive (IAC) accounts of face naming have stripped the PINs of semantic content, rendering them token markers that can provide access in parallel to both name representations and semantic information (e.g., Bredart, Valentine, Calder, & Gassi, 1995;Burton & Bruce, 1992;Valentine, Hollis, & Moore, 1998). Empirical work on face naming in the last few years has sought to distinguish between what have been termed the serial (semantically mediated) and parallel accounts of face naming.…”

“…It would be more difficult to understand within the framework of most IAC models, for the reasons given above. 2 One parallel account, which incorporates a lemma level subsequent to PINs, might accommodate such a result assuming semantic organization of lemma representations (Valentine et al, 1998). A set of priming results that contrasted with the earlier object-naming studies would require some differentiation between object-and face-naming accounts.…”

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