The Effect of ‘Masking’ on Picture Naming

Abstract

It is frequently assumed that because compared to nonliving things, living things are less familiar, have lower name frequency, and are more visually complex, this makes them more difficult to name by patients and normal subjects. This has also been implicitly accepted as an explanation for the greater incidence of living thing disorders. Patient studies do not, however, typically contain any premorbid data and so, we do not know that the same variables would have necessarily predicted their 'normal' performance. To examine this issue, we measured picture-naming latencies in normal subjects presented with unmasked and masked versions of the same line drawings. In accord with other recent studies, living things were named faster than nonliving things. Furthermore, contrary to some theories of category naming, the living thing advantage persisted regardless of whether stimuli were undegraded, degraded or the density of degradation. Finally, multiple simultaneous regression analyses showed that one visual variable (Euclidean Overlap) and one linguistic variable (Age of Acquisition) predicted naming latencies across all masked and unmasked conditions. Other variables either had no predictive value (Contour Overlap; Name Frequency; Category); predicted only high masking (Visual Complexity; Familiarity), or normal and low masking (Number of Phonemes). These findings imply that the more commonly documented deficits for living things do not reflect an exaggeration of the normal profile (be it with masked or unmasked stimuli) or the influence of the same variables that affect normal naming.

The naming profile in Alzheimer patients parallels that of elderly controls

“…The presence of a considerable category effect in neurologically normal participants may well have been "hidden" by ceiling effects in the control data of previous studies. Indeed, the presence of a normal category advantage (whether living or nonliving) accords with recent findings in healthy participants (Brousseau & Buchanan, 2004;Coppens & Frisinger, 2005;Filliter, McMullen, & Westwood, 2004;Låg, 2005;Låg, Hveem, Ruud, & Laeng, 2006;Laws, 1999Laws, , 2000Laws & Hunter, 2006;Laws & Neve, 1999;Laws, Leeson, & Gale, 2002b;Lloyd-Jones & Luckhurst, 2002;McKenna & Parry, 1994). With the recent accumulation of studies documenting category effects in healthy participants, it is pertinent to ask whether, and indeed how, extant models of category specificity incorporate the notion of category effects in the healthy brain.…”

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

“…Finally, previous research has shown that normal and patient populations name pictures of living objects more quickly and accurately than pictures of nonliving objects (e.g., Kiefer, 2001;Laws, Leeson, & Gale, 2002;Takarae & Levin, 2001). For words with high neighborhood frequency there were 11 objects of organic origin (deer, foot, goat, hive, leg, log, nose, pear, run, seal, and sheep) and 16 inorganic objects (bib, bike, book, bus, cage, cake, cape, chair, comb, cone, cup, fan, kite, knife, pan, pen).…”

Timed picture naming: Extended norms and validation against previous studies

“…This is a parallel effort in English, Italian, Spanish, and Chinese, part of the continuing project "Cross-Linguistic Studies of Aphasia." In this regard, we are particularly interested in studies showing that the kinds of naming errors produced by aphasic patients can also be elicited in normal adults forced to name pictures under perceptual degradation (Laws, Leeson, & Gale, 2002) or under increasing time pressure (Vitkovitch & Humphreys, 1991;Vitkovitch, Humphreys, & Lloyd-Jones, 1993). In the present study, the partici-pants were asked to name the stimuli as fast as possible without making mistakes, and parameters were set to avoid inducing a speed/accuracy trade-off.…”