Theoretical analysis of the cognitive processing of lexical and pictorial stimuli: Reading, naming, and visual and conceptual comparisons.

Abstract

This article reviews the research literature on the differences between word reading and picture naming. A theory for the visual and cognitive processing of pictures and words is then introduced. The theory accounts for slower naming of pictures than reading of words. Reading aloud involves a fast, grapheme-to-phoneme transformation process, whereas picture naming involves two additional processes: (a) determining the meaning of the pictorial stimulus and (b) finding a name for the pictorial stimulus. We conducted a reading-naming experiment, and the time to achieve (a) and (b) was determined to be approximately 160 ms. On the basis of data from a second experiment, we demonstrated that there is no significant difference in time to visually compare two pictures or two words when size of the stimuli is equated. There is no difference in time to make the two types of cross-modality conceptual comparisons (picture first, then word, or word first, then picture). The symmetry of the visual and conceptual comparison results supports the hypothesis that the coding of the mind is neither intrinsically linguistic nor imagistic, but rather it is abstract. There is a potent stimulus size effect, equal for both pictorial and lexical stimuli. Small stimuli take longer to be visually processed than do larger stimuli. For optimal processing, stimuli should not only be equated for size, but should subtend a visual angle of at least 3 degrees. The article ends with the presentation of a mathematical theory that jointly accounts for the data from word-reading, picture-naming visual comparison, and conceptual-comparison experiments.

23 Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Human Comprehension

“…In these studies, pictures that follow a semantically related word or picture were processed faster than pictures that follow semantically unrelated items (Sperber et al, 1979;McCauley et al, 1980;Carr et al, 1982;Bajo, 1988;Theios et al, 1989). Moreover, the strength of the primetarget connection also influenced the processing times of target pictures (e.g., McEvoy, 1988).…”

Repetition Priming in Picture Naming and Translation Depends on Shared Processes and Their Difficulty: Evidence From Spanish-English Bilinguals.

“…Tasks are defined in terms of their component processes, which when successfully completed, lead from a stimulus to an overt response. Processes are conceptualized in a manner similar to those used in critical path networks (Townsend & Schweickert, 1989) and in other mathematical models of picture and word processing (e.g., Theios & Amrhein, 1989). First, a process is defined in terms of its start and end points and the subprocesses between them.…”

Are Arabic numerals processed as pictures in a Stroop interference task?

“…In some models, this conversion depends on direct grapheme-phoneme translations (Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993;Coltheart, Rastle, Parry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001); in other models, it consists of a connectionist type of conversion between letters and sounds (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996); and in still other models, it additionally consists of a direct link between an orthographic input lexicon and the speech output system (e.g., Besner, 1999). In contrast, nearly all models of picture naming (e.g., Glaser, 1992;Snodgrass, 1984;Theios & Amrhein, 1989;Humphreys, Price, & Riddoch, 1999) assume that pictures cannot be named if their meaning is not understood. Neuropsychological evidence for this position was reported by Hodges and Greene (1998).…”