Word recognition research with alphabetical scripts has revealed a facilitatory neighborhood size effect, whereby naming of words with more orthographic neighbors is faster than that of words with fewer neighbors. Preliminary behavioral evidence in Chinese revealed both facilitatory and inhibitory neighborhood size effects, depending on whether there are higher-frequency neighbors (HFNs) than t...

Naming game simulates the process of naming an objective by a population of agents organized in a certain communication network. By pair-wise iterative interactions, the population reaches consensus asymptotically. We study naming game with communication errors during pair-wise conversations, with error rates in a uniform probability distribution. First, a model of naming game with learning err...

In four experiments, Malt and Sloman [Malt, B. C., & Sloman, S. A. (2007). Category essence or essentially pragmatic? Creator’s intention in naming and what’s really what. Cognition, 105, 615–648] show that the naming of artifacts is affected by discourse context. They see this phenomenon as posing a problem for the intentional-history theory of artifact categorization (e.g., [Bloom, P. (1996)....

Abstract It has been proposed that semantic systems evolve under pressure for efficiency. This hypothesis so far supported largely indirectly, by synchronic cross-language comparison, rather than directly diachronic data. Here, we test this in the domain of color naming, analyzing recent data from Nafaanra, a language Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, comparing it with quantitative predictions derived m...

Retrieving the names of friends, loved ones, and famous people is a fundamental human ability. This ability depends on the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL), where lesions can be associated with impaired naming of people regardless of modality (e.g., picture or voice). This finding has led to the idea that the left ATL is a modality-independent convergence region for proper naming. Hypotheses f...

Background and Purpose: Research indicates that many kinship families are in need of financial, emotional and intervention services (Linsk et al, 2009; Sakai, Lin, & Flores, 2011). Identifying their needs, however, is challenging due to kin caregivers’ diverse backgrounds and children’s various circumstances in out-of-home placement (Ynacura, 2013). Adding to these challenges is the lack of a r...

Object detection and identification are fundamental to human vision, and there is mounting evidence that objects guide the allocation of visual attention. However, the role of objects in tasks involving multiple modalities is less clear. To address this question, we investigate object naming, a task in which participants have to verbally identify objects they see in photorealistic scenes. We re...

In the present work we were concerned with the role of sound representations in object recognition. In order to address this issue we made use of a picture naming task in which target pictures might be accompanied by a white-noise burst. White-noise was thought to interfere with the representation of the sound possibly associated with the depicted object. We reasoned that if such a representati...

XML is now an established standard for data communication and representation. There has been considerable work on XML querying, modeling, and type definition. However, one of the most important aspects of XML, standardized tag naming for conveying semantics, has been almost ignored by the research community. This paper argues that the naming aspects of XML are important to consider and presents...