Sound symbolism is the non-arbitrary use of speech sounds to convey meaning. For example, we tend to mark large objects with back vowels, e.g., /u/ in ”huge,” and small objects with front vowels, e.g., /i/ in ”tiny.” Previous research into sound symbolic naming has suggested that an object’s motion is considered when naming the object. We report results from two experiments in which participant...

Historically, both clinicians and cognitive scientists have used visual object naming measures to study naming, and lesion-type studies have implicated the left posterior, temporo-parietal region as a critical component of naming circuitry. However, recent results from behavioral and cortical stimulation studies using auditory description naming as well as visual object naming in left temporal ...

Neuropsychological studies have suggested differences in the cortical representations of verbs and nouns. Assessment of word-class specific deficits often relies on picture naming with different sets of images used for action and object naming. Such a setup may be problematic in neuroimaging studies, as the perception of the image and the actual differences in retrieving verbs or nouns become i...

In this paper we have described the construction of a graded naming test that makes the distinction between object and proper names. This distinction was prompted by a single case study of a patient who showed a specific naming impairment for a particular class of proper names. Naming vocabulary was found to be highly correlated with other measures of verbal intelligence and we have discussed t...

We examined the contribution of executive control to individual differences in response time (RT) for naming objects and actions. Following Miyake et al., executive control was assumed to include updating, shifting, and inhibiting abilities, which were assessed using operation span, task-switching, and stop-signal tasks, respectively. Experiment 1 showed that updating ability was significantly ...

Neuropsychological studies have demonstrated that the production of nouns and verbs can be dissociated in aphasia. These reports have been taken as evidence for separate representations of nouns and verbs in the human brain. We used whole-head magnetoencephalography to record cortical dynamics of action and object naming in 10 healthy adults and in 1 anomic patient with superior naming of verbs...

Eye movements have been shown to reflect word recognition and language comprehension processes occurring during reading and auditory language comprehension. The present study examines whether the eye movements speakers make during object naming similarly reflect speech planning processes. In Experiment 1, speakers named object pairs saying, for instance, 'scooter and hat'. The objects were pres...