We measured Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) and naming times to picture targets preceded by masked words (stimulus onset asynchrony: 80 ms) that shared one of three different types of relationship with the names of the pictures: (1) Identity related, in which the prime was the name of the picture ("socks" - ), (2) Phonemic Onset related, in which the initial segment of the pri...

Subjects were presented with a series of pictures, some of which were general (girl walking down the path) and others specific (girl hiking down the path). These pictures were matched with sentences which were either general or specific ("The girl is walking [hiking] down the path.") Subsequently, a forced-choice picture recognition test was administered in which subjects saw pairs of pictures ...

We investigated whether speakers represent their partners' task in a joint naming paradigm. Two participants took turns in naming pictures; occasionally the (initial) picture was replaced by a different picture (target), signaling that they had to stop naming the initial picture. When the same participant had to name the target picture, he or she completed the name of the initial picture more o...

Confrontation naming of objects, as measured by the Boston Naming Test (BNT), is impaired in both fronto-temporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). However, the profile of naming disturbances seems to be different in these two neurodegenerative conditions, which could provide clues for differential diagnosis. This study aimed to characterize the naming performance in FTD and AD as we...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of enriching line drawings with color/texture and environmental context as a facilitator of naming speed and accuracy in older adults. METHOD Twenty young and 23 older adults named high-frequency picture stimuli from the Boston Naming Test (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001) under three conditions: (a) black-and-white items, (b...

0749-596X/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier Inc doi:10.1016/j.jml.2011.01.004 ⇑ Corresponding author. Address: Radboud Unive ders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Spinoza Building B.01.05, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 Netherlands. E-mail address: [email protected] (V. Piai). Disagreement exists about whether lexical selection in word production is a competitive process. Competition pre...

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative syndrome that causes a gradual atrophy of the left hemisphere language network, leading to impairments of object naming (anomia) and word comprehension. In 33 human subjects with PPA, object naming and word comprehension were explored with N400 potentials elicited by picture-word or picture-picture matching tasks. Two mechanisms of impair...

In this study we address the question of how lexical selection is achieved by bilingual speakers during speech production. Speci®cally, we test whether there is competition between the two lexicons of a bilingual during lexical access. In two picture±word interference experiments we explore the performance of two groups of bilinguals, English±Spanish and Spanish±English pro®cient bilinguals whi...

In picture-word interference experiments, participants name pictures (e.g., of a cat) while trying to ignore distractor words. Mean response time (RT) is typically longer with semantically related distractor words (e.g., dog) than with unrelated words (e.g., shoe), called semantic interference. Previous research has examined the RT distributional characteristics of distractor effects by perform...

The enhancement of cognitive function in healthy subjects by medication, training or intervention yields increasing political, social and ethical attention. In this paper facilitatory effects of single-pulse TMS and repetitive TMS on a simple picture naming task are presented. A significant shortening of picture naming latencies was observed after single-pulse TMS over Wernicke's area. The accu...