We used fMRI in 35 healthy participants to investigate how two neighbouring subregions in the lateral anterior temporal lobe (LATL) contribute to semantic matching and object naming. Four different levels of processing were considered: (A) recognition of the object concepts; (B) search for semantic associations related to object stimuli; (C) retrieval of semantic concepts of interest; and (D) r...

Rather than having universal linguistic categories for some sets of common objects, languages develop their own, idiosyncratic naming patterns for them. Accounting for these patterns requires reference not only to the understanding of stimulus properties by individual speakers of a language, but also to the linguistic and cultural histories of the language they speak. To better understand how t...

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA), a selective neurodegeneration of the language network, frequently causes object naming impairments. We examined the N400 event-related potential (ERP) to explore interactions between object recognition and word processing in 20 PPA patients and 15 controls. Participants viewed photographs of objects, each followed by a word that was either a match to the objec...

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...

It has been argued that semantic information is distributed across various types of knowledge domains reflecting the manner in which information was acquired. We analyzed the influence of several common picture naming and word naming predictors across two categories: animals and tools/manipulable objects. However, in the regression analyses we used as additional predictors three different measu...

Two recent lines of research suggest that explicitly naming objects at study influences subsequent memory for those objects at test. Lupyan (2008) suggested that naming impairs memory by a representational shift of stored representations of named objects toward the prototype (labeling effect). MacLeod, Gopie, Hourihan, Neary, and Ozubko (2010) and MacLeod, Ozubko, Forrin, and Hourihan (submitte...

Graded interference effects were tested in a naming task, in parallel for objects and actions. Participants named either object or action pictures presented in the context of other pictures (blocks) that were either semantically very similar, or somewhat semantically similar or semantically dissimilar. We found that naming latencies for both object and action words were modulated by the semanti...

There is a remarkable lack of research bringing together the literatures on oral reading and speaking. As concerns phonological encoding, both models of reading and speaking assume a process of segmental spellout for words, which is followed by serial prosodification in models of speaking (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). Thus, a natural place to merge models of reading and speaking would...

Levelt (2002) argued that apparent effects of word frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) reported in recent picture naming studies might actually be confounded effects operating at the level of object recognition, rather than relevant to theories of lexical retrieval. In order to investigate this issue, AoA effects were examined in an object recognition memory task (Experiments 1 and 2) and a ...

Visual object recognition and naming deficits in patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type (DAT) have typically been attributed to deficits in semantic processing. On a visual object naming test, a group of 10 mild, early stage DAT patients (mean MMSE=23.8) were found to suffer from anomia, compared to a group of 10 age-matched control participants. DAT naming errors were typically within ca...