Timed written picture naming in 14 European languages

Mark Torrance, Guido Nottbusch, Rui A. Alves, Barbara Arfé, Lucile Chanquoy, Evgeny Chukharev-Hudilainen, Ioannis Dimakos, Raquel Fidalgo, Jukka Hyönä, Ómar I. Jóhannesson, George Madjarov, Dennis N. Pauly, Per Henning Uppstad, Luuk van Waes, Michael Vernon, Åsa Wengelin

We describe the Multilanguage Written Picture Naming Dataset. This gives trial-level data and time and agreement norms for written naming of the 260 pictures of everyday objects that compose the colorized Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois in Perception, 33, 217-236, 2004). Adult participants gave keyboarded responses in their first language under controlled experimental conditions (N = 1,274, with subsamples responding in Bulgarian, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish). We measured the time to initiate a response (RT) and interkeypress intervals, and calculated measures of name and spelling agreement. There was a tendency across all languages for quicker RTs to pictures with higher familiarity, image agreement, and name frequency, and with higher name agreement. Effects of spelling agreement and effects on output rates after writing onset were present in some, but not all, languages. Written naming therefore shows name retrieval effects that are similar to those found in speech, but our findings suggest the need for cross-language comparisons as we seek to understand the orthographic retrieval and/or assembly processes that are specific to written output.