Action and object picture naming in Turkish: A psycholinguistic database.

Abstract

Naming is a complex cognitive process that is incorporated into various models of speech and language processing. The picture-naming task is commonly employed to study naming processes. Investigation of cognitive processes in a reliable manner requires normative databases. The primary aim of the present study was to create a normative database for action and object picture naming in Turkish-speaking young, healthy adults, incorporating naming latencies and various relevant measures that may affect naming performance. In addition, the current study examined the effects of word category (action, object), lemma frequency, age of acquisition, name agreement (H index), word length, visual complexity, and conceptual complexity on naming latencies. Forty healthy adults between 18 and 38 years of age who were all native speakers of Turkish participated in the study. The participants were asked to name 62 action and 198 object pictures selected from the International Picture-Naming Project. The study resulted in the creation of a picture-naming database for Turkish, which provides naming latencies and name agreement scores along with various other relevant variables and their correlation matrix. Also, a linear mixed-effects model showed that name agreement (H index) and age of acquisition had a significant effect on naming latencies, highlighting the importance of these factors for picture naming in Turkish. The database can be used in future research in Turkish to consider naming difficulty associated with each action and object picture, to match stimuli on relevant measures, and/or to control for these measures as covariates in statistical models.