When you try to name the two lions, you might notice that the one on the left is more difficult to name than the one on the right. In this blogpost, you will read why this happens.
The seemingly simple task of naming a picture consists of several stages. You need to recognize the picture, remember the correct name for what it shows, think of how to pronounce it and get your articulators - such as your tongue and mouth - in the right positions to produce that name correctly. For the picture above, this means you need to recognize that the picture resembles a lion, think of the word lion, and finally say “lion”.
The words written on top of the lion interfere with this process in a very specific way. While you try to name the picture, you also read the words, even if you try really hard to ignore them. In one case (tiger), the written word slows down the picture-naming process, but in the other case (apple) it doesn’t.
This is because the words tiger and apple differ in how related they are to the picture name, lion. The words tiger and lion are closely related: They are both animals, both dangerous, both big cats, etc. The words apple and lion are comparatively less related: One is a fruit, and the other is an animal. Across many different word and picture pairs, it takes longer to name pictures that are accompanied by a related word than an unrelated word. Why is this?
One explanation for this phenomenon is that there is ‘competition’ between the picture name and the word written on top. When you read the word tiger or apple on top of the picture, you ‘activate’ this word in your so-called mental lexicon, which is like a dictionary of all the words you know, together with all their characteristics (such as how the word is spelled, what it means, or its pronunciation). However, when you activate a word, you not only activate the word itself, but also related words. This means when you read tiger, you also activate words like lion or cat and when you read the word apple, you activate words like pear and fruit.
As you try simultaneously to name the picture of the lion, you additionally activate the word lion, which in its turn activates related words such as tiger and panther, but not unrelated words like apple. This means tiger and lion mutually strengthen each other’s activation, and both the picture name lion and the word on top tiger become highly activated and compete to be produced. Thus, you have to stop yourself from saying “tiger” before you can name the picture of the lion. This competition is what slows you down with related picture-word pairs. The activation of the word apple is not strengthened by the picture name lion, which makes it easier to ignore than tiger.
Naming pictures with words written on top is not something we often do in daily life, but this type of task can help us understand more about how we store words in our brain and how we retrieve them from our memory when we speak. In particular, it shows us that we do not just activate the words that we want to say when speaking – we also activate related words, which we may not end up saying.
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