The scope of advance planning in written picture naming

Abstract

The present study focused on the issue of the scope of advance planning in written picture naming. In the first series of experiments, participants had to write down or to speak aloud two bare nouns from pictures presented side-by-side starting with the left one, whereas in the second series of experiments, participants had to produce noun phrases in written naming only. Multiple regression analyses were performed on the naming latencies. In the first type of regression analysis, certain characteristics corresponding to the two pictures (in first and in second position) and their names were introduced as independent variables. In the second type of analysis, the latencies required to name the pictures corresponding to the pairs individually were introduced as independent variables. Overall, the findings suggest that naming is initiated when the processing of the first target is fully complete whereas the processing that is undertaken on the second target is restricted to the structural/semantic levels, i.e., there is no access to name representations. The implications of the findings are discussed.