German normative data with naming latencies for 283 action pictures and 600 action verbs.

ABSTRACT

Timed picture naming is a common psycholinguistic paradigm. In this task, participants are asked to label visually depicted objects or actions. Naming performance can be influenced by several picture and verb characteristics which demands fully characterized normative data. In this study, we provide a first German normative data set of picture and verb characteristics associated with a compilation of 283 freely available action pictures and 600 action verbs including naming latencies from 55 participants. We report standard measures for pictures and verbs such as name agreement indices, visual complexity, word frequency, word length, imageability and age of acquisition. In addition, we include less common parameters, such as orthographic Levenshtein distance, transitivity, reflexivity, morphological complexity, and motor content of the pictures and their associated verbs. We use repeated measures correlations in order to investigate associations between picture and word characteristics and linear mixed effects modeling for the prediction of naming latency. Our analyses reveal comparable results to previous studies in other languages, indicating high construct validity. We found that naming latency varied as a function of entropy of responses, word frequency and motor content of pictures and words. In summary, we provide first German normative data for action pictures and their associated verbs and identify variables influencing naming latency.