Facilitation in Naming and Categorizing Repeated Pictures and Words

Subjects named or categorized a picture preceded sometime earlier by itself or by its verbal label as well as a word preceded by itself or a pictorial counterpart. The extent to which the second item benefited from prior pro- cessing was a function of the mode of the second item, the mode of the previous occurrence of the concept, and the task. The results of the naming task of Experiment 1 suggested that words are more generic, in that they tended to facilitate processing of subsequent occurrences of the concept re- gardless of the mode of the second occurrence, whereas pictures tended to facilitate only subsequent pictures. In fact, reading a word was not faster after having just named a pictorial representation of that concept. Experi- ment 2 explored, and ruled out, the possibility that this failure to find facil- itation was the result of an inhibitory mechanism. In general, the data are consistent with the idea that pictures and words consult the same semantic system for their interpretation but that words activate a more generic set of semantic information than do pictures.