The effect of psycholinguistic factor on picture naming in Persian speaking children

Abstract

Background: Cross-linguistic studies on picture naming tasks have shown that several psycholinguistic variables predict naming accuracy and latency. However, differing effects of these variables across languages and age groups are unclear. The aim of this study was first to examine the normative data for a set of picture stimuli using psycholinguistic features of name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and age of acquisition. The second aim was to report on the effects of the psycholinguistic variables on timed picture naming in children. Methods: At first, 128 pictures from Cycowicz et al’s study (1997) were selected and collect normative data for each item. Then 128 black and white pictures were presented to 120 healthy Persian speaking children aged 7-9-year-old to measure the reaction time as it relates to psycholinguistic variables. Results: The regression analysis revealed that only name agreement and age of acquisition could be considered as significant predictors of naming latency for the Persian speaking children. Conclusion: We concluded that psycholinguistic features such as name agreement and age of acquisition might have effect on the naming skills in children like in adults.