Recognizing words, pictures, and concepts: A comparison of lexical, object, and reality decisions

A series of five experiments addressed the question of whether pictures and the words that name them access a common conceptual representation. In the first three experiments the processing of words in the lexical decision task was compared with the processing of pictured objects in a formally analogous task which we called the object decision task. The results showed that the lexical and object decision tasks produce approximately similar response latencies and are similar in their sensitivity to a set of experimental manipulations (e.g., frequency effects, interference effects, semantic facilitation from related words or pictures). In two additional experiments the processing of words was compared with that of pictures in a mixed reality decision task in which a decision about whether a word or picture represents a real thing is to be made independent of the surface form. The results indicated that subjects were unable to make amodal decisions of this sort; the response latencies in reality decision were markedly longer than those in either a pure lexical or pure object decision and there was little conceptual transfer across repetitions of different surface forms. Overall, the results of the five experiments suggest that the major component in a lexical or object decision is a form-specific memory representation of the word or visual object.