Predictors of timed picture naming in Chinese

We report normative data collected from Mainland Chinese speakers for 232 objects taken from Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980). These data include adult ratings of concept familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), printed-word frequency, and word length (in syllables), as well as measures of rated visual complexity, image agreement, and name agreement. We then examined timed picture naming of these objects with native Chinese speakers in Beijing in two experiments using line drawings and colored pictures. In both experiments, the variables name agreement, rated concept familiarity, and AoA made significant independent contributions to naming latency in multiple regression analyses. We observed a correlation of r = .85 between naming latency with line drawings and colored pictures and a reduced effect of image agreement on naming when colored pictures were presented. We discuss the implications of our findings for the study of lexical processing in Chinese. Normative data for 232 Chinese nouns may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.