The present study characterizes the neural correlates of noun and verb imageability and addresses the question of whether components of the neural network supporting word recognition can be separately modified by variations in grammatical class and imageability. We examined the effect of imageability on BOLD signal during single-word comprehension of nouns and verbs. Subjects made semantic simi...

The present study characterizes the neural correlates of noun and verb imageability and addresses the question of whether components of the neural network supporting word recognition can be separately modiWed by variations in grammatical class and imageability. We examined the eVect of imageability on BOLD signal during single-word comprehension of nouns and verbs. Subjects made semantic simila...

The hippocampus is thought to support association-memory, particularly when tested with cued recall. One of the most well-known and studied factors that influences accuracy of verbal association-memory is imageability; participants remember pairs of high-imageability words better than pairs of low-imageability words. High-imageability words are also remembered better in tests of item-memory. Ho...

Imageability is a complex and controversial measure as was already noted by Paivio et al. (1968) when they first introduced the term. According to these authors imageability should describe the ease/difficulty with which “words arouse a sensory experience” (p. 4) and therefore should closely correlate with concreteness. Since concrete objects are experienced through the senses, the words that d...

BACKGROUND The grammatical class effect in aphasia, i.e. dissociated processing of words according to their respective grammatical class, has been attributed to either grammatical, lexical or semantic (i.e., imageability) deficits. This study explores the hypotheses of impaired semantic treatment as the source of the grammatical class effect in aphasia. METHOD A synonym judgement task that in...

Verbs are harder to learn than nouns in English and in many other languages, but are relatively easy to learn in Chinese. This paper evaluates one potential explanation for these findings by examining the construct of imageability, or the ability of a word to produce a mental image. Chinese adults rated the imageability of Chinese words from the Chinese Communicative Development Inventory (Tard...

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g., Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage nouns have is not a function of grammatical form ...

This study investigated the effects of word imageability and orthographic neighbourhood size, as well their combined effects, in free recall recognition memory. A total 45 young adults performed tasks on same materials. Word size were orthogonally manipulated across four conditions: low-imageability words – high N, saveur [flavor], low [total], high-imageability carré [square] nuage [cloud]. Th...

Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as a way of testing the generality of the findings across orthographies. The results replicated the earlier findings that readers were slower and more error prone in reading low-frequency exception words when ...

Spoken word recognition involves the activation of multiple word candidates on the basis of the initial speech input--the "cohort"--and selection among these competitors. Selection may be driven primarily by bottom-up acoustic-phonetic inputs or it may be modulated by other aspects of lexical representation, such as a word's meaning [Marslen-Wilson, W. D. Functional parallelism in spoken word-r...