The cognitive psychology of proper names: On the importance of being Ernest

Book published by Routledge (1996)

An interactive activation model of face naming

in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (1995), 48A(2), 466-486

Burton and Bruce's (1992) model of face naming predicts a "fan effect", in which naming of famous people about whom many descriptive properties are known should be slower than naming of celebrities about ... [more ▼]

Burton and Bruce's (1992) model of face naming predicts a "fan effect", in which naming of famous people about whom many descriptive properties are known should be slower than naming of celebrities about whom few properties are known. An experiment is reported that showed that, contrary to this prediction, knowledge of many descriptive properties facilitated face-naming latency. An alternative architecture for an interactive activation model is proposed in which descriptive properties are represented in separate pools of units for each domain of information and in which names are represented by a separate pool of lexical output units. Computer simulations showed that this model could simulate the previously available empirical data as effectively as Burton and Bruce's (1992) original model. However, the proposed model could also simulate the effect of the number of known descriptive properties upon face-naming latency observed in the experiment reported. The new architecture also has the advantage of being more compatible with current models of speech production, and it allows preserved access to unique semantic properties in the context of impaired face naming as reported in the neuropsychological literature. [less ▲]

Personal name anomia: A single case study

in Cortex (1995), 31

The cognitive approach to familiar face processing in human subjects

in Behavioural Processes (1994), 33(1-2), 213-232

Accès aux noms propres et vieillissement

in Van der Linden, Martial (Ed.) Le vieillissement cognitif (1994)

Retrieval failures in face naming

in Memory (1993), 1(4), 351-366

Several authors have reported that the incidence of retrieval failures is higher for people's names than for object names. The first aim of the paper was to evaluate the role of one factor that might ... [more ▼]

Several authors have reported that the incidence of retrieval failures is higher for people's names than for object names. The first aim of the paper was to evaluate the role of one factor that might contribute to making face naming difficult. Face naming usually requires the retrieval of one specific label: the name of the seen individual. Object naming is less restricting. First, object names may have synonyms. Second, labels available from different levels of categorisation of an object may be appropriate to name that object (e.g. trousers, jeans, Levis). Such a degree of freedom does not exist in naming faces. The hypothesis that face naming is made difficult by the simple fact that people have only one name was tested by studying faces having the exceptional property of bearing two names: faces of actors playing nameable characters (e.g. Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones). Consistent with the hypothesis, data from two experiments showed that when bypassing a block is possible by producing another name that is known for a face, the incidence of blocks falls dramatically. The other aim of the paper was to test the reversed frequency effect in person naming reported previously in several diary studies, in an experimental setting. A direct frequency effect rather than a reversed frequency effect was obtained in the present study. [less ▲]

Daily-life difficulties in person recognition reported by young and elderly subjects

in Applied Cognitive Psychology (1992), 6

Face naming and speech production model

in Alegria, J. (Ed.) Analytic approaches to human cognition (1992)

Face naming

in International Journal of PSychology (1992), 27

Word interruption in self-repairing

in Journal of Psycholinguistic Research (1991), 20(2), 123-137

Levelt (1983) proposed that the reason why speakers often do not interrupt an erroneous word before self-repairing is a lack of trouble detection before the end of that word. However, this explanation ... [more ▼]

Levelt (1983) proposed that the reason why speakers often do not interrupt an erroneous word before self-repairing is a lack of trouble detection before the end of that word. However, this explanation does not apply to merely inappropriate words. According to Levelt, this latter kind of word is completed for pragmatic reasons. In the present paper, a new corpus containing 1225 repairs is analyzed. From Levelt's theoretical framework, it was predicted that for erroneous words the longer the reparandum the higher the amount of word interruptions. Another prediction was that this decrease across word length should be slighter for nonerroneous words than for erroneous ones. Both predictions were confirmed. Results were consistent with Levelt's hypothesis and especially with the idea that erroneous word completion is not a real exception to the main interruption rule in speech self-repairing. [less ▲]