ABSTRACT
Recently, a number of psychologists have been investigating differences in the cognitive processing of pictorial and lexical stimuli. It has been reported that in a concept verification task pictorial stimuli tend to be verified faster than lexical stimuli (Pellegrino, Rosinski, Chiesi, & Siegel, 1977; Potter & Faulconer, 1975; Rosch, 1975; and Smith & Magee, 1980). These data have been interpreted to suggest that pictorial stimuli access meaning faster than lexical stimuli. Snodgrass and McCullough (1986) questioned the validity of this interpretation and suggested that the results are due to greater visual dissimilarity between pictorial categories than between lexical categories. Snodgrass and McCullough showed that the difference reverses itself when they increase visual similarity between pictorial categories and decrease visual similarity within pictorial categories.
