ABSTRACT
One paradigm of semantic memory research requires people to make timed judgments about two concepts presented either as outline drawings or as printed words. Given the concepts chimpanzee and mouse, for example, people are asked; which is larger in real life? (e.g., Paivio, 1975); which is more intelligent? (e.g., Banks & Flora, 1977); are the concepts members of the same semantic category? (e.g., Pellegrino, Rosinski, Chiesi & Siegal, 1977). In such semantic decision tasks, so named because they draw on our conceptual knowledge about the objects, pictures have typically produced faster response latencies than words. In this chapter I first, briefly outline accounts of this result both from common coding and dual coding approaches to the representation of meaning in memory. Second, I will present the results of experiments where pictures and words were used in decisions about object color, associative relatedness and size. The findings allow some choices to be made among the various accounts of picture-word latency differences in semantic decisions.
