SEMANTIC EFFECTS IN SINGLE-WORD NAMING

Three experiments demonstrated that, for lower frequency words, readin g aloud is affected not only by spelling-sound typicality but also by a semantic variable, imageability. Participants were slower and more e rror prone when naming exception words with abstract meanings (e.g., s carce) than when naming either abstract regular words (e.g., scribe) o r imageable exception words (e.g., soot). It is proposed that semantic representations of words have the largest impact on translating ortho graphy to phonology when this translation process is slow or noisy (i. e., for low-frequency exceptions) and that words with rich semantic re presentations (i.e., high-imageability words) are most likely to benef it from this interaction.