A 'normal' category-specific advantage for naming living things

'Artefactual' accounts of category-specific disorders for living things hav e highlighted that compared to nonliving things, living things have lower n ame frequency, lower concept familiarity and greater visual complexity [6,2 1] and greater within-category structural similarity or 'visual crowding' [ 7]. These hypotheses imply that deficits for living things are an exaggerat ion of some 'normal tendency'. Contrary to these notions, we found that nor mal subjects were consistently worse at naming nonliving than living things in a speeded presentation paradigm. Moreover, their naming was not predict ed by concept familiarity, name frequency or visual complexity; however, a novel measure of visual familiarity (i.e. for the appearance of things) did significantly predict naming. We propose that under speeded conditions, no rmal subjects find nonliving things harder to name because their representa tions are less visually predictable than for living things (i.e. nonliving things show greater within-item structural variability). Finally, because n onliving things have multiple representations in the real world, this may l ower the probability of finding impaired naming and recognition in this cat egory. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.