De l’utilité des normes psycholinguistiques pour l’étude de l’accès au lexique mental

Abstract EN

In this paper, the goal is to explain the reason why studies on psycholinguistic norms are useful to achieve a better understanding of the mechanisms underpinning access to the mental lexicon.

We will focus on lexical access in the verbal production of words and on psycholinguistic norms that have been collected from pictures corresponding to drawings or to photographs of objects.

After a brief description of norms that are available in the literature for this kind of stimuli, we will describe the main measures that are collected either from pictures of drawings or from photographs of objects (e.g., name agreement, image agreement, visual complexity), or from their names (e.g., age of acquisition, imageability, conceptual familiarity).

We will then show how the collected norms are useful at both theoretical and empirical levels to researchers who investigate lexical processing in adults (in naming or in reading).

We will then go on presenting two issues about the norms: the reliability and validity issues.

The validity issue will be examined in the light of age of acquisition.

Finally, we will sketch several avenues for future studies on psycholinguistic norms.