Picture-Naming Task

In the picture-naming task, participants see a pictured object and say its name aloud as quickly and accurately as possible. The time from the picture appearing to the onset of speech — the naming latency — together with the accuracy and type of response, indexes the cognitive route from seeing an object to retrieving and articulating its word. Because that route runs through conceptual preparation, lexical selection, phonological encoding, and articulation, the task is a central tool for studying lexical access in speech production, for probing bilingual word retrieval, and for assessing word-finding ability in aphasia and other clinical conditions.