Compare methods

	Picture-Naming Task	Elicited Imitation Task
Field	Linguistics	Linguistics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1980	2002
Originator	Psycholinguists of word production (Joan Snodgrass; Willem Levelt)	Applied linguists and child-language researchers (overview by Thora Vinther)
Type	Online measure of lexical access in speech production	Proficiency/implicit-knowledge measure via sentence repetition
Seminal source	Snodgrass, J. G., & Vanderwart, M. (1980). A standardized set of 260 pictures: Norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6(2), 174–215.	Vinther, T. (2002). Elicited imitation: A brief overview. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 12(1), 54–73.
Aliases	Picture Naming, Confrontation Naming Task, Object Naming Task	Elicited Imitation, Sentence Repetition Task, EIT
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	In the elicited imitation task, participants listen to spoken sentences — typically of increasing length and grammatical complexity — and repeat each one back. The key insight is that when a sentence exceeds short-term verbatim memory, accurate reproduction is impossible by rote echoing; the listener must comprehend the sentence and reconstruct it through their own grammar. Reproduction accuracy therefore indexes implicit linguistic proficiency rather than parroting. Widely used in second-language acquisition as an efficient proficiency measure and in child-language research to gauge developing grammar, it has been validated as a window onto implicit knowledge.