Predicting naming latencies for action pictures: Dutch norms.

The present study provides Dutch norms for age of acquisition, familiarity, imageability, image agreement, visual complexity, word frequency, and word length (in syllables) for 124 line drawings of actions. Ratings were obtained from 117 Dutch participants. Word frequency was determined on the basis of the SUBTLEX-NL corpus (Keuleers, Brysbaert, & New, Behavior Research Methods, 42, 643–650, 2010). For 104 of the pictures, naming latencies and name agreement were determined in a separate naming experiment with 74 native speakers of Dutch. The Dutch norms closely corresponded to the norms for British English. Multiple regression analysis showed that age of acquisition, imageability, image agreement, visual complexity, and name agreement were significant predictors of naming latencies, whereas word frequency and word length were not. Combined with the results of a principal-component analysis, these findings suggest that variables influencing the processes of conceptual preparation and lexical selection affect latencies more strongly than do variables influencing word-form encoding.