Rated Familiarity, Visual Complexity, and Image Agreement and Their Relation to Naming Difficulty for Items from the Boston Naming Test

The purpose of this experiment was to obtain data on the name agreement, familiarity, visual complexity, and imageability of the 60 line drawings of objects that comprise the Boston Naming Test (BNT). One group (N = 64) named and then rated each item for visual complexity. Another group (N = 98) rated the familiarity of each depicted concept and a third group (N = 41) rated each drawing for how closely it matched their mental image of the item’s name. Significant correlations between several measures were found and the results were consistent with those obtained by Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) for 21 overlapping concepts depicted in both the BNT and their set of items.

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