Picture name agreement is commonly used as both a control variable and independent variable in studies of language production. It describes the proportion of participants who volunteer a picture’s modal name in a norming study—a population-level descriptor—but researchers often assume that name agreement also indexes cognitive processes that occur within individuals.
For instance, if norms show that 50% of speakers name a picture as couch, then each time a person tries to name the picture, they might have a 50% chance of selecting couch. An alternative, however, is that name agreement may simply reflect population-level sampling of more stable individual preferences (e.g., 50%
of speakers prefer the name couch), continually developed through experience. One way to distinguish between these possibilities – and assess the psychological reality of name agreement – is simply to re-norm pictures with the same individuals. In Experiment 1, we therefore collected timed naming norms for a large set of line drawings from the same 25 native British English speakers twice, 1-2 weeks apart. Results show participants’ name choices in Session 2 are jointly predicted by population-level name agreement, from our previous norms, and individuals’ own productions in Session 1. Experiment 2 replicated this result and further showed that prior selections predicted Session 3 outcomes better than those in Session 2, in line with an incremental learning account. This is the first direct demonstration that picture name agreement has some psychological validity, but also reveals that it does not directly index within participant
lexical competition as previously assumed.