Pictorial stimuli are very often used to test preschool children, given that pictures are more age-appropriate than words for pre-reading children. Pictures of everyday objects are especially more frequently used in both semantic and episodic memory tasks like naming, recognition, classification, and semantic processing. Given that features of pictures such as name agreement, familiarity and complexity have been proposed to influence picture processing across ages and cultures, picture norms standardized by age and culture are necessary when psychologists want to employ pictures to investigate the development of cognitive functions. However,standardized pictorial stimuli for Chinese children are still absent. The present study is the very first to provide a standardized picture norm for Chinese preschool children.
Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) first introduced a standardized set of 260 pictures, which consisted of black-and-white drawings of everyday objects. In the past two decades, this picture set has been standardized for adult samples in different cultures including American, Brazilian, Dutch, French, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. Its children norms were only collected for American, French and Portuguese. Using the same set of stimulus material enables more direct cross-age and cross-culture comparisons. The current study presents normative measures for Snodgrass and Vanderwart pictures, viewed by 4- and 6-year old Chinese children. Name agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity were obtained for each age group. The data indicate substantial differences between young and older children in name agreement based on expected name, familiarity and visual complexity. The correlation pattern of the variables collected in the present study was consistent with children’s norms in other cultures and norms of Chinese adults, while there were also cross-age and cross-culture differences in specific variables.
The obtained measures represent a useful tool for further research on Chinese children’s pictorial processing and constitute the first picture normative study for children in this language. Information in regards to expected name, model name, word length, name agreement, number of DKN (don’t know name) and DKO (don’t know object), alternative names, familiarity, visual complexity, word frequency, and age of acquisition for 4- and 6- years old Chinese preschool children can be found in this norm.
This project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31200783), 973 Program (2010CB8339004) and Chinese Academy of Sciences project (KSZD-EW-Z-008).
Wang L, Chen C-W, Zhu L (2014) Picture Norms for Chinese Preschool Children: Name Agreement, Familiarity, and Visual Complexity. PLoS ONE 9(3):e90450. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0090450
