The goal of the present study was to examine action and object naming under varying processing constraints, such as item difficulty and context, to observe how these different conditions affect naming performance. Normative data was collected from a group of thirty-eight healthy young adults as the first in a series of studies investigating the process of lexical access and its underlying neural substrates. Lead-in sentences used were either neutral (not predictive) or congruent (predictive of the particular lexical category, i.e. noun vs. verb). Results indicated that across subjects as well as items, objects and easy items elicited both significantly more accurate and faster responses than actions and difficult items. Congruent contexts facilitated processing compared to neutral contexts. In addition, these factors differentially affected objects and actions, with an advantage seen for object naming.

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