The UCSD Center for Research in Language is engaged in a large international study to provide norms for timed picture naming in seven different languages (American English, German, Mexican Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and the variant of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan). In the past few years we have obtained object-naming norms (including indices of name agreement and latency) for 520 black-and-white drawings of common objects. This corpus includes 174 pictures from the original Snodgrass & Vanderwart set, and additional items from various sources. Here you can also find the details concerning our picture naming method and validation of this method against the earlier studies by Snodgrass and colleagues for the 161 items that overlap between their studies and ours. The rationale for using a much larger list of items in cross-cultural studies would be to achieve a balance over languages in the experimental parameters of interest (e.g. target word length, target word frequency, and other factors that assess "nameability"). Action-naming norms are also available (or nearly complete) for 275 black-and-white drawings of concrete transitive and intransitive actions in English, Hungarian, Spanish, Italian, Bulgarian and Chinese. Subjective ratings of several picture and word attributes have been collected (age-of-acquisition, word-frequency, familiarity, goodness-of-depiction and visual complexity) for the full (795 item) action-object corpus in some of the above languages (see present status of IPNP norms for details). Word-reading and word-repetition naming norms have been collected (or underway) as well in English, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian and Chinese, for those words that emerged as the dominant or target names in the picture-naming study.
These pages provide the pictures (downloadable as freeware) and the norms for each of the languages. The cross-language database is organized by items, including results of the norming study itself together with available lexical information (frequency, age of acquisition, etc.) for the associated target names. Our publications based on these data are also available, contact us for more information).
