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Three experiments examined the processing of pictures and words in two tasks of semantic decision--judgments of conceptual size and judgments of associative relatedness--in order to test the prediction from single-coding models of memory that different semantic decisions produce comparable picture-word latency differences. In Experiment 1 an interaction in decision latency was found such that picture-picture (P-P) pairs were significantly faster than word-word (W-W) pairs in decisions of size but not in decisions of associative relatedness. In Experiment 2 no latency differences were found in decisions of association for pairs presented in P-P, W-W, or mixed (P-W or W-P) forms. Decisions of size, however, were fastest for P-P pairs, intermediate for mixed pairs, and slowest for W-W pairs. In a third experiment, using a speeded inference task, the interaction obtained in the first two experiments was reproduced. In light of these results possible revisions to common-coding assumptions about the processing of pictures and words in semantic decisions are discussed.

This study investigated symbolic comparison of color similarity using a triplet paradigm. Results showed that the time to choose which of two color samples is more similar to a color name was a function of several measures of distance between the samples relative to the focal color for the category name. Since colors appear to be represented in memory only as names and images and not as abstract entities such as features or propositions, these results provide support for models of symbolic comparison that assume that items are stored and compared as mental analogs.