Naming pictures at no cost: asymmetries in picture and word conditional naming.

We report a striking finding about naming and categorization of pictures and reading aloud and categorization of words. The categorization of a word before reading it aloud leads to an increase in response time as compared with the condition in which naming is not conditional on the categorization of the word. Quite differently, no cost is associated with the conditional naming of pictures. Results are discussed in terms of multiple procedures operating on pictorial and verbal stimuli to retrieve phonological forms.