Mental representations for pictures and words: same or different?

Do pictures and their corresponding verbal labels activate common meaning representations? Alternatively, do pictures invariably act like words-in-context generating some but not all of the semantic content activated by their labels? These possibilities were evaluated in a cuing experiment in which the cues consisted of either pictures or their labels and the targets consisted of related words. Modality and cue presence-absence during the study trial were manipulated along with preexperimental measured-meaning set size and cue-target strength. The results indicated that as long as category size and relative strength were equal, pictures and words appeared to activate functionally identical semantic representations. However, this commonality should not be expected across all drawings of the same referent. A second experiment using rhyming words indicated that the phonemic representations activated by naming a picture or reading a word were identical. However, subjects were able to use visual information contained in the labels to facilitate retrieval.