How visually presented brand names are represented in the mental lexicon.

Word types are represented independently within the mental lexicon. Much of the research supporting this assumption has been accomplished through studying those with neurological impairment in naming. These studies indicate that mental representations of proper nouns differ from those of common nouns: The differences might lie in the fact that proper nouns are tokens (have one meaning), whereas common nouns are types (have more than one meaning). Brand names are assumed to be another special category with representations between these two word-types, but research on these special words is not as plentiful and their status as a distinct category is not as widely received. This study investigates brand name representation in the mental lexicon to determine whether they are intermediate between proper and common nouns as demonstrated in behavioral data from word recognition experiments. The results showed that common nouns demonstrated faster reaction times and proper nouns and brand names performed similarly to each other. This behavioral data adds to the current knowledge of type versus token responses and that brand names could be similar to proper nouns, but differences are evident. Further research is needed to understand this unresolved issue.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .S36. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1522. Thesis (M.A.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005