A Literacy-Related Color-Specific Deficit in Rapid Automatized Naming: Evidence From Neurotypical Completely Illiterate and Literate Adults

There is a robust positive relationship between reading skills and the time to name aloud an array of letters, digits, objects, or colors as quickly as possible. A convincing and complete explanation for the direction and locus of this association remains, however, elusive. In this study, we investigated rapid automatized naming (RAN) of everyday objects and basic color patches in neurotypical illiterate and literate adults. Literacy acquisition and education enhanced RAN performance for both conceptual categories but this advantage was much larger for (abstract) colors than everyday objects. This result suggests that (a) literacy/education may be causal for serial rapid naming ability of non-alphanumeric items and (b) differences in the lexical quality of conceptual representations can underlie the reading-related differential RAN performance.