are proper names pure referencing expressions?
Theoretical models of proper-name processing have been primarily derived from studies of people’s names; however, they are thought to generalize to all classes of proper name. Five experiments are reported that use repetition priming to compare different classes of proper names. It was found that for people’s names and landmark names, (a) production of a name in response to seeing a picture primed a subsequent familiarity decision to the same item’s written name and (b) similarly, making a familiarity decision to an auditory presentation of a name primed a familiarity decision to the same item’s written name. No comparable facilitation was found for the country-name stimuli. The presence of this specific facilitation was attributed to the nature of connectivity between conceptual and lexical representations. Theoretical views that proper names are unique, meaningless labels and that they are pure referencing expressions are evaluated.
