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This article presents a review of the available knowledge as regards written picture naming. The contribution of cognitive neuropsychology on this topic is substantial : The analyses of performances of brain-damaged patients have allowed to identify and to characterize some of the processing levels involved in this cognitive activity. However, this approach cannot constitute the only approach to this activity. Therefore, a number of results obtained on normal participants by means of tasks of naming in real time have been collected. Some of these results show, in agreement with certain data obtained on brain-damaged patients, that written production has a « relative » autonomy with regard to spoken production, in that the access to orthographic codes is not obligatorily mediated by phonological codes. Other results collected from written picture naming experiments suggest, however, that phonological codes play a constraining role in orthographic encoding. We report a series of findings, also obtained in healthy adults in picture naming tasks, that indicate that certain effects (semantic interference, age-of-acquisition, image variability, name- agreement) are observed in both spoken and written naming, which strongly suggests that the written production of words shares with spoken production some processing components.
