Acceso usuarios
Marie Izaute
This article provides a review of empirical studies and theoretical models concerned with retrieval problems for proper names. Many findings have demonstrated the difficulty associated with both learning and retrieving proper names. Retrieval difficulties for proper names have been shown to affect elderly people and some brain-damaged patients. We review person naming-models and explore the explanations proposed. First, the difficulty of retrieving someone's name in the face recognition domain is examined. Second, some explanations concerned with the comparison of the recall of common names and proper names are explored. Our conclusion is that « uniqueness » is a factor that make proper names difficult to recall. However, uniqueness is not a single factor because it can be interpreted in several ways. Proper names have no synonyms, are generally not shared by another person and are « pure referring expressions ». Moreover, all theoretical models suggest that proper names are activated by a single semantic node.
