Recognition advantage of proper names

Abstract This study investigates whether the recognition advantage of proper names (PN) over common nouns (CN) — reported in several languages — is also observed in Spanish, and whether different types of PN (e.g., personal vs. geographical) are affected to the same extent. Drawing on semantic theories that assign different presuppositional meanings to subcategories of PN, we designed four experiments to examine PN processing patterns: a lexical decision task, two categorization tasks, and a semantic priming task. To explore which semantic factors account for variability within each subcategory, we also conducted a series of regression analyses. The results confirm a cross-linguistic recognition advantage for PN in categorization tasks; however, this effect is limited to personal PN — even after controlling for affective factors and familiarity — while the advantage for geographical PN appears to be language-specific. Participants’ behavioral responses to geographical PN resembled those elicited by CN. These findings suggest that PN is a semantically heterogeneous category, and that their recognition lies on a continuum with that of CN.