Imageability – the ease of generating a mental image for a word – has been commonly used as a predictor of word recognition but its effects are highly variable across the literature, raising questions about the robustness and stability of the construct. We compared six existing imageability norms in their ability to predict RT and accuracy in lexical decision and word naming across thousands of words. Results showed that, when lexical and sensorimotor sources of variance were partialled out, imageability predicted little unique variance in word recognition performance and effect sizes varied greatly between norms. Further analysis suggested that such heterogenous effect sizes are likely due to inconsistent strategies in how participants interpret and rate imageability in norming studies, despite consistent instructions. Our findings suggest that the ease of generating a mental image for a word does not reliably facilitate word recognition and that imageability ratings should be used with caution in such research.

形象性——为一个词生成心理图像的难易程度——通常被用作词识别的预测指标，但它的影响在整个文献中变化很大，引发了对结构的稳健性和稳定性的质疑。我们比较了六种现有的形象性规范预测 RT 的能力，以及对数千个单词的词汇决策和单词命名的准确性。结果表明，当词汇和感觉运动来源的差异被部分排除时，可想象性预测单词识别性能的独特差异很小，并且影响大小在规范之间差异很大。进一步的分析表明，尽管有一致的指示，但这种异质效应大小可能是由于参与者在常模研究中如何解释和评价形象性的策略不一致所致。