Abstract: Exploring recognitive processing mechanism with different kinds of materials is one of the main approaches used in the study of cognitive psycho-logy. The paper presents two experiments. In the first one the differences ofpictures, Chinese characters and English words in naming and category veri-fication task was compared. The results show that naming speed of Englishwords turns to be the fastest, that of pictures the slowest, and Chinese cha-racters come in between, but the order of processing inverts in category ver-ification. The second experiment concentrates on representational structureand processing characteristics of verbal and fionverbal information. Four kindsof combinational materials are used in naming agreement and semantic catego-ry verification tasks. The combinational forms of materials are picture-pictu-re, picture-word, word-picture and word-word. The results show that responseof word-featured pairs(w-w, w-p) is quicker than that of picture-featuredpairs (p-p, p-w) in naming agreement task, but the results of semantic verification tasks show that response of picture featured pairs is quicker. Suchresults are difficult to be explained by the dual-code theory and common codetheory. The verbal symbols gain access to their phonetic codes directly, butindirectly to their semantic codes. The nonverbal information i. e. pictures,has access opposite to that of the verbal ones. The difference between pictu-re-featured pairs and wordfeatured pairs results from some kind of strategyused by the subjects.

Key words: Picture, Chinese character, English word, Naming, Category