Graphemic Information Research Articles

Influence of the graphemic information of Japanese Kanji characters on the number of synesthetic colors

Influence of the graphemic information of Japanese Kanji characters on the number of synesthetic colors

The Basis of the Syllable Hierarchy: Articulatory Pressures or Universal Phonological Constraints?

Across languages, certain syllable types are systematically preferred to others (e.g., [Formula: see text] lbif, where [Formula: see text] indicates a preference). Previous research has shown that these preferences are active in the brains of individual speakers, they are evident even when none of these syllable types exists in participants' language, and even when the stimuli are presented in print. These results suggest that the syllable hierarchy cannot be reduced to either lexical or auditory/phonetic pressures. Here, we examine whether the syllable hierarchy is due to articulatory pressures. According to the motor embodiment view, the perception of a linguistic stimulus requires simulating its production; dispreferred syllables (e.g., lbif) are universally disliked because their production is harder to simulate. To address this possibility, we assessed syllable preferences while articulation was mechanically suppressed. Our four experiments each found significant effects of suppression. Remarkably, people remained sensitive to the syllable hierarchy regardless of suppression. Specifically, results with auditory materials (Experiments 1-2) showed strong effects of syllable structure irrespective of suppression. Moreover, syllable structure uniquely accounted for listeners' behavior even when controlling for several phonetic characteristics of our auditory materials. Results with printed stimuli (Experiments 3-4) were more complex, as participants in these experiments relied on both phonological and graphemic information. Nonetheless, readers were sensitive to most of the syllable hierarchy (e.g., [Formula: see text]), and these preferences emerged when articulation was suppressed, and even when the statistical properties of our materials were controlled via a regression analysis. Together, these findings indicate that speakers possess broad grammatical preferences that are irreducible to either sensory or motor factors.

Letter-case information and the identification of brand names.

A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task ('is it a brand name?'): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the single-presentation experiment revealed faster identification times of brand names in their standard case configuration than in their non-standard case configuration (i.e., adidas faster than ADIDAS; IKEA faster than ikea). In the masked priming experiment, we found faster identification times of brand names when they were preceded by an identity prime that matched its standard case configuration than when it did not (i.e., faster response times to adidas-adidas than to ADIDAS-adidas). Taken together, the present findings strongly suggest that letter-case information forms part of a brand name's graphemic information, thus posing some limits to current models of visual-word recognition.

La structure profonde et la modélisation des règles de construction de lexèmes: l'exemple de cinq suffixes agentifs du français

The advent of the Chomskyan Lexicalist Hypothesis brought about radical theoretical orientations in the field of morphology. One of those orientations is Lexeme-Based Morphology. Primarily, morphologists under the auspices of Lexeme-Based Morphology formulate and describe rules that generate built lexemes. Having observed that most of the morphological rules hitherto formulated revolve most essentially around syntactic rules, we set out in this paper to explore few principles of D-structure of language in the formulation of a rule that can account for the construction of all possible agent nouns arising from five French suffixes (-ant, -eur, -ier, -iste and -oir). We adopt the substratal principle whereby the formation of lexemes is organized around a multidimensional operation which takes into account graphemic, phonological, syntactic and semantic information about both the base and the built lexemes.

An fMRI study of the differential effects of word presentation rates (reading acceleration) on dyslexic readers' brain activity patterns

Several lines of evidence have recently provided a clear indication that word reading rate can be considered as an independent variable which influences comprehension as well as accuracy in reading. Thus, not only is fluent reading a critical characteristic of skilled (automatic) reading, it has been shown that faster reading does not necessarily incur a cost in terms of accuracy. Indeed, readers of various levels of reading proficiency, as well as clearly impaired readers (dyslexics), if made to read faster than their normal (routine) reading rate, can increase their decoding accuracy and comprehension. Using block design, blood-(de)oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging we studied the differences in brain activation patterns induced by reading and script processing in adult dyslexics and normal reading controls as a function of two word presentation rates. Word presentation rates were set individually for each participant to correspond to his/her routine reading rate (slow) and to a correspondingly faster rate (fast). Three task conditions were tested: sentences (plausibility judgment), single words (concrete/abstract judgment), non-words (homophonic judgment). Comprehension and accuracy in the faster presentation rates were unimpaired in both groups. There were no significant differences between the activation patterns induced in both groups in ‘slow’ reading of sentences and single words, but ‘fast’ reading was related to higher activations in visual areas in the normal readers. However, in the slow non-words condition the dyslexics were characterized by activations in the Lt IFG (Broca's area) and operculum, while the control readers clearly activated visual processing areas (extra-striate cortex). These differences in brain activation patterns were not found in the fast non-words condition. We propose that time-constrained (accelerated) script decoding may prompt the dyslexic brain to process graphemic information in a different manner compared to the one employed in unconstrained (routine) reading, in some conditions in a manner of processing much closer to the one employed by normal reading controls.

Unexpectedly Poor Spelling in University Students

University students who were unexpectedly poor spellers relative to above average spellers revealed less extensive word-specific knowledge in their misspellings but not inferior knowledge of phoneme-grapheme correspondences, indicating that many of their orthographic representations lack word-specific graphemic information. Performance on deceptive nonwords in a printed lexical decision task showed that the poorer spellers did not place particular reliance on word beginnings as the basis for identification. However, because they could classify accurately many words for which they did not know the precise spelling, they may make greater use of partial cues when identifying words. They were also slower at making lexical decisions and slower and more error-prone at making same/different judgments on pairs of common words presented intact or with misordered letters. These effects showed that the poorer spellers were inferior at rapid orthographic analysis. The origin of their disadvantage in orthographic knowledge and orthographic-processing skill was not explained by more limited print exposure.

Trying Something New: Meaning-Based Reading Instruction in a Finnish First-Grade Classroom

This study investigated children's reading strategies and progress when a meaning-based approach to reading instruction was implemented in a Finnish 1st-grade classroom. A reading program was designed in which the teacher introduced predictable books, literacy-related centers, and minilessons in context on selected letter-sound correspondences. Field notes and videotapes of individual reading sessions were analyzed to describe the strategies the students used while reading both familiar and unfamiliar books. In the fall, in a familiar context, the students read mostly based on their memory. In an unfamiliar context, the students used graphemic information and sounded out and elongated the words and named some letters. Later, they used their phonological recoding skills in both familiar and unfamiliar contexts. All the students progressed toward conventional reading, demonstrating that they had reached at least the alphabetic phase of reading development.

Parafoveal Processing of Graphemic Information of Kanji Character : Priming Effects on Kanji Recognition

Parafoveal Processing of Graphemic Information of Kanji Character : Priming Effects on Kanji Recognition

The Effects of Graphemic Information in Kanji Reading : An Examination by Using a Phonemical Matching Task

The Effects of Graphemic Information in Kanji Reading : An Examination by Using a Phonemical Matching Task

Reaction time measures of spelling: testing a two-strategy model of skilled spelling.

Two strategies have been suggested to be important in skilled English spelling: a lexical strategy, which relies on word-specific graphemic information, and a rule strategy, which relies on phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences. Limitations in the usefulness of spelling accuracy as a dependent variable make it difficult to test claims about how the strategies might work together. Two experimental paradigms that measure both spelling accuracy and time are suggested to be useful. Results produced with the paradigms were consistent with the claims that skilled spellers make use of both strategies and that the lexical strategy is more useful than the rule strategy. Working memory may be important in combining products of both strategies. Results were inconsistent with the claim that the rule strategy is invoked only when the lexical strategy fails to produce a complete spelling.

The relation between item identification difficulty and elaborative conceptual processing for children and adults

The four experiments concerned the relation between the difficulty of item identification processes, elaborative conceptual processing, and developmental differences in cued recall. Elaborative conceptual processing was manipulated by asking related (“How many are related?”), category (“How many are vehicles?”), and analytic (“How many usually carry freight?”) orienting questions about four-word stimuli in which the words were categorically related (Bus-Airplane-Car-Train). The measures of elaborative processing were the speed and accuracy of question answers. Cued recall for the targets (Train) was assessed for one-word (Bus) or two-word (Bus-Airplane) cues, which were varied to determine if elaborative processing affected cue discriminability or constructability, or both. The difficulty of item identification was varied in several ways. In Experiment 1, the graphemic information was degraded in the acquisition stimuli, or the retrieval cues, or the stimulus words were intact. In Experiments 2 and 3, acquisition presentation time was varied and the stimuli were readby the experimenter or the subject. Experiment 4 featured pictures to determine generalizability. The results showed that elaborative conceptual processing facilitates recall. Most important, item identification processes limit elaborative conceptual processing for both words and pictures, and more for children than for college students.

Different methods of lexical access for words presented in the left and right visual hemifields

Right-handed adults were asked to identify by name bilaterally presented words and pronounceable nonwords. For words in the normal horizontal format, word length (number of letters) affected left visual hemifield (LVF) but not right visual hemifield (RVF) performance in Experiments 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6. This finding was made for words of high and low frequency (Experiment 6) and imageability (Experiment 5). It also held across markedly different levels of overall performance (Experiments 1 and 2), and across different relative positionings of short and long words in the LVF and RVF (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 demonstrated that the variable affecting LVF performance is the number of letters in a word, not its phonological length. For pronounceable nonwords (Experiment 7) and words in unusual formats (Experiment 8), however, length affected both LVF and RVF performance. The characteristics identified for RVF performance in these experiments also hold for the normal reading system. In this (normal) system the absence of length effects for horizontally formatted words is generally taken to reflect the processes involved in lexical access. Length effects in the normal reading system are thought to arise when lexical access for unusually formatted words and for the pronunciation of nonwords requires the short-term storage of information at a graphemic level of analysis. The characteristics of LVF performance indicate that horizontally formatted words presented to the right cerebral hemisphere can only achieve lexical access by a method that requires the short-term storage of graphemic information. This qualitative difference in methods of lexical access applies regardless of whether the right hemisphere is seen as accessing words in the left hemisphere's lexicon or words in a lexicon of its own.

The role of semantic information in reading spatially transformed text

Four studies which were designed to discriminate the use of elaborate graphemic and semantic information in the reading of spatially transformed text are reported. Subjects read a series of sentences, some of which appeared twice. The data revealed large reductions in reading times for the second occurrence of a sentence when it was presented previously in a transformed orientation, and, importantly, this effect could be attributed entirely to the use of elaborate semantic information extracted from the first presentation of the sentence. While graphemic information may be encoded, it did not appear to affect reading times on the second occurrence of the sentence. The data and conclusions are consistent with recent interpretations of the effects of reading spatially transformed text.

DEVELOPMENTAL ASPECTS OF THE USE OF LINGUISTIC AND GRAPHEMIC INFORMATION DURING READING

Summary.— The use of syntactic, semantic and graphemic information by 52 readers in the first and second year of junior school was examined by means of a cloze task and an error‐detection task. The results from both tasks indicated that there is greater use of all three types of information in the second year compared with the first year, and by good readers compared with poor readers. No evidence was found for an inverse relationship between the use of contextual and graphemic cues. The use of semantic information is initially less effective than that of syntactic information, but increases to equal it by the second year. The children's pattern of responding in relation to grammatical classes was similar to that found in adults.

The Use of Abstract Graphemic Information in Lexical Access

Three experiments investigated the nature of the information required for the lexical access of visual words. A four-field masking procedure was used, in which the presentation of consecutive prime and target letter strings was preceded and followed by presentations of a pattern mask. This procedure prevented subjects from identifying, and thus intentionally using, prime information. Experiment I extablished the existence of a semantic priming effect on target identification, demonstrating the lexical access of primes under these conditions. It also showed a word repetition effect independent of letter case. Experiment II tested whether this repetition effect was due to the activation of graphemic or phonemic information. The graphemic and phonemic similarity of primes and targets was varied. No evidence for phonemic priming was found, although a graphemic priming effect, independent of the physical similarity of the stimuli, was obtained. Finally Experiment III demonstrated that, irrespective of whether the prime was a word or a nonword, graphemic priming was equally effective. In both Experiments II and III, however, the word repetition effect was stronger than the graphemic priming effect. It is argued that facilitation from graphemic priming was due to the prime activating a target representation coded for abstract (non-visual) graphemic features, such as letter identities. The extra facilitation from same identity priming was attributed to semantic as well as graphemic activation. The implications of these results for models of word recognition are discussed.

On the relationship between autobiographical memory and perceptual learning.

Although the majority of research on human memory has concentrated on a person's ability to recall or recognize items as having been presented in a particular situation, the effects of memory are also revealed in a person's performance of a perceptual task. Prior experience with material can make that material more easily identified or comprehended in perceptually difficult situations. Unlike with standard retention tests, effects of prior experience on a perceptual task do not logically require that a person be aware that he or she is remembering. Indeed, amnesic patients purportedly show effects of practice in their subsequent performance of a perceptual or motor task even though they profess that they do not remember having engaged in that prior experience. The experiments that are reported were designed to explore the relationship between the more aware autobiographical form of memory that is measured by a recognition memory test and the less aware form of memory that is expressed in perceptual learning. Comparisons of effects on perceptual learning and recognition memory reveal two classes of variables. Variables such as the level of processing of words during study influenced recognition memory, although they had no effect on subsequent perceptual recognition. A study presentation of a word had as large an effect on its later perceptual recognition when recognition memory performance was very poor as it did when recognition memory performance was near perfect. In contrast, variables such as the number and the spacing of repetitions produced parallel effects on perceptual recognition and recognition memory. Following Mandler and others, it is suggested that there are two bases for recognition memory. If an item is readily perceived so that it seems to "jump out" from the page, a person is likely to judge that he or she has previously seen the item in the experimental situation. Variables that influence ease of perceptual recognition, then, can also have an effect on recognition memory, so parallel effects are found. The second basis for recognition memory involves elaboration of a word's study context and depends on such factors as level of processing during study--factors that are not important for perceptual recognition of isolated words. Comparisons of perceptual recognition and recognition memory are shown to be useful for determining how a variable has its effect. Effects of study on perceptual recognition appear to be totally due to memory for physical or graphemic information. Results reported are also relevant to theories of perceptual learning. A single presentation of an item is shown to have large and long-lasting effects on its later perceptual recognition. At least partially, effects of study on perceptual recognition depend on the same variables as do effects on more standard memory tests.

Priming effects with phonemically similar words: the encoding-bias hypothesis reconsidered.

Recent studies have demonstrated that two-word lexical decision times may be influenced by the degree of shared phonemic and graphemic similarity between the items. Specifically, graphemically similar rhyming pairs (e.g., BRIBE-TRIBE) are responded to more rapidly than graphemically and phonemically unrelated controls (e.g., BREAK-DITCH), whereas graphemically similar nonrhyming pairs (TOUCH-COUCH) are responded to more slowly. In a series of three experiments, the present study examined the encoding-bias explanation (Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1974) of these effects by modifying or eliminating the graphemic information available. Experiment 1 found that rhyming facilitation was not eliminated by presenting the initial pair member auditorily. Experiments 2 and 3 showed the rhyming effect to be independent of graphemic similarity with equivalent facilitation for graphemically similar and dissimilar (EIGHT-MATE) rhymes. These findings were all considered contrary to the predictions of the encoding-bias model. As an alternative, a model by Forster (1976) was employed. In the Forster model, sensory representations of lexical entries are represented as entries in a separate access file organized by physical, rather than semantic, similarity. The rhyming facilitation can then be seen as the result of spreading activation between entries in this file.

The Effect of Orthographic Structure and Lexical Meaning on “Same-different” Judgments

Pairs of high frequency English words, orthographically acceptable pseudo-words, and non-word letter strings were presented in a “same”-“different” task. The mean reaction times for “same” judgments were ordered; real words were faster than pseudo-words, and pseudo-words were faster than non-words. The RTs for the “different”, judgments showed no differences among the three types of words, except in the first two days of practice in a blocked presentation condition when the difference between the real words and non-words was marginally significant. These and other results suggest that “same” judgments are based upon a comparison process which efficiently uses higher order semantic and orthographic information in words, whereas “different” judgments are based upon comparison process which performs a self-terminating search of the graphemic information in words. The results were also discussed with reference to hierarchical models of word perception and reading.