Lexical Decision Performance Research Articles

Statistical Relationships Between Phonological Form, Emotional Valence and Arousal of Spanish Words.

A number of studies have provided evidence of limited non-arbitrary associations between the phonological forms and meanings of affective words, a finding referred to as affective sound symbolism. Here, we explored whether the affective connotations of Spanish words might have more extensive statistical relationships with phonological/phonetic features, or affective form typicality. After eliminating words with poor affective rating agreement and morphophonological redundancies (e.g., negating prefixes), we found evidence of significant form typicality for emotional valence, emotionality, and arousal in a large sample of monosyllabic and polysyllabic words. These affective form-meaning mappings remained significant even when controlling for a range of lexico-semantic variables. We show that affective variables and their corresponding form typicality measures are able to significantly predict lexical decision performance using a megastudy dataset. Overall, our findings provide new evidence that affective form typicality is a statistical property of the Spanish lexicon.

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) for 1,130 Chinese words: relationships with other semantic and lexical psycholinguistic variables

Abstract Sensory experience rating (SER) is a subjective semantic variable that measures the extent to which a word generates a sensory experience when a reader processes the word, and it has been explored in English, French, and Spanish. The present study collected the SERs of 1,130 Chinese words and explored the correlation between SER and other lexical and semantic variables. SER was significantly associated with concreteness, age of acquisition (AoA), context diversity, and word frequency. The results confirmed both the reliability and the validity of SER. However, SER failed to predict lexical decision performance in reaction time and accuracy rate. It is possible that SER is not as powerful in influencing word recognition as previous studies have assumed, at least for Chinese.

What is an Emotion-label Word? Emotional Prototypicality (EmoPro) Rating for 1,083 Chinese Emotion Words and Its Relationships with Psycholinguistic Variables.

The present study offered the emotion prototypicality (EmoPro) ratings for 1,083 Chinese emotion words. EmoPro measures the extent to which an emotion word refers to an emotion. Emotion words with high EmoPro are representative emotion-label words, so EmoPro provides an objective evaluation of defining an emotion-label word. The EmoPro rating results had adequate reliability and validity. The correlation results showed that EmoPro was related to valence, arousal, age of acquisition (AoA), and word frequency, but was not associated with concreteness, familiarity, and imageability. The EmoPro was also predicted by valence, arousal, and AoA. However, EmoPro failed to predict lexical decision performance after considering the contribution of valence, arousal, AoA, and concreteness. The present normative study is of high value for selecting the most typical emotion-label words as stimuli in future affective science and psycholinguistic studies.

The Chinese Lexicon Project II: A megastudy of speeded naming performance for 25,000+ traditional Chinese two-character words.

Using a megastudy approach, (Tse et al.,2017Behavior Research Methods, 49,1503-1519)established a large-scale repository of lexical variables and lexical decision responses for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese two-character words. In the current study, we expand their database by collecting norms for speeded naming reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates, and compiling more lexical variables (e.g., phonological consistency and semantic neighborhood size). Following Tse et al.'s procedure, about 33 college-aged native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong read aloud each word. We conducted item-level regression analyses to test the relative predictive power of orthographic variables (e.g., stroke count), phonological variables (e.g., phonological consistency), and semantic variables (e.g., semantic transparency) in naming performance. We also compared the effects of lexical variables on naming performance and Tse et al.'s lexical decision performance to examine the extent to which effects are task-specific or task-general. Freely accessible to the research community, this resource provides a valuable addition to other influential mega-databases, such as the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2004Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283-316), and furthers our understanding of Chinese word recognition processes.

Task cue influences on lexical decision performance and masked semantic priming effects: The role of cue-task compatibility

Recent research demonstrated that mere presentation of a task cue influences subsequent unconscious semantic priming by attentional sensitization of related processing pathways. The direction of this influence depended on task-set dominance. Dominant task sets with a compatible cue-task mapping were supposed to be rapidly suppressed, while weak task sets showed more sustainable activation. Building on this research, we manipulated cue-task compatibility as instance of task-set dominance in two experiments and tested how masked semantic priming was influenced by actually performing the cued task (induction-task trials) or by mere cue presentation (task cue-only trials). In induction-task trials, the results of earlier research were replicated; semantic priming was larger following a semantic induction task compared to a perceptual induction task. In task cue-only trials, priming effects were reversed compared to induction-task trials in both experiments. Priming was larger for a perceptual compared to a semantic task set in task cue-only trials, indicating suppression of task sets following mere cue presentation in preparation for the upcoming lexical decision task. This notion of an inhibition of task sets after mere cue presentation was further supported by switching-related costs and changes of task-set implementation throughout the experiment. The absence of a moderator role of cue-task compatibility for task cue effects on priming in the present study suggests that the precise time course of task-set activation and inhibition in response to task cues as a function of cue-task compatibility might depend on specific experimental settings.

Familiarity with words modulates interhemispheric interactions in visual word recognition.

Bilateral redundancy gain (BRG) indicates superior performance in bilaterally presented word recognition in the left and right visual fields (RVFs) relative to word recognition given in either the left or the RVF. The BRG may be modulated by participants’ subjective familiarity with words as previous studies found smaller regional activations in the brain as they become proficient. It can be assumed that visual recognition of words with high subjective familiarity indicates skilled performance in visual recognition. Thus, this study examined the subjective familiarity effect of visual words on the BRG during lateralized lexical decision performances. It showed that the significant BRG of response times was only observed in the most familiar word condition (F4 level); on the other hand, accuracy results revealed the significant BRGs in all the subjective familiarity levels (F1, F2, F3, and F4 levels). These results suggest that the bilateral presentation of identical words with higher subjective familiarity facilitates the recognition led by cooperative interactions between cerebral hemispheres. Therefore, the subjective familiarity with visual words modulates the efficiency of hemispheric interactions in visual word recognition.

CCLOWW: A grade-level Chinese children's lexicon of written words.

In this article, we present the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Written Words (CCLOWW), the first grade-level database that provides frequency statistics of simplified Chinese characters and words for children. The database computes from a corpus of 34,671,424 character tokens and 22,427,010 word tokens (including single- and multicharacter words), extracted from 2131 books. It contains 6746 different character types and 153,079 different word types. CCLOWW provides several frequency indices of simplified Chinese for three grade levels (grade 2 and below, grades 3-4, grades 5-6) to profile children's experience with written Chinese in and outside of school. We describe in this article the distributions of frequency and contextual diversity of the characters and words, as well as word length and syntactic categories of the words in the corpus and the subcorpora. We also report results of correlation analyses with other written corpora and of several naming and lexicon decision experiments. The findings suggest that CCLOWW frequency measures correlate well with other corpora. Importantly, they could reliably predict children's and adults' naming and lexical decision performances. They could also explain variance in adults' visual word recognition, in addition to frequency measures computed in an adult corpus, indicating that early print exposure might influence readers' lexical processing later on beyond an age of acquisition effect. CCLOWW will help researchers in language processing and development as well as educators with selecting language materials appropriate for children's developmental stages. The database is freely available online at https://www.learn2read.cn/database/ .

Context Availability and Sentence Availability Ratings for 3,000 English Words and their Association with Lexical Processing

Words that can be easily placed in contexts are more easily processed, yet norms for context availability are limited. Here, participants rated 3,000 words for context availability and sentence availability, a new metric predicted to capture information relating to textual variation. Both variables were investigated alongside other word-level characteristics to explore lexical-semantic space. Analyses demonstrated that context availability and sentence availability are distinct. Context availability covaries with concreteness and imageability, while sentence availability captures information relating to contextual variation, frequency and ambiguity. Analyses of megastudy data showed that both context availability and sentence availability uniquely facilitated lexical decision performance.

Clarifying the roles of schizotypy and psychopathic traits in lexical decision performance

IntroductionSome studies suggest that lexical recognition is impaired in people with schizophrenia, psychopathy and/or antisocial personality disorders, but not affective disorders. We examined the extent to which various traits dimensionally linked to one or more of these disorders are associated with lexical recognition performance in the general population. MethodsSeventy-eight healthy English-speaking participants completed self-report measures of schizotypy, psychopathy, impulsivity, depression, anxiety and stress. All participants were assessed on a one-choice variant of a lexical decision task (LDT). ResultsMeanness and Boldness traits of psychopathy (Triarchic Psychopathy Measure), and positive schizotypy (Unusual Experiences, Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences) were associated with poor word-nonword accuracy, and predicted a significant amount of unique variance (Meanness, 12%; Boldness, 4.8%; Positive Schizotypy, 4.4%; total 21%) in performance. Higher motor impulsivity predicted 30% of the variance in low-frequency words recognition accuracy, but only in non-native English speakers. Affective traits were not associated with LDT performance. ConclusionPsychopathic traits show stronger negative associations with lexical recognition performance than schizotypal traits, and impulsivity may differently influence lexical decision performance in native and non-native speakers. Further studies are needed to replicate these findings, especially the influence of language familiarity in the impulsivity-performance relationship, and to clarify the influence of corresponding symptom dimensions in lexical recognition abilities, taking language familiarity, migration status, and comorbidity into account, in people with schizophrenia, psychopathy, and/or antisocial personality disorders.

How well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predict recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance

ABSTRACT We examined how well imageability, concreteness, perceptual strength, and action strength predicted recognition memory, lexical decision, and reading aloud performance. We used our imageability estimates [Cortese, M. J., & Fugett, A. (2004). Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words. Behavior Methods and Research, Instrumentation, & Computers, 36(3), 384–387. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03195585; Schock, J., Cortese, M. J., & Khanna, M. M. (2012a). Imageability ratings for 3,000 disyllabic words. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 374–379. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-011-0162-0], concreteness norms of Brysbaert and colleagues [Brysbaert, M., Warriner, A. B., & Kuperman, V. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 904–911. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0403-5], and perceptual and action strength ratings of Lynott and colleagues [Lynott, D., Connell, L., Brysbaert, M., Brand, J., & Carney, J. (2020). The lancaster sensorimotor norms: Multidimensional measures of perceptual and action strength for 40,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 52(3), 1271–1291. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-019-01316-z]. Our results indicate imageability is the best predictor, but methodological differences between ratings studies may contribute to the results. Surprisingly, action strength was negatively (albeit weakly) related to recognition memory. Analyses of item zRTs from the English lexicon project indicate these variables were not strong predictors of reading aloud or lexical decision performance. However, there is a small, consistent positive relationship between concreteness and zRTs (i.e., a facilitative abstractness effect). We believe researchers should either employ or control for imageability rather than concreteness, perceptual strength, or action strength when conducting recognition memory experiments. In addition, image-based codes generated at encoding strengthen memory traces but do not provide major inputs into reading aloud and lexical decision processes. Also, the facilitative abstractness effect on lexical decision and reading aloud zRTs may reflect more robust lexical representations for abstract words than concrete words, and that these two constructs are distinct.

Performance Differences Between Native and Non-Native Speakers on a New Happy-Sad Executive Function Measure.

The happy-sad task adapts the classic day-night task by incorporating two early acquired emotional concepts ("happy" and "sad") and demonstrates elevated inhibitory demands for native speakers. The task holds promise as a new executive function measure for assessing inhibitory control across the lifespan, but no studies have examined the influence of language of test administration on performance. Seventy adult native English speakers and 50 non-native speakers completed the computerized day-night and the new happy-sad tasks administered in English. In two conditions, participants were categorized pictorial stimuli either in a congruent manner ("happy" for a happy face) or in a more challenging, incongruent manner ("sad" for a happy face). Lexical decision performance was obtained to estimate levels of English language proficiency. Native speakers and non-native speakers performed comparably except for the critical incongruent condition of the happy-sad task, where native speakers responded more slowly. A greater congruency effect for the happy-sad task was found for native than for non-native speakers. Lexical decision performance was associated with performance on the challenging incongruent conditions. This study reinforced the usefulness of the happy-sad task as a new measure in evaluating inhibitory control in adult native-speakers. However, the language of test administration needs to be considered in assessment because it may lead to performance differences between native and non-native speakers.

Phonetic categorization ability and vocabulary size contribute to the encoding of difficult second-language phonological contrasts into the lexicon

AbstractThis study investigated the contribution of second-language (L2) phonetic categorization abilities and vocabulary size to the phonolexical encoding of challenging non-native phonological contrasts into the L2 lexicon. Two groups of German learners of English differing in L2 proficiency (advanced vs. intermediate) participated in an English lexical decision task including words and nonwords with /ɛ/ and /æ/ (/æ/ does not exist in German), an /ɛ/-/æ/ phonetic categorization task and an English vocabulary test. Results showed that the effects of phonetic categorization and vocabulary size on lexical decision performance were modulated by proficiency: categorization predicted /ɛ/-/æ/ nonword rejection accuracy for intermediate learners, whereas vocabulary did so for advanced learners. This suggests that sufficient phonetic identification ability is key for an accurate phonological representation of difficult L2 phones, but, for learners for whom robust phonetic identification is already in place, their ultimate success is tightly linked to their vocabulary size in the L2.

A NEW TYPE OF MASKED FORM PRIMING

AbstractMonolingual English speakers and Chinese–English bilinguals were compared on their lexical decision performance in a masked priming experiment where the prime and target ended in the same embedded word. All primes were nonwords where the letters in addition to the embedded word did not form a morpheme (e.g., the sab of sabagree or the ple of plerough). The targets were of two types. In one condition they were prefixed words (as in sabagree–DISAGREE) and in the other they were nonprefixed words (as in plerough–THOROUGH). With an unrelated prime as the baseline, the native speakers showed priming for the prefixed words but not the nonprefixed words, whereas the nonnative speakers showed priming for both types of word. It was concluded from these results that nonnative speakers focus more on the individual letters of a complex word than do native speakers when reading, and the specific processing mechanisms that might underlie this are discussed.

Syllable and letter similarity effects in Korean: Insights from the Korean Lexicon Project

• Network analysis was used to quantify syllable and letter similarity of Korean words. • Visual lexical decision data for thousands of Korean words were analyzed. • Words in central locations of the syllable similarity space were recognized faster. • Greater letter similarity inhibited word recognition. • Korean readers process syllable and letter information in Hangul in complex ways. The Korean writing system, Hangul, is an alphabetic syllabary which permits a unique opportunity to investigate how both the syllabic and letter similarity structure of the Korean mental lexicon influences lexical processing. We capitalized on the availability of lexical decision behavioral data for thousands of Korean words, and the tools of network science to quantify the similarity structure of Korean words, to investigate the relative and interacting influences of syllable and letter similarity effects on Korean word recognition. Syllable and letter similarity measures were computed at both local and global levels of the lexicon, by considering the immediate neighbors of the target word (i.e., local) and the centrality of the target word with respect to the entire lexicon (i.e., global). Regression analyses showed that both local and global syllable and letter similarity influenced lexical decision performance, revealing a complex pattern of similarity effects where greater local similarity inhibited word recognition, and greater global distinctiveness facilitated word recognition. Furthermore, there were significant interaction effects between syllable and letter levels, suggesting that both syllabic and letter information are processed in an interactive fashion by Korean readers. Our findings demonstrate the importance of adopting computational methods that go beyond standard neighborhood measures and that can quantify the similarity relationships between words at multiple levels.

Individual differences in Cantonese Chinese word recognition: Insights from the Chinese Lexicon Project

The Chinese Lexicon Project is a repository of lexical decision data for 25,286 Cantonese Chinese two-character compound words. To create that repository, 594 participants responded to approximately 1,404 words and 1,404 nonwords over three sessions. Using the data in this repository, the present study examines the variability and reliability of Chinese lexical decision performance, along with the moderating influence of individual differences on lexical processing. We generally found high to very high within- and between-session reliabilities for mean response times, ex-Gaussian parameters, accuracy rates, and a composite proficiency measure tapping lexical processing fluency. Using linear mixed effects models, we also found reliable interactions between fluency and two lexical effects. Specifically, more fluent readers showed larger effects of word frequency and semantic transparency. These results attest to the stability of Chinese word recognition performance, and are most consistent with a flexible lexical processing system that adapts optimally to task demands.

Lexical decision performance using the divided visual field technique following training in adults with intellectual disabilities with and without Down syndrome

ABSTRACTStudies of brain lateralization in individuals with non-specific intellectual disability and Down syndrome suggest atypical brain lateralization to speech perception. According to the biological dissociation model, the right hemisphere (RH) mediates speech perception and the left hemisphere (LH) mediates motor control in Down syndrome. The current study aimed to test, for the first time, brain lateralization in both non-specific intellectual disability and Down syndrome, compared to individuals with typical development. Furthermore, bilateral word presentation was utilized to assess interhemispheric communication. Twenty adults with non-specific intellectual disability, 14 adults with Down syndrome, and 30 adults with typical development participated in the study. Participants in the non-specific intellectual disability and Down syndrome groups were trained to perform the task prior to the experiment. The results showed that whereas hemispheric lateralization did not differ between individuals with non-specific intellectual disability and typical development, individuals with DS showed reduced brain lateralization in comparison to adults with typical development. All three groups showed no significant difference between words presented to the LH and bilaterally. Our results also show that individuals with intellectual disabilities can benefit from training programmes and that they may perform equally as fast as their typically developing peers.

No Effect of cathodal tDCS of the posterior parietal cortex on parafoveal preprocessing of words

The present study investigated the functional role of the posterior parietal cortex during the processing of parafoveally presented letter strings. To this end, we simultaneously presented two letter strings (word or pseudoword) – one foveally and one parafoveally – and asked the participants to indicate the presence of a word (i.e., lexical decision flanker task). We applied cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the posterior parietal cortex in order to establish causal links between brain activity and lexical decision performance (accuracy and latency). The results indicated that foveal stimulus difficulty affected the amount of parafoveally processed information. Bayes factor analysis showed no effects of brain stimulation suggesting that posterior parietal cathodal tDCS does not modulate attention-related processes during parafoveal preprocessing. This result is discussed in the context of recent tDCS studies on attention and performance.

Comparing length and frequency effects in children across modalities.

Although it is well established that beginning readers rely heavily on phonological decoding, the overlap of the phonological pathways used in visual and auditory word recognition is not clear. Especially in transparent languages, phonological reading could use the same pathways as spoken word processing. In the present study, we report a direct comparison of lexical decision performance in the visual and auditory modality in beginning readers of a transparent language. Using lexical decision, we examine how marker effects of length and frequency differ in the two modalities and how these differences are modulated by reading ability. The results show that both frequency and length effects are stronger in the visual modality, and the differences in length effects between modalities are more pronounced for poorer readers than for better readers. This suggests that visual word recognition in beginning readers of a transparent language initially is based on phonological decoding and subsequent matching in the phonological lexicon, especially for poor readers. However, some orthographic processing seems to be involved already. We claim that the relative contribution of the phonological and orthographic route in beginning readers can be measured by the differences in marker effects between auditory and visual lexical decision.

The role of semantic transparency in visual word recognition of compound words: A megastudy approach.

Previous studies on visual word recognition of compound words have provided evidence for the influence of lexical properties (e.g., length, frequency) and semantic transparency (the degree of relatedness in meaning between a compound word and its constituents) in morphological processing (e.g., to what extent is doorbell influenced by door and bell?). However, a number of questions in this domain, which are difficult to address with the available methodological resources, are still unresolved. We collected semantic transparency scores for 2,861 compound words at the constituent level (i.e., how strongly the overall meaning of a compound word is related to that of each constituent) and analyzed their effects on speeded pronunciation and lexical decision performance for the compound words using the English Lexicon Project (http://elexicon.wustl.edu) data. The results from both tasks indicated that our human-judged semantic transparency ratings for both the first and second constituents play a significant role in compound word processing. Moreover, additional analyses indicated that the human-judged semantic transparency scores at the constituent level accounted for more variance in compound word recognition performance than did either whole-word semantic transparency scores or corpus-based semantic distance scores.

Internet use experience influence individuals' lexical decision performance by changing their body representation

Human-computer interactions keep changing the way humans experience the world, yet the underlying mechanism for such interactions remains obscure. As humans' bodily experiences play an important role in cognition, the current study designed three experiments to investigate whether individuals with different extent of internet use experience would perform differently in a lexical decision task in which words related to body movement in different ways were used as stimuli. All the experiments were conducted in a five-step sequence: the lexical decision pre-test, the body representation pre-measurement, the tool-use training, the body representation post-measurement, and the lexical decision post-test. The participants with high (N = 32 in Exp. 1, N = 20 in Exp. 2, N = 18 in Exp. 3, respectively) or low (N = 28 in Exp. 1, N = 23 in Exp. 2, N = 22 in Exp. 3) level of internet-use experience were recruited. The results of the study revealed that both groups of the participants performed differently in a lexical decision task when the words used in the task were action verbs or nouns which refer to the tools used in the immediate space of the body, but not when words included metaphorical orientation information related to body movement. This study provided further empirical evidence for the impact of internet use experience on individual's conceptual processing via body representation changes.