Lexical Decision Response Times Research Articles

EXPRESS: Stratified Distributional Analysis - a Novel Perspective on RT Distributions.

Response times and their distributions serve as a powerful lens into cognitive processes. We present a novel statistical methodology called Stratified Distributional Analysis (SDA) to quantitatively assess how key determinants of response times (word frequency and length) shape their distributions. Taking advantage of the availability of millions of lexical decision response times in the English Lexicon Project and the British Lexicon Project, we made important advances into the theoretical issue of linking response times and word frequency by analysing RT distributions as a function of word frequency and word length. We tested these distributions against the lognormal, Wald, and Gamma distributions and three measures of word occurrence (word form frequencies obtained from subtitles and contextual diversity as operationalized as discourse contextual diversity and user contextual diversity). We found that the RT distributions were best described by a lnorm distribution across both megastudies when word occurrence was quantified by a contextual diversity measure. The link between the lnorm distribution and its generative process highlights the power of SDA in elucidating mechanisms that govern the generation of RTs through the fitting of probability distributions. Using a hierarchical Bayesian framework, SDA yielded posterior distributions for the distributional parameters at the single-participant level, enabling probabilistic predictions of response times as a function of word frequency and word length, which has the potential to serve as a diagnostic tool to uncover idiosyncratic features of word processing. Crucially, while we applied our parsimonious methodology to lexical decision response times, it is applicable to a variety of tasks such as word-naming and eye-tracking data.

What Drives Task Performance in Animal Fluency in Individuals Without Dementia? The SMART-MR Study.

In this study, we aim to understand whether and how performance in animal fluency (i.e., total correct word count) relates to linguistic levels and/or executive functions by looking at sequence information and item-level metrics (i.e., clusters, switches, and word properties). Seven hundred thirty-one Dutch-speaking individuals without dementia from the Second Manifestations of ARTerial disease-Magnetic Resonance study responded to an animal fluency task (120 s). We obtained cluster size and number of switches for the task, and eight different word properties for each correct word produced. We detected variables that determine total word count with random forests, and used conditional inference trees to assess points along the scales of such variables, at which total word count changes significantly. Number of switches, average cluster size, lexical decision response times, word frequency, and concreteness determined total correct word count in animal fluency. People who produced more correct words produced more switches and bigger clusters. People who produced fewer words produced fewer switches and more frequent words. Concurrent with existing literature, individuals without dementia rely on language and executive functioning to produce words in animal fluency. The novelty of our work is that such results were shown based on a data-driven approach using sequence information and item-level metrics. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23713269.

LaDEP: A large database of English pseudo-compounds

The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which mimic, but do not truly possess, a compound morphemic structure. These pseudo-compounds can be parsed into two free morpheme constituents (e.g., car-pet), but neither constituent functions as a morpheme within the overall word structure. The items were manually coded as pseudo-compounds, further coded for features related to their morphological structure (e.g., presence of multiple affixes, as in ruler-ship), and summarized using common psycholinguistic variables (e.g., length, frequency). This paper also presents an example analysis comparing the lexical decision response times between compound words, pseudo-compound words, and monomorphemic words. Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words did not differ in response time, and both groups had slower response times than compound words. This analysis replicates the facilitatory effect of compound constituents during lexical processing, and demonstrates the need to emphasize the pseudo-constituent structure of pseudo-compounds to parse their effects. Further applications of LaDEP include both psycholinguistic studies investigating the nature of human word processing or production and educational or clinical settings evaluating the impact of linguistic features on language learning and impairments. Overall, the items within LaDEP provide a varied and representative sample of the population of English pseudo-compounds which may be used to facilitate further research related to morphological decomposition, lexical access, meaning construction, orthographical influences, and much more.

Emotionality effects in Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from lab-based and web-based lexical decision tasks

Previous studies have shown that processes of word recognition are influenced by the emotional content of a word. This pattern is most readily explained by the motivated attention and affective states model (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1997), which states that emotional stimuli are motivationally significant and capture attention. Drawing on this theoretical account, the current study compared lexical decision response times to positive and negative emotion words versus neutral words across two experimental environments - a traditional lab-based environment and a web-based environment. In addition, the experiment was conducted using Korean words presented to native Korean speakers in order to test whether the emotionality effect emerges in a non-English language. The results revealed faster response times to emotion words versus neutral words across both experimental environments with no evidence of a difference between the two environments. These findings provide important evidence that emotion words successfully attract attention and facilitate word processing even in situations where participants might be more easily distracted than they would be in a traditional lab setting. This work also constitutes the first demonstration of an emotionality effect in Korean word recognition, thus providing further evidence that the emotionality effect may be a language-universal phenomenon.

The "Small World of Words" free association norms for Rioplatense Spanish.

Large-scale word association datasets are both important tools used in psycholinguistics and used as models that capture meaning when considered as semantic networks. Here, we present word association norms for Rioplatense Spanish, a variant spoken in Argentina and Uruguay. The norms were derived through a large-scale crowd-sourced continued word association task in which participants give three associations to a list of cue words. Covering over 13,000 words and +3.6 M responses, it is currently the most extensive dataset available for Spanish. We compare the obtained dataset with previous studies in Dutch and English to investigate the role of grammatical gender and studies that used Iberian Spanish to test generalizability to other Spanish variants. Finally, we evaluated the validity of our data in word processing (lexical decision reaction times) and semantic (similarity judgment) tasks. Our results demonstrate that network measures such as in-degree provide a good prediction of lexical decision response times. Analyzing semantic similarity judgments showed that results replicate and extend previous findings demonstrating that semantic similarity derived using spreading activation or spectral methods outperform word embeddings trained on text corpora.

Financial reward has differential effects on behavioural and self-report measures of listening effort

Objectives To investigate the effects of listening demands and motivation on listening effort (LE) in a novel speech recognition task. Design We manipulated listening demands and motivation using vocoded speech and financial reward, respectively, and measured task performance (correct response rate) and indices of LE (response times (RTs), subjective ratings of LE and likelihood of giving up). Effects of inter-individual differences in cognitive skills and personality on task performance and LE were also assessed within the context of the Cognitive Energetics Theory (CET). Study sample Twenty-four participants with normal-hearing (age range: 19 − 33 years, 6 male). Results High listening demands decreased the correct response rate and increased RTs, self-rated LE and self-rated likelihood of giving up. High financial reward increased subjective LE ratings only. Mixed-effects modelling showed small fixed effects for competitiveness on LE measured using RTs. Small fixed effects were found for cognitive skills (lexical decision RTs and backwards digit span) on LE measured using RTs and correct response rate, respectively. Conclusions The effects of listening demands on LE in the speech recognition task aligned with CET, whereas predictions regarding the influence of motivation, cognitive skills and personality were only partially supported.

Asymmetry of the frontal aslant tract is associated with lexical decision

The frontal aslant tract (FAT) is a recently documented white matter tract that connects the inferior and superior frontal gyri with a tendency to be more pronounced in the left hemisphere. This tract has been found to play a role in language functions, particularly verbal fluency. However, it is not entirely clear to what extent FAT asymmetry is related to performance benefits in language-related tasks. In the present study, we aimed to fill this gap by examining the correlations between asymmetric micro- and macro-structural properties of the FAT and performance on verbal fluency and lexical decision tasks. The results showed no correlation between the FAT and verbal fluency; however, lexical decision was correlated with FAT laterality. Specifically, greater left lateralization in both micro- and macro-structural properties was related to faster lexical decision response times. The results were not due merely to motor or decision-making processes, as responses in a simple discrimination controltask showed no correlation with laterality. These data are the first to suggest a role for the FAT in mediating processes underlying lexical decision.

Forward versus backward semantic priming: What movement dynamics during lexical decision reveal.

Separate processes underlying forward (e.g., crescent MOON) and backward (e.g., office POST) priming have previously been inferred from button-press lexical decision response times, with an automatic prospective mechanism and a strategic retrospective mechanism presumed responsible for forward and backward priming, respectively. We tracked hand/mouse kinematics during lexical decision, and found that forward, backward, and symmetrical (e.g., cat DOG) priming exhibited different movement trajectories, with the effect of forward priming emerging earlier than that of backward priming and with symmetrical priming taking the lead around the time when the backward priming effect came online. The findings provide strong converging evidence for different mechanisms driving forward and backward priming, and demonstrate that continuous kinematic measures can shed light on cognitive processes as they unfold in real time.

Acoustic reduction, context, and inter-stimulus interval in cross-modal priming

Work such as Tucker (2011) and van de Ven et al. (2011) show that reduced acoustic contrasts can impede lexical access for a listener. Tucker (2011) also found preliminary evidence of a nonlinear (U-shaped) relationship between the degree of intensity dip in stops and lexical decision response times. The present talk summarizes results from a cross-modal identity priming experiment designed to explore this potential nonlinearity further. Utilizing three different inter-stimulus-intervals, trials were presented in which conversational words with variously reduced intervocalic stops served as auditory primes. Visual targets included the same word as the prime, words with a large degree of phonological overlap, and unrelated controls, as well as phonologically overlapping and non-overlapping pseudowords. Additionally, the auditory primes were presented with three degrees of surrounding context: isolation (the word only), phonetic context (including the vowels in neighboring syllables, providing primarily spe...

The causality implicit in traits

Are personality trait concepts merely descriptive of behaviors or do they describe causes? Social psychologists have differing views. Thus we looked at lexical decision response times (RTs) in a list context paradigm, which presents prime–target pairs embedded in lists of different contexts. In lists of associated pairs, traits did not affect RTs to related behaviors. But in lists of causally related pairs, traits primed RTs to behavioral words. Causality was never mentioned, and RTs were short enough to suggest automatic processing. This is consistent with other research on priming thematic relations. It also indicates that traits are implicit causes rather than mere descriptions of behavior, at least among Western participants. This challenges some current formulations in the social psychology of impression formation.

Sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 mono- and disyllabic words

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) reflect the extent to which a word evokes a sensory and/or perceptual experience in the mind of the reader. Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, and Gullick (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64:1683-1691, 2011) demonstrated that SERs predict a significant amount of variance in lexical-decision response times in two megastudies of lexical processing when a large number of established psycholinguistic variables are controlled for. Here we provide the SERs for the 2,857 monosyllabic words used in the Juhasz et al. study, as well as newly collected ratings on 3,000 disyllabic words. New analyses with the combined set of words confirmed that SERs predict a reliable amount of variance in the lexical-decision response times and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota, Yap, Cortese, Hutchison, Kessler, Loftus, & Treiman, Behavior Research Methods 39:445-459, 2007) when a large number of surface, lexical, and semantic variables are statistically controlled for. The results suggest that the relative availability of sensory/perceptual information associated with a word contributes to lexical-semantic processing.

Processing Causality in Narrative Events: Temporal Order Matters

To successfully comprehend narrative text, readers often make inferences about different causes and effects that occur in a text. In this study, participants read texts in which events related to a cause were presented before an effect (i.e., the forward causal condition), texts in which an effect was presented before the events related to a cause (i.e., the backward causal condition), or control (i.e., the non-causal) texts. Lexical decision response times to cause-relevant words were faster in the forward causal condition than in the control condition and were faster in the backward causal condition than in the control condition. Importantly, response times were faster in the forward causal condition than in the backward causal condition. These effects were unrelated to individual differences in reading ability. These results suggest that readers process causal relations regardless of temporal order but that causal events presented in backward temporal order may be processed more slowly compared to causal events presented in forward temporal order.

Discrete Emotion Effects on Lexical Decision Response Times

Our knowledge about affective processes, especially concerning effects on cognitive demands like word processing, is increasing steadily. Several studies consistently document valence and arousal effects, and although there is some debate on possible interactions and different notions of valence, broad agreement on a two dimensional model of affective space has been achieved. Alternative models like the discrete emotion theory have received little interest in word recognition research so far. Using backward elimination and multiple regression analyses, we show that five discrete emotions (i.e., happiness, disgust, fear, anger and sadness) explain as much variance as two published dimensional models assuming continuous or categorical valence, with the variables happiness, disgust and fear significantly contributing to this account. Moreover, these effects even persist in an experiment with discrete emotion conditions when the stimuli are controlled for emotional valence and arousal levels. We interpret this result as evidence for discrete emotion effects in visual word recognition that cannot be explained by the two dimensional affective space account.

Measures of phonological typicality

Phonological Typicality (PT) is a measure of the extent to which a word’s phonology is typical of other words in the lexical category to which it belongs. There is a general coherence among words from the same category in terms of speech sounds, and we have found that words that are phonologically typical of their category tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than words that are less typical. In this paper we describe in greater detail the operationalisation of measures of a word’s PT, and report validations of different parameterisations of the measure. For each variant of PT, we report the extent to which it reflects the coherence of the lexical categories of words in terms of their sound, as well as the extent to which the measure predicts naming and lexical decision response times from a database of monosyllabic word processing. We show that PT is robust to parameter variation, but that measures based on PT of uninflected words (lemmas) best predict response time data for naming and lexical decision of single words.

The cost of remembering to remember in event-based prospective memory: investigating the capacity demands of delayed intention performance.

Prospective memory tasks are often accomplished during the performance of other activities. Despite the dual-task nature of prospective memory, little attention has been paid to how successful prospective memory performance affects ongoing activities. In the first 2 experiments, participants performing an embedded prospective memory task had longer response times on nonprospective memory target trials of a lexical decision task than participants performing the lexical decision task alone. In the prospective memory groups, longer lexical decision response times were associated with better prospective memory performance (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), a pattern not demonstrated with an embedded retrospective memory task (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 3 suggest that the retrieval of a delayed intention, or the prospective component, can require capacity.

Fractal Characteristics of Response Time Variability

The relations between English spellings and pronunciations have been described as a fractal pattern. Manipulations of word properties are constructed to coincide with the fractal pattern of ambiguity in these relations (sampled as random variables). New word naming and lexical decision experiments replicate previously established effects of relations between word spellings and pronunciations. The structure of these relations establishes a measurement scale, which is nested in a manner that is loosely analogous to the way that centimeters are nested within meters, and so on. The experiments revealed that broader, increasingly stretched-more variable-distributions of pronunciation and response time accompany the introduction of higher resolution measurement scales to the naming and lexical decision measurement process. Moreover, the distribution of lexical decision response times is shown to obey an inverse power-law scaling relation, which implies lexical decision does not conform to a characteristic measurement scale.

Fractal Characteristics of Response Time Variability

The relations between English spellings and pronunciations have been described as a fractal pattern. Manipulations of word properties are constructed to coincide with the fractal pattern of ambiguity in these relations (sampled as random variables). New word naming and lexical decision experiments replicate previously established effects of relations between word spellings and pronunciations. The structure of these relations establishes a measurement scale, which is nested in a manner that is loosely analogous to the way that centimeters are nested within meters, and so on. The experiments revealed that broader, increasingly stretched-more variable-distributions of pronunciation and response time accompany the introduction of higher resolution measurement scales to the naming and lexical decision measurement process. Moreover, the distribution of lexical decision response times is shown to obey an inverse power-law scaling relation, which implies lexical decision does not conform to a characteristic measu...

Lexical processing and text integration of function and content words: evidence from priming and eye fixations.

The results of two experiments comparing processing of function words and content words are reported. In Experiment 1, priming was present for both related function and related content word pairs, as measured in lexical decision response times. In Experiment 2, participants' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing either a high- or a low-frequency function or content target word. Average word length and word frequency were matched across the function and content word conditions. Function words showed frequency effects in first-fixation and gaze duration that were similar to those seen for content words. Clear differences in on-line processing of function and content words emerged in later processing measures. These differences were reflected in reading patterns and reading time measures. There was inflated processing time in the phrase immediately following a low-frequency function word, and participants made more regressions to the target word in this condition than in the other three conditions. The priming effects in lexical decision and the word frequency effects in initial processing measures in silent reading for both word types were taken as evidence of common lexical processing for function and content words. The observed differences in later processing measures in the eye-movement data were taken as evidence of differences in the role that the two word types have in sentence processing beyond the lexical level.

Exploitation of stress information in spoken-word recognition in Dutch

A fragment-priming experiment addressed the question of how stress information is exploited in the process of recognizing spoken Dutch words. Materials were 20 pairs of Dutch words such as octopus/oktober, with two initial syllables which were segmentally identical but different in stress; both begin okto- (N.B.: in neither case is their vowel reduction, in Dutch), but octopus is stressed on the first syllable, oktober on the second. Exploiting the known effect that visual lexical decisions are made more rapidly if subjects have just heard the word, or part of it, we compared the lexical decision response times of 56 native speakers of Dutch to the target words (e.g., OKTOBER), presented visually immediately following a spoken presentation of a neutral sentence ending with a partial word. This partial word had (a) a correctly stressed beginning (e.g., okTO-), (b) an incorrectly stressed beginning (e.g., OKto-), or (c) a control beginning (e.g., eufo-). Responses were significantly faster (than the control condition) only after correctly stressed primes; that is, OKto- primed OCtopus but not okTOber, okTO- primed okTOber but not OCtopus. Thus Dutch listeners can exploit stress information effectively at a relatively early stage in the spoken presentation of a word.

Repetition of misoriented words reduces lexical-decision response times at repeated and novel orientations.

Repetition of misoriented words reduces lexical-decision response times at repeated and novel orientations.