Lexical Decision Response Times Research Articles

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.

How is morphological decomposition achieved?

Abstract Two experiments investigated morphological decomposition in ambiguous novel compounds such as BUSHEATER, which can be parsed as either BUS-HEATER or BUSH-EATER. It was found that subjects' parsing choices for such words are influenced by orthographic constraints, but that these constraints do not operate prelexically. Lexical decision response times for ambiguous novel compounds were found to be longer than those for non-ambiguous novel compounds such as LARKEATER. This finding supports the view that all legal lexical entries in a multimorphemic string are automatically activated during visual word recognition. The claim that morphological parsing proceeds from left to right and lexical access is automatic and obligatory is presented as the Automatic Progressive Parsing and Lexical Excitation (APPLE) model of lexical processing.

Testing theories of language processing: An empirical investigation of the on-line lexical decision task.

J. L. Nicol and D. Swinney (1989) reported that lexical decision response times to a test word that was related to the implicit object of a verb were faster, when tested immediately after the verb, than response times to a control test word. They concluded from this result that the relation between the implicit object and the verb was understood during comprehension. In G. McKoon, R. Ratcliff, and G. Ward (1994), another interpretation was suggested, that the faster lexical decision response times were due to the better semantic-pragmatic fit of the related test words to the sentential contexts, and experimental data were presented to support this interpretation. In response, J.L. Nicol, J. D. Fodor, and D. Swinney (1994) pointed out some possible problems with these experiments. The experiment presented in this article undermines their arguments. By using sentences in which there was no implicit object, exactly the same pattern of results was found as originally reported by J. L. Nicol and D. Swinney, thereby implicating some factor other than syntactic processing of an implicit object as an explanation of their finding.

Phonological coding in word reading: evidence from hearing and deaf readers.

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times (RTs) to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nortrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared with RTs to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In Experiment 3, in which the nonwords were unpronounceable, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished auditory, experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality.

Bilinguals in a monolingual and a bilingual speech mode: the effect on lexical access.

The time course of lexical access in fluent Portuguese-English bilinguals and in English speaking monolinguals was examined during the on-line processing of spoken sentences using the phoneme-triggered lexical decision task (Blank, 1980). The bilinguals were tested in two distinct speech modes: a monolingual, English or Portuguese, speech mode, and a bilingual, code-switching, speech mode. Although the bilingual’s lexical decision response times to word targets in the monolingual speech modes were identical to those of the monolingual subjects, their response times to code-switched word targets in the bilingual mode were significantly slower. In addition, the bilinguals took longer to detect nonwords in both the monolingual and bilingual modes. These results confirm that bilinguals cannot totally deactivate their other language when in a monolingual speech mode. It is hypothesized that bilinguals search both lexicons when confronted with nonwords, even when in a totally monolingual mode, and that they search the base-language lexicon before the other lexicon when in a bilingual, code-switching, speech mode.