Lexical Decision Task Research Articles

Phonological Awareness of English among Saudi Learners: An Examination of the Role of Lexical Status and Intra-syllabic Phonological Unit

This study explores phonological awareness ability in the second language. Although some studies have examined L2 phonological awareness, most of these studies have not provided sufficient details on the type of stimulus items employed in these studies nor considered the possible effect of some linguistic factors on the results. Thus, the study aims to explore the impact of the lexical status of the item on phonological awareness in L2. In addition, the study examines the preferred intra-syllabic phonological unit in L2 among Saudi university students. Specifically, the study examines the effect of the lexical status (word vs non-word) and the intra-syllabic phonological unit (onset-rime vs. body-coda) on the phonological awareness of English. The participants were 48 university students majoring in English language. Two phonological awareness tasks were administered to test phonological awareness at the intra-syllabic and phonotactic levels. The tasks were an intra-syllabic segmentation task and a lexical decision task. The results showed significant effects of both linguistic factors on the participants’ L2 phonological awareness. The lexical status of the test item had a significant effect on the participants’ performance in the task. The participants performed significantly better in identifying real-words than non-words, which reflects an advanced phonotactic awareness. Finally, the results revealed that the body-coda unit is the preferred intra-syllabic structure for Saudi learners. Therefore, the study provides evidence that the onset-rime hypothesis is not universal and is at least not applicable to Saudi Arabic speakers. The study offers theoretical and practical implications for the acquisition and teaching of L2.

Perceptual adaptation to unfamiliar dialect variation

Regional varieties of a language often differ in the phonetic realization of shared phonological categories, resulting in perceptual ambiguity. In perceptual tasks, listeners with more exposure to regional dialect variation perform differently than listeners with less exposure, reflecting underlying differences in lexical competition. In this study, we examined perceptual adaptation to one authentic dialect of American English and one novel dialect to test for adaptation to unfamiliar variation. Our materials contained contrasts that are perceptually ambiguous in Southern American English and in the novel dialect we created, in which linguistically trained bilinguals substituted English /ow/ with Spanish /o/. Participants heard a familiarization passage spoken in a Southern or Novel dialect and then completed an auditory lexical decision task. Adaptation was assessed by differences in accuracy and response times for each vowel contrast, talker dialect, and familiarization dialect. Results revealed lower accuracy and slower response times for both target contrasts when pronounced in their respective dialects. These effects reflect the difficulty in processing perceptually ambiguous stimuli. Familiarization dialect had no effect on accuracy or response times; future analyses will include quantification of listener regional dialect exposure to better assess its influence on processing novel variation.

Visuo-Attentional and Phonological Deficits Explored in French Students with Dyslexia: Eye Movements Recorded during a Phonological Lexical Decision Task.

Whether dyslexia is caused by phonological or attentional dysfunction remains a widely debated issue. To enrich this debate, we compared the eye movements of 32 French university students with (14 students) and without (18 students) dyslexia while performing a delayed phonological lexical decision task on 300 visually presented stimuli. The processing stimuli involved either a lexical (i.e., words) or a non-lexical route relying on a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (pseudohomophones and pseudowords), while other stimuli involved only a visual search (consonant and symbol sequences). We recorded the number of fixations, the duration of the first fixation and the amplitude of saccades made on the stimuli. Compared to the controls, the participants with dyslexia made more fixations while reading regardless of the type of stimulus (lexical and non-lexical). Crucially, the participants with dyslexia exhibited longer first fixations in particular while reading phonologically challenging stimuli such as pseudohomophones and pseudowords compared to stimuli involving a simple visual search (consonants, symbols). Taken together, these results suggest that both visual and phonological impairments may be implicated in dyslexia, supporting the hypothesis that dyslexia is a multifactorial deficit.

Word or pseudoword? The lexicality effect in naming and lexical decision tasks during advanced aging.

Although there is evidence that recognizing pseudowords is more difficult than recognizing words during childhood, adulthood, and early old age (60-75 years), it is not yet clear what happens during advanced aging or the fourth age, a stage when the decline of fluid intelligence strongly affects processing speed, but a good performance of crystallized intelligence is described through an increase in vocabulary and knowledge. The objective of this study was to determine the lexicality effect in advanced aging, specifically exploring how the ability to recognize words and pseudowords (ortho-phonologically plausible for Spanish) is affected during the third and fourth-ages. The lexicality effect was measured using naming and lexical decision tasks. Response time and accuracy were compared between a fourth-age group (80+ years) and two third-age groups (60-69 and 70-79 years) through linear regression models. The results showed that, in general, the fourth-age group had longer response times and reduced accuracy when recognizing words and pseudowords. Moreover, they showed a significant lexicality effect (which increases from the third- age onwards), reflected in higher costs during pseudoword recognition, especially when the task required more cognitive effort (lexical decision task). These results were consistent with the impact of the deterioration of fluid intelligence on the speed of lexical recognition and with the better performance that crystallized intelligence can generate on accuracy, especially in the early stages of old age. Additionally, this study supports the fact that pseudoword recognition resists cognitive decline, as accentuated deterioration is visualized only after 80 years.

문해력과 어휘 접속 효율 간의 관련성

Although the literacy has been recently emphasized in many areas, it is known rarely that the relationship between the literacy and the word recognition process. To find the relationship, the present study conducted an exploratory study to investigate whether a correlation between the literacy and the lexical access in a process of word recognition existed, and an experiment to specify the relation among two variables. This study found that a relevance between the literacy and lexical decision latencies and accuracy rates reflecting the effectiveness of lexical access through the exploratory study. The experimental study used the lexical decision task that ask participants to press “word” or “nonword” button when they showed strings on the monitor as correctly and rapidly as they can. Four hundred words were selected from Korean newspapers DB and dialog DB randomly and used stimuli in the lexical decision task. The current study used verified questionary for the literacy. The results show that upper score group in the literacy score elicit faster lexical decision latency and higher accuracy than lower score group. Based on the result, the present study explained which processes of the lexical access were more efficient in the upper group as compared to the lower group.

Attention networks in multilingual adults who do and who do not stutter

ABSTRACT This study investigated whether multilinguals who stutter differ from multilinguals who do not stutter in terms of attention networks. Towards that end, it measured (a) performance differences in attention networks between multilinguals who stutter and those who do not stutter and (b) the correlation between stuttering characteristics and attention networks. Twenty-four multilingual Dutch-English speaking adults (20–46y), half of whom were diagnosed with stuttering, completed the Attentional Network Task (ANT) that evaluates the attention networks of alerting, orienting, and executive control. A language and social background questionnaire and a lexical decision task (LexTALE) assessed the participants’ language proficiency. The Stuttering Severity Instrument 4th Ed. and the Brief Version of the Unhelpful Thoughts and Beliefs About Stuttering Scale were used to evaluate stuttering characteristics. The two groups did not differ in the ANT in terms of reaction time and error rate scores. Furthermore, no differences were observed in the three attention networks between the groups. Lastly, no correlation was found between stuttering characteristics and attention networks. The results suggest that the attention abilities of multilinguals who stutter do not differ from multilinguals who do not stutter.

How country of origin and stimuli language influence visual word recognition in bilingual children

Aims and objectives: We used mouse tracking to determine how country of origin and stimuli language influence visual word recognition in bilingual children. Methodology: Children attending bilingual schools in Spain and the USA completed a lexical decision task in English. The task included real English words (e.g., true), and pseudohomophones following Spanish (e.g., tru) and English (e.g., troo) orthographical rules. Data and analysis: Bilingual children from both countries performed worse when responding to English pseudohomophones (within-language interference) than Spanish pseudohomophones (between-language interference). Findings/conclusions: The children from the USA outperformed the children from Spain in almost every measure. Interestingly, their mouse trajectories followed a different pattern. Originality: When responding to pseudohomophones, children from the USA showed a pronounced initial deviation toward the incorrect response (likely due to a strong activation of the phonology of the real English word) followed by a very effective corrective movement (likely due to an orthographic verification mechanism). Significance: Mouse tracking provides novel insights regarding language activation in bilingual readers.

Ortho-semantic learning of novel words: an event-related potential study of grade 3 children

IntroductionAs children become independent readers, they regularly encounter new words whose meanings they must infer from context, and whose spellings must be learned for future recognition. The self-teaching hypothesis proposes orthographic learning skills are critical in the transition to fluent reading, while the lexical quality hypothesis further emphasizes the importance of semantics. Event-related potential (ERP) studies of reading development have focused on effects related to the N170 component—print tuning (letters vs. symbols) and lexical tuning (real words vs. consonant strings)—as well as the N400 reflecting semantic processing, but have not investigated the relationship of these components to word learning during independent reading.MethodsIn this study, children in grade 3 independently read short stories that introduced novel words, then completed a lexical decision task from which ERPs were derived.ResultsLike real words, newly-learned novel words evoked a lexical tuning effect, indicating rapid establishment of orthographic representations. Both real and novel words elicited significantly smaller N400s than pseudowords, suggesting that semantic representations of the novel words were established. Further, N170 print tuning predicted accuracy on identifying the spellings of the novel words, while the N400 effect for novel words was associated with reading comprehension.DiscussionExposure to novel words during self-directed reading rapidly establishes neural markers of orthographic and semantic processing. Furthermore, the ability to rapidly filter letter strings from symbols is predictive of orthographic learning, while rapid establishment of semantic representations of novel words is associated with stronger reading comprehension.

EXPRESS: The Dynamics of Multiword Sequence Extraction.

Being able to process multiword sequences is central for both language comprehension and production. Numerous studies support this claim, but less is known about the way multiword sequences are acquired, and more specifically how associations between their constituents are established over time. Here we adapted Rey et al.'s (2020) Hebb naming task into a Hebb lexical decision task to study the dynamics of multiword sequence extraction. Participants had to read letter strings presented on a computer screen and were required to classify them as words or pseudowords. Unknown to the participants, a triplet of words or pseudowords systematically appeared in the same order and random words or pseudowords were inserted between two repetitions of the triplet. We found that RTs for the unpredictable first position in the triplet decreased over repetitions (i.e., indicating the presence of a repetition effect) but more slowly and with a different dynamic compared to items appearing at the predictable second and third positions in the repeated triplet (i.e., showing a slightly different predictability effect). Implicit and explicit learning also varied as a function of the nature of the triplet (i.e., unrelated words, pseudowords, semantically related words, or idioms). Overall, these results provide new empirical evidence about the dynamics of multiword sequence extraction, and more generally about the role of statistical learning in language acquisition.

Time is -ending: Sublexical information activates the horizontal mental time line in word processing.

Time is -ending: Sublexical information activates the horizontal mental time line in word processing.

Colored valence in a lexical decision task

Color influences behavior, from the simplest to the most complex, through controlled and more automatic information elaboration processes. Nonetheless, little is known about how and when these highly interconnected processes interact. This study investigates the interaction between controlled and automatic processes during the processing of color information in a lexical decision task. Participants discriminated stimuli presented in different colors (red, blue, green) as words or pseudowords. Results showed that while color did not affect the faster and more accurate recognition of words compared to pseudowords, performance was influenced when examining words and pseudowords separately. Pseudowords were recognized faster when presented in blue or red, suggesting a potential influence of evolutionary color preferences when processing is not guided by more controlled processes. With words, emotional enhancement effects were found, with a preference for green independent of valence. These results suggest that controlled and more automatic processes do interact when processing color information according to stimulus type and task.

Effects of social interactions on the neural representation of emotional words in late bilinguals

ABSTRACT This fMRI study explored the relationship between social interactions and neural representations of emotionality in a foreign language (LX). Forty-five late learners of Japanese performed an auditory Japanese lexical decision task involving positive and negative words. The intensity of their social interactions with native Japanese speakers was measured using the Study Abroad Social Interaction Questionnaire. Activity in the left ventral striatum significantly correlated with social interaction intensity for positive words, while the right amygdala showed a significant correlation for negative words. These results indicate neural representations of LX emotional words link with the intensity of social interactions. Furthermore, LX negative words activated the left inferior frontal gyrus more than positive and neutral words, suggesting greater cognitive effort for processing negative words, aligning with a bias in adult social interactions towards more positively-valenced language. Overall, our findings underscore the importance of social interaction experiences in the processing of LX emotional words.

The cost of monitoring in time-based prospective memory

Time-based prospective memory (TBPM) involves remembering to perform actions at specific times in the future. Several studies suggest that monetary consequences improve prospective remembering; however, the effect of monetary consequences on strategic time monitoring (i.e., clock-checking behaviour) in TBPM is still unknown. The present study investigated how the monetary costs on clock-checking affected TBPM accuracy and strategic time monitoring. Participants performed an ongoing lexical decision task while carrying out a TBPM task every two minutes. Motivational incentives were manipulated across three experimental conditions: a single-cost condition in which missed TBPM responses led to monetary deductions, a double-cost condition in which both missed responses and time monitoring led to monetary deductions, and a control condition with no monetary deductions. Overall, the findings indicated that monetary costs on clock-checking prompted more parsimonious strategic time monitoring behaviour, which negatively impacted TBPM accuracy. These results emphasize the importance of weighing the motivational aspects involved in strategic monitoring, shedding light on the complex relationship between clock-checking behaviour, its consequences, and TBPM performance.

Using narrative 360° video as a tool to promote breast self-examination

This experiment examined the feasibility of 360° video as a tool for public health messaging by investigating the effect that viewing the 360° documentary The Waiting Room VR had on female viewers’ sense of identification, attitudes to breast cancer screening and mortality salience. A key part of the documentary places participants in a viewpoint ambiguously aligned to that of the film’s director and subject, Victoria Mapplebeck (VM), in a scene that recreates her radiotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Eighty female participants watched the documentary either sitting upright with the chair back set at a 90° angle or reclining with the chair back set at a 140° angle (consistent with VMs posture) under conditions of either high or low cognitive load. The effect of posture type was measured explicitly using questionnaires on presence, identification and breast self-examination (BSE) intention as well as implicitly using a lexical decision task to measure death-thought awareness (DTA). Reclined posture led to a higher sense of spatial presence but no increase in identification with VM. Significantly increased identification with VM led to greater intention to conduct BSE. There were no effects of posture, cognitive load or identification on DTA. The implications of these results for using 360° video as a behaviour change tool, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the terror management manipulation and the relevance of spatial viewpoint in 360° video are discussed.

Error-monitoring: A predictor of future reading skills? A 3-year longitudinal study in children

Investigation of the factors explaining individual differences in the acquisition of expert reading skills has become of particular interest these last decades. Non-verbal abilities, such as visual attention and executive functions play an important role in reading acquisition. Among those non-verbal factors, error-monitoring, which allows one to detect one's own errors and to avoid repeating them in the future, has been reported to be impaired in dyslexic readers. The present three-year longitudinal study aims at determining whether error-monitoring efficiency evaluated before and during reading instruction could improve the explanation of reading skills. To do so, 85 children will be followed from the last year of kindergarten to the second grade. The classic predictors of reading will be assessed at each grade level. Error-monitoring indices in domain-general and reading-related contexts will be derived from EMG data recorded during a Simon task in kindergarten and during both a Simon and a lexical decision tasks in the first and second grades. Findings concerning the role of error-monitoring on reading skills are expected to have an important impact on reading instruction to prevent reading difficulties in at-risk children and improve remediation to help children with reading difficulties.

The semantic access mechanism of L3 Spanish words

Abstract This study investigates the lexical semantic access mode among students (n = 70) who speak Chinese as their first language (L1), English as a second language (L2), and are in the process of learning Spanish as their third language (L3). We use a cross-linguistic repetition priming paradigm with lexical decision tasks to assess whether semantic access to L3 Spanish words is achieved with the help of L1 Chinese or L2 English translation equivalents. The results show that the lexical semantic access mode varies depending on L3 proficiency level: Participants with high Spanish proficiency level have direct access to the concepts, while nonproficient Spanish learners have access to the Spanish words’ conceptual representation with the help of translation equivalents from both L1 Chinese and L2 English, which suggests that the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart, 1994) in second language acquisition (SLA) can be extended to the third language acquisition (TLA) process. Our results also corroborate the Parasitic Model (Ecke, 2015), as trilingual speakers are shown to be dependent on previously acquired languages at the initial stage.

Effects of age and word frequency on Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from a web-based large-scale lexical-decision task.

The present study examined age differences in word-frequency effects in Korean visual word recognition through a large-scale, web-based lexical-decision task. Four hundred ninety-seven adult Korean speakers in their 20s through 60s participated in the task, in which they decided the lexicality of 120 Korean words varying in frequency and 120 nonwords. Overall, both lexical-decision accuracy and response times increased with age, and more frequent words were recognized more rapidly than less frequent words. We also found significant effects of participants' reading skill as well as age of acquisition of words. Crucially, despite older adults' generally slower reaction times, there was no hint of any interaction between participant age and word frequency on lexical-decision times. This result adds to the literature on age-related changes in visual word recognition and provides evidence for stable word-frequency effect across the adult age spectrum. These findings are discussed with different hypotheses of lexical access and aging proposed in the literature. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Experiential traces first: Does holding a location in visuospatial working memory affect the processing of space-associated words?

This study aimed to systematically examine whether actively maintaining a visual location in working memory can influence the processing of spatially related words. In five experiments, we asked participants to maintain either the location or the shape of a visually presented stimulus in working memory so that it could later be compared with a test stimulus concerning the relevant target features. In between, we presented participants with words that refer to objects typically encountered in the upper or lower vertical space (roof vs. root, respectively). The task participants performed as a response to these words differed between experiments. In Experiments 1–3, participants performed a lexical decision task, in Experiment 4 they performed a semantic task (deciding whether the word refers to an occupation), and in Experiment 5 they performed a spatial task (deciding whether the word refers to something in the upper or lower visual field.) Only in Experiment 5 did we observe an interaction between the position of the visual stimulus held in working memory (up vs. down) and the meaning of the spatial words (associated with up vs. down). Our results therefore suggest that actively maintaining a stimulus location in working memory does not automatically affect the processing of spatially related words, but does so if the relevant spatial dimension is made highly salient by the task. The results are thus in line with studies showing a strong context-dependency of embodiment effects and thus allow the conclusion that language processing proper is not operating on a sensorimotor representational format.

Frequency effects in linear discriminative learning.

Word frequency is a strong predictor in most lexical processing tasks. Thus, any model of word recognition needs to account for how word frequency effects arise. The Discriminative Lexicon Model (DLM) models lexical processing with mappings between words' forms and their meanings. Comprehension and production are modeled via linear mappings between the two domains. So far, the mappings within the model can either be obtained incrementally via error-driven learning, a computationally expensive process able to capture frequency effects, or in an efficient, but frequency-agnostic solution modeling the theoretical endstate of learning (EL) where all words are learned optimally. In the present study we show how an efficient, yet frequency-informed mapping between form and meaning can be obtained (Frequency-informed learning; FIL). We find that FIL well approximates an incremental solution while being computationally much cheaper. FIL shows a relatively low type- and high token-accuracy, demonstrating that the model is able to process most word tokens encountered by speakers in daily life correctly. We use FIL to model reaction times in the Dutch Lexicon Project by means of a Gaussian Location Scale Model and find that FIL predicts well the S-shaped relationship between frequency and the mean of reaction times but underestimates the variance of reaction times for low frequency words. FIL is also better able to account for priming effects in an auditory lexical decision task in Mandarin Chinese, compared to EL. Finally, we used ordered data from CHILDES to compare mappings obtained with FIL and incremental learning. We show that the mappings are highly correlated, but that with FIL some nuances based on word ordering effects are lost. Our results show how frequency effects in a learning model can be simulated efficiently, and raise questions about how to best account for low-frequency words in cognitive models.

Visual word recognition of Chinese-Japanese bilinguals: limited role of phonology.

The investigation of how orthography and phonology influence lexical semantic access in visual word identification is a crucial area in psycholinguistics. Previous studies, focusing on alphabetic scripts in bilingual lexical recognition, have highlighted the facilitative role of phonological similarity. Yet, the impact of cross-language phonological similarity in bilinguals using non-alphabetic scripts remains unclear. In this study, we employed a lexical decision task to examine Chinese-Japanese bilinguals. Participants were presented with Chinese-Japanese cognate translation pairs, categorized into phonologically similar and dissimilar cognates. Analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) revealed no significant differences between phonologically similar and dissimilar contexts in the early time windows (90-170 ms and 170-270 ms). However, in the later time window (350-500 ms), significant differences were observed, with the phonologically dissimilar condition eliciting a larger negative wave. Contrary to findings in alphabetic script-based studies, our results suggest that in logographic script processing, the activation of phonology and semantics occurs simultaneously, and the influence of phonology is limited. This indicates a distinct cognitive processing mechanism in non-alphabetic language bilinguals, providing new insights into the dynamics of bilingual lexical recognition.