Lexical Decision Times Research Articles

Lexical Access in Bulgarian: Nouns and Adjectives with and without Floating Vowels

The main goal of the experiments described in this paper was to compare the behavior of Bulgarian words with vs. without «vowel/O» alternation. The O-form may for instance be observed, within the relevant word paradigms, in noun plurals, in adjectives’ gender and plural inflections, and in derived nouns. The materials in experiment 1 consisted of six sets of frequency controlled Bulgarian words, contrasting with respect to the following factors: Alternation (sets A1, B1, C1 with alternation vs. A2, B2, C2 without alternation), Morphology (set A with plural formation, an inflectional process, vs. set C with abstract noun formation, a derivational process), and Stress pattern (set A with first syllable stress vs. set B with second syllable stress). The experimental paradigm was based on repetition priming with visual-input lexical decision. Alternation had a clear effect on the lexical decision time, while Morphology (in the specific manifestation of this parameter) was virtually ineffective and Stress had a minor effect. The materials in experiment 2 consisted of two sets of adjectives contrasting with respect to Alternation (D1 vs. D2), presented in three forms: base-form, inflected (plural) and derived (the corresponding abstract noun). The results of experiment 2 substantially replicate those of experiment 1. The converging results of experiments 1 and 2 offer themselves to a relatively straightforward interpretation. The Bulgarian participants showed a sharp inclination towards full listing, i.e. direct access, of the morphologically modified forms (both inflected and derived) of morphophonologically complex, thus opaque, alternating words. By contrast, the morphologically modified forms of non-alternating, transparent words were clearly processed compositionally. As for the contrast inflection/derivation, although the specific instantiation of this opposition did not prove to directly yield a statistical difference, its interplay with the morphophonological complication implied by the process of vowel/O alternation produced a relatively clear effect in terms of lexical decision speed. Finally, the combination of vowel alternation and second syllable stress, involving replacement of the stressed vowel in morphologically modified forms, seemed to enhance the intimations of direct access.

Effects of cumulative frequency, but not of frequency trajectory, in lexical decision times of older adults and patients with Alzheimer’s disease

The purpose of this study was to investigate the issue of age-limited learning effects on visual lexical decision in normal and pathological aging, by using words with different frequency trajectories and cumulative frequencies. We selected words that objectively changed in frequency trajectory from an early word count ( Thorndike, 1921, 1932; Thorndike & Lorge, 1944) to a later one ( Francis & Kucera, 1982; Kucera & Francis, 1967): we used Dated words, which changed from high frequency values, in effect during the participants’ childhood, to low values, later in development, and Contemporary words, which showed the reverse pattern of low frequency values in childhood to high ones later in life. Cumulative frequency for these words was assumed to be greater in Contemporary relative to Dated words, as the frequency values from the later word count (1967/1982) remained similar up until testing time according to a current frequency table (CELEX database; Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995). As predicted, when word processing involves consistent mappings, no frequency trajectory effect was found in lexical decision. However, a cumulative frequency effect was observed, reflecting an advantage for Contemporary words in both healthy older adults (Experiment 1) and patients with Alzheimer’s disease (Experiment 2). This advantage was found to be modified by education level and vocabulary knowledge in healthy older adults (Experiment 3). These participants also performed a subjective AoA rating of the stimuli, which further confirmed that Dated words were acquired before Contemporary words (Experiment 4). Methodological factors are discussed that may account for the finding of age of acquisition effects in lexical decision and other tasks, under some conditions and not others.

Foveal vs. Parafoveal Attention-Grabbing Power of Threat-related Information

We investigated whether threat words presented in attended (foveal) and in unattended (parafoveal) locations of the visual field are attention grabbing. Neutral (nonemotional) words were presented at fixation as probes in a lexical decision task. Each probe word was preceded by 2 simultaneous prime words (1 foveal, 1 parafoveal), either threatening or neutral, for 150 ms. The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the primes and the probe was either 300 or 1,000 ms. Results revealed slowed lexical decision times on the probe when primed by an unrelated foveal threat word at the short (300-ms) delay. In contrast, parafoveal threat words did not affect processing of the neutral probe at either delay. Nevertheless, both neutral and threat parafoveal words facilitated lexical decisions for identical probe words at 300-ms SOA. This suggests that threat words appearing outside the focus of attention do not draw or engage cognitive resources to such an extent as to produce interference in the processing of concurrent or subsequent neutral stimuli. An explanation of the lack of parafoveal interference is that semantic content is not extracted in the parafovea.

Multiple cognitive deficits during the transition to Alzheimer's disease.

The literature on cognitive markers in preclinical AD is reviewed. The findings demonstrate that impairment in multiple cognitive domains is typically observed several years before clinical diagnosis. Measures of executive functioning, episodic memory and perceptual speed appear to be most effective at identifying at-risk individuals. The fact that these cognitive domains are most implicated in normal cognitive aging suggests that the cognitive deficit observed preclinically is not qualitatively different from that observed in normal aging. The degree of cognitive impairment prior to the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) appears to generalize relatively well across major study characteristics, including sample ascertainment procedures, age and cognitive status of participants, as well as time to diagnosis of dementia. In episodic memory, there is evidence that the size of the preclinical deficit increases with increasing cognitive demands. The global cognitive impairment observed is highly consistent with observations that multiple brain structures and functions are affected long before the diagnosis of AD. However, there is substantial overlap in the distribution of cognitive scores between those who will and those who will not be diagnosed with AD, hence limiting the clinical utility of cognitive markers for early identification of cases. Future research should consider combining cognitive indicators with other types of markers (i.e. social, somatic, genetic, brain-based) in order to increase prediction accuracy.

The effect of preview eccentricity in a lexical decision task

We report lexical decision experiments in which eye movements and lexical decision time were analysed. The results show that nonwords produced more fixation than words, and that the time to make a lexical decision was also greater for nonwords. Further, a preview of the stimulus was presented on some occasions either at fixation or peripherally. When the presentation was peripheral the number of refixations and lexical decision times were reduced. Parafoveal previews of words also reduced word length effects on refixations and lexical decision time. These effects decreased (for nonwords) when the case of the letters was changed in the preview. These results are compatible with the idea that the peripheral preview benefit derives from word visual structure in addition to information about word length, word envelope, and single letter identities.

The processing of singular and plural nouns in French and English

Contradictory data have been obtained about the processing of singular and plural nouns in Dutch and English. Whereas the Dutch findings point to an influence of the base frequency of the singular and the plural word forms on lexical decision times ( Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997), the English reaction times depend on the surface frequency of the presented word form only ( Sereno & Jongman, 1997). To settle this contradiction, we first examined the issue in the French language to see which interpretation generalized to a new language. Having found that the French data were similar to the Dutch data, we then reassessed the English evidence. On the basis of our findings, we conclude that the similarities among the languages are greater than the differences, and that the data are more in line with the Dutch pattern than with the previously reported English pattern. These data rule out the full-storage model as a viable account of the recognition of singular and plural noun forms.

Learning to Represent Vowels in Written Hebrew: Different Factors across Development

The study investigates novice and veteran Hebrew readers’ perception of words containing a vowel letter in different orthographic and morphological contexts. In the first experiment, children and adults were asked to judge pointed words with different morphological structures with and without the grapheme W. Half of the words had consistent (obligatory) W and half had inconsistent (optional) W. In the second experiment, the same procedure was repeated using the same words without pointing marks. Response latencies and accuracy were measured. Accuracy scores improved with age and schooling, and at the same time lexical decision times dropped. Only expert adult readers found it easier to correctly identify words with consistent W than words with inconsistent W. Participants generally found it easier to reach a decision if the word contained a W, but in the pointed experiment adults alone were able to judge words correctly even when W was absent. Morphological structure affected all readers in the same way. The study supports a root-based view of Hebrew spelling. It also supports a reading/spelling processing model which claims that internal orthographic representations of words are increasingly strengthened with each exposure during reading, but not all graphemes are strengthened equally.

The influence of age of acquisition in word reading and other tasks: A never ending story?

This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which validates its use as a variable to examine age-limited learning effects. We report a large-scale multiple regression study of French word reading which shows that controlling for cumulative frequency (derived from child and adult frequency counts) does not result in the removal of an effect of AoA in reading aloud French words, but there was no effect of frequency trajectory. We also report some re-analyses of previous published data which show that frequency trajectory has a reliable influence on spoken and written object naming latencies and lexical decision times, but not on spelling-to-dictation or word reading latencies. Cumulative frequency has a reliable effect in all tasks. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Relations between emotion, memory, and attention: evidence from taboo stroop, lexical decision, and immediate memory tasks.

This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and attention. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated three taboo Stroop effects that occur when people name the color of taboo words. One effect is longer color-naming times for taboo than for neutral words, an effect that diminishes with word repetition. The second effect is superior recall of taboo words in surprise memory tests following color naming. The third effect is better recognition memory for colors consistently associated with taboo words rather than with neutral words. None of these effects was due to retrieval factors, attentional disengagement processes, response inhibition, or strategic attention shifts. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that taboo words impair immediate recall of the preceding and succeeding words in rapidly presented lists but do not impair lexical decision times. We argue that taboo words trigger specific emotional reactions that facilitate the binding of taboo word meaning to salient contextual aspects, such as occurrence in a task and font color in taboo Stroop tasks.

Neural correlates of the effects of morphological family frequency and family size: an MEG study

Schreuder and Baayen (Schreuder. R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simplex words can be. Journal of Memory and Language 37, 118–139) report that lexical decision times to nouns are not sensitive to the cumulative frequency of the noun's morphological derivatives in its “morphological family”, even though such a cumulative frequency effect is obtained in the domain of inflection. Under a decomposition view of derivational morphology, this constitutes a puzzling exception to the robust finding that lexical frequency is one of the major determinants of behavioral response latencies. If morphologically complex words are decomposed, each occurrence of a member of a noun's morphological family should add to its root-frequency. We investigated the effects of morphological family frequency on the magnetoencephalographic response component M350, which shows sensitivity to factors affecting early stages of lexical processing, including lexical frequency. We hypothesized that high morphological family frequency should have a facilitory effect on the M350, even though no such effect can be seen in response time, presumably due to competition among possible root–affix combinations. Contrary to this hypothesis, we found that high family frequency elicits an M350 inhibition, suggesting that competition among morphological family members occurs at the M350. The result is significant, since there is evidence that competition among phonologically similar words occurs after, not at, the M350. Thus, our results suggest that competition within a morphological family precedes competition within a phonological similarity neighborhood.

Word-shape and word-lexical-frequency effects in lexical-decision and naming tasks

The present study investigated the use of word-shape information in visual word recognition. Word-shape frequency was computed for lexically frequent and rare words. Experiment 1 contrasted lowercase and uppercase presentations in a lexical-decision task. The observed latencies indicated a shape-frequency effect in lowercase presentation, i.e., responses were given faster for words with a low-frequency shape than for words with a high-frequency shape, and an interaction between shape frequency and lexical frequency, indicating that, for rare words, having a rare shape speeded up lexical decisions. Experiment 2 primed shape information with a 400 ms SOA. The results showed that high-frequency shape words benefited more from the priming procedure than did low-frequency ones. Priming was also used in a naming task (Experiment 3). The results indicated a strong priming effect for all four target types. When all words were given an up-down configuration (Experiment 4), the same pattern of results as in Experiment 1 was found, rejecting a letter-confusability explanation. Taken together, the results suggest that shape information affects word recognition. Having a rare shape seems to shorten lexical decision times on lexically rare words and to lengthen naming times on lexically frequent words.

Effect of grammatical gender on visual word recognition: evidence from lexical decision and eye movement experiments.

Lexical decision times and eye movements were recorded to determine whether grammatical gender can influence the visual recognition of isolated French nouns. This issue was investigated by assessing the use of two types of regularities between a noun's form and its gender--namely ending-to-gender regularities (e.g., the final letter sequence -at appears only in masculine nouns and, thus, is predictive of masculine gender) and gender-to-ending regularities (e.g., feminine gender would predict the final letter e, whereas masculine gender would not). Previous studies have shown that noun endings are used by readers when they have to identify gender. However, the influence of ending-to-gender predictiveness has never been investigated in a lexical decision task, and the effect of gender-to-ending regularities has never been evaluated at all. The results suggest that gender information can influence both the activation stage (Experiments 1 and 3) and the selection stage (Experiments 2 and 3) of the word recognition process.

A demonstration of attentional bias, using a novel dual task paradigm, towards clinically salient material in recovering alcohol abuse patients?

This study examined whether alcohol abuse patients are characterized either by enhanced schematic processing of alcohol related cues or by an attentional bias towards the processing of alcohol cues. Abstinent alcohol abusers (N = 25) and non-clinical control participants (N = 24) performed a dual task paradigm in which they had to make an odd/even decision to a centrally presented number while performing a peripherally presented lexical decision task. Stimuli on the lexical decision task comprised alcohol words, neutral words and non-words. In addition, participants completed an incidental recall task for the words presented in the lexical decision task. It was found that, in the presence of alcohol related words, the performance of patients on the odd/even decision task was poorer than in the presence of other stimului. In addition, patients displayed slower lexical decision times for alcohol related words. Both groups displayed better recall for alcohol words than for other stimuli. These results are interpreted as supporting neither model of drug cravings. Rather, it is proposed that, in the presence of alcohol stimuli, alcohol abuse patients display a breakdown in the ability to focus attention.

Semantic and morpho-syntactic priming in auditory word recognition in congenitally blind adults

While several studies have reported a deviation from the normal time course of language acquisition in blind children others have provided evidence for a more efficient processing of the language input in blind than sighted adults. The present study used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to address the question at which processing stage the advantage of blind adults may arise. Congenitally blind adults and sighted controls matched for age, gender and education, first heard an adjective followed by a noun or a pseudo-word. The adjective was or was not semantically associated with the target and it was either correctly or incorrectly inflected for gender with respect to the following noun. Participants decided whether or not the target noun was a legal German word. Nouns primed semantically and morpho-syntactically had shorter lexical decision times than those primed only semantically or only morpho-syntactically and decision times for the latter two conditions were shorter than in a condition without a semantically or morpho-syntactically congruent context. This response pattern did not differ between groups. However, blind participants had shorter reaction times than sighted for pseudo-words, and overall decision times for words tended to be shorter in the blind as well. It is concluded that the faster speech comprehension skills of blind adults most likely originate from a more efficient perceptual analysis rather than from a more extended use of semantic or morpho-syntactic context information.

Foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts

In three experiments, we studied the influence of foreign language knowledge on native language performance in an exclusively native language context. Trilinguals with Dutch as their native and dominant language (L1), English as their second language (L2), and French as their third language (L3) performed a word association task (Experiment 1) or a lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) in L1. The L1 stimulus words were cognates with their translations in English, cognates with their translations in French, or were noncognates. In Experiments 1 and 2 with trilinguals who were highly proficient in English and relatively low in proficiency in French, we observed shorter word association and lexical decision times to the L1 words that were cognates with English than to the noncognates. In these relatively low-proficiency French speakers, response times (RTs) for the L1 words that were cognates with French did not differ from those for the noncognates. In Experiment 3, we tested Dutch-English-French trilinguals with a higher level of fluency in French (i.e., equally fluent in English and in French). We now observed faster responses on the L1 words that were cognates with French than on the noncognates. Lexical decision times to the cognates with English were also shorter than those to then oncognates. The results indicate that words presented in the dominant language, to naive participants, activate information in the nontarget, and weaker, language in parallel, implying that the multilinguals' processing system is profoundly nonselective with respect to language. A minimal level of nontarget language fluency seems to be required, however, before any weaker language effects become noticeable in L1 processing.

A morphological effect obtains for isolated words but not for words in sentence context

The effect of morphological complexity on word identification was studied in three experiments conducted in Finnish, employing the same set of target nouns. In Experiment 1, the target nouns were presented in isolation, and lexical decision times were employed as lexical access measures. In Experiments 2 and 3, the same words were embedded in sentence contexts, where both the inflected and non-inflected forms were equally plausible, and eye fixation patterns (Exp. 2) and lexical decision latencies (Exp. 3) were recorded. The experiment with isolated words replicated previous lexical decision studies by showing more effortful processing for inflected than monomorphemic nouns. However, this morphological complexity effect did not generalise to the context experiments; fixation durations and response latencies were highly similar for inflected and monomorphemic words. It is suggested that, at least for the type of inflected nouns studied, the morphological effect observed for isolated words may derive from the syntactic and/or semantic level and not necessarily from the lexical level, as previously assumed.

Event templates in the lexical representations of verbs

Four experiments support the hypothesis that syntactically relevant information about verbs is encoded in the lexicon in semantic event templates. A verb's event template represents the participants in an event described by the verb and the relations among the participants. The experiments show that lexical decision times are longer for verbs with more complex templates than verbs with less complex templates and that, for both transitive and intransitive sentences, sentences containing verbs with more complex templates take longer to process. In contrast, sentence processing times did not depend on the probabilities with which the verbs appear in transitive versus intransitive constructions in a large corpus of naturally produced sentences.

Is the go/no-go lexical decision task an alternative to the yes/no lexical decision task?

In the go/no-go lexical decision task (LDT), participants are instructed to respond as quickly as they can when a word is presented and not to respond if a nonword is presented. By minimizing part of the response selection process in the experimental task, the impact of response decision time on the obtained lexical decision time is probably reduced relative to the standard yes/no LDT (Gordon, 1983). Experiments 1 and 2 show that the go/no-go LDT is sensitive to the effects of word frequency and associative priming--the magnitude of these effects is similar with the two tasks. More important, the go/no-go LDT has a number of advantages with respect to the "standard" yes/no LDT: It offers faster response times, more accurate responding, and fewer processing demands than does the yes/no task. Accordingly, the go/no-go task appears to be an excellent alternative to the standard yes/no task.

Mapping from Sound to Meaning: Reduced Lexical Activation in Broca's Aphasics

Recent studies of lexical access in Broca's aphasics suggest that lexical activation levels are reduced in these patients. The present study compared the performance of Broca's aphasics with that of normal subjects in an auditory semantic priming paradigm. Lexical decision times were measured in response to word targets preceded by an intact semantically related prime word (“cat”–“dog”), by a related prime in which one segment was acoustically altered to produce a poorer phonetic exemplar (“c*at”–“dog”), and by a semantically unrelated prime (“ring”–“dog”). The effects of the locus of the acoustic distortion within the prime word (initial or final position) and the presence of potential lexical competitors (“cat” → /gæt/versus “coat” → “goat”) were examined. In normal subjects, the acoustic manipulations produce a small, short-lived reduction in semantic facilitation irrespective of the position of the distortion in the prime word or the presence of a voiced lexical competitor. In contrast, Broca's aphasics showed a large and lasting reduction in priming in response to word-initial acoustic distortions, but only a weak effect of word-final distortions on priming. In both phonetic positions, the effect of distortion was greater for prime words with a lexical competitor. These findings are compatible with the claim that Broca's aphasics have reduced lexical activation levels, which may result in a disruption of the bottom-up access of words on the basis of acoustic input as well as increased vulnerability to competition between acoustically similar lexical items.

The Adaptive Value of Lexical Connotation in Speech Perception

Previous work (e.g. Bargh, Chaiken, Govender, & Pratto, 1992; Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, & Kardes, 1986) has shown that objects are evaluated on a goodness/badness dimension automatically and preconsciously. Vakoch and Wurm (1997; Wurm & Vakoch, 1996) have found similar results using different stimuli and tasks. They found that auditory lexical decision times depend on dimensions of connotation (Evaluation, Potency, and Activity). Reaction times (RTs) from these studies were interpreted in terms of the evolutionary adaptiveness of different types of perceptual processing. The current study introduces a new way to define words, using two dimensions (Danger and Usefulness) rather than three, that allows a direct test of the adaptiveness model. RTs for nouns chosen for their adaptive significance were related to Usefulness and Danger, and to the interaction between Usefulness and Danger. A database of dimension weights is included.