Lexical Decision Research Articles

Multisensory Integration in Lexical Processing: Predicting Word Recognition Through Cross-Modal Capability

The integration of multisensory in lexical processing has garnered significant interest in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics. This study investigates the predictive power of cross-modal capability (CMC) on word recognition, focusing on how sensory integration influences cognitive processing and lexical decision-making. By collecting five-sense ratings for synesthetic adjectives, we computed the cross-modal capability for each word. We then conducted regression analyses to examine the relationship between these indices and reaction time in lexical decision tasks. Our findings reveal that words with higher cross-modal capabilities, as measured by CMC, are recognized and processed more quickly. This superior predictive power of CMC underscores the importance of sensory associations in lexical processing and highlights the need for comprehensive indices that account for multiple sensory inputs. These results provide deeper insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying word recognition and processing speed, suggesting that CMC is a better independent variable for partially predict lexical cognition and recognition. This research contributes to our understanding of multisensory integration in lexical processing and has implications for models of word recognition and cognitive linguistics.

Revealing hidden interactions in mean performance through distributional analyses: Evidence from Chinese lexical decision performance.

Important insights in visual word recognition have been provided by studies examining the combined influence of multiple factors on participants' mean response times to English words in the lexical decision task. However, to make progress towards a complete understanding of how meaning is activated by print, researchers need to conduct more detailed analyses of behavioral patterns beyond mean response latencies and accuracies, particularly how variables influence different components of response time distributions. Moreover, it is critical to extend patterns found in English to the diverse scripts encountered by readers across the world. The present study is the first to explore the theoretically important effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on lexical decisions involving two-character Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese Chinese words, using participants from Singapore and Hong Kong, respectively. Despite the profound differences between the English and Chinese writing systems, we observed remarkably similar trade-offs in the stimulus quality × word frequency interaction across different portions of the response time distribution for both orthographies, indicating that the optimization of lexical processing by leveraging available codes in response to task demands extends across multiple and highly diverse writing systems.

The aging of emotional words processing in implicit and explicit emotion task: an ERP study.

This study examined how cognitive aging affects emotional word processing using event-related potential technique. Young and older adults completed both implicit lexical decision and explicit emotion categorization tasks involving positive, negative, and neutral words. Behaviorally, older adults displayed a negative emotion effect in the implicit task, which was absent in young adults. While both age groups exhibited both positive and negative emotion effects in the explicit task, older adults demonstrated a greater positivity bias compared to young adults. Event-related potential technique data revealed that young adults exhibited an early negative emotion effect on the P2 and a late emotion effect on the late positivity potentials in the implicit task. In contrast, older adults exhibited an early negativity bias effect on the P2, as well as both negative and positive emotion effects on the N400, and positive emotion effects on the late positivity potentials. In the explicit task, young adults showed both early and late negative emotion effects on the P2 and late positivity potentials, while older adults showed both negative and positive emotion effects on the late positivity potentials. The results suggest distinct processing mechanisms for emotion words in young and older adults, involving both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms, which support the socioemotional selectivity theory.

Morpho-orthographic segmentation on visual word recognition in Brazilian Portuguese speakers

ObjectiveStudies have demonstrated a morphological decomposition process in the initial stages of visual word recognition based on orthographically defined morphemes and independent of semantic and lexical information. The present study sought to investigate this phenomenon in adult Brazilian Portuguese-speaking readers.MethodParticipants performed a lexical decision task preceded by primes at two Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA): 33 or 250 ms. The primes had one of the following relations with the target word: morphological (porteiro [DOORKEEPER]–PORTA [DOOR]), morpho-orthographic (cordeiro [LAMB]–CORDA [ROPE]), orthographic (abril [APRIL]–ABRIU [OPENED]), semantic (abelha [BEE]–MEL [HONEY]), or no relation (pessoa [PERSON]–DADO [DICE]).ResultsPriming effects were observed for the morphological and semantic conditions at both SOAs but not for the orthographic and morpho-orthographic conditions.ConclusionOur results suggest that semantic representations mediate morphological priming in Brazilian Portuguese since the early stages of visual word recognition.

Speech perception and language comprehension in primary progressive aphasia

Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive loss of speech and language. Although speech perception and language comprehension deficits are observed in individuals with PPA, these deficits have been understudied relative to production deficits. Recent work has examined receptive language processing at sublexical, lexical, and semantic levels in PPA; however, systematic investigation of these levels of processing within a single PPA cohort is lacking. The current study sought to fill this gap. Individuals with logopenic, nonfluent, and semantic variants of PPA and healthy, age-matched controls completed minimal pairs syllable discrimination, auditory lexical decision, and picture-word verification tasks to assess sublexical, lexical, and semantic processing. Distinct profiles were observed across PPA variants. Individuals with logopenic variant PPA had impaired performance on auditory lexical decision and picture-word verification tasks, with a trend toward impaired performance on the syllable discrimination task. Individuals with nonfluent and semantic variant PPA had impaired performance only on auditory lexical decision and picture-word verification. Evaluation of the types of errors made on the picture-word verification task (phonological and semantic) provided further insight into levels of deficits across the variants. Overall, the results indicate deficits in receptive processing at the lexical-phonological, lexical-semantic, and semantic levels in logopenic variant PPA, with a trend toward impaired sublexical processing. Deficits were observed at the lexical-semantic and semantic levels in semantic variant PPA, and lexical-phonological deficits were observed in nonfluent PPA, likely reflecting changes both in lexical-phonological processing as well as changes in predictive coding during perception. This study provides a more precise characterization of the linguistic profile of each PPA subtype for speech perception and language comprehension. The constellation of deficits observed in each PPA subtype holds promise for differential diagnosis and for informing models of intervention.

Neural correlates of masked priming: only morphologically derived words facilitate lexical decisions

ABSTRACT The visual processing of morphologically complex words has been studied for decades now. One influential account proposes initial sublexical parsing, based on surface structure, before semantic information comes in (form-first models; Rastle & Davis, 2008, Morphological decomposition based on the analysis of orthography. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23(7-8), 942–971. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960802069730). We tested this account in German, a morphologically rich language in a masked-priming lexical decision study with (pseudo-)derived German words. Behavioural data showed masked priming for truly morphologically complex (e.g. farmer – FARM), but not for pseudo-complex (e.g. corner – CORN) or merely form-related primes (e.g. cartel – CAR). MEG data revealed an early sensitivity to form (140–330 ms), followed by a differentiation between derived and other primes (260–480 ms), challenging the notion of early blind decomposition. The results align with the AUSTRAL model (Taft, 2023, Localist lexical representation of polymorphemic words. In D. Crepaldi (Ed.), Linguistic morphology in the mind and brain (1st ed., pp. 152–166). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003159759-11) and suggest that German speakers have heightened sensitivity to morpho-semantic information, unlike English speakers, which likely due to differences in morphological complexity between languages.

Neural changes in sign language vocabulary learning: Tracking lexical integration with ERP measures

The present study aimed to investigate the neural changes related to the early stages of sign language vocabulary learning. Hearing non-signers were exposed to Catalan Sign Language (LSC) signs in three laboratory learning sessions over the course of a week. Participants completed two priming tasks designed to examine learning-related neural changes by means of N400 responses. In a semantic decision task, participants evaluated whether written Catalan word pairs were semantically related or not. The experimental manipulation included prime-target phonological overlap (or not) of the corresponding LSC sign translations. In a LSC primed lexical decision task, participants saw pairs of signs and had to determine if the targets were real LSC signs or not. The experimental design included pairs of signs that were semantically related or unrelated. The results of the LSC lexical decision task showed N400 lexicality and semantic priming effects in the third session. Also in the third session, N400 effects related to the activation of LSC phonology were observed during word processing in the semantic decision task. Overall, our findings suggest rapid neural changes occurring during the initial stages of intensive sign language vocabulary training. The results are discussed in relation to the temporality of lexicality and semantic effects, as well as their potential relation to linguistic features of sign languages.

EXPRESS: Exploring the differences in processing between Chinese emotion and emotion-laden words: A cross-task comparison study.

Affective words can be classified into two types: emotion words (EM words, e.g., "happy") and emotion-laden words (EL words, e.g., "wedding"). Several studies have shown differences in processing between EM and EL words, although results are inconclusive. These two types of words may have representational differences because affective content is an inherent part of the semantic features of EM words (i.e., denotative meaning) but not of EL words, whose affective content is part of their connotative meaning (i.e., these words do not name emotions, but are associated to emotions). In this study, we tested a set of Chinese EM and EL words. Both conditions included positive and negative words. The study involved two tasks, an implicit task, in which emotional content was not relevant (lexical decision task, LDT), and an explicit task, in which the emotional content was relevant (affective categorization task, ACT). Our results showed that participants responded faster to EM words than to EL words. This advantage was mostly observed in the ACT and with negative words. These results reveal differences in processing between EM and EL words which can be related to the greater relevance of affective content in the meaning of EM words compared to EL words.

The role of emotional prototypicality in Chinese emotion word recognition: evidence from implicit and explicit emotion tasks

Abstract Emotional prototypicality (EmoPro) quantifies the extent to which an emotion-label word represents emotion concepts. While previous research demonstrated faster recognition for high EmoPro words than low EmoPro words in Spanish, the modulation of EmoPro on emotion word recognition in other languages and its dependence on task demands remain unclear. This study employed both the lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and the valence judgment task (Experiment 2) to investigate the EmoPro effect among Chinese speakers. The results not only confirmed the role of EmoPro in Chinese emotion word recognition, supporting the prototype theory of emotion concepts, but also highlighted that the EmoPro effect was more pronounced in the valence judgment task (an explicit emotion task) than in the lexical decision task (an implicit emotion task). This suggests that EmoPro is associated with the ease of accessing emotion concepts and serves as an affective-semantic variable.

Top-down feedback normalizes distortion in early visual word recognition: Insights from masked priming.

The identification of visually presented words tolerates distortions in the input format, as Hannagan et al. Plos One, 7, e32121, (2012) demonstrated in a masked priming lexical decision task, showing sizable identity-priming effects with CAPTCHA-like primes. This tolerance to distortion has two potential explanations: bottom-up normalization in the encoding stage (Dehaene et al., Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9, 335-341, 2005) or top-down lexical feedback (McClelland & Rumelhart, Psychological Review, 88, 375-407, 1981). To disentangle the predictions of these accounts, we conducted two masked identity-priming experiments with printed and CAPTCHA-like distorted primes on high- and low-frequency words. The rationale was that, in the distorted format, high-frequency words would benefit more from top-down feedback than low-frequency words. Results in the lexical decision experiment showed that, for high-frequency words, identity-priming effects were only slightly greater for printed than for CAPTCHA-like primes, whereas this difference was larger for low-frequency words. In contrast, when employing the same-different matching task, which does not require lexical access, the identity-priming effect was greater for printed primes and was unaffected by word frequency. Thus, during lexical access, top-down feedback may help normalize the visual input in the early stages of word recognition, challenging bottom-up models of visual word recognition.

Weathering words: a virtual reality study of environmental influence on reading dynamics.

Reading is a fundamental cognitive activity that is influenced by both textual and external environmental factors, although the latter has been less thoroughly explored. This study aims to examine the impact of environmental visual conditions on reading performance using Virtual Reality (VR) technology. We conducted two experiments to assess the effects of visual contrast and simulated weather conditions on reading dynamics. In Experiment 1, we measured single-word recognition speed using a lexical decision task under different visual contrasts and weather conditions. In Experiment 2, we assessed reading dynamics during a sentence reading task, analyzing how visual contrast and simulated sunny versus rainy weather conditions affected reading behavior, particularly focusing on reading speed and eye fixations. In Experiment 1, high visual contrast, particularly under sunny conditions, significantly enhanced single-word recognition speed, indicating a notable influence of environmental visual conditions. In Experiment 2, visual contrast had minimal effect on sentence reading; however, sunny weather facilitated faster reading times, while rainy scenarios increased the number of eye fixations. These findings suggest that environmental factors, such as weather conditions, can significantly affect reading behavior. The study contributes to the understanding of key environmental influences on reading in everyday life contexts and has implications for the ergonomic design of reading materials, especially for outdoor settings and VR environments. Additionally, the integration of controlled stimuli within VR increases the ecological validity of reading research, underscoring the potential of VR as a powerful tool for cognitive research.

Cross-Linguistic Differences in Morphological Processing: Evidence from English and Italian

ABSTRACT Purpose The present study examined cross-linguistic differences in orthographic transparency and morphological complexity during complex word recognition in English and Italian. If morphological processing is more important in orthographically transparent and morphemically rich languages, larger morpheme-effects should be evident in Italian. However, if morphological processing is more pronounced in orthographically opaque and morphemically sparser languages, morpheme-effects should be larger in English. Method 60 Italian (M age = 25.33, 34 females, Caucasian) and 60 English (M age = 26.35, 34 females, mostly Caucasian) native-speakers completed an online lexical decision task, while reaction times and accuracy were measured. To tease apart the independent role of stems and suffixes, we employed four types of nonwords: Stem+Suffix: night+ness, Stem+NonSuffix: night-lude, NonStem+Suffix: nisht+ness, NonStem+NonSuffix: nisht-lude). Results The results revealed a significant morpheme interference effect in both languages: nonwords with stems were read slower and less accurately than those without stems and nonwords with suffixes slower and less accurately than those without suffixes. Crucially, this observed pattern was larger in English than Italian. Also, a significant Stem by Suffix interaction suggested that Stem+Suffix nonwords were harder to reject than all others. Conclusion The current findings suggest that morphological processing is more pronounced in opaque orthographies like English, possibly because the activation of morphemic chunks can be used to compensate for grapheme-to-phoneme inconsistencies.

Understanding with the body? Testing the role of verb relative embodiment across tasks at the interface of language and memory

Multiple representation accounts of conceptual knowledge argue that information associated with sensory-motor experience, in addition to pure linguistic information, contributes to word processing. A number of issues, however, remain under-investigated, including the extent to which these dimensions affect verb processing (rather than nouns), especially in languages other than English, and their role across different tasks along the language-memory continuum. Here, we collected ratings for a verb-specific dimension linked to bodily experience (relative embodiment, RE) for 647 Italian verbs and we tested its effects in three tasks differently modulating semantic activation and memory processes (i.e., lexical decision, grammatical decision, and memory recognition). Our results showed reliable influences of RE during lexical decision and memory recognition, but not in grammatical decision, possibly due to the Italian morphological richness. The cross-task analysis showed that RE effects were substantially higher in memory recognition compared to lexical decision, indicating that semantic and episodic processes interact at the interface of language and memory. Overall, results support the flexible and context-dependent role of sensory-motor and bodily-related experience during verb processing, pointing also to language-specific factors and implications for the organization of declarative memory.

How Age of Acquisition Affects Compound Word Recognition

ABSTRACT Purpose Adults recognize words that are acquired during childhood more quickly than words acquired during adulthood. This is known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. The AoA effect, according to the integrated account, manifests in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing and in tasks with arbitrary input-output mapping. Compound words allow us to investigate this account due to the arbitrary input-output mapping between the compound word itself and its morphemes, which requires greater semantic processing. Method Forty-eight British English students in each experiment completed an unspaced (Experiment 1; n = 48; 83% female; Mage = 19.73), spaced (Experiment 2; n = 48; 83% female; Mage = 19.04), auditory (Experiment 3; n = 48; 63% female; Mage = 19.83), and cross-modal (Experiment 4; n = 48; 52% female; Mage = 19.81) lexical decision task (LDT) using a regression design on 226 compound words. Results We observed that the AoA of the compound word affected accuracy across all tasks, whereas the AoA of the compound word influenced recognition latencies across all tasks except cross-modal LDT. Discussion The results suggest that the influence of the AoA effect and of semantic predictors is largest in unspaced compound words and smallest in cross-modal LDT. This indicates that the AoA effect in word recognition is in line with the integrated account.

Emojis and affective priming in visual word recognition

ABSTRACT Emojis are frequently used in digital communication to supplement the lack of non-verbal cues, but their integration during reading has not been thoroughly examined. This study explores the interplay between language and emotion by testing the influence of emotional valence and face-status of emojis on visual word recognition. Two online experiments were conducted with 92 native English-speaking university students, examining priming effects between congruent (e.g. delicious) and incongruent (e.g. hate) prime-target pairs, varying the face-status of the emoji prime (face vs. non-face) and the valence (positive vs. negative) of the word target. Irrespective of valence, face emojis demonstrated a processing advantage over non-face emojis, implying automatic attention capture. Additionally, the results revealed an interaction between prime-target congruency and valence, with a facilitatory effect for positive, but not negative, items, suggesting a valence-specific mechanism of affective priming in the lexical decision task. The research suggests that the rapid integration of emoji content occurs during the early stages of visual word recognition, with heightened attentional sensitivity to both face-like and positive stimuli when reading digital communications.

Word Type and Frequency Effects on Lexical Decisions Are Process-dependent and Start Early.

When encountering letter strings, we rapidly determine whether they are words. The speed of such lexical decisions (LDs) is affected by word frequency. Apart from influencing late, decision-related, processing stages, frequency has also been shown to affect very early stages, and even the processing of nonwords. We developed a detailed account of the different frequency effects involved in LDs by (1) dividing LDs into processing stages using a combination of hidden semi-Markov models and multivariate pattern analysis applied to EEG data and (2) using generalized additive mixed models to investigate how the effect of continuous word and nonword frequency differs between these stages. We discovered six stages shared between word types, with the fifth stage consisting of two substages for pseudowords only. In the earliest stages, visual processing was completed faster for frequent words, but took longer for word-like nonwords. Later stages involved an orthographic familiarity assessment followed by an elaborate decision process, both affected differently by frequency. We therefore conclude that frequency indeed affects all processes involved in LDs and that the magnitude and direction of these effects differ both by process and word type.

Impact of Disciplinary Variations on Second Language Mental Lexicon

This study investigates how academic disciplines impact second language (L2) lexical competencies. Prior L2 research has often overlooked the broader effects of disciplinary backgrounds on lexical development. To address this gap, this study utilized lexical decision, memory, and semantic fluency tasks to examine lexicon recognition, memory, and storage processes among L2 Chinese learners from various academic fields. The study participants comprised 16 students from the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) disciplines and 11 from the Science and Engineering (S&E) disciplines, all having passed HSK level 4. The tasks were conducted using E-Prime 2.0. The findings revealed distinct cognitive strategies and thinking patterns among the participants from different disciplines . These strategies and patterns affected lexical task performance in terms of accuracy and response times. Although lexical memory exhibited no significant variation among the groups, discipline-specific tendencies were observed in the formation of semantic networks. Learners from S&E disciplines preferred mastering field-relevant Chinese terminology, whereas HSS learners tended to acquire words outside their specific disciplines. This observation highlights how learners’ disciplinary backgrounds influence their vocabulary acquisition and the organization of semantic networks in L2.

Impact of olfactory priming on mental representations of food concepts and subsequent food choice

Previous research suggests that food odors act as a prime and influence food choice outside of awareness. Little is known about how odors prime (healthy) food choices. We hypothesized that odors could activate mental representations of food concepts, interacting with cognitive processes underlying food decision-making. We tested this by examining which concepts (healthy, sensory, or product-specific) are activated by odors and how this impacts subsequent food choices. In a between-subjects design, 112 participants were divided into three conditions: healthy odor (apple or banana), unhealthy odor (chocolate or caramel), and non-odor (control). Participants were exposed to one condition for 5 min and then completed a lexical decision task and a screen-based food choice task. The lexical decision task included four word categories: healthy-related, sensory-related, neutral words, and non-words. Reaction times were recorded and computed for each category. Participants were asked to choose one food they wanted to eat from four (in-)congruent food word options and repeated it four times (one for each odor). Results showed participants responded slower to non-words than other words, and slower to healthy and sensory words than neutral words. However, odor exposure did not influence reaction times, nor did the interaction between odor condition and word category affect reaction times. Participants were more likely to choose unhealthy foods regardless of odor exposure. Thus, ambient sweet odors did not prime food-related information or choice. We recommend additional testing using a broader range of odors and word categories to fully validate the association of an odor with a concept.

Are all negative words alike? Behavioral differences in processing negative words associated and not associated with physical and social pain.

Studies examining whether stimulus valence affects cognitive processing and motor responses yield mixed results, possibly due to treating negative words as a homogeneous category. Words related to pain may hold distinct status because of their relevance to survival. Thus, they offer a unique opportunity to investigate semantic influences on cognitive processing. This study aims to determine if words related to physical and social pain elicit stronger aversion than general negative words by assessing the Affective Compatibility Effect in implicit and explicit tasks. In Experiment 1, 35 participants performed a lexical decision task on 60 positive words and 60 negative words, of which 20 not related to pain, 20 related to physical pain, and 20 related to social pain. Participants held down the central key of a keyboard and released it to press a key far from the screen (avoidance condition) or close to the screen (approach condition) for words. In Experiment 2, 43 participants performed a valence evaluation task on the same words. They held down the central key and released it to press a key close to the screen for positive words and a key far from the screen for negative words (congruent condition), or the opposite (incongruent condition). In Experiment 1, we found faster RTs for social pain-related words compared to other categories. We also found faster RTs in the approach condition than in the avoidance condition, regardless of whether valence or semantics were considered as independent variables. In Experiment 2, we found faster RTs in the congruent condition than in the incongruent condition when semantics was considered as independent variable. We also found an interaction valence*condition, with faster RTs for negative words in the congruent condition than in the incongruent condition when valence was considered as independent variable. Our findings suggest that, notwithstanding pain-related words do not affect aversive behaviors compared to negative, pain-unrelated words, they are processed faster when conveying social pain. This supports the hypothesis that the cognitive system differentiates and responds congruently not only based on general semantic categories, like pain, but also possibly based on nuances within it.

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.