Lexical Decision Research Articles

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.

How does emotional content influence visual word recognition? A meta-analysis of valence effects

AbstractResearch on the interplay between language and emotion has shown evidence that the affective content of words influences their recognition. However, the direction of the effects is not clear, as there are mixed findings regarding the role of positive and, especially, negative valence. We conducted a Bayesian multi-level meta-analysis to examine the role of valence in visual word recognition, focusing on the lexical decision task. The results revealed a facilitative effect of positive valence on lexical decision times. That is, positive words led to faster responses than both negative and neutral words. In contrast, negative valence did not have any effect, although the analysis of several moderator variables suggested that there might be a facilitative effect in some cases, specifically, when negative words elicit very strong and intense emotions. These results shed light on the complexities of emotional word processing. They also point to the need for psycholinguistic models to take affective information into account, and thus provide a complete view of visual word recognition.

Visual letter similarity effects in Korean word recognition: The role of distinctive strokes.

While the impact of visual letter similarity on word recognition in the Latin script has been extensively documented using masked priming techniques, research into non-Latin scripts such as Hangul remains limited. Hangul letters are systematically formed by adding one or two strokes to the base form, creating a pool of visually similar letters in the inventory. This study investigated the role of added distinctive strokes in word recognition by employing two experimental tasks: a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and a same-different word matching task (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 1 revealed a visual similarity effect only for primes without distinctive strokes, indicating an asymmetry in the priming effects. Conversely, Experiment 2 showed that visually similar primes facilitated target word processing regardless of the presence of the distinctive stroke, indicating no asymmetric priming effect. These findings suggest initial uncertainty of letter identity during Korean word processing and the processing of distinctive strokes in differentiating visually similar words.

Readers encode absolute letter positions

Reading research has long been concerned with the question of whether the reading brain accesses lexical representations via absolute or relative letter position information. In recent years, important results have been obtained with the flanker lexical decision task. Studies have shown faster decisions about target words (e.g., ‘rock’) when flanked by related letters (‘ro rock ck’) than unrelated letters (‘st rock ep')—and crucially, equal facilitation upon switching flanker positions (‘ck rock ro'), pointing to relative rather than absolute letter position coding. Yet, a later study employing longer targets and flankers yielded detrimental effects of switching flanker positions. In order to get a better grasp on the equivocal evidence thus far, here we carried out an extensive test of flanker relatedness and position effects, using various target and flanker lengths, all within a single experiment. We observed a clear reduction of flanker relatedness effects upon switching flanker positions, and this held true across target and flanker lengths. The present results unambiguously suggest that lexical access is driven by absolute letter position information, and furthermore, are accurately predicted by the recent PONG model (Snell, 2024b).

The distinctive role of vowel harmony in visual word recognition: The case of Turkish.

Vowel harmony is a phenomenon in which the vowels in a word share some features (e.g., frontness vs. backness). It occurs in several families of languages (e.g., Turkic and Finno-Ugric languages) and serves as an effective segmenting cue in continuous speech and when reading compound words. The present study examined whether vowel harmony also plays a role in visual word recognition. We chose Turkish, a language with four front and four back vowels in which approximately 75% of words are harmonious. If vowel harmony contributes to the formation of coherent phonological codes during lexical access, harmonious words will reach a stable orthographic-phonological state more rapidly than disharmonious words. To test this hypothesis, in Experiment 1, we selected two types of monomorphemic Turkish words: harmonious (containing only front vowels or back vowels) and disharmonious (containing front and back vowels)-a parallel manipulation was applied to the pseudowords. Results showed faster lexical decisions for harmonious than disharmonious words, whereas vowel harmony did not affect pseudowords. In Experiment 2, where all words were harmonious, we found a small but reliable advantage for disharmonious over harmonious pseudowords. These findings suggest that vowel harmony helps the formation of stable phonological codes in Turkish words, but it does not play a key role in pseudoword rejection.

HeLP: The Hebrew Lexicon project

Lexicon projects (LPs) are large-scale data resources in different languages that present behavioral results from visual word recognition tasks. Analyses using LP data in multiple languages provide evidence regarding cross-linguistic differences as well as similarities in visual word recognition. Here we present the first LP in a Semitic language—the Hebrew Lexicon Project (HeLP). HeLP assembled lexical decision (LD) responses to 10,000 Hebrew words and nonwords, and naming responses to a subset of 5000 Hebrew words. We used the large-scale HeLP data to estimate the impact of general predictors (lexicality, frequency, word length, orthographic neighborhood density), and Hebrew-specific predictors (Semitic structure, presence of clitics, phonological entropy) of visual word recognition performance. Our results revealed the typical effects of lexicality and frequency obtained in many languages, but more complex impact of word length and neighborhood density. Considering Hebrew-specific characteristics, HeLP data revealed better recognition of words with a Semitic structure than words that do not conform to it, and a drop in performance for words comprising clitics. These effects varied, however, across LD and naming tasks. Lastly, a significant inhibitory effect of phonological ambiguity was found in both naming and LD. The implications of these findings for understanding reading in a Semitic language are discussed.