Lexical Decision Research Articles

Incorporating Frequency Effects in the Lexical Access of Mandarin Tone 3 Sandhi.

Mandarin tone 3 sandhi refers to the phenomenon whereby a tone 3 syllable changes to a tone 2 when followed by another tone 3. This phonological process creates a deviation between the tonal forms realized at morphemic (/tone3-tone3/) and word ([tone2-tone3]) levels, posing questions in terms of how disyllabic tone 3 sandhi words are represented and accessed. The current study conducted three cross-modal lexical decision priming experiments to investigate this issue. Experiment 1 manipulated the frequencies of the initial morpheme and whole word, showing that the higher initial-character frequency against the whole word gives stronger activation to the underlying representation and the lower frequency of the initial character leads to stronger activation of the surface tone. Experiments 2 and 3 operationalized the relative frequency of the initial tone 3 morpheme's realization as a sandhi tone, finding that the competition between the two tonal realizations also influences how T3 sandhi words are accessed. Specifically, the more frequently the T3 morpheme surfaces as a T2 allomorph, the less activated the underlying representation becomes in the mental lexicon. Our results indicate a complex interplay between morpheme, word, and the associated tonal representations in the mental lexicon and that these factors co-determine the lexical access of tone 3 sandhi.

Body-object interaction ratings for 3600 French nouns.

Body-object interaction (BOI) measures the ease with which the human body can interact with the concept represented by a word. This research focuses on two main objectives: first, to establish French norms for the psycholinguistic variable BOI, and second, to investigate the contribution of BOI to language processing in French. We collected BOI ratings for 3600 French nouns from participants through an online platform. The inter- and intrastudy reliability of these new ratings indicate that the ratings are robust. We then aimed to determine the role of BOI in word recognition. A hierarchical regression analysis was conducted using lexical decision reaction times (RTs) as the dependent variable. BOI was found to be a significant predictor of lexical decision latencies, beyond the contribution of word length, frequency, orthographic distinctiveness, and imageability. Contrary to previous findings in English, higher BOI values were associated with longer RTs in French, indicating an inhibitory effect of BOI on French word processing. Methodological differences may account for this divergent result. Taken together, the results of this study show the independent contribution of BOI to word recognition in French. This supports the notion that sensorimotor information is a crucial component of language processing. By providing a reliable and sizable BOI database for French nouns, we offer a valuable resource for psycholinguistic and language processing research. This research underscores the complex relationship between language, cognition, and sensorimotor experiences, advancing our comprehension of language processing mechanisms.

The role of hyponymy and context concreteness in compound word processing

ABSTRACT This paper describes the effects of hyponymy and emotion on the comprehension and production of compound words. The research subjects are over 2000 concatenated compounds of English taken from the LADEC database (Gagné et al. 2019). The study builds on the research carried out in Charitonidis (2022), according to which context concreteness for the second constituent was a significant positive predictor of lexical decision and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and the British Lexicon Project (BLP). In the present paper, the hyponymy norms from Gagné et al. (2020) were added in the analysis. The results show that both hyponymy and context concreteness for the second constituent are relevant. In addition, all models including both variables have a better fit than nested models omitting one of these variables. There is thus strong evidence that both hyponymy and context concreteness for the second constituent are obligatory parameters in compound word processing.

The time course of semantic ambiguity in visual word recognition: behavioral and ERP evidence for the lexical-semantic effect.

Homonyms are words with multiple, unrelated meanings that share a single form and pronunciation. These words provide valuable insights into how semantic representation is retrieved and selected independently of orthography and phonology. This study aims to investigate the temporal dynamics of lexical and semantic processing in the visual recognition of Korean words. Specifically, we examine how homonyms and unambiguous words are processed differently during a lexical decision task (LDT) with EEG recording, considering the effects of word frequency and the number of meanings (NOMs). Participants performed a lexical decision task where they were required to determine if a visually presented stimulus was a valid Korean word. We compared the behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked by homonyms and unambiguous words, each possessing either high or low word frequency. Both subjective and objective NOMs were measured and manipulated, while controlling for the subjective balance of individual frequencies of meanings to control for confounding from the relatedness of meaning (ROM). For ERP analysis, a non-parametric cluster-based permutation test was employed in addition to the two time windows of interest (i.e., N400 and P600). Behavioral results indicated a marginally significant interaction between word frequency and semantic ambiguity along with a main effect of word frequency, showing faster and more accurate responses for high-frequency words. An ambiguity advantage was observed only for low-frequency words, with no significant effect found for high-frequency words. ERP results revealed that lexical-semantic interactions were reflected in the modulations of the N400 and P600 components. High-frequency homonyms elicited an enhanced N400 amplitude, while low-frequency homonyms showed a reduced P600 amplitude. The findings suggest that the activation of semantic information occurs simultaneously with lexical processing, rather than during post-lexical or decision-making processes. Furthermore, considering balanced homonyms were employed in this study, inhibitory competition may arise from the high-frequency individual meanings of high-frequency words. In contrast, in low-frequency words, a facilitative effect may arise from gains in global semantic activation or semantic feedback to the orthographic level.

Embodied cognition comes of age: A processing advantage for action words is modulated by aging and the task.

Processing action words (e.g., fork, throw) engages neurocognitive motor representations, consistent with embodied cognition principles. Despite age-related neurocognitive changes that could affect action words, and a rapidly aging population, the impact of healthy aging on action-word processing is poorly understood. Previous research suggests that in lexical tasks demanding semantic access, such as picture naming, higher motor-relatedness can enhance performance (e.g., fork vs. pier)-particularly in older adults, perhaps due to the age-related relative sparing of motor-semantic circuitry, which can support action words. However, motor-relatedness was recently found to affect performance in younger but not older adults in lexical decision. We hypothesized this was due to decreased semantic access in this task, especially in older adults. Here we tested effects of motor-relatedness on 2,174 words in younger and older adults not only in lexical decision but also in reading aloud, in which semantic access is minimal. Mixed-effects regression, controlling for phonological, lexical, and semantic variables, yielded results consistent with our predictions. In lexical decision, younger adults were faster and more accurate at words with higher-motor relatedness, whereas older adults showed no motor-relatedness effects. In reading aloud, neither age group showed such effects. Multiple sensitivity analyses demonstrated that the patterns were robust. Altogether, whereas previous research indicates that in lexical tasks demanding semantic access, higher motor-relatedness can enhance performance, especially in older adults, evidence now suggests that such effects are attenuated with decreased semantic access, which in turn depends on the task as well as aging itself. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Statistical relationships between surface form and sensory meanings of English words influence lexical processing.

Across spoken languages, there are some words whose acoustic features resemble the meanings of their referents by evoking perceptual imagery, i.e., they are iconic (e.g., in English, "splash" imitates the sound of an object hitting water). While these sound symbolic form-meaning relationships are well-studied, relatively little work has explored whether the sensory properties of English words also involve systematic (i.e., statistical) form-meaning mappings. We first test the prediction that surface form properties can predict sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 monosyllabic and disyllabic words (Juhasz & Yap, 2013), confirming they explain a significant proportion of variance. Next, we show that iconicity and sensory form typicality, a statistical measure of how well a word's form aligns with its sensory experience rating, are only weakly related to each other, indicating they are likely to be distinct constructs. To determine whether form typicality influences processing of sensory words, we conducted regression analyses using lexical decision, word recognition, naming and semantic decision tasks from behavioral megastudy data sets. Across the data sets, sensory form typicality was able to predict more variance in performance than sensory experience or iconicity ratings. Further, the effects of typicality were consistently inhibitory in comprehension (i.e., more typical forms were responded to more slowly and less accurately), whereas for production the effect was facilitatory. These findings are the first evidence that systematic form-meaning mappings in English sensory words influence their processing. We discuss how language processing models incorporating Bayesian prediction mechanisms might be able to account for form typicality in the lexicon. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

On the relationship between spatial attention and semantics in the context of a Stroop paradigm.

A controversial issue in the literature on single word reading concerns whether semantic activation from a printed word can be stopped. Several reports have claimed that, even when attention is directed to a single letter in a word, semantic interference persists full blown in the context of variants of Stroop's paradigm. Incidental word recognition is thus claimed to be unaffected by directed spatial attention and hence to be automatic by this criterion. In contrast, the literature examining the relation between intentional visual word recognition and spatial attention in tasks like lexical decision and reading aloud suggests that spatial attention is a necessary preliminary to lexical/semantic processing of a word. These opposing conclusions raise the question of whether there is a qualitative difference between incidental and intentional visual word recognition when spatial attention is considered. We first consider the methodology from Stroop experiments in which putatively narrowed spatial attention manipulations failed to prevent interference from semantics. We then report a new experiment that better promotes focused spatial attention. The results yield clear evidence that the effect of semantic activation can indeed be sidelined because one or more prior processes were in large measure stopped. We conclude that incidental word recognition is not automatic in the sense of occurring without any kind of attention.

Emotion effects survive non-standard orthographic representations

ABSTRACT Digital communication has generated forms of written speech that may deviate from standard ones, such as Greeklish (a Latin-alphabet-based script) vs. Greek. The question of interest is how different orthographic representations of the same referent (e.g. petaloyda, “butterfly”, in Greeklish vs. πϵταλούδα “butterfly” in Greek) may influence word processing, particularly visual word recognition and access to affective connotations. 120 Greek native speakers were tested on a lexical decision task, in which script (Greeklish vs. Greek) and valence (positive vs. negative vs. neutral) were manipulated within participants. Words were matched for word class, frequency, concreteness, length, number of syllables and orthographic neighbourhood. Emotional words differed from neutral ones in valence and arousal. Results yielded faster response times for words written in the standard script (Greek) than the non-standard script (Greeklish). Moreover, regardless of script, response times were negatively correlated with the words’ valence, with slowest responses for negative words and fastest for positive ones, suggesting that positive content accelerates lexical access, whereas negative content slows it down. To sum up, although script type was found to affect word recognition, activation of and access to emotional content seemed to resist non-standard characteristics of visual word processing.

Training Finnish morphology with a smartphone application in adult beginner level learners

The rich inflectional grammar of Finnish is often considered a challenge for second language (L2) learners. However, the inflectional variation is based on relatively systematic morphological and morphophonological rules. Smartphone applications could offer an effective way to train these rules by utilizing adaptive spaced repetition exercises. Currently there is little research on morphology learning via Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) applications in morphologically rich languages. The present study introduces a newly developed Finnish Morphology Application (FMA) that aims to teach beginner-level Finnish morphology. In a randomized controlled trial, the test group participants (n = 33) practiced Finnish morphology with the FMA during a three-week period, and their improvements were compared to those of an active control group using a general Finnish language learning application (n = 38). The practiced morphological operations comprised transparent and semi-transparent inflections. Pre- and posttests included a visual lexical decision task and a morphological production task. In comparison to the control group, the FMA group improved substantially in written morphological production skills, especially in transparent inflections. In visual lexical decision task, there was an improvement in accuracy for trained words in the FMA group, but this improvement applied to both transparent and semi-transparent inflections as well as monomorphemic nouns. In reaction times, there were no differences between the groups. Self-ratings of perceived efficacy of the FMA regarding grammar and vocabulary varied from neutral to positive. The results suggest that the FMA is particularly useful for learning inflectional production skills in Finnish by adult beginner level learners but can also be used to train word recognition.

Masked Translation Priming Effects for Chinese-English-Japanese Triple Cognates in Lexical Decision Tasks.

Previous research has demonstrated cognate translation priming effects in masked priming lexical decision tasks (LDTs) even when a bilingual's two languages have different scripts. Because those effect sizes are normally larger than with noncognates, the effects have been partially attributed to the impact of prime-target phonological similarity. The present research extended that work by examining priming effects when using triple different-script cognates, i.e., /ka1 feɪ1/-coffee-コーヒー/KoRhiR/. Specifically, masked cognate priming effects were examined in six different priming directions (i.e., L1↔L2, L1↔L3, and L2↔L3) for Chinese-English-Japanese trilinguals using LDTs. Significant priming effects were observed only when the primes were from the stronger language. This asymmetric pattern suggests that the phonological similarity of cognate primes only facilitates the processing of different-script triple cognates to the extent that the processing of the prime is robust enough to make phonology available before target processing is finished.

Event-related Potential Measures of Visual Word Processing in Monolingual and Bilingual Children and Adults: A Focus on Word Frequency Effects.

How does language background influence the neural correlates of visual word recognition in children? To address this question, we used an ERP lexical decision task to examine first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) visual word processing in monolingual and bilingual school-aged children and young adults (n = 123). In particular, we focused on the effects of word frequency (an index of lexical accessibility) on RTs and the N400 ERP component. Behaviorally, we found larger L1 versus L2 word frequency effects among bilingual children, driven by faster and more accurate responses to higher-frequency words (no other language or age group differences were observed). Neurophysiologically, we found larger L1 word frequency effects in bilinguals versus monolinguals (across both age groups), reflected in more negative ERP amplitudes to lower-frequency words. However, the bilingual groups processed L1 and L2 words similarly, despite lower levels of subjective and objective L2 proficiency. Taken together, our findings suggest that divided L1 experience (but not L2 experience) influences the neural correlates of visual word recognition across childhood and adulthood.

Language lateralization in temporal lobe epilepsy: A behavioral screening tool for surgical planning.

Temporal lobe epilepsy can disturb eloquent areas, affecting language. We applied a visually-mediated task to measure lateralization of language recognition in drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy. Patients with left (n = 26), right (n = 28) temporal lobe epilepsy and controls (n = 30) were administered the translingual lexical decision task. We performed repeated measures analyses of variance, with the visual half-field as an intrasubject factor and the group as an intersubject factor. A main effect of visual half-field was found, showing the right visual field (left hemisphere) advantage for both accuracy and response time. A main effect of the group was found in accuracy, showing that both epilepsy groups performed less accurately than controls, and left temporal lobe epilepsy performed less accurately than right temporal lobe epilepsy. Also, the group-by-visual half-field interaction was significant. Post hoc t tests indicated the controls and right temporal lobe epilepsy performed better in the right visual field than in the left visual field, whereas no visual half-field effect was found in left temporal lobe epilepsy. For response times, the interaction was also significant. Post hoc t tests showed a significant right visual-field advantage for controls (two-tailed) and for the right temporal lobe epilepsy (one-tailed). Right visual-field advantage was absent in left temporal lobe epilepsy. The translingual lexical decision task can efficiently distinguish between left and right temporal lobe epilepsy. Compared to right temporal lobe epilepsy and controls, language lateralization is diminished in left temporal lobe epilepsy. The potential use of the translingual lexical decision task as an effective noninvasive presurgical language lateralization screening tool is highlighted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Estimating the proportions and latencies of reaction time outliers: A pooling method and case study of lexical decision tasks

A methodological problem in most reaction time (RT) studies is that some measured RTs may be outliers—that is, they may be very fast or very slow for reasons unconnected to the task-related processing of interest. Numerous ad hoc methods have been suggested to discriminate between such outliers and the valid RTs of interest, but it is extremely difficult to determine how well these methods work in practice because virtually nothing is known about the actual characteristics of outliers in real RT datasets. This article proposes a new method of pooling cumulative distribution function values for examining empirical RT distributions to assess both the proportions of outliers and their latencies relative to those of the valid RTs. As the method is developed, its strengths and weaknesses are examined using simulations based on previously suggested ad hoc models for RT outliers with particular assumed proportions and distributions of valid RTs and outliers. The method is then applied to several large RT datasets from lexical decision tasks, and the results provide the first empirically based description of outlier RTs. For these datasets, fewer than 1% of the RTs seem to be outliers, and the median outlier latency appears to be approximately 4–6 standard deviations of RT above the mean of the valid RT distribution.

Effects of Subjective Type Frequency and Phonetic Structure on L2 Morphological Processing: A Constructional Perspective

Little research has been conducted to investigate the effects of subjective type frequency and phonetic structure on morphological processing. From the perspective of construction, this study carried out two experiments to examine whether these two factors have impacts on the processing of derivatives by Chinese EFL learners. In Experiment 1, the masked priming paradigm produced facilitation effect for the prefixed words rather than the suffixed ones. However, participants with higher subjective type frequency of the target words did not differ significantly from their counterparts in response times (RTs). In Experiment 2, words whose phonetic structure is consistent with the morphological structure took significantly longer RTs than the inconsistent group and the monomorphemic words in the unprimed lexical decision task. These findings demonstrated that subjective type frequency may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the generalization of morphological constructions, while phonetic structure can affect the perceptual salience of affix, thus playing an important part in morphological decomposition.

The family size effect in visual and auditory word recognition

ABSTRACT Words with larger morphological families elicit shorter response times in visual lexical decision, but in auditory lexical decision, family size effects have been reported to be facilitative, absent, or inhibitory. We revisit the auditory family size effect and different family size definitions by re-analysing data from two large lexical decision experiments. The results suggest that words with larger families elicit smaller response latencies not only in visual but also in auditory lexical decision. However, in auditory lexical decision, this effect is insignificant when the word contains a prefix. In both modalities, it is the degree of semantic similarity and the degree of form overlap between a word and its family members, rather than the mere presence of overlap, that seem to drive the family size effect.

Words can only get us so far

The traditional ontological division between the lexicon and grammar has often resulted in a reductionist view of the lexicon and lexical competence as composed of individual words in isolation. This narrow view of the lexicon has transcended disciplinary boundaries and is apparent in the focus on single words of widely used psycholinguistic measures of language (e.g. picture naming, verbal fluency, lexical decision) and cognitive ability alike (e.g. Stroop, recall in working memory span). This article argues that such an approach has imposed limitations on the questions that can be examined by researchers and on the generalizability of some results. Here I propose that, rather than assigning multiword units their own ‘niche’ in psycholinguistic studies, they should be viewed as part of the way core lexical competence is measured and conceptualized, both in monolingual and bilingual speakers. I also review promising advances in recent years brought about by a surge in the number of studies focused on multiword units and by new tasks of individual cognitive skill (e.g. multiword-based chunking ability). These hold the potential to allow for a cross-disciplinary shift in the examination of lexical competence as grounded in community-based norms and in line with current usage-based approaches.

Transposition and substitution-letter effects in a flanker task: Evidence from children and adults.

Several studies have shown that parafoveal processing is essential in reading development. In this study, we explore the effect of transposing and substituting inner and outer letters in a flanker lexical decision task administered to 78 children and 65 adults. The results show a significant interaction between the Group factor and the Flanker factor, suggesting differences in the effects of flankers for children and adults. In the case of adults, transposed and substituted letters generated benefit of the same magnitude in comparison with the unrelated condition, but of lesser magnitude than the Identity condition. In the case of children, the results show facilitation for the transposed conditions of the same magnitude as the Identity condition. However, the substitution conditions failed to generate any benefit in comparison with the unrelated condition. The results for the adults are in line with the predictions of the open bigram model, whereas the results for the children are explained through a developmental perspective of the dual-route architecture and open bigram framework.

Processing Turkish case markers: Implications for the case containment hypothesis

We investigate the processing of accusative-marked NPs in Turkish, compared to genitive- and locative-marked NPs. We use psycholinguistic methods (a lexical decision task) to test competing predictions derived from frequency effects in lexical processing on the one hand, and morphosyntactic theories of case containment on the other hand. Our experimental outcomes support a case containment approach to Turkish morphology.

Neural correlates of emotion-label vs. emotion-laden word processing in late bilinguals: evidence from an ERP study

ABSTRACT The brain processes underlying the distinction between emotion-label words (e.g. happy, sad) and emotion-laden words (e.g. successful, failed) remain inconclusive in bilingualism research. The present study aims to directly compare the processing of these two types of emotion words in both the first language (L1) and second language (L2) by recording event-related potentials (ERP) from late Chinese-English bilinguals during a lexical decision task. The results revealed that in the early word processing stages, the N170 emotion effect emerged only for L1 negative emotion-laden words and L2 negative emotion-label words. In addition, larger early posterior negativity (EPN) was elicited by emotion-laden words than emotion-label words in both L1 and L2. In the later processing stages, the N400 emotion effect was evident for L1 emotion words, excluding positive emotion-laden words, while it was absent in L2. Notably, L1 emotion words elicited enhanced N400 and attenuated late positive complex (LPC) compared to those in L2. Taken together, these findings confirmed the engagement of emotion, and highlighted the modulation of emotion word type and valence on word processing in both early and late processing stages. Different neural mechanisms between L1 and L2 in processing written emotion words were elucidated.

Facilitation for non-identical cognates in L3

Abstract In the present study we aimed to obtain with trilinguals the cognate inhibitory effects reported earlier for bilingual speakers who performed L2 lexical decision tasks (LDTs) with non-identical cognates and controls. To that end, Polish–English–Dutch trilinguals performed two LDTs in their L3. In Experiment 1, the stimuli included two types of double non-identical cognates Polish–Dutch (e.g., SMAK–SMAAK), and English–Dutch (e.g., BUTTER–BOTER) as well as matched non-cognate Dutch controls (e.g., JASJE). In Experiment 2, we tested triple non-identical cognates shared across Polish, English and Dutch (e.g., GRUPA–GROUP–GROEP) and Dutch controls (e.g., BROEK). We failed to find the bilingual inhibitory effects. In contrast, significant facilitation for English–Dutch and for Polish–English–Dutch cognates was found, even though no identical cognates were used. However, Polish–Dutch cognates yielded null results. The current findings emphasize the influence of the levels of form similarity on the observed cognate effects and point to the important role of stimulus list composition in cognate processing.