Lexical Effects Research Articles

Lexical Effect Handlers, Directly

Lexically scoping effect handlers is a language-design idea that equips algebraic effects with a modular semantics: it enables local-reasoning principles without giving up on the control-flow expressiveness that makes effect handlers powerful. However, we observe that existing implementations risk incurring costs akin to the run-time search for dynamically scoped handlers. This paper presents a compilation strategy for lexical effect handlers, adhering to the lexical scoping principle and targeting a language with low-level control over stack layout. Key aspects of this approach are formalized and proven correct. We embody the ideas in a language called Lexa: the Lexa compiler translates high-level effect handling to low-level stack switching. We evaluate the Lexa compiler on a set of benchmarks; the results suggest that it generates efficient code, reducing running-time complexity from quadratic to linear in some cases.

Is There a Domain of Linguistic Competence AI Cannot Grasp?

Abstract Linguistic competence is, among other things, the cognitive ability of using words appropriately. Following this notion, being a competent language user cannot be merely simulated because pretending to use words appropriately already is using words appropriately. Since current AI already can use words appropriately it may be that AI already has linguistic competence instead of merely simulating it. However, in this article I argue that there is at least one domain of linguistic competence that can be simulated: grasping lexical effects. Since grasping lexical effects presupposes an ability which AI lacks, namely feeling emotions, I argue that AI can only grasp the cognitive part of words but not their lexical effects. AI can only simulate to grasp lexical effects. Hence, lexical effects are a domain of linguistic competence AI cannot grasp.

Lexical Effects on Second Language Grammar Acquisition: Testing Psycholinguistic and Neurocognitive Predictions

Lexical Effects on Second Language Grammar Acquisition: Testing Psycholinguistic and Neurocognitive Predictions

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.

Neighborhood in Chinese lexicon: A megastudy analysis of lexical decision and naming of two-character Chinese words.

The present study examines the impact of neighborhood size (number of other two-character words sharing the same character at the same position) on Chinese lexical processing, along with its joint effects with variables such as character frequency, word frequency, and semantic transparency. Previous factorial experiments have yielded conflicting results that are difficult to reconcile with existing models (Li et al., 2015, 2017). To provide high-powered tests for these theoretically important effects on visual word recognition, we leveraged the megastudy approach and used linear mixed-effect analyses to investigate lexical decision and naming responses to a large pool of two-character Chinese words (N > 17,000) sourced from Tse et al.'s (2017, 2023) database. In all analyses we controlled for extraneous orthographic (e.g., stroke count), phonological (e.g., consistency), and semantic (e.g., transparency) variables. In addition to evaluating Li et al.'s (2015, 2017) models, we also investigated whether the parallel dual-route mechanism, which entails lexical access via whole-word or character decomposition-then-composition, could account for neighborhood size effect and its interactions in lexical decision and naming. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings on the specificity of lexical effects with regard to character position and lexical processing task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Decisional components of motor responses are not related to online response control: Evidence from lexical decision and speed-accuracy tradeoff manipulations.

Evidence suggests that decision processes can propagate to motor-response execution. However, the functional characterization of motor decisional components is not yet fully understood. By combining a classic lexical decision experiment with manipulations of speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT), the present experiment assessed the hypothesis that decisional effects on chronometric measures of motor-response execution are related to online response control. The electromyographic (EMG) signal associated with manual button-press responses was used to dissociate the premotor component (from stimulus onset until the onset of the EMG activity) from the motor component (from EMG onset until the button-press), thus enabling the assessment of decision-related effects in terms of motor-response duration within single-trial reaction times. Other than replicating all the previously reported SAT effects, the experiment revealed hindered control processes when the instructions emphasized speed over accuracy, as indicated by measures of response control such as partial errors, fast errors, and correction likelihood. Nonetheless, the lexicality effect on motor responses, consisting of slower motor times for pseudowords compared to words, was impervious to any SAT modulation. The results suggest that SAT-induced variations in decision and response control policies may not be the prominent determinant of decision-related effects on motor times, highlighting the multiple "cognitive" components that affect peripheral response execution.

Phonetic categorization in phonological lexical neighborhoods: Facilitatory and inhibitory effects

Phonetic processing, whereby the bottom-up speech signal is translated into higher-level phonological representations such as phonemes, has been demonstrated to be influenced by phonological lexical neighborhoods. Previous studies show facilitatory effects of lexicality and phonological neighborhood density on phonetic categorization. However, given the evidence for lexical competition in spoken word recognition, we hypothesize that there are concurrent facilitatory and inhibitory effects of phonological lexical neighborhoods on phonetic processing. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants categorized the onset phoneme in word-nonword and nonword-word acoustic continua. The results show that the target word of the continuum exhibits facilitatory lexical influences whereas rhyme neighbors inhibit phonetic categorization. The results support the hypothesis that sublexical phonetic processing is affected by multiple facilitatory and inhibitory lexical forces in the processing stream.

Lenition of fricative sibilants in casual conversations in Basque

This paper analyses lenition of lamino-alveolar and apico-alveolar fricative sibilants in Basque in casual conversations between speakers of the variety of Beasain (Central Basque dialect). To describe the phonetic realisation of sibilants, the following measures were used: the proportion of voiced frames, the centre of gravity and relative intensity. Results show that 13% of sibilants can be classified as ‘voiced’ (i.e. they show uninterrupted voicing during the middle 50% of the duration) and another 25% has at least one voiced frame in the middle interval. Several factors were identified as important predictors of voicing: context, speech rate and the presence of the word boundary. It is also shown that voicing lowers the sibilants’ centre of gravity and relative intensity. Finally, the paper discusses potential lexical effects in lenition phenomena.

Data from “A Registered Report Testing the Effect of Sleep on DRM False Memory: Greater Lure and Veridical Recall but Fewer Intrusions After Sleep”

This paper describes a rich dataset from a registered report investigating sleep’s effect on false memory in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. 534 young adults completed free recall either shortly or 12 hours after studying lists of semantic associates (e.g., hospital, nurse). Collected online, our recall data showcase high data quality, replicating classic behavioural effects (e.g., serial position curve). The dataset contains raw recall data with original spelling and recall order, accompanied by demographic information (e.g., gender, time-of-day preference). Its versatility supports reuse in modelling memory decay and search processes, understanding lexical effects and individual differences, and benchmarking online memory studies.

Exploring the effect of lexicality and listener experience on gradient ratings of Swedish sibilant fricatives

ABSTRACT This study explores the influence of lexicality on gradient judgments of Swedish sibilant fricatives by contrasting ratings of initial fricatives in words and word fragments (initial CV-syllables). Visual-Analogue Scale (VAS) judgments were elicited from experienced listeners (speech-language pathologists; SLPs) and inexperienced listeners, and compared with respect to the effects of lexicality using Bayesian mixed-effects beta regression. Overall, SLPs had higher intra- and interrater reliability than inexperienced listeners. SLPs as a group also rated fricatives as more target-like, with higher precision, than did inexperienced listeners. An effect of lexicality was observed for all individual listeners, though the magnitude of the effect varied. Although SLP’s ratings of Swedish children’s initial voiceless fricatives were less influenced by lexicality, our results indicate that previous findings concerning VAS ratings of non-lexical CV-syllables cannot be directly transferred to the clinical context, without consideration of possible lexical bias.

Development of derivational morphological knowledge in monolingual and bilingual children: Effects of modality and lexicality.

This study mapped the trajectory of developing derivational morphological knowledge in Hebrew monolingual and Russian-Hebrew bilingual children. We investigated 2nd and 4th graders, using a two-by-two structure along the dimensions of modality (comprehension, production) and type of word (real-word, pseudo-word). Performance in the morphological analogies comprehension tasks improved with grade, and monolingual and bilingual children performed equally well. A different pattern was evident in production tasks. In real-word production, monolingual children were more accurate than bilingual children, but this group difference narrowed with age. In pseudo-word production, monolingual children used more morphological elements than bilingual children, and there was also a tendency towards group differences narrowing with age. Detailed error analyses across all tasks revealed that monolingual children recruited more morphological elements than bilingual children. We present implications for assessment of morphological knowledge, and suggest that morphological intervention is a promising avenue for promoting bilingual children's success.

Lexical effects on talker discrimination in adult cochlear implant usersa).

The lexical and phonological content of an utterance impacts the processing of talker-specific details in normal-hearing (NH) listeners. Adult cochlear implant (CI) users demonstrate difficulties in talker discrimination, particularly for same-gender talker pairs, which may alter the reliance on lexical information in talker discrimination. The current study examined the effect of lexical content on talker discrimination in 24 adult CI users. In a remote AX talker discrimination task, word pairs-produced either by the same talker (ST) or different talkers with the same (DT-SG) or mixed genders (DT-MG)-were either lexically easy (high frequency, low neighborhood density) or lexically hard (low frequency, high neighborhood density). The task was completed in quiet and multi-talker babble (MTB). Results showed an effect of lexical difficulty on talker discrimination, for same-gender talker pairs in both quiet and MTB. CI users showed greater sensitivity in quiet as well as less response bias in both quiet and MTB for lexically easy words compared to lexically hard words. These results suggest that CI users make use of lexical content in same-gender talker discrimination, providing evidence for the contribution of linguistic information to the processing of degraded talker information by adult CI users.

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

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

Color sorting and color term evolution.

When participants sort color samples into piles, Boster showed that their color groupings can resemble the "stages" of Kay & McDaniel's model of color term evolution. Boster concluded that both the unfolding of color piles in a sequential color sorting task and the unfolding of color terms according to Kay & McDaniel's model reveal how human beings understand color. If this is correct, then: (1) pile sorts should be reasonably robust across variations in the palette of colors to be sorted, as long as the palette contains good examples of Berlin & Kay's universal color categories, and (2) pile-sorting should be more related to lexical effects and less related to perceptual processes governed by similarity judgments alone. We report three studies on English speakers and Somali speakers (Study 1 only), where participants sorted colors into 2…6 piles. The three studies used varying numbers of palette colors (25, 30, or 145 colors) and varying chromaticity schemes (mainly hue, widely-separated in hue and lightness, or densely distributed at high chroma). We compared human sorting behavior to Kay & McDaniel's model and to the "optimal" patterns of color sorting predicted by Regier's well-formedness statistic, which quantifies the perceived similarity between colors. Neither hypothesis is confirmed by the results of our studies. Thus, we propose that color sorts are determined by pragmatic influences based on heuristics that are inspired by the palette of colors that are available and the task that the viewer is asked to perform.

The Chinese lexicon of deaf readers: A database of character decisions and a comparison between deaf and hearing readers.

We present a psycholinguistic study investigating lexical effects on simplified Chinese character recognition by deaf readers. Prior research suggests that deaf readers exhibit efficient orthographic processing and decreased reliance on speech-based phonology in word recognition compared to hearing readers. In this large-scale character decision study (25 participants, each evaluating 2500 real characters and 2500 pseudo-characters), we analyzed various factors influencing character recognition accuracy and speed in deaf readers. Deaf participants demonstrated greater accuracy and faster recognition when characters were more frequent, were acquired earlier, had more strokes, displayed higher orthographic complexity, were more imageable in reference, or were less concrete in reference. Comparison with a previous study of hearing readers revealed that the facilitative effect of frequency on character decision accuracy was stronger for deaf readers than hearing readers. The effect of orthographic-phonological regularity differed significantly for the two groups, indicating that deaf readers rely more on orthographic structure and less on phonological information during character recognition. Notably, increased stroke counts (i.e., higher orthographic complexity) hindered hearing readers but facilitated recognition processes in deaf readers, suggesting that deaf readers excel at recognizing characters based on orthographic structure. The database generated from this large-scale character decision study offers a valuable resource for further research and practical applications in deaf education and literacy.

Do readers here what they sea?: Effects of lexicality, predictability, and individual differences on the phonological preview benefit

For decades, researchers have debated whether readers benefit from translating visual word forms into phonological codes. A focus of this debate has been on the earliest moments of processing when a word is perceived in parafoveal vision (i.e., phonological preview benefit). A recent meta-analysis (Vasilev et al., 2019) concluded that the phonological preview benefit may be small and unreliable but they did not take into account potentially important stimulus-level or participant-level factors that varied across the included studies. Therefore, we conducted two well-powered experiments that systematically investigated the effects of sentence constraint, preview lexicality, and participant language skills on the phonological preview benefit effect. We found phonological preview benefits that were larger in high versus low constraint sentences, larger for words than pseudowords, and larger for better spellers. We conclude that phonological codes do facilitate early word recognition during reading, but that the phonological preview benefit magnitude depends on subject- and stimulus-level factors.

Lexical processing in children with hearing impairment in oral word reading in transparent Arabic orthography

AbstractWord recognition mechanisms constitute an essential contribution to reading achievement in both deaf and hearing children. Little is known about how children with hearing impairment (HI) manage to read aloud words in the vowelled Arabic transparent script which provides full vowel information. This study aimed to compare word and pseudoword reading accuracy and speed between 32 Lebanese children with HI and 32 younger hearing Lebanese children. The two groups were carefully matched for reading comprehension and oral comprehension levels. Length, word frequency, and lexicality effects were assessed to characterize the functioning of the lexical and sublexical reading procedures. Reading errors were also analyzed to document reading difficulties in transparent Arabic orthography in the sublexical route. The results show significant effects of length, word frequency, and lexicality on reading accuracy and speed in both groups. They also indicate underdeveloped sublexical and lexical routes in children with HI who read less accurately and faster than the younger hearing children. Reading errors are numerous in children with HI. The data are discussed in light of the Dual Route Cascaded model. Suggestions are made about how to improve reading processes in children with HI.

Language-universal and script-specific factors in the recognition of letters in visual crowding: The effects of lexicality, hemifield, and transitional probabilities in a right-to-left script

Peripheral letter recognition is fundamentally limited not by the visibility of letters but by the spacing between them, i.e., ‘crowding’. Crowding imposes a significant constraint on reading, however, the interplay between crowding and reading is not fully understood. Using a letter recognition task in varying display conditions, we investigated the effects of lexicality (words versus pseudowords), visual hemifield, and transitional letter probability (bigram/trigram frequency) among skilled readers (N = 14. and N = 13) in Hebrew – a script read from right to left. We observed two language-universal effects: a lexicality effect and a right hemifield (left hemisphere) advantage, as well as a strong language-specific effect – a left bigram advantage stemming from the right-to-left reading direction of Hebrew. The latter finding suggests that transitional probabilities are essential for parafoveal letter recognition. The results reveal that script-specific contextual information such as letter combination probabilities is used to accurately identify crowded letters.

First person singular subject pronoun expression of young Spanish speakers from Quito, Ecuador

Abstract This variationist study analyzes the first-person subject pronoun expression (SPE) of speakers from Quito, Ecuador. To date, this morphosyntactic variable has not been explored in this Andean variety of Spanish. The data consists of 20 sociolinguistic interviews. Results reveal an SPE rate of 17%, comparable to other Andean Spanish varieties. As per Rbrul’s quantitative analysis, the predictors that promote the presence of the ‘yo’ in this variety of Spanish are co-referential Priming, switch reference, ambiguous TMA endings and main clauses. In addition, following Orozco and Hurtado (2021), lexical effects of the verb were observed by analyzing the verb lemma. This predictor revealed similarly opposing tendencies between verbs in the same lexical category. This study adds to the growing body of SPE research by examining which linguistic variables influence the use of ‘yo’ in this Ecuadorian Andean Spanish (EAS) variety and comparing these results to those of other Andean Spanish varieties.

Spanish Heritage Language Learners' Reading Accuracy and Spelling Difficulties

Spelling has been recognized as a challenging aspect of literacy for Spanish Heritage Language Learners (SHLLs). This study examines the relationship between reading and spelling accuracy, with a specific focus on the vowel e, in monophthongs and diphthongs. A total of forty-five participants completed the Bilingual Language Profile and a reading task involving the contrast between monophthongs and diphthongs in real words and pseudowords. The results of the study indicate that participants encountered greater difficulties in accurately reading the vowel e when it appeared in a diphthong (ie) than when it appeared in a monophthong. Moreover, participants’ reading abilities were subject to a lexicality effect and hindered by limited phonological awareness and decoding skills. The paper further explores the connections between individual language dominance factors and literacy measures.