Lexical Factors Research Articles

Influence of Lexical Factors on Word-Finding Accuracy, Error Patterns, and Substitution Types

This retrospective, exploratory investigation examined the types of target words that 66 children with/without word-finding difficulties (WFD) had difficulty naming, and the types of errors they made. Words were studied with reference to lexical factors (LFs) that might influence naming performance: word frequency, familiarity, length, phonotactic probability, and lexical neighborhood. For the most part, LFs similarly affected the word finding of children with/without WFD. Target word frequency predicted word-finding success for both groups, and word substitutions and error patterns were affected by the LFs under study. Children tended to produce substitutions that were shorter and higher in frequency, neighborhood frequency, and phonotactic probability than the target word. LFs also influenced children’s error patterns. Low word frequency led to form-related blocked errors for both groups, and low neighborhood frequency predicted form- and segment-related phonologic errors for children with WFD only. Theoretical and practical implications of these preliminary findings are discussed.

The effect of lexical factors on recall from working memory: Generalizing the neighborhood size effect.

The word-length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, is 1 of the 4 benchmark phenomena that guided development of the phonological loop component of working memory. However, previous work has noted a confound in word-length studies: The short words used had more orthographic neighbors (valid words that can be made by changing a single letter in the target word) than long words. The confound is that words with more neighbors are better recalled than otherwise comparable words with fewer neighbors. Two experiments are reported that address criticisms of the neighborhood-size account of the word-length effect by (1) testing 2 new stimulus sets, (2) using open rather than closed pools of words, and (3) using stimuli from a language other than English. In both experiments, words from large neighborhoods were better recalled than words from small neighborhoods. The results add to the growing number of studies demonstrating the substantial contribution of long-term memory to what have traditionally been identified as working memory tasks. The data are more easily explained by models incorporating the concept of redintegration rather than by frameworks such as the phonological loop that posit decay offset by rehearsal. (PsycINFO Database Record

Spanish norms for completion of restricted length word stems.

This study presents a normative database of Spanish restricted length word stems that provides useful information for the selection of stimuli in memory experiments with Word Stem Completion (WSC) tasks. The database includes indices relative to stems (total baseline completion, priming baseline completion, priming, number of completions, ratio between given and deleted letters, and syllabic structure), and indices relative to characteristics of the words used to obtain the stems (frequency, familiarity, number of meanings, length, number of syllables, arousal, and valence). A WSC task was performed by 515 participants to calculate priming and baseline indices. An Exploratory Factor Analysis showed that these indices are grouped in four factors: perceptual, lexical, emotional, and response competition. Stepwise regression analyses performed with these factors showed that the lexical, response competition, and perceptual factors predict priming baseline completion, while only the lexical factor predicts priming. The model that best explains the relationship between priming and priming baseline completion was a cubic model, and the optimum baseline values for achieving priming were between .31 and .36. These norms can be downloaded as Supplemental Materials for this article from https://nuvol.uv.es/owncloud/index.php/s/hpj9by1qbENdjfj .

The influence of lexical factors on vowel distinctiveness: Effects of jaw positioning

The phonetic characteristics of words are influenced by lexical characteristics, including word frequency and phonological neighborhood density (Baese-Berke & Goldrick, 2009; Wright, 2004). In our previous research, we replicated this effect with neurologically healthy young adults (Munson & Solomon, 2004). In research with the same set of participants, we showed that speech sounded less natural when produced with bite blocks than with an unconstrained jaw (Solomon, Makashay, & Munson, 2016). The current study combined these concepts to examine whether a bite-block perturbation exaggerated or reduced the effects of lexical factors on normal speech. Ten young adults produced more challenging lexical stimuli (i.e. infrequent words with many phonological neighbors) with shorter vowels and more disperse F1/F2 spaces than less challenging words (i.e. frequent words with few phonological neighbors). This difference was exaggerated when speaking with a 10-mm bite block, though the interaction between jaw positioning and lexical competition did not achieve statistical significance. Results indicate that talkers alter vowel characteristics in response both to biomechanical and linguistic demands, and that the effect of lexical characteristics is robust to the articulatory reorganization required for successful bite-block compensation.

Lexical Factors that Influence the Korean Eojeol Recognition

Lexical Factors that Influence the Korean Eojeol Recognition

The effects of acoustic and lexical factors on perception of accented speech

Foreign-accented speech differs from native pronunciation on a variety of spectral and temporal properties that affect both accentedness and intelligibility. The specific acoustic correlates, however, as well as the role of signal-independent lexical characteristics on accentedness judgments and intelligibility, remain unclear. The current study examined the potential contribution of particular acoustic (F1, F2, duration) and lexical (frequency, neighborhood density) factors to native speakers' ratings of accentedness and assessments of intelligibility for English words spoken by native Spanish speakers. Previous research has found that in native English speech, hard words (low frequency, high neighborhood density) have more dispersed vowel spaces relative to easy words (Pardo et al., 2013). Preliminary findings in the current study indicate the opposite pattern such that foreign-accented easy words exhibited more vowel dispersion than hard words. Further, vowel dispersion measures for easy, but not hard,...

Acoustic–Phonetic Versus Lexical Processing in Nonnative Listeners Differing in Their Dominant Language

Nonnative listeners have difficulty recognizing English words due to underdeveloped acoustic-phonetic and/or lexical skills. The present study used Boothroyd and Nittrouer's (1988)j factor to tease apart these two components of word recognition. Participants included 15 native English and 29 native Russian listeners. Fourteen and 15 of the Russian listeners reported English (ED) and Russian (RD) to be their dominant language, respectively. Listeners were presented 119 consonant-vowel-consonant real and nonsense words in speech-spectrum noise at +6 dB SNR. Responses were scored for word and phoneme recognition, the logarithmic quotient of which yielded j. Word and phoneme recognition was comparable between native and ED listeners but poorer in RD listeners. Analysis of j indicated less effective use of lexical information in RD than in native and ED listeners. Lexical processing was strongly correlated with the length of residence in the United States. Language background is important for nonnative word recognition. Lexical skills can be regarded as nativelike in ED nonnative listeners. Compromised word recognition in ED listeners is unlikely a result of poor lexical processing. Performance should be interpreted with caution for listeners dominant in their first language, whose word recognition is affected by both lexical and acoustic-phonetic factors.

Heritage Speakers Follow All the Rules: Language Contact and Convergence in Polish Devoicing

We use a comparative variationist framework to compare variable word-final obstruent devoicing patterns in heritage Polish, English and homeland Polish in conversational speech. Phonological and lexical factors are shown to condition this variation differently in the three varieties. We have a particular interest in one other factor relevant to heritage speakers: the amount of code-switching between Polish and English by each speaker. We show that, for second generation heritage speakers, individuals’ code-switching rates are positively correlated with their rates of devoicing. Based on the qualitatively and quantitatively different devoicing patterns of heritage Polish speakers, compared to both homeland Polish and Toronto English, we argue that the phonological grammar of this group of speakers constitutes a convergence of the heritage language and the dominant language’s grammars and suggest that frequent codeswitching provides the context in which these speakers’ knowledge of Polish and English patterns converge.

Lexical Factors in L2 English Vocabulary Learning of Korean 6th Graders

A multitude of factors are involved in the process and outcome of second language (L2) learners’ vocabulary learning. One relevant area of research concerns the identification of semantico-syntactic and morpho-phonological features related to a word’s learnability. The present study attempts to investigate how far such factors influence the ability of Korean elementary students to recognize and produce L2 English words. Participants from 12 classrooms in 3 different schools carried out a variant of Wesche and Paribakht’s (1996) Vocabulary Knowledge Scale, consisting of 39 words selected from the word list that they had learned in the previous year. Although the students had been taught in different learning contexts with varying materials, sequences, and input frequencies, they showed a largely shared pattern of acquisition. In order to assess the relationship between a word’s lexical properties and its learning difficulty, a set of formand meaning-related factors proposed in earlier works were taken into account. It was found that semantic factors such as meaning specificity and context-sensitive polysemy exerted a significant effect on learnability while phonological factors such as number of syllables, foreign phonemes, foreign consonant clusters, and incongruent sound-spelling pairings did not.

Lexical Considerations in the Treatment of Speech Sound Disorders in Children

The interaction between lexical and phonological development has been the focus of a growing body of research. Findings suggest that phonological ability influences word learning and that certain characteristics of words influence how words are produced by children. This article summarizes research findings regarding the effects of word frequency, phonological neighborhood density (PND), and phonotactic probability (PP) on phonological development, and describes how these factors have been manipulated to influence phonological learning in the treatment of speech sound disorder in children. Clinical applications and ideas for considering lexical factors in the selection of target words for treatment are provided.

Morphological embedding and phonetic reduction: the case of triconstituent compounds

In this paper we propose that the internal bracketing of a word with more than two morphemes is reflected in the phonetic implementation. We hypothesize that embedded forms show more phonetic reduction than forms at higher structural levels (‘Embedded Reduction Hypothesis’). This paper tests the prediction of the Embedded Reduction Hypothesis with triconstituent compounds. The analysis of the durational properties of almost 500 compound tokens shows that there is a lengthening effect on the non-embedded constituent, and a shortening effect on the adjacent embedded constituent. Yet, this predicted effect of embedding interacts with other lexical factors, above all the bigram frequency of the embedded compound. At a theoretical level, these effects mean that the durational properties of the cross-boundary constituents are indicative of the hierarchical structure and of the strength of the internal boundary of triconstituent compounds. Hence, morphological structure is reflected in the speech signal.

Testing tolerance for lexically-specific factors in Gradient Symbolic Computation

In their keynote article, Goldrick, Putnam and Schwarz (2016) present a computational account of code-mixing. Although they review literature on the co-activation of lexical representations and cognate facilitation effects in bilingual language processing, their model remains silent on how it interfaces with lexical factors, and how lexical factors impact code-switching. One such lexical factor is cognate status, which has been found to affect code-switching, as demonstrated in corpus analyses (e.g., Broersma & De Bot, 2006) and psycholinguistic experiments (Kootstra, Van Hell & Dijkstra, 2012). For example, using the structural priming technique to examine the role of lexical factors in code-switching, Kootstra et al. asked Dutch–English bilinguals to repeat a code-switched prime sentence (starting in Dutch and ending in English) and then describe a target picture by means of a code-switched sentence (also from Dutch into English). They observed that bilinguals' tendency to switch at the same position as in the prime sentence was increased when the prime sentence and target picture contained cognates.

Syntactic and Lexical Inference in the Acquisition of Novel Superlatives

ABSTRACTAcquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities (seven, most) and qualities (red, spotty) present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding, not only of what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning task. The results of our word-learning task with 4-year-olds indicate that a “syntactic bootstrapping” hypothesis correctly predicts a bias toward quantity-based interpretations when a novel word appears in the syntactic position of a determiner but also leaves open the explanation of a bias towards quality-based interpretations when the same word is presented in the syntactic position of an adjective. We develop four computational models that differentially encode how lexical, conceptual, and perceptual factors could generate the latter bias. Simulation results suggest it results from a combination of lexical bias and perceptual encoding.

Referential and lexical factors in alignment variation of trivalent verbs

AbstractArgument marking with trivalent verbs exhibits a much larger variation than argument marking with bivalent verbs. In many cases, this variation – stemming both from referential and lexical factors – presents a problem when attempting crosslinguistic comparison of alignment patterns of trivalent verbs. Often, this problem results in picking just one of a number of patterns as representative for comparative purposes and thus ignoring the rest of the variation. This paper addresses these general challenges by discussing a case study of trivalent verbs in Yakima Sahaptin, a language with a large amount of alignment variation in indexing and flagging. In doing so, the paper elaborates the recently developed method for alignment typology called

The Effect of Lexical Content on Dichotic Speech Recognition in Older Adults.

Age-related auditory processing deficits have been shown to negatively affect speech recognition for older adult listeners. In contrast, older adults gain benefit from their ability to make use of semantic and lexical content of the speech signal (i.e., top-down processing), particularly in complex listening situations. Assessment of auditory processing abilities among aging adults should take into consideration semantic and lexical content of the speech signal. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of lexical and attentional factors on dichotic speech recognition performance characteristics for older adult listeners. A repeated measures design was used to examine differences in dichotic word recognition as a function of lexical and attentional factors. Thirty-five older adults (61-85 yr) with sensorineural hearing loss participated in this study. Dichotic speech recognition was evaluated using consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) word and nonsense CVC syllable stimuli administered in the free recall, directed recall right, and directed recall left response conditions. Dichotic speech recognition performance for nonsense CVC syllables was significantly poorer than performance for CVC words. Dichotic recognition performance varied across response condition for both stimulus types, which is consistent with previous studies on dichotic speech recognition. Inspection of individual results revealed that five listeners demonstrated an auditory-based left ear deficit for one or both stimulus types. Lexical content of stimulus materials affects performance characteristics for dichotic speech recognition tasks in the older adult population. The use of nonsense CVC syllable material may provide a way to assess dichotic speech recognition performance while potentially lessening the effects of lexical content on performance (i.e., measuring bottom-up auditory function both with and without top-down processing).

Lexical Influences on Spoken Spondaic Word Recognition in Hearing-Impaired Patients.

Top-down contextual influences play a major part in speech understanding, especially in hearing-impaired patients with deteriorated auditory input. Those influences are most obvious in difficult listening situations, such as listening to sentences in noise but can also be observed at the word level under more favorable conditions, as in one of the most commonly used tasks in audiology, i.e., repeating isolated words in silence. This study aimed to explore the role of top-down contextual influences and their dependence on lexical factors and patient-specific factors using standard clinical linguistic material. Spondaic word perception was tested in 160 hearing-impaired patients aged 23–88 years with a four-frequency average pure-tone threshold ranging from 21 to 88 dB HL. Sixty spondaic words were randomly presented at a level adjusted to correspond to a speech perception score ranging between 40 and 70% of the performance intensity function obtained using monosyllabic words. Phoneme and whole-word recognition scores were used to calculate two context-influence indices (the j factor and the ratio of word scores to phonemic scores) and were correlated with linguistic factors, such as the phonological neighborhood density and several indices of word occurrence frequencies. Contextual influence was greater for spondaic words than in similar studies using monosyllabic words, with an overall j factor of 2.07 (SD = 0.5). For both indices, context use decreased with increasing hearing loss once the average hearing loss exceeded 55 dB HL. In right-handed patients, significantly greater context influence was observed for words presented in the right ears than for words presented in the left, especially in patients with many years of education. The correlations between raw word scores (and context influence indices) and word occurrence frequencies showed a significant age-dependent effect, with a stronger correlation between perception scores and word occurrence frequencies when the occurrence frequencies were based on the years corresponding to the patients' youth, showing a “historic” word frequency effect. This effect was still observed for patients with few years of formal education, but recent occurrence frequencies based on current word exposure had a stronger influence for those patients, especially for younger ones.

Lexical factors in conceptual processes: The relationship between semantic representations and their corresponding phonological and orthographic lexical forms.

To examine phonological and orthographic effects on semantic processing, the present study utilized a semantic task with nonverbal stimuli. In Experiment 1, Hebrew speakers were asked to decide whether 2 pictorial targets are semantically related or not. In Experiment 2, Hebrew speakers and non-Hebrew speakers were asked to rate the semantic relatedness of the same targets on a 5-point scale. Experiment 3 was identical to the first experiment except that the 2 pictures were presented simultaneously rather than sequentially. In all experiments, we compared responses to semantically unrelated pairs in 2 conditions: In the ambiguous condition, each pair represented 2 distinct meanings of an ambiguous Hebrew word. In the unambiguous condition, the first picture was replaced with an unambiguous control. To disentangle phonological and orthographic effects, three types of Hebrew ambiguous words were used: homonyms, homophones, and homographs. Ambiguous pairs were more difficult to be judged as semantically unrelated in comparison to their unambiguous controls. Moreover, while non-Hebrew speakers did not distinguish between the 2 lexical conditions, Hebrew speakers rated ambiguous pairs as significantly more related than their unambiguous controls. Importantly, in general, the ambiguity effect was stronger for homonyms, where both lexical forms are shared, than for either homophones or homographs, which are only phonologically or orthographically related. Thus, consistent with interactive "triangle" models, the results suggest that (a) conceptual-semantic representations automatically activate both their corresponding phonological and orthographic lexical forms, and (b) these lexical forms, once activated, may in turn affect semantic-conceptual processes via feedback connections.

Phonetic complexity of words immediately following utterance-initial productions in children who stutter

PurposeThe purpose of the present study was to analyze phonetic complexity in the speech of children who stutter in a manner distinct from previous research with specific emphasis on three methodological considerations: (1) analysis of the word immediately following the initial word in the utterance; (2) accounting for other additional linguistic and lexical factors; and (3) discrimination of disfluency types produced. MethodsParent–child conversations were transcribed for 14 children who stutter (mean age=3 years, 7 months; SD=11.20 months) and coded for phonetic complexity using the Word Complexity Measure (WCM). Phonetic complexity of words immediately following the initial fluent or stuttered words of an utterance were included within binomial regression analyses, along with additional linguistic and lexical factors. ResultsAnalyses indicate that the phonetic complexity of the second word of an utterance was not a significant contributor to the likelihood of whole- or part-word repetitions on the preceding initial word of the utterance. ConclusionFindings support previous data that suggest the phonetic complexity of speech, at least as measured by the WCM, does not distinctly influence stuttered speech in preschool-age children.

The role of frequency in the retrieval of nouns and verbs in aphasia

ABSTRACTBackground: Word retrieval in aphasia involves different levels of processing—lemma retrieval, grammatical encoding, lexeme retrieval, and phonological encoding—before articulation can be programmed and executed. Several grammatical, semantic, lexical, and phonological characteristics, such as word class, age of acquisition, imageability, and word frequency influence the degree of success in word retrieval. It is, however, not yet clear how these factors interact. The current study focuses on the retrieval of nouns and verbs in isolation and in sentence context and evaluates the impact of the mentioned factors on the performance of a group of 54 aphasic speakers.Aims: The main aim is to measure the effect of word frequency on the retrieval of nouns and verb by disentangling the influence of word class, age of acquisition, imageability, and lemma and lexeme frequencies on word retrieval in aphasia.Methods & Procedures: Four tests for retrieval of nouns, verbs in isolation, and infinitives and finite verbs were administered to 54 aphasic speakers. The influence of lemma and lexeme frequency, Age of Acquisition on the word retrieval abilities was analysed.Outcomes and Results: Word class, age of acquisition, and imageability play a significant role in the retrieval of nouns and verbs: nouns are easier than verbs; the earlier a word has been learned and the more concrete it is, the easier it is to retrieve. When performance is controlled for these factors, lemma frequency turns out to play a minor role: only in object naming does it affect word retrieval: the higher the lemma frequency of a noun, the easier it is to access. Such an effect does not exist for verbs, neither on an action-naming test, nor when verbs have to be retrieved in sentence context. Lexeme frequency was not found to be a better predictor than lemma frequency in predicting word retrieval in aphasia.Conclusions: Word retrieval in aphasia is influenced by grammatical, semantic, and lexical factors. Word frequency only plays a minor role: it affects the retrieval of nouns, but not of verbs.

Lexical support for phonetic perception during nonnative spoken word recognition.

Second language comprehension is generally not as efficient and effective as native language comprehension. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that lower-level processes such as lexical support for phonetic perception are a contributing factor to these differences. For native listeners, it has been shown that the perception of ambiguous acoustic–phonetic segments is driven by lexical factors (Samuel Psychological Science, 12, 348-351, 2001). Here, we tested whether nonnative listeners can use lexical context in the same way. Native Hebrew speakers living in Israel were tested with American English stimuli. When subtle acoustic cues in the stimuli worked against the lexical context, these nonnative speakers showed no evidence of lexical guidance of phonetic perception. This result conflicts with the performance of native speakers, who demonstrate lexical effects on phonetic perception even with conflicting acoustic cues. When stimuli without any conflicting cues were used, the native Hebrew subjects produced results similar to those of native English speakers, showing lexical support for phonetic perception in their second language. In contrast, native Arabic speakers, who were less proficient in English than the native Hebrew speakers, showed no ability to use lexical activation to support phonetic perception, even without any conflicting cues. These results reinforce previous demonstrations of lexical support of phonetic perception and demonstrate how proficiency modulates the use of lexical information in driving phonetic perception.