Lexical Status Research Articles

Romance N Prep N constructions in visual word recognition

Abstract N Prep N constructions such as Sp. bicicleta de montaña ‘mountain bike’ are very productive and frequent in Romance languages. They commonly have been classified as syntagmatic compounds that show no orthographic union and exhibit an internal structure that resembles free syntactic structures, such as Sp. libro para niños ‘book for children’. There is no consensus on how to best distinguish lexical from syntactic N Prep N constructions. The present paper presents an explorative eye-tracking study on N Prep N constructions, varying both lexical type (lexical vs. syntactic) and preposition across three languages, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The task of the eye-tracking study was a reading aloud paradigm of the constructions in sentence context. Constructions were fixated on less when more frequent, independent of lexical status. There was also modest evidence that a higher construction frequency afforded shorter total fixation durations, but only for lower deciles of the response distribution. The (construction-initial) head noun also received fewer fixations as construction frequency increased, and also when the head noun was more frequent. The second fixation durations on the head noun also revealed an effect of lexical status, with syntactic constructions receiving shorter fixations at the 5th and 7th deciles. The probability of a fixation on the preposition decreased with preposition frequency, but first fixations on the preposition increased with preposition frequency. The prepositions of Portuguese, the language with the richest inventory of prepositions, received more fixations than the prepositions of French and Spanish. The observed pattern of results is consistent with models of lexical processing in which reading is guided by knowledge of both higher-level constructions and knowledge of key constituents such as the head noun and the preposition.

The lexical status of verbs among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers: a developmental model.

The goal of this study was to investigate the development of mental lexicon organization among typical and dyslexic native Arabic readers. The participants included 271 students, divided into dyslexic readers, age-matched typical readers, and typical readers 2years younger. The lexical status of root and pattern morphemes was examined using two priming paradigms: masked priming and the cross-modal immediate repetition task. We conducted two visual lexical decision tasks (Experiment 1 for verb pattern, Experiment 3 for verb roots), and two auditory decision tasks (Experiment 2 for verb pattern, Experiment 4 for verb roots). In the visual tasks, the participants were asked to decide whether a visual stimulus was a real word or not by pressing the laptop keyboard's "yes" or "no" button. The auditory experiments were conducted similarly to the visual experiments, except that the stimuli were auditory, to clarify the locus of the morphological deficit observed in the visual test of the dyslexic students, should there be such failures. Analysis of Experiment 1 showed that verb patterns are not lexical entities with a role in organizing the mental lexicon among typical and dyslexic readers of different ages. However, Experiment 3 indicated that roots do indeed constitute lexical entities with a role in organizing the mental lexicon among normal and dyslexic readers of different ages. In Experiment 2, the auditory-morpho priming effect in the word pattern test was stronger among dyslexic and young readers than among more skilled readers, and contributed to speeding up lexical decisions more than its quality, among all research groups. In Experiment 4, the auditory-morpho priming effect in the root test was stronger than the visual effect among all participants, and contributed to hastening lexical decisions and improving the quality of the answers (success percentage). The results showed that roots contribute to the reading process. However, their contribution is different among dyslexic readers. Its construction is slower and different from that of typical readers, whereas word patterns have no lexical representation among the three reader groups that are likely to facilitate lexical decisions. The results are discussed with reference to the latest research literature on morpheme type (root or pattern).

The effect of lexical status on prosodic processing in infants learning a fixed stress language.

In speech processing, in the first year of life, prosody and phoneme-relevant aspects serve different functions. Recent studies have assumed that the two aspects become integrated at around 9months of age. The present study investigates the effect of lexical status on stress processing in a fixed stress language. We hypothesize that lexicality modulates stress processing, and where the stress cue is in conflict with the lexical status (legal deviant condition), we will observe differences in age indicating the stage of integration. We tested 69 6 and 10month-old infants in an acoustic oddball event-related potential paradigm. A frequent word stimulus (baba) and a pseudoword (bebe) were used with legal versus illegal stress. We systematically swapped the standard and deviant roles of the different stress variants in two conditions. In the illegal deviant condition in the case of the word stimulus, the response pattern typical for the pseudoword (an MMR to the absence of the stress cue) was missing. This implies the suppression effect of lexicality. In the legal deviant condition, negative MMR (N-MMR) in the second time window indicated a facilitation effect of lexicality in both age groups. As only the 6-month-olds produced an N-MMR in the first time window, we concluded that in a fixed stress language, integration starts at 6months but is only completed by the age of 10months. Our results show that lexical status modulates stress processing at word level in a highly regularly stressed language in which stable, long-term language-specific stress representation exists from early infancy.

Complement-taking predicates, parentheticals and grammaticalization

The present paper aims to provide an improved understanding of the grammaticalization of parenthetical complement-taking predicates (CTPs). We point out problems in existing accounts (focusing on Boye & Harder 2007 and Brinton 1996, 2008) and propose a synthesis which incorporates the main insights of those accounts, while avoiding the problems. Based on the theory of grammatical vs. lexical status in Boye & Harder (2012), our proposal invokes as a key theoretical innovation a distinction between constructional slots for discursively secondary material, and CTP clauses as fillers of such slots. We argue that this distinction allows us to be precise not only about the status of parentheticals with respect to the grammatical vs. lexical distinction, but also about the status of sentence adverbs.Research on parentheticals and CTP clauses has been focused on constructions where the CTP clauses co-occur with clauses that are sentence-like and propositional. We broaden the scope to include constructions with clauses that are reduced and constructions that designate illocutions or states-of-affairs rather than propositions. We argue that while all CTP are structurally qualified for undergoing grammaticalization, both the syntactic and semantic type of the clauses that co-occur with them restrict grammaticalization in certain ways.While focusing on English, we regard our proposals and hypotheses as potentially applicable also to other languages. Accordingly, we include data also from other languages without however pretending that this is sufficient to actually confirm our hypotheses crosslinguistically.

Letter processing in Russian: Does orthography matter?

Prior research has suggested that the identification and encoding of letter positions within letter strings might be influenced by orthography. Letters in transparent languages (e.g., Greek) with regular grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are processed sequentially, whereas letters in deep languages (e.g., English) are processed in parallel. In three experiments, we used a visual search paradigm to test this hypothesis on Russian—a relatively transparent language. In Experiment 1, we measured the identification speed of Cyrillic letters at each position in the five-element real words or pronounceable pseudowords. In Experiment 2, the performance was compared to random letter strings, and in Experiment 3, to non-linguistic symbol strings. Our results reveal a search pattern similar to English, excluding strictly serial letter computation, which is inconsistent with the orthography hypothesis. Moreover, we showed that the lexical status and the nature of the string (linguistic/non-linguistic) affect response times for Russian and therefore must be accounted for in models of visual word recognition.

Pitch Variation in Children With Childhood Apraxia of Speech: Preliminary Findings.

Introduction Pitch variation, which refers to one's ability to vary fundamental frequency (F0) within or between syllables when speaking, has not been investigated in children with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS). However, pitch variation plays an important role in tone languages, as varying F0 patterns communicate different lexical meanings. This study investigated pitch variation abilities in individuals with CAS via the tone-sequencing tasks (TSTs), focusing on task performance and the effects of syllable structure, lexical status, and tones. Method Three Cantonese-speaking children with CAS (aged 3;7-5;8 [years;months]) and six children without CAS participated in the study. Children without CAS were divided into two control groups, comprising those with speech and/or language impairment or typical development. TSTs consisted of 56 sets of five repetitions of stimuli. The stimuli varied in syllable structure, lexical status, and tones. Percentage of tones correct (PTC), consistency scores, F0 values, and acoustic repetition duration were measured. Results The CAS group performed more poorly than the control groups on the TST with respect to tone accuracy, consistency, and repetition duration. No interaction effects between group and syllable structure or group and lexical status were found. No significant difference was found on F0 values across time between Tone 1 and Tone 2 syllables in the CAS group. However, interaction effects between group and time points of F0 values on Tone 2 syllables were found. Discussion The results suggest that children with CAS have difficulty with pitch variation, which was revealed on the TST with respect to tone accuracy, consistency, and repetition duration. Moreover, children with CAS have difficulty in varying F0 values to produce high-rising tones and tend to use high-level tones to substitute. Clinically, the TST may be useful to assist in the diagnosis of CAS. Isolated vowel stimuli may be useful to test young children or children with severe impairment. Future investigations and development of a normed tool for children with CAS are suggested.

Orthographic friends and lexical strangers in the L2 lexicon

Abstract Some recent studies demonstrated a lexical processing difference between L1 and L2. In a lexical decision task, masked word primes had an inhibitory or no effect on the identification of their neighbor targets (e.g., reason-SEASON) in L1, but they produced a faciliatory priming effect in L2. The present study attempted to replicate this finding with materials that were developed with familiarity, length, and frequency considerations. Native and nonnative speakers of English were tested on 40 English targets that were preceded by prime words that were their neighbors or orthographically unrelated. The results replicated previous findings. Nonnative speakers showed a significant priming effect of 63 ms but native speakers produced a nonsignificant effect of 11 ms. This finding suggested that words in the L2 lexicon seemed to recognize and interact with each other only on the basis of orthographic overlap (thus orthographic friends). They did not seem to do so on the basis of lexical status (thus lexical strangers), i.e., showing little lexical interaction or competition. Current explanations of this intriguing L1-L2 difference are discussed.

Lexical Influences on Categorical Speech Perception Are Driven by a Temporoparietal Circuit.

Categorical judgments of otherwise identical phonemes are biased toward hearing words (i.e., "Ganong effect") suggesting lexical context influences perception of even basic speech primitives. Lexical biasing could manifest via late stage postperceptual mechanisms related to decision or, alternatively, top-down linguistic inference that acts on early perceptual coding. Here, we exploited the temporal sensitivity of EEG to resolve the spatiotemporal dynamics of these context-related influences on speech categorization. Listeners rapidly classified sounds from a /gɪ/-/kɪ/ gradient presented in opposing word-nonword contexts (GIFT-kift vs. giss-KISS), designed to bias perception toward lexical items. Phonetic perception shifted toward the direction of words, establishing a robust Ganong effect behaviorally. ERPs revealed a neural analog of lexical biasing emerging within ∼200 msec. Source analyses uncovered a distributed neural network supporting the Ganong including middle temporal gyrus, inferior parietal lobe, and middle frontal cortex. Yet, among Ganong-sensitive regions, only left middle temporal gyrus and inferior parietal lobe predicted behavioral susceptibility to lexical influence. Our findings confirm lexical status rapidly constrains sublexical categorical representations for speech within several hundred milliseconds but likely does so outside the purview of canonical auditory-sensory brain areas.

The sign superiority effect: Lexical status facilitates peripheral handshape identification for deaf signers.

Deaf signers exhibit an enhanced ability to process information in their peripheral visual field, particularly the motion of dots or orientation of lines. Does their experience processing sign language, which involves identifying meaningful visual forms across the visual field, contribute to this enhancement? We tested whether deaf signers recruit language knowledge to facilitate peripheral identification through a sign superiority effect (i.e., better handshape discrimination in a sign than a pseudosign) and whether such a superiority effect might be responsible for perceptual enhancements relative to hearing individuals (i.e., a decrease in the effect of eccentricity on perceptual identification). Deaf signers and hearing signers or nonsigners identified the handshape presented within a static ASL fingerspelling letter (Experiment 1), fingerspelled sequence (Experiment 2), or sign or pseudosign (Experiment 3) presented in the near or far periphery. Accuracy on all tasks was higher for deaf signers than hearing nonsigning participants and was higher in the near than the far periphery. Across experiments, there were different patterns of interactions between hearing status and eccentricity depending on the type of stimulus; deaf signers showed an effect of eccentricity for static fingerspelled letters, fingerspelled sequences, and pseudosigns but not for ASL signs. In contrast, hearing nonsigners showed an effect of eccentricity for all stimuli. Thus, deaf signers recruit lexical knowledge to facilitate peripheral perceptual identification, and this perceptual enhancement may derive from their extensive experience processing visual linguistic information in the periphery during sign comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Assessing children’s incremental word knowledge in the upper primary grades

Word knowledge acquisition is an incremental process that relies on exposure. As a result, word knowledge can broadly range from recognizing the word’s lexical status, to knowing its meaning in context, and to knowing its meaning independent of context. The present study aimed to model incremental word knowledge in 1454 upper primary school children from grades 3 to 5 by investigating their abilities on three word knowledge tasks originating from the same set of 300 words: lexical decision, context decision, and definitional decision. A mixed-effects model showed significant differences in performance between tasks and between grades, and a significant interaction indicating that task differences were different for children in grade 5 compared to children in grades 3 and 4. In order to examine further the different task relation patterns at the word level, a cluster analysis was performed using the observed item means, which were corrected for the guessing chance. The analysis showed that for most words, recognition of its lexical status was easier than knowing its meaning in context, which in turn was easier than knowing its meaning independent of context. It is concluded that task relation patterns differ based on mean log frequency as a proxy of word exposure.

Second language perception of English vowels by Portuguese learners: The effect of stimulus type

The present study investigated L2 English vowel perception and the effect of stimulus type on the identification of vowel segments that present difficulties for Portuguese learners. It also examined the effect of subject factors such as age of acquisition, length of formal instruction, language use and vocabulary size, on the L2 learners’ perceptual performance. Twenty-nine adult Portuguese learners of English were tested on six English vowels (/iː ɪ ɛ æ ɜː ʌ/) with two tasks, differing in stimulus type, i.e., in the lexical status of trials (real words and pseudo words) in which the target vowels were auditorily presented. The testing stimuli consisted of 72 trials with real CVC words and 72 trials with pseudo CVC words, naturally produced by two speakers of standard southern British English (SSBE). The L2 vocabulary size of the participants was measured with two receptive vocabulary size tests and the language background data, viz. age of learning, length of formal instruction and L2 use was collected with a questionnaire. Results confirmed the Portuguese learners’ difficulties in accurately categorizing the target vowels, particularly when identifying the vowel target sounds embedded in pseudo words, which suggests that L2 phonological categories may be established after lexical forms. Furthermore, a significant correlation was found between L2 language use and accurate perception of four of the target vowels, which indicates that the more frequently learners use the target language, the more accurate is their L2 English vowel perception.

Speaking in the Brain: The Interaction between Words and Syntax in Sentence Production

This neuroimaging study investigated the neural infrastructure of sentence-level language production. We compared brain activation patterns, as measured with BOLD-fMRI, during production of sentences that differed in verb argument structures (intransitives, transitives, ditransitives) and the lexical status of the verb (known verbs or pseudoverbs). The experiment consisted of 30 mini-blocks of six sentences each. Each mini-block started with an example for the type of sentence to be produced in that block. On each trial in the mini-blocks, participants were first given the (pseudo-)verb followed by three geometric shapes to serve as verb arguments in the sentences. Production of sentences with known verbs yielded greater activation compared to sentences with pseudoverbs in the core language network of the left inferior frontal gyrus, the left posterior middle temporal gyrus, and a more posterior middle temporal region extending into the angular gyrus, analogous to effects observed in language comprehension. Increasing the number of verb arguments led to greater activation in an overlapping left posterior middle temporal gyrus/angular gyrus area, particularly for known verbs, as well as in the bilateral precuneus. Thus, producing sentences with more complex structures using existing verbs leads to increased activation in the language network, suggesting some reliance on memory retrieval of stored lexical-syntactic information during sentence production. This study thus provides evidence from sentence-level language production in line with functional models of the language network that have so far been mainly based on single-word production, comprehension, and language processing in aphasia.

How Do We Segment Text? Two-Stage Chunking Operation in Reading.

Chunking in language comprehension is a process that segments continuous linguistic input into smaller chunks that are in the reader’s mental lexicon. Effective chunking during reading facilitates disambiguation and enhances efficiency for comprehension. However, the chunking mechanisms remain elusive, especially in reading, given that information arrives simultaneously yet the written systems may not have explicit cues for labeling boundaries such as Chinese. What are the mechanisms of chunking that mediates the reading of the text that contains hierarchical information? We investigated this question by manipulating the lexical status of the chunks at distinct levels in four-character Chinese strings, including the two-character local chunk and four-character global chunk. Male and female human participants were asked to make lexical decisions on these strings in a behavioral experiment, followed by a passive reading task when their electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The behavioral results showed that the lexical decision time of lexicalized two-character local chunks was influenced by the lexical status of the four-character global chunk, but not vice versa, which indicated the processing of global chunks possessed priority over the local chunks. The EEG results revealed that familiar lexical chunks were detected simultaneously at both levels and further processed in a different temporal order, the onset of lexical access for the global chunks was earlier than that of local chunks. These consistent results suggest a two-stage operation for chunking in reading, the simultaneous detection of familiar lexical chunks at multiple levels around 100 ms followed by recognition of chunks with global precedence.

(A)Symmetry in vowel features in verbs and pseudoverbs: ERP evidence

This paper examines the processing of height and place contrasts in vowels in words and pseudowords, using mismatch negativity (MMN) to determine firstly whether asymmetries resulting from underlying representations found in the processing of vowels in isolation will remain in a word context and secondly whether there is any difference in the way these phonological differences manifest in pseudowords. The stimuli are two sets of English ablaut verbs and corresponding pseudowords (sit ~ sat/*sif~*saf and get ~ got/*gef~*gof) contrasting in vowel height ([high] vs. [low]) and place of articulation ([coronal] vs. [dorsal]). In line with previous research, the results show a processing asymmetry for place of articulation in both words and nonwords, while different vowel heights result in symmetrical MMN patterns. These findings confirm that an underspecification account provides the best explanation for featural processing and that phonological information is independent of lexical status.

Варианты сложных слов и однокоренные синонимы. Проблемы лексикографической разработки

The article considers the problem of variability of composites in the aspect of their lexicographical description in a special dictionary. By the material of the “Russian Dictionary of Synonyms. Composites”, the author examines the methodology of lexicographical description of composites variants and cognate synonyms-composites. The following criteria to differentiate composites variants and cognate synonyms are identified: stylistic markedness, compatibility, typical contexts. Relying on the Russian National Corpus data, the author ascertains stylistic and lexical status of composites variants and cognate synonyms. The factors that hamper differentiation of these notions and complicate the process of composites codification are revealed.

The grammatical-lexical distinction in Chinese aspectual markers

AbstractThis paper discusses the grammatical-lexical distinction based onBoye and Harder (2012)in the class of aspectual markers in Chinese and aims to decide whether these markers are grammatical or lexical in a theoretically anchored sense. To accomplish this, the language-general criteria proposed inBoye and Harder (2012)are translated into Chinese-specific criteria for diagnosing grammatical vs. lexical status, and these translated criteria are then applied to Chinese aspect markers in a questionnaire-based survey in order to test whether these markers are lexical or grammatical. Our classification of the Chinese markers tested is then compared with a traditional classification based on grammaticalization features (Lehmann 2015). The results support an integration of the two ways of approaching the grammatical-lexical distinction.

Can response congruency effects be obtained in masked priming lexical decision?

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same instructions as to the targets, one would predict a response congruency effect (e.g., book-TRUE faster than fiok-TRUE). Critically, the Bayesian Reader model predicts that there should be no effects of response congruency in masked priming lexical decision, whereas interactive-activation models offer more flexible predictions. We conducted 3 masked priming lexical decision experiments with 4 unrelated priming conditions differing in lexical status and wordlikeness (high-frequency word, low-frequency word, orthographically legal pseudoword, consonant string). Experiment 1 used wordlike nonwords as foils, Experiment 2 used illegal nonwords as foils, and Experiment 3 used orthographically legal hermit nonwords as foils. When the foils were orthographically legal (Experiments 1 and 3; i.e., a standard lexical decision scenario), lexical decision responses were not affected by the lexical status or wordlikeness of the unrelated primes, as predicted by the Bayesian Reader model and the selective inhibition hypothesis in interactive-activation models. When the foils were illegal (Experiment 2), consonant-string primes produced the slowest responses for word targets and the fastest responses for nonword targets. The Bayesian Reader model can capture this pattern, assuming that participants in Experiment 2 were making an orthographic legality decision (i.e., anything legal must be a word) rather than a lexical decision. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Native language processing is influenced by L2-to-L1 translation ambiguity

ABSTRACTWords of one language often have multiple translations into another language. Does mapping of an L2 word onto multiple L1 words impact how these L1 words are represented in the bilingual lexicon? Russian-English bilinguals decided on the lexical status (Exp1) or the conceptual relatedness (Exp2) of pairs of Russian words that had the same or different translations in English. We obtained evidence for a facilitative effect of L2-to-L1 translation ambiguity. In Exp1, bilinguals were faster to respond to a Russian target if a prime had the same vs. different English translation as the target. Further, the magnitude of the N400 ERP component was reduced and the P200 was enhanced in the translation ambiguous compared to non-ambiguous condition. In Exp2, translation alternatives were rated as being more conceptually similar than words with different translations. Thus, the presence of a shared L2 translation leads to some convergence of corresponding L1 lexico-conceptual representations.

Lexical and Frequency Effects on Keystroke Timing: Challenges to a Lexical Search Account From a Type-To-Copy Task

We explore how timing in identical keystroke sequences of a stem morpheme is influenced by linguistic knowledge by manipulating lexical status and morphological complexity of words in a type-to-copy task. Starting from the second keystroke, we find that average keystroke latency within a stem morpheme varies according to whole-word frequency (Experiment1) and lexicality defined by compatibility of the upcoming suffix (e.g., IZE vs IST) with the stem (e.g., NORMAL) to form a string (e.g., RENORMALIZE vs. RENORMAL; RENORMALIZE vs. RENORMALIST in Experiments 2 & 3 respectively). Further, although lexical and frequency effects persist over the string as a whole, nonlinear mixed-effects regressions reveal position varying lexical effects on keystroke latencies within the stem morpheme. In addition, whole word frequency effects on the first keystroke were present. These results challenge hierarchical accounts of production with modular motor programs where the same letter sequence (for a morpheme) is realized independently of and only after lexical access to the word in which the letters occur (cf. Crump & Logan, 2010; Logan & Crump 2011).

The Impact of the Position of Phonemes and Lexical Status on Phonological Awareness in the Diglossic Arabic Language.

This study aimed at examining the impact of phonemes and lexical status on phonological manipulation among pre-school children. Specifically, we tested the impact of phonemic positions (initial vs. final) and lexical status (shared, spoken, standard and pseudo-words) on phonemic isolation performance. Participants were 1012 children from the second year (K2) and third year (K2) in kindergarten. The results of the ANOVAs revealed significant effect of the phonemes' position on the phonemic isolation performance whereas the performance was easier with the initial rather than the final phonemes. Also, the repeated measure analysis showed that the lexical status also impacts the phonemic isolation performance. The performance in pseudo-words was lower than all the others. However, the other clusters of real words did not differ. The results are discussed in the light of previous findings in the literature and of differences in the syllabic structures of the words that may influence phonological awareness.