Lexical Status Research Articles

On silent elements: a case study of grand and its silent entourage

Recent work in syntax has seen a proliferation of silent elements (SEs), e.g., van Riemsdijk (2002, 2005) and Kayne (e.g., Kayne 2005, 2006, 2012). This paper offers a feature-based taxonomy of lexical items, in which SEs are non-canonical items without phonological features. An SE and its pronounced counterpart, if any, are thus semantically equivalent, but SEs are not the result of ellipsis, which suppresses the pronunciation of pronounceable elements. Under this contextualization, the SEs in Kayne’s (2012) and Law’s (2012) accounts of the monetary expression grand are reexamined. For ten grand, Kayne (2012) proposes for its underlying source: ten THOUSAND BUCKS IN grand TOTAL, where capitalized items are SEs, while Law (2012) argues for a simpler source form: ten THOUSAND grand BUCKS, where grand remains an adjective. Yet, their starting assumptions that grand does not pluralize and is not used as a noun elsewhere are incorrect. The SE accounts also make a number of incorrect predictions syntactically and semantically and have difficulty explaining acquisition. A nominal account of grand with the same lexical status as G and nickel is far simpler and applies to all dialects. Though the feature-based taxonomy of lexical items predicts the existence of SEs, a proposed SE must still be justified syntactically and semantically. Thus, some of the SEs proposed may not be warranted upon closer scrutiny.

Talker variability in spoken word recognition: Evidence from repetition priming

The effect of talker variability on the processing of spoken words is investigated using short-term repetition priming experiments. Prime-target pairs, either repeated (e.g., queen-queen) or unrelated (e.g., bell-queen), were produced by the same or different male speakers. Two interstimulus intervals (ISI, 50 and 250 ms) were used to explore the time course of repetition priming and voice specificity effects. The auditory stimuli were presented to 40 listeners, who completed a lexical decision task followed by a talker voice discrimination task. Results from the lexical decision task showed that the magnitude of priming was attenuated in the different-talker condition, indicating a talker variability effect on spoken word recognition. In contrast, the talker variability effect on priming did not differ between the two ISIs. Talker voice discrimination was faster and more accurate for nonword targets, but not for word targets, indicating a lexical status effect on voice discrimination. Taken together, these results suggest that talker variability affects recognition of spoken words, and that the effect cannot be simply attributed to non-lexical voice discrimination.

The influence of lexical status in the perception of English allophones by Korean learners

This study investigated whether the allophonic contrast in the second language (L2) may require contact with the lexicon to influence the perception. Given that English medial voiceless stops occur with aspiration in stressed, but without aspiration in unstressed syllables, Korean learners of English were tested for aspirated and unaspirated allophones of /p/ for perceptual preference in appropriate and inappropriate stress contexts in the second syllable of disyllabic words. The stimuli included four types of non-words and eight pairs of real words (four pairs each for high-frequency and low-frequency words), and participants were asked to judge the perceptual preference of each token on a 7-scale (1 = a bad example, 7 = a good example). The results demonstrated that in tests with non-words, there was no significant difference in the ratings as a function of context appropriateness (e.g., [ípɚ] vs. [íphɚ]), with higher rankings for initially-stressed words. By contrast, in real words, participants preferred the correct allophones (e.g., [képɚ] vs. [képhɚ] “caper”). The frequency of real words further showed a significant effect. This finding suggests that allophony in L2 is driven by lexicality (Whalen et al., 1997). Exemplar theory (Pierrehumbert 2001, 2002) provides a more effective means of modeling this finding than do traditional approaches.

Reproducing American Sign Language sentences: cognitive scaffolding in working memory.

The American Sign Language Sentence Reproduction Test (ASL-SRT) requires the precise reproduction of a series of ASL sentences increasing in complexity and length. Error analyses of such tasks provides insight into working memory and scaffolding processes. Data was collected from three groups expected to differ in fluency: deaf children, deaf adults and hearing adults, all users of ASL. Quantitative (correct/incorrect recall) and qualitative error analyses were performed. Percent correct on the reproduction task supports its sensitivity to fluency as test performance clearly differed across the three groups studied. A linguistic analysis of errors further documented differing strategies and bias across groups. Subjects' recall projected the affordance and constraints of deep linguistic representations to differing degrees, with subjects resorting to alternate processing strategies when they failed to recall the sentence correctly. A qualitative error analysis allows us to capture generalizations about the relationship between error pattern and the cognitive scaffolding, which governs the sentence reproduction process. Highly fluent signers and less-fluent signers share common chokepoints on particular words in sentences. However, they diverge in heuristic strategy. Fluent signers, when they make an error, tend to preserve semantic details while altering morpho-syntactic domains. They produce syntactically correct sentences with equivalent meaning to the to-be-reproduced one, but these are not verbatim reproductions of the original sentence. In contrast, less-fluent signers tend to use a more linear strategy, preserving lexical status and word ordering while omitting local inflections, and occasionally resorting to visuo-motoric imitation. Thus, whereas fluent signers readily use top-down scaffolding in their working memory, less fluent signers fail to do so. Implications for current models of working memory across spoken and signed modalities are considered.

Lexical-perceptual integration influences sensorimotor adaptation in speech.

A combination of lexical bias and altered auditory feedback was used to investigate the influence of higher-order linguistic knowledge on the perceptual aspects of speech motor control. Subjects produced monosyllabic real words or pseudo-words containing the vowel [ε] (as in “head”) under conditions of altered auditory feedback involving a decrease in vowel first formant (F1) frequency. This manipulation had the effect of making the vowel sound more similar to [I] (as in “hid”), affecting the lexical status of produced words in two Lexical-Change (LC) groups (either changing them from real words to pseudo-words: e.g., less—liss, or pseudo-words to real words: e.g., kess—kiss). Two Non-Lexical-Change (NLC) control groups underwent the same auditory feedback manipulation during the production of [ε] real- or pseudo-words, only without any resulting change in lexical status (real words to real words: e.g., mess—miss, or pseudo-words to pseudo-words: e.g., ness—niss). The results from the LC groups indicate that auditory-feedback-based speech motor learning is sensitive to the lexical status of the stimuli being produced, in that speakers tend to keep their acoustic speech outcomes within the auditory-perceptual space corresponding to the task-related side of the word/non-word boundary (real words or pseudo-words). For the NLC groups, however, no such effect of lexical status is observed.

Time course of morphological processing in aphasia: a magnetoencephalographic study

Time course of morphological processing in aphasia: a magnetoencephalographic study

Phoneme categorization and discrimination in younger and older adults: A comparative analysis of perceptual, lexical, and attentional factors.

This study investigates the extent to which age-related language processing difficulties are due to a decline in sensory processes or to a deterioration of cognitive factors, specifically, attentional control. Two facets of attentional control were examined: inhibition of irrelevant information and divided attention. Younger and older adults were asked to categorize the initial phoneme of spoken syllables ("Was it m or n?"), trying to ignore the lexical status of the syllables. The phonemes were manipulated to range in eight steps from m to n. Participants also did a discrimination task on syllable pairs ("Were the initial sounds the same or different?"). Categorization and discrimination were performed under either divided attention (concurrent visual-search task) or focused attention (no visual task). The results showed that even when the younger and older adults were matched on their discrimination scores: (1) the older adults had more difficulty inhibiting lexical knowledge than did younger adults, (2) divided attention weakened lexical inhibition in both younger and older adults, and (3) divided attention impaired sound discrimination more in older than younger listeners. The results confirm the independent and combined contribution of sensory decline and deficit in attentional control to language processing difficulties associated with aging. The relative weight of these variables and their mechanisms of action are discussed in the context of theories of aging and language.

Word skipping during sentence reading: effects of lexicality on parafoveal processing

Two experiments examined how lexical status affects the targeting of saccades during reading by using the boundary technique to vary independently the content of a letter string when seen in parafoveal preview and when directly fixated. Experiment 1 measured the skipping rate for a target word embedded in a sentence under three parafoveal preview conditions: full preview (e.g., brain-brain), pseudohomophone preview (e.g., brane-brain), and orthographic nonword control preview (e.g., brant-brain); in the first condition, the preview string was always an English word, while in the second and third conditions, it was always a nonword. Experiment 2 investigated three conditions where the preview string was always a word: full preview (e.g., beach-beach), homophone preview (e.g., beech-beach), and orthographic control preview (e.g., bench-beach). None of the letter string manipulations used to create the preview conditions in the experiments disrupted sublexical orthographic or phonological patterns. In Experiment 1, higher skipping rates were observed for the full (lexical) preview condition, which consisted of a word, than for the nonword preview conditions (pseudohomophone and orthographic control). In contrast, Experiment 2 showed no difference in skipping rates across the three types of lexical preview conditions (full, homophone, and orthographic control), although preview type did influence reading times. This pattern indicates that skipping not only depends on the presence of disrupted sublexical patterns of orthography or phonology, but also is critically dependent on processes that are sensitive to the lexical status of letter strings in the parafovea.

How robust are lexical effects on phonetic categorization?

Previous work has shown that lexical knowledge (whether a stimulus token makes a word or nonword) influences phonetic categorization [e.g., Fox (1984)]. Recent work in our lab examined the effect of lexical influences on speech perception using two tasks (phoneme identification and AXB discrimination) and uncovered some unexpected findings. Listeners who performed identification first showed a robust effect of lexical status on phonetic categorization. However, listeners who performed the discrimination task first showed no effect of lexical status. Since prior research has shown that the lexical effect is fairly robust [see Pitt and Samuel (1993)], the finding that the influence of lexical status can be eliminated by first placing listeners in an AXB discrimination task is the focus of the current research. The AXB task may focus attention on the prelexical, phonetic representation and differences within each phonetic category. This, in turn, eliminates the influence of higher level processes on phonetic perception in the identification task. The present study seeks to replicate this finding and investigate whether other lexical influences on perception (the influence of lexical neighborhood) are also altered by experience with AXB discrimination. Results are discussed in terms of the flow of information during phonetic perception and word recognition.

A computational model explaining language phenomena on Korean visual word recognition

How do we understand the meaning of written word? Until recently, the basic mechanisms underlying visual word recognition have remained controversial. To explore the basic mechanisms underlying the human recognition processes, we propose the computational model of visual word recognition which reflects the theoretically presented linguistic processing mechanisms of Korean’s visual word processing. In applying the computational model, sets of orthographic units, hidden units, context units and semantic units, were constructed. During the training phase, the weight on the connections between the units were modified using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The model using a lexical decision response time was substituted by a cross entropy values. To evaluate the model, we also conducted behavioral experiments to compare the results of the model performance with human performances. The results show that the proposed model closely simulates Korean visual word processing characteristics such as the word frequency effect, the lexical status effect, the word similarity effect and the semantic priming effect. The model suggests that the computational models should be a valuable tool that can explain the lexical information processing characteristics of the Korean visual word recognition.

Nasal place assimilation between phonetics and phonology: An EPG study of Italian nasal-to-velar clusters

An acoustic and electropalatographic analysis of nasal place assimilation in /nk/ and /ng/ clusters is provided for five native Italian speakers. Place assimilation for pre-velar nasals in Italian is usually said to be categorical in both word-internal and word-boundary position. However, empirical research on place assimilation in non-homorganic clusters in different languages has uncovered aspects of variation supporting a non-discrete view of several phonological processes previously thought of as obligatory and categorical. The present study aims at investigating the role of stylistic and internal factors on Italian nasal-to-velar cluster assimilation, such as speech rate variations (normal vs. slow speech), the lexical status of the cluster (word-internal vs. cross-boundary), stress position, and postnasal voicing. Assimilation is evaluated for frequency of occurrence, strength of application, and target intrinsic variability. Results indicate that nasal-to-velar clusters in Italian are mostly fully assimilated and therefore homorganic, but the process is also sensitive to factors such as speech rate and the presence of a word boundary. Patterns of variability are observed both within and across speakers, and sporadic gradient reduction of gestures is also detected. Both anticipatory and carry-over coarticulatory effects are found within the cluster; nasal-to-velar clusters are conceived of as a constituent with a single articulatory target and a complex gestural pattern distributed over a relatively extended temporal interval.

Modulation of additive and interactive effects in lexical decision by trial history.

Additive and interactive effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and semantic priming have been used to test theoretical claims about the cognitive architecture of word-reading processes. Additive effects among these factors have been taken as evidence for discrete-stage models of word reading. We present evidence from linear mixed-model analyses applied to 2 lexical decision experiments indicating that apparent additive effects can be the product of aggregating over- and underadditive interaction effects that are modulated by recent trial history, particularly the lexical status and stimulus quality of the previous trial's target. Even a simple practice effect expressed as improved response speed across trials was powerfully modulated by the nature of the previous target item. These results suggest that additivity and interaction between factors may reflect trial-to-trial variation in stimulus representations and decision processes rather than fundamental differences in processing architecture.

Coordination of word recognition and oculomotor control during reading: the role of implicit lexical decisions.

The coordination of word-recognition and oculomotor processes during reading was evaluated in eye-tracking experiments that examined how word skipping, where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading, is affected by the lexical status of a letter string in the parafovea and ease of recognizing that string. Ease of lexical recognition was manipulated through target-word frequency (Experiment 1) and through repetition priming between prime-target pairs embedded in a sentence (Experiment 2). Using the gaze-contingent boundary technique the target word appeared in the parafovea either with full preview or with transposed-letter (TL) preview. The TL preview strings were nonwords in Experiment 1 (e.g., bilnk created from the target blink), but were words in Experiment 2 (e.g., sacred created from the target scared). Experiment 1 showed greater skipping for high-frequency than low-frequency target words in the full preview condition, but not in the TL preview (nonword) condition. Experiment 2 showed greater skipping for target words that repeated an earlier prime word than for those that did not, with this repetition priming occurring both with preview of the full target and with preview of the target's TL neighbor word. However, time to progress from the word after the target was greater following skips of the TL preview word, whose meaning was anomalous in the sentence context, than following skips of the full preview word whose meaning fit sensibly into the sentence context. Together, the results support the idea that coordination between word-recognition and oculomotor processes occurs at the level of implicit lexical decisions.

Lexical effects on the perception of /l/ allophones in English

Previous work has shown that perception of allophones of /p/ in English utterances was influenced by lexical status. In nonwords, the aspirated allophone was preferred whether appropriate or not; in words, the appropriate allophone was preferred [Whalen, Best, & Irwin (1997), J. Phonetics, 25, 501-528]. Here, we examined dark and light [l] in English words and nonwords. Dark [l] occurs in syllable codas whereas light [l] occurs in onsets. Items were selected in pairs to balance syllable position in monosyllabic English words and pseudowords, such as “gel”/“ledge”, “teal”/“leat”, and “beel”/“leeb.” Frequency of occurrence for words was also manipulated to explore compatibility with versions of exemplar theory. A phonetician produced two versions of each item, one with a contextually appropriate allophone and one with the inappropriate. Listeners were asked to rate where each acoustically presented item fell on a Likert scale (1-7) between “ideal (native) pronunciation” or “bad (nonnative) pronunciation.” Results will be discussed in terms of the underlying representation needed to account for lexical effects in perception. The relationship to phonotactic rules will also be discussed.

Concurrent effects of lexical status and letter-rotation during early stage visual word recognition: Evidence from ERPs

Recent studies report that the occipito-temporal N170 component of the ERP is enhanced by letter strings, relative to non-linguistic strings of similar visual complexity, with a left-lateralized distribution. This finding is consistent with underlying mechanisms that serve visual word recognition. Conclusions about the level of analysis reflected within the N170 effects, and therefore the timecourse of word recognition, have been mixed. Here, we investigated the timing and nature of brain responses to putatively low- and high-level processing difficulty. Low-level processing difficulty was modulated by manipulating letter-rotation parametrically at 0°, 22.5°, 45°, 67.5°, and 90°. Higher-level processing difficulty was modulated by manipulating lexical status (words vs. word-like pseudowords). Increasing letter-rotation enhanced the N170 led to monotonic increases in P1 and N170 amplitude up to 67.5° but then decreased amplitude at 90°. Pseudowords enhanced the N170 over left occipital-temporal sites, relative to words. These combined findings are compatible with a cascaded, interactive architecture in which lower-level analysis (e.g., word-form feature extraction) leads higher-level analysis (e.g., lexical access) in time, but that by approximately 170ms, the brain's response to a visual word includes parallel, interactive processing at both low-level feature extraction and higher-order lexical access levels of analysis.

Interference and Facilitation in Spoken Word Production: Effects of Morphologically and Semantically Related Context Stimuli on Picture Naming

We report two picture-word interference experiments investigating conceptual and lexical activation, and response selection, in speaking. We varied stimulus onset asynchrony to investigate potential fine-grained activation and competition effects. Morphologically related existing and pseudoword adjectives, as well as associatively related adjectives, served as context stimuli in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, we focused on semantic interference by using morphologically related and unrelated subordinates of the target concept as context stimuli. Morphologically complex pseudowords were also included as context stimuli. Pseudowords should not interfere, given that they have no lexical or conceptual representation. We consistently obtained facilitation with all morphologically related context stimuli, irrespective of their lexical status. We argue that effects originate at the word-form level, and discuss how our results may help decide among the many explanations of semantic interference in picture naming.

Preserved visual language identification despite severe alexia

Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and sentences in French and English while he had great difficulty in reading them, judging their lexical status or extracting semantic information. Lexical decision was strongly influenced by the orthographic structure of stimuli: whereas he easily determined the lexical status of illegal nonwords (e.g., ‘rsdo’), he had random performance with legal pseudowords (e.g., ‘binus’). When asked to determine the language of meaningless letter trigrams with high frequency in the English or French orthography (e.g., ‘oth’ or ‘iqu’) his performance was significantly above chance. In contrast, similarly to healthy participants his language decision was at chance with low-frequency trigrams. These findings suggest that written language identification relies on sublexical processing of orthographic rules specific to each language.

Effects of parafoveal word length and orthographic features on initial fixation landing positions in reading

Previous research has demonstrated that readers use word length and word boundary information in targeting saccades into upcoming words while reading. Previous studies have also revealed that the initial landing positions for fixations on words are affected by parafoveal processing. In the present study, we examined the effects of word length and orthographic legality on targeting saccades into parafoveal words. Long (8-9 letters) and short (4-5 letters) target words, which were matched on lexical frequency and initial letter trigram, were paired and embedded into identical sentence frames. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to manipulate the parafoveal information available to the reader before direct fixation on the target word. The parafoveal preview was either identical to the target word or was a visually similar nonword. The nonword previews contained orthographically legal or orthographically illegal initial letters. The results showed that orthographic preprocessing of the word to the right of fixation affected eye movement targeting, regardless of word length. Additionally, the lexical status of an upcoming saccade target in the parafovea generally did not influence preprocessing.

Is “Hit and Run” a Single Word? The Processing of Irreversible Binomials in Neglect Dyslexia

The present study is the first neuropsychological investigation into the problem of the mental representation and processing of irreversible binomials (IBs), i.e., word pairs linked by a conjunction (e.g., “hit and run,” “dead or alive”). In order to test their lexical status, the phenomenon of neglect dyslexia is explored. People with left-sided neglect dyslexia show a clear lexical effect: they can read IBs better (i.e., by dropping the leftmost words less frequently) when their components are presented in their correct order. This may be taken as an indication that they treat these constructions as lexical, not decomposable, elements. This finding therefore constitutes strong evidence that IBs tend to be stored in the mental lexicon as a whole and that this whole form is preferably addressed in the retrieval process.

Antonymy

This article offers a Cognitive Semantic approach to antonymy in language and thought. Based on a series of recent empirical investigations using different observational techniques, we analyze (i) the nature of the category of antonymy, and (ii) the status of its members in terms of goodness of opposition. Our purpose is to synthesize these empirical investigations and provide a theoretical framework that is capable of accounting for antonymy as a mode of thought in language use and meaning-making. We show that antonymy has conceptual basis, but in contrast to other lexico-semantic construals, a limited number of words seem to have special lexical status as dimensional protagonists. Form–meaning pairings are antonyms when they are used as binary opposites. Configurationally, this translates into a construal where some content is divided by a BOUNDARY. This configuration (or schema) is a necessary requirement for meanings to be used as antonyms and all antonyms have equal status as members. In contrast to categorization by configuration, categorization by contentful meaning structures forms a continuum ranging from strongly related pairings as core members to ad hoc couplings on the outskirts. In order to explain why some lexico-semantic couplings tend to form conventionalized pairs, we appeal to their ontological set-up, the symmetry of the antonyms in relation to the boundary between the meaning structures, their contextual range of use and frequency.