Orthographic Neighborhood Research Articles

Impact of Lexical Parameters and Audibility on the Recognition of the Freiburg Monosyllabic Speech Test.

Correct word recognition is generally determined by audibility, but lexical parameters also play a role. The focus of this study was to examine both the impact of audibility and lexical parameters on speech recognition of test words of the clinical German Freiburg monosyllabic speech test, and subsequently on the perceptual imbalance of test lists observed in the literature. For 160 participants with normal hearing that were divided into three groups with different simulated hearing thresholds, monaural speech recognition for the Freiburg monosyllabic speech test was obtained via headphones in quiet at different presentation levels. A software manipulated the original speech material to simulate two different hearing thresholds. All monosyllables were classified according to their frequency of occurrence in contemporary language and the number of lexical neighbors using the Cross-Linguistic Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Density database. Generalized linear mixed-effects regression models were used to evaluate the influences of audibility in terms of the Speech Intelligibility Index and lexical properties of the monosyllables in terms of word frequency (WF) and neighborhood density (ND) on the observed speech recognition per word and per test list, respectively. Audibility and interactions of audibility with WF and ND correctly predicted identification of the individual monosyllables. Test list recognition was predicted by test list choice, audibility, and ND, as well as by interactions of WF and test list, audibility and ND, ND and test list, and audibility per test list. Observed differences in speech recognition of the Freiburg monosyllabic speech test, which are well reported in the literature, depend not only on audibility but also on WF, neighborhood density, and test list choice and their interactions. The authors conclude that future creations of speech test material should take these lexical parameters into account.

Orthographic neighborhood size volatility analysis in the context of writing assessment

Abstract Writing assessment was conducted using the orthographic neighborhood size as a numerical measure of transforming literacy to numeracy. The neighborhood size was calculated using the free online CLEARPOND technology from Northwestern University. The transformed numerical information can be viewed as a time series where fluctuation analysis could be applied. The concept of volatility used in stock market analysis was employed to analyze the fluctuation of the orthographic neighborhood sizes in short essays assigned to students in an introductory astronomy course offered by an open admission community college. The results showed that writing containing scientific words with low neighborhood sizes exhibited high volatility, consistent with high-demand cognitive tasks students were asked to perform. A random shuffling of the words in a sentence generated word-list sequences where the students would be asked to exercise rules of grammar to select the correct sequence. The hypothesis that the reading of a high volatility in the neighborhood size histogram would be expected to correspond to a high-demand cognitive task was tested in this exploratory project. The CLEARPOND output contained a list of phonological neighborhood sizes and the association of orthographic volatility with phonological volatility is also studied with additional examples from presidential debate sentences and song lyrics. This proof of concept volatility project brings stock market analysis, based on econometric methodology, into writing and language studies that demand precision comparison. The volatility analysis results in comparison to lexical diversity analysis results are also discussed.

二语词汇识别过程中的正字法邻近词效应研究

二语词汇识别过程中的正字法邻近词效应研究

The Effect of Orthographic Neighbors on Second‐Grade Students’ Spelling Acquisition

ABSTRACTMany words in English resemble one another in multiple ways. Words with similar spellings are referred to as orthographic neighbors. The purpose of this within‐subject experimental study was to examine the effect of orthographic neighbors on the spelling acquisition of second‐grade students. In each of five sessions of a computer‐based experiment, 71 participants were presented with two prime words and prompted to learn the spelling of seven novel words. The latter seven words were control words (no meaningful connection with the corresponding prime word) and neighbor words (words representing various types of connections with the corresponding prime word). Spelling tasks were administered twice: immediately after the experiment and two days later. The findings suggest that spelling acquisition depends on two critical factors: orthographic neighbor type and orthographic processing ability. Students’ spelling acquisition was supported by analogizing rime neighbors (e.g., rain/vain). However, facilitative effects were not found for substitution neighbors (e.g., rain/ruin) and transposition neighbors (e.g., clam/calm). Additionally, a student’s level of orthographic processing was an important determinant of spelling acquisition; students with well‐developed orthographic processing ability correctly learned the novel words regardless of the presence of rime neighbors. In contrast, acquiring spelling was far more difficult for students with less developed orthographic processing ability, but their spelling acquisition was strongly facilitated by the presence of rime neighbors. Implications of this research are (a) learners’ orthographic processing skills should be considered when designing spelling instruction and (b) early elementary students need instructional support when making orthographic analogies for substitution and transposition neighbors.

The Curious Role of Morphological Family Size in Language Minority Learners’ Problem Solving of Unfamiliar Words

ABSTRACT Given that words from the academic layer of English typically carry bound roots (min in diminish) rather than free-standing base words (small in smaller), there is a need to understand the factors that make bound roots more or less accessible for morphological problem-solving unfamiliar words. We investigated the contributions of learner characteristics and morpheme/word characteristics to the morphological problem-solving skill of 87 language minority learners. Participants analyzed 18 morphologically complex, unfamiliar words on a Morphological Analysis Task. Among learner characteristics, results from multilevel logistic models indicated that only English proficiency predicted difficulty. For root characteristics, semantic opaqueness, phonological shift, and orthographic neighborhood size predicted difficulty as expected. Morphological family size also predicted difficulty, but in unexpected ways, with larger family size predicting greater difficulty. Exploratory analyses suggested that family size may interact with other root characteristics to further influence difficulty. Findings hold implications for models of morphological processing and literacy intervention design.

Food in the corner and money in the cashews: Semantic activation of embedded stems in the presence or absence of a morphological structure.

In visual word identification, readers automatically access word internal information: they recognize orthographically embedded words (e.g., HAT in THAT) and are sensitive to morphological structure (DEAL-ER, BASKET-BALL). The exact mechanisms that govern these processes, however, are not well established yet - how is this information used? What is the role of affixes in this process? To address these questions, we tested the activation of meaning of embedded word stems in the presence or absence of a morphological structure using two semantic categorization tasks in Italian. Participants made category decisions on words (e.g., is CARROT a type of food?). Some no-answers (is CORNER a type of food?) contained category-congruent embedded word stems (i.e., CORN-). Moreover, the embedded stems could be accompanied by a pseudo-suffix (-er in CORNER) or a non-morphological ending (-ce in PEACE) - this allowed gauging the role of pseudo-suffixes in stem activation. The analyses of accuracy and response times revealed that words were harder to reject as members of a category when they contained an embedded word stem that was indeed category-congruent. Critically, this was the case regardless of the presence or absence of a pseudo-suffix. These findings provide evidence that the lexical identification system activates the meaning of embedded word stems when the task requires semantic information. This study brings together research on orthographic neighbors and morphological processing, yielding results that have important implications for models of visual word processing.

Numerical Assessment of Orthographic Neighbourhood Size Fluctuation in Writing Using Fractal Dimension Analysis

ABSTRACT The orthographic size of a targeted word, the number of new words that can be generated from a targeted word by exchanging a single letter, offers a research window where words can be transformed into numerical values. The CLEARPOND technology from Northwestern University was used for the transformation. A writing can then be modelled as a time series where the fluctuation can be further described using fractal dimension analysis. This project used the Higuchi fractal method for the computation of the fractal dimensions of time series. The proof of concept was conducted using writing examples which include Astronomy writing and English writing, the responses of Trump and Clinton in a Presidential election debate, and song lyrics. The results suggested that a high fractal dimension has an association with a high-demand cognitive task. The use of fractal dimension analysis as a writing assessment tool is discussed with relationship to the current lexical diversity computation technology.

Children with dyslexia show an inhibition domain-specific deficit in reading

Children with dyslexia face persistent difficulties in acquiring reading skills, often making guessing errors characterized by the replacement of a word by an orthographic neighbour. These reading errors could be related to inhibition problems within the reading task. Previous studies examining inhibition skills in dyslexic children led to unclear results when inhibition in cognitive and non-reading tasks was evaluated. The present study aims to demonstrate whether dyslexic children have a specific reading inhibition deficit or if they have a general inhibition deficit. Eighteen dyslexic children (age range: 106–131 months, in Grade 4) were matched to typically developing children on both chronological age (age range: 109–128 months, in Grade 4), and on reading level (age range: 87–98 months, in Grade 2). All children were asked to perform (i) a cognitive inhibition task based on fruit colours; (ii) a reading inhibition task, consisting of reading sentences in which an expected word was replaced by a orthographic neighbour. Our results demonstrated that dyslexic children performed equally compared to the two control groups in the cognitive inhibition task, whilst they read the sentences less accurately than the two control groups in the reading inhibition task, and they were slower than children of the same age. Therefore, our results clearly demonstrate that dyslexic children have an inhibition deficit specific to the reading task. The study highlights the importance of better understanding the specific reading difficulties of dyslexic children, which in turn opens up interesting perspectives for treatment.

Individual Differences in Reading Speed are Linked to Variability in the Processing of Lexical and Contextual Information: Evidence from Single-trial Event-related Brain Potentials

In the current paper, we examined the effects of lexical (e.g. word frequency, orthographic neighborhood density) and contextual (e.g. word predictability in the form of cloze probability) features on single-trial event-related brain potentials in a self-paced reading paradigm. Critically, we examined whether individual differences in reading speed modulated single-trial effects on the N400, an ERP component linked to semantic memory access. Consistent with past work, we found that word frequency effects on the N400 were attenuated with increasing predictability. However, effects of orthographic neighborhood density were robust across all levels of predictability. Importantly, individual differences in reading speed moderated the influence of both frequency and predictability (but not orthographic neighborhood density) on the N400, such that slower readers showed reduced effects compared to faster readers. These data show that different lexical factors influence word processing through dissociable mechanisms. Our findings support a dynamic semantic-memory access model of the N400, in which information at multiple levels (lexical, sentential, individual) simultaneously contributes to the unfolding neural dynamics of comprehension.

The role of a prime’s orthographic neighbors on masked semantic priming

The role of a prime’s orthographic neighbors on masked semantic priming

Neighborhood effects in Chinese character recognition: Going beyond phonological perspectives to explain a possible underlying mechanism

In recent years, there has been an increase of research investigating the neighborhood effect in Chinese character recognition. As for whether orthographic neighborhood size (NS) effect reveals facilitative or inhibitory results in Chinese character recognition, opinions vary and the question is still under debate. To clarify this topic, the present study implemented two experiments, the materials of which respectively were irregular-inconsistent phonograms in Experiment 1 (1A and 1B), and regular-consistent phonograms in Experiment 2 (2A and 2B). The researchers manipulated the orthographic NS and the number of higher frequency neighbors (HFNs) of the target characters, with the character frequency controlled. Results indicated that, regardless of the regularity and consistency of the stimuli, an inhibitory NS effect was observed. Moreover, in conditions of targets both with and without HFN, inhibitory NS effects were also stably displayed. This study revealed a possible underlying mechanism of the orthographic NS effect in the lexical decision task and naming task with Chinese characters, and exploited a global theoretical framework involving the neighborhood effect of characters in Chinese.

Too harts, won sole: Using dysgraphia treatment to address homophone representation

ABSTRACT Previous spoken homophone treatment in aphasia found generalization to untreated homophones and interpreted this as evidence for shared phonological word form representations. Previous written treatment of non-homophones has attributed generalization to orthographic neighbours of treated items to feedback from graphemes to similarly spelled orthographic word forms. This feedback mechanism offers an alternative explanation for generalization found in treatment of spoken homophones. The aim of this study was to investigate the mechanism underpinning generalization (if any) from treatment of written homophones. To investigate this question a participant with acquired dysgraphia and impaired access to orthographic output representations undertook written spelling treatment. Generalization to untreated items with varying degrees of orthographic overlap was investigated. Three experimental sets included homographs (e.g., bank-bank), heterographs (e.g., sail-sale), and direct orthographic neighbours (e.g., bath-path). Treatment improved written picture naming of treated items. Generalization was limited to direct neighbours. Further investigation of generalization found that items with a greater number of close neighbours in the treated set showed greater generalization. This suggests that feedback from graphemes to orthographic word forms is the driving force of generalization. The lack of homograph generalization suggests homographs do not share a representation in the orthographic lexicon.

ERP Effects of masked orthographic neighbour priming in deaf readers

ABSTRACTIn masked priming studies with hearing readers, neighbouring words (e.g. wine, vine) compete through lateral inhibition. Here, we asked whether lateral inhibition also characterises visual word recognition in deaf readers and whether the neural signature of this competition is the same as for hearing readers. Only real words have lexical representations that engage in lateral inhibition. Therefore, we compared processing of target words following neighbouring prime words (e.g. wine-VINE) and pseudowords (e.g. bine-VINE). Targets following prime words elicited larger amplitude N400s and slower lexical decision responses, indicating more effortful processing due to lateral inhibition. Although these effects went in the same direction for hearing and deaf readers, the distribution of the N400 effect differed. We associate the more anterior effect in hearing readers with stronger co-activation of, and competition among, phonological representations. Thus, deaf readers use lexical competition to recognise visual words, but it is primarily restricted to orthographic representations.

The complex interactions of context availability, polysemy, word frequency, and orthographic variables during lexical processing.

In this study we examined the interactions of context availability, polysemy, word frequency, and orthographic neighborhood variables during lexical processing. Context availability and polysemy interacted, in that words that were both lower in context availability and had fewer related senses were especially disadvantaged, as was originally reported by Tokowicz and Kroll (2007). Word frequency interacted with both polysemy and context availability, in that the effects of polysemy and context availability were stronger for lower-frequency words. Finally, orthographic neighborhood size and frequency both interacted with polysemy: the effect of polysemy was greater for words with smaller orthographic neighborhoods and a greater number of higher-frequency neighbors. These findings provide support for the context availability hypothesis (Schwanenflugel & Shoben, 1983). Specifically, the feedback activation account (Hino & Lupker, 1996) offers a mechanistic explanation of our findings that is rooted in feedback from semantic to orthographic representations.

Reading Shakespeare Sonnets: Combining Quantitative Narrative Analysis and Predictive Modeling -an Eye Tracking Study.

As a part of a larger interdisciplinary project on Shakespeare sonnets’ reception (1, 2), the present study analyzed the eye movement behavior of participants reading three of the 154 sonnets as a function of seven lexical features extracted via Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA). Using a machine learning-based predictive modeling approach five ‘surface’ features (word length, orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, orthographic dissimilarity and sonority score) were detected as important predictors of total reading time and fixation probability in poetry reading. The fact that one phonological feature, i.e., sonority score, also played a role is in line with current theorizing on poetry reading. Our approach opens new ways for future eye movement research on reading poetic texts and other complex literary materials(3).

A model-guided dissociation between subcortical and cortical contributions to word recognition

Neurocognitive studies of visual word recognition have provided information about brain activity correlated with orthographic processing. Some of these studies related the orthographic neighborhood density of letter strings to the amount of hypothetical global lexical activity (GLA) in the brain as simulated by computational models of word recognition. To further investigate this issue, we used GLA of words and nonwords from the multiple read-out model of visual word recognition (MROM) and related this activity to neural correlates of orthographic processing in the brain by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Words and nonwords elicited linear effects in the cortex with increasing BOLD responses for decreasing values of GLA. In addition, words showed increasing linear BOLD responses for increasing GLA values in subcortical regions comprising the hippocampus, globus pallidus and caudate nucleus. We propose that these regions are involved in the matching of orthographic input onto representations in long-term memory. The results speak to a potential involvement of the basal ganglia in visual word recognition with globus pallidus and caudate nucleus activity potentially reflecting maintenance of orthographic input in working memory supporting the matching of the input onto stored representations by selection of appropriate lexical candidates and the inhibition of orthographically similar but non-matching candidates.

The Effect of Cognates on Cognitive Control in Late Sequential Multilinguals: A Bilingual Advantage?

The present study investigated the influence of Dutch-German cognates resp. orthographic neighbors on controlled language processing (i.e., response inhibition). Two monolingual Stroop tasks (Dutch and German) were performed by Dutch-speaking participants who could and could not speak German, and by French-speaking participants who could speak German. The question is whether or not cognate language processing affects cognitive control, resulting in a possible bilingual advantage. In the German Stroop task, we found additional advantages in congruent, as well as incongruent, trials for the two Dutch-speaking groups, which postulates the existence of a cognate resp. orthographic neighbor facilitation effect, even when participants only know one of the two cognate languages. The findings are discussed in relation to two possible factors that can modulate the effect of bilingualism on cognitive control: cognateness and orthographic neighborhood. The results suggest the existence of a notification mechanism in the bilingual brain. This mechanism would notify the bilingual brain when dealing with cognates and orthographic neighbors.

Task modulates ERP effects of orthographic neighborhood for pseudowords but not words

Words and pseudowords from high-density orthographic neighborhoods elicit larger amplitude N400s than similar items from low-density orthographic neighborhoods in the lexical decision task. This pattern could be interpreted as an increase in the amount of lexico-semantic information to be processed or as an increase in difficulty identifying a word (or rejecting a pseudoword) amongst many co-activated alternatives. In order to dissociate between these mechanisms, we compared neighborhood effects between a lexical decision task (LDT) and a letter search task (LST). Behaviorally, we found the standard neighborhood and lexicality effects in the LDT, but no significant effects in the LST. Thus, behavioral responses were sensitive to the decisions required by the respective tasks. Electrophysiologically, we found similar N400 neighborhood effects between tasks for words, but the N400 neighborhood effect for pseudowords was only present in the LDT. Moreover, the effect of neighborhood in the LDT occurred earlier for words than for pseudowords. These nuanced differences in the time course and automaticity of word and pseudoword neighborhood effects lend insight into the processes that underlie N400 effects of orthographic neighborhood and how they unfold over time. We propose that the early neighborhood effects for words across tasks were driven by highly automatized word identification processes that were sensitive to the lateral inhibition generated by orthographic neighbors. In contrast, the later neighborhood effects for pseudowords in the LDT could have been driven by task-specific processes tied to how global lexical activity is used to make a lexical decision.

Single Chinese Character fragments: An ERPs Study On Orthographic Neighborhood Effect

Single Chinese Character fragments: An ERPs Study On Orthographic Neighborhood Effect

BasiScript

Abstract This short paper introduces BasiScript, a 9-million-word corpus of contemporary Dutch texts written by primary school children. The data were collected over three years with 17,216 children contributing texts throughout this period. Each word token in the corpus is annotated with the correct orthographical form, the associated lemma and the part of speech. The most frequent polysemous words have been annotated for word meaning, while all words in the lexicon that was derived from the BasiScript corpus have been annotated for corpus and subcorpora frequency, dispersion, length, family size, family frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, and orthographic neighborhood frequency. Images of the texts are available to researchers. The present article describes the corpus and presents a comparison of BasiScript with BasiLex (a Dutch corpus with texts primary school children are likely to read, completed in 2015) by means of frequency profiling.