Processing Of Novel Words Research Articles

Orthographic, Semantic, and Contextual Influences on Initial Processing and Learning of Novel Words During Reading: Evidence From Eye Movements

Abstract This study investigates how orthographic, semantic and contextual variables—including word length, concreteness, and contextual support—impact on the processing and learning of new words in a second language (L2) when first encountered during reading. Students learning English as a foreign language (EFL) were recruited to read sentences for comprehension, embedded with unfamiliar L2 words that occurred once. Immediately after this, they received a form recognition test, a meaning recall test, and a meaning recognition test. Eye-movement data showed significant effects of word length on both early and late processing of novel words, along with effects of concreteness only on late-processing eye-tracking measures. Informative contexts were read slower than neutral contexts, yet contextual support did not show any direct influence on the processing of novel words. Interestingly, initial learning of abstract words was better than concrete words in terms of form and meaning recognition. Attentional processing of novel L2 words, operationalized by total reading time, positively predicted L2 learners’ recognition of new orthographic forms. Taken together, these results suggest: 1) orthographic, semantic and contextual factors play distinct roles for initial processing and learning of novel words; 2) online processing of novel words contributes to L2 learners’ initial knowledge of unfamiliar lexical items acquired from reading.

Incidental Vocabulary Learning From Bilingual Subtitled Viewing: An Eye‐Tracking Study

AbstractThis study examined the effectiveness of bilingual subtitles relative to captions, subtitles, and no subtitles for incidental vocabulary learning. Learners’ processing of novel words in the subtitles and its relationship to learning gains were also explored. While their eye movements were recorded, 112 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English watched a documentary in one of 4 conditions: bilingual subtitles, captions, L1 subtitles, and no subtitles. Vocabulary pretests and posttests assessed the participants’ knowledge of the target vocabulary for form recognition, meaning recall, and meaning recognition. Results suggested an advantage for bilingual subtitles over captions for meaning recognition and over L1 subtitles for meaning recall. Bilingual subtitles were less effective than captions for form recognition. Participants in the bilingual subtitles group spent more time reading the Chinese translations of the target items than the English target words. The amount of attention to the English target words (but not to the translations) predicted learning gains.

THE EFFECT OF GLOSS TYPE ON LEARNERS’ INTAKE OF NEW WORDS DURING READING

AbstractA reading experiment combining online and offline data evaluates the effect on second language learners’ reading behaviors and lexical uptake of three gloss types designed to clarify word meaning. These are (a) textual definition, (b) textual definition accompanied by picture, and (c) picture only. We recorded eye movements while intermediate learners of English read a story presented on-screen and containing six glossed pseudowords repeated three times each. Cumulative fixation counts and time spent on the pseudowords predicted posttest performance for form recall and meaning recognition, confirming findings of previous eye-tracking studies of vocabulary acquisition from reading. However, the total visual attention given to pseudowords and glosses was smallest in the condition with picture-only glosses, and yet this condition promoted best retention of word meaning. This suggests that gloss types differentially influence learners’ processing of novel words in ways that may elude the quantitative measures of attention captured by eye-tracking.

The Effect of Training-Induced Visual Imageability on Electrophysiological Correlates of Novel Word Processing.

The concreteness effect (CE) describes a processing advantage for concrete over abstract words. Electrophysiologically, the CE manifests in higher N400 and N700 amplitudes for concrete words. The contribution of the stimulus-inherent imageability to the electrophysiological correlates of the CE is not yet fully unraveled. This EEG study focused on the role of imageability irrespective of concreteness by examining the effects of training-induced visual imageability on the processing of novel words. In two training sessions, 21 healthy participants learned to associate novel words with pictures of novel objects as well as electron-microscopical structures and were additionally familiarized with novel words without any picture association. During a post-training EEG session, participants categorized trained novel words with or without picture association, together with real concrete and abstract words. Novel words associated with novel object pictures during the training elicited a higher N700 than familiarized novel words without picture-association. Crucially, this training-induced N700 effect resembled the CE found for real words. However, a CE on the N400 was found for real words, but no effect of imageability in novel words. The results suggest that the N400 CE for real words depends on the integration of multiple semantic features, while mere visual imageability might contribute to the CE in the N700 time window.

Nonword repetition depends on the frequency of sublexical representations at different grain sizes: Evidence from a multi-factorial analysis

The nonword repetition task (NWR) has been widely used in basic cognitive and clinical research, as well as in clinical assessment, and has been proposed as a clinical marker for Specific Language Impairment (SLI). Yet the mechanisms underlying performance on this task are not clear. This study offers insights into these mechanisms through a comprehensive examination of item-related variables identified in previous research as possibly contributing to NWR scores and through testing the predictive power of each in relation to the others. A unique feature of the study is that all factors are considered simultaneously. Fifty-seven typically developing children were tested with a NWR task containing 150 nonwords differing in length, phonotactic probability, lexical neighbourhood and phonological complexity. The results indicate that phonological processing of novel words draws on sublexical representations at all grain sizes and that these representations are phonological, unstructured and insensitive to morphemehood. We propose a novel index – mean ngram frequency of all phonemes – that best captures the extent to which a nonword draws on sublexical representations. The study demonstrates the primacy of sublexical representations in NWR performance with implications for the nature of the deficit in SLI.

The nature of orthographic learning in self-teaching: Testing the extent of transfer

The current study was designed to test how orthographic learning, or the learning of the spelling patterns of words, happens within the self-teaching paradigm. One possibility is that orthographic learning occurs on a word-specific basis. Two other possibilities are that orthographic learning transfers specifically to the processing of novel words that are morphologically related or that it transfers to novel words that are orthographically similar, regardless of morphological relationship. In an orthographic learning paradigm, we asked children in Grades 3 and 5 to read nonwords embedded in short stories. In a between-participants design, some children read nonwords that were base forms, others read nonwords that were morphologically complex forms, and others read nonwords that were orthographically complex forms (e.g., feap, feaper, and feaple, respectively). Children completed an orthographic choice task with the same items as in the stories. To evaluate transfer of learning, children also completed orthographic choices for the two forms of the nonwords not seen in the stories. Results indicated that children’s orthographic learning affected processing of novel items that appeared to be morphologically related as well as those that shared only orthographic structure (e.g., both feaper and feaple). Additional analyses showed that these effects were held across cases when children did and did not successfully decode the novel words in the learning experience, although successful decoding did lead to higher levels of orthographic learning and transfer. Together, the findings suggest that children’s prior experiences affect their processing of novel words that share orthographic similarity, likely reflecting a role for orthographic analogies in the self-teaching process.

Word length effects on novel words: Evidence from eye movements

The present study investigated the effects of word length on eye movement behavior during initial processing of novel words while reading. Adult skilled readers' eye movements were monitored as they read novel or known target words in sentence frames with neutral context preceding the target word. Comparable word length effects on all single-fixation measures for novel and known words suggested that both types of words were subject to similar initial encoding strategies. The impact of the absence of an existing lexical entry emerged in multiple first-pass fixation measures in the form of interactions between word length (long and short) and word type (novel and known). Specifically, readers spent significantly more first-pass time refixating long novel targets than short novel targets; however, the first-pass time spent refixating known controls did not differ as a function of length. Implications of these findings for models of eye movement control while reading, as well as for vocabulary acquisition in reading, are discussed.

Out of sight, but not out of mind: 21-month-olds use syntactic information to learn verbs even in the absence of a corresponding event

By 27 months of age, toddlers hearing a novel verb in transitive syntax are able to (1) establish an initial representation for the verb based on its syntactic properties alone, even in the absence of a relevant visual scene, and (2) retrieve this representation later when a candidate causative referent comes into view. This ability is important considering that over 60% of the verbs that mothers produce in conversations with their children refer to events that are not currently observable. Here, we advance this finding in two ways. First, we demonstrate the same ability in 21-month-olds, who do not yet show mastery of transitive structures in their own productions. Second, we use analyses of toddlers’ eye gaze to explore the time-course with which they process the novel verb and assign its referent when candidate scenes become available. These results (1) provide the first evidence that 21-month-olds establish a representation of a novel verb's meaning from syntax alone, and (2) establish that they process and assign meaning to novel verbs with a similar time-course to that for novel nouns. The findings are thus relevant to our understanding of both word learning and lexical processing of novel words.

Context length and reading novel words: An eye‐movement investigation

The current study investigated the effects of context length on the processing of novel words. Participants read real adjectives or novel words embedded in either sentence or paragraph contexts while their eye movements were recorded. The results extend the literature on novel word reading by exploring the time-course of word processing using realistic contexts derived from existing sources. Eye-movement measures demonstrated that readers were very sensitive to the presence of novel words. Novel words were more likely to be fixated and had longer reading times than real words. In addition, words in sentence contexts had longer gaze durations than words in paragraphs. The effect of novelty on reading the target word did not vary as a function of the context length. While performance on the surprise post-test did not demonstrate significant word learning, participants did report higher confidence in correct responses than incorrect, suggesting that some learning took place.

Acquiring novel words and their past tenses: Evidence from lexical effects on phonetic categorisation

Two experiments addressed how novel verbs come to be represented in the auditory input lexicon, and how the inflected forms of such novel words are acquired and recognised. Participants were introduced to new spoken forms as uninflected verbs. These varied in whether they contained a final /d/ (e.g., confald or confal). Either immediately after training or a week later they performed phonetic categorisation on variants of these forms that ended with an ambiguous phoneme on a /d/-/t/ continuum. Lexical influences in categorisation would be demonstrated by a /d/ response bias, consistent with either the learnt uninflected form (e.g., confald) or a regular past tense inflection of the learnt form (e.g., confalled). In Experiment 1, lexical effects on categorisation were present for both word types, immediately and a week after exposure. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these findings using degraded stimuli. While lexical effects on response choice were present straight away, lexical facilitation of response speed was stronger after a week. These findings provide evidence for an account of verb learning in which rapidly stored word form information can have immediate lexical properties in some respects, such as allowing generalisation of existing knowledge of verb morphology to new words. However, consolidation over time enhances these representations, enabling swift lexical influences on phoneme perception. Implications for theories of the representation of inflectional forms and the time course of lexical processing of novel words are discussed.

Metalinguistic judgments of phonotactics by monolinguals and bilinguals

AbstractThis paper demonstrates that a speaker's judgments of well-formedness for novel forms is based directly on their lexical knowledge by showing individual differences in performance in metalinguistic processing of novel words by 68 monolingual English speakers and 30 Spanish-English bilinguals. Monolingual participants were given a well-formedness judgment task and vocabulary assessment in English. Bilingual participants participated in well-formedness judgment tasks and vocabulary assessments in both English and Spanish. An influence of onset-rime phonotactic probability on well-formedness judgments was demonstrated, replicating and extending previous work to a bilingual population. For the bilinguals, there was no evidence of interference between the two languages in the well-formedness task. Individual differences in well-formedness judgments were examined by looking at relations between well-formedness judgments and vocabulary knowledge. Evidence supporting a connection between lexical knowledge and well-formedness task performance was found in the English data for both monolingual and bilingual participants, but this finding was not replicated in the Spanish data. Participants with a larger vocabulary in English were more accepting of low probability nonwords in English. It appears that those with greater vocabulary knowledge are more likely to have experienced improbable phonological constituents, and may also have a lower threshold for “unacceptable” nonwords, if their threshold is based on a likelihood estimate from their individual lexicon. The lack of a lexical effect for Spanish may reflect the lack of a comparable vocabulary test for Spanish. Overall, it appears that performance on well-formedness judgment tasks for nonwords is shown to be related to emergent generalizations based on the individual's linguistic experience with a language, as reflected in their lexical knowledge.

Assembling and encoding word representations: fMRI subsequent memory effects implicate a role for phonological control

Novel word learning is central to the flexibility inherent in the human language capacity. Word learning may partially depend on long-term memory formation during the assembly of phonological representations from orthographic inputs. In the present study, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) examined the contributions of phonological control—a component of the verbal working memory system—to phonological assembly and word learning. Subjects were scanned while making syllable decisions about visually presented familiar (English) and novel (pseudo-English and Foreign) words, a task that required retrieval and analysis of existing phonological codes or the assembly and analysis of novel representations. Results revealed that left inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPC) and bilateral parietal cortices were differentially engaged during the processing of novel words, suggesting that this circuit is recruited during phonological assembly. A subsequent memory analysis that examined the relation between fMRI signal and the subject’s ability to later remember the words (a measure of effective memory formation) revealed that the magnitude of activation in LIPC, bilateral superior parietal, and left inferior parietal cortices was positively correlated with later memory. Moreover, although the magnitude of the subsequent memory effect in parietal cortex was not significantly affected by word type, this effect was greater in posterior LIPC for novel (pseudo-English) than for familiar (English) words. In the course of subserving the assembly of novel word representations, the phonological (articulatory) control component of the phonological system appears to play a central role in the encoding of novel words into long-term memory.