Whole-word Access Research Articles

Chinese Emotional Two-character Word Processing in Sentence Reading

Compared to the processing of the words alone, the processing of Chinese two-character words in sentences will be closer to a natural scenario, and the understanding of the sentence will be influenced by both linguistic contexts and the non-linguistic contexts. This study, in a moving-window self-paced word-by-word sentence reading task, experimentally explored the processing of Chinese sentences with emotional two-character words using reversible words and reaction time as materials and index respectively. The experimental results showed that emotional words may facilitate the processing of its following two words; there might exist subsequent processing in the third word behind the emotional word; there might exist lexical access and whole-word access, processing of morpheme positioned information in the processing of Chinese two-character words in sentence reading; the processing of Chinese two-character words may be similar with that of word alone. This study expands the research of Chinese emotional two-character words processing.

The processing of Chinese compound words with ambiguous morphemes in sentence context.

We employed a boundary paradigm to investigate how Chinese two-character compounds (i.e., compound words) are processed during reading. The first character of the compound was an ambiguous morpheme that had a dominant and subordinate meaning. In Experiment 1, there were three previews of the second character: identical to the target character; the preview provided subordinate biasing information (the subordinate condition); the preview provided dominant biasing information (the dominant condition). An invisible boundary was inserted between the two characters. We found that gaze durations and go-past times on the compounds were longer in the subordinate condition than those in the dominant or identical conditions. In Experiment 2, the semantic similarity between target and preview words in the dominant condition was manipulated to determine whether the differences in fixation durations in Experiment 1 resulted from the semantic similarity between the preview and target words. There were significant fixation duration differences on the target word between the dominant and subordinate conditions only when the preview and target words were semantically related. This finding indicated that the whole-word meaning plays an important role in processing Chinese compounds and that the whole-word access route is the principal processing route in reading two-character compounds in Chinese.

Do morphemes matter when reading compound words with transposed letters? Evidence from eye-tracking and event-related potentials

ABSTRACTThe current study investigates the online processing consequences of encountering compound words with transposed letters (TLs), to determine if cross-morpheme TLs are more disruptive to reading than those within a single morpheme, as would be predicted by accounts of obligatory morpho-orthopgrahic decomposition. Two measures of online processing, eye movements and event-related potentials (ERPs), were collected in separate experiments. Participants read sentences containing correctly spelled compound words (cupcake), or compounds with TLs occurring either across morphemes (cucpake) or within one morpheme (cupacke). Results showed that between- and within-morpheme transpositions produced equal processing costs in both measures, in the form of longer reading times (Experiment 1) and a late posterior positivity (Experiment 2) that did not differ between conditions. Findings converge to suggest that within- and between-morpheme TLs are equally disruptive to recognition, providing evidence against obligatory morpho-orthographic processing and in favour of whole-word access of English compound words during sentence reading.

Parallel Processing of Whole Words and Morphemes in Visual Word Recognition

Models of morphological processing make different predictions about whether morphologically complex written words are initially decomposed and recognized on the basis of their morphemic subunits or whether they can directly be accessed as whole words and at what point semantics begin to influence morphological processing. In this study, we used unprimed and masked primed lexical decision to compare truly suffixed (darkest) and pseudosuffixed words (glossary) with within-boundary (drakest/golssary) to across-boundary (darekst/glosasry) letter transpositions. Significant transposed-letter similarity effects were found independently of the morphological position of the letter transposition, demonstrating that, in English, morphologically complex whole-word representations can be directly accessed at initial word processing stages. In a third masked primed lexical decision experiment, the same materials were used in the context of stem target priming, and it was found that truly suffixed primes facilitate the recognition of their stem-target (darkest-DARK) to the same extent as pseudosuffixed primes (glossary-GLOSS), which is consistent with theories of early morpho-orthographic decomposition. Taken together, our findings provide evidence for both whole-word access and morphological decomposition at initial stages of visual word recognition and are discussed in the context of a hybrid account.

The processing of novel and lexicalised prefixed words in reading

Two experiments compared how relatively long novel prefixed words (e.g., overfarm) and existing prefixed words were processed in reading. The use of novel prefixed words allows one to examine the roles of whole-word access and decompositional processing in the processing of non-novel prefixed words. The two experiments found that, although there was a large cost to novelty (e.g., gaze durations were about 100 ms longer for novel prefixed words), the effect of the frequency of the root morpheme on fixation measures was about the same for novel and non-novel prefixed words for most measures. This finding rules out a (“horse-race”) dual-route model of processing for existing prefixed words in which the whole-word and decompositional route are parallel and independent, as such a model would predict a substantially larger root frequency effect for novel words (where whole-word processes do not exist). The most likely model to explain the processing of prefixed words is a parallel interactive one.

Neural correlates of Italian nominal compounds and potential impact of headedness effect: An ERP study

An event-related potential (ERP) technique was used to investigate the way in which noun–noun compounds are processed during a lexical decision task with Italian speakers. Reaction times and error rates were higher for compounds than for noncompounds. ERP data showed a more negative peak in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component for compounds. These results are compatible with a dual-route model that posits not only whole-word access for compounds but also an activation of decomposed representations of compound constituents. A final result relates to head position, which in Italian compounds could be on either the left- or the right-hand side of the word. While behavioural analysis did not reveal a difference between left- and right-headed compounds, a difference was found with the P300 component. The role of the compound head as a crucial information-bearing component is discussed.

The effects of root frequency, word frequency, and length on the processing of prefixed English words during reading

Two experiments were performed to investigate the roles of root morpheme frequency and word frequency in the encoding of prefixed words in sentence context. Two alternative words, which were equated on other indices but differed with respect to either root morpheme frequency or word frequency, were embedded in the same sentence frame. In Experiment 1, there was a significant root morpheme frequency effect on gaze duration but only a marginal word frequency effect. Post hoc analyses indicated that word length influenced both effects, with word frequency effects predominating for shorter words and root morpheme effects predominating for longer words. In Experiment 2, word length was also manipulated. There was a significant root frequency effect for longer prefixed words and a significant word frequency effect for shorter prefixed words. The results were best explained by a dual-route model (with competing whole-word access and compositional routes), in which increasing word length inhibited the whole-word process, relative to the compositional route.

Morphological decomposition and the reverse base frequency effect.

If recognition of a polymorphemic word always takes place via its decomposition into stem and affix, then the higher the frequency of its stem (i.e., base frequency) the easier the lexical decision response should be when frequency of the word itself (i.e., surface frequency) is controlled. Past experiments have demonstrated such a base frequency effect, but not under all circumstances. Thus, a dual pathway notion has become dominant as an account of morphological processing whereby both decomposition and whole-word access is possible. Two experiments are reported here that demonstrate how an obligatory decomposition account can handle the absence of base frequency effects. In particular, it is shown that the later stage of recombining the stem and affix is harder for high base frequency words than for lower base frequency words when matched on surface frequency, and that this can counterbalance the advantage of easier access to the higher frequency stem. When the combination stage is crucial for discriminating the word items from the nonword items, a reverse base frequency effect emerges, revealing the disadvantage at this stage for high base frequency words. Such an effect is hard for the dual-pathway account to explain, but follows naturally from the idea of obligatory decomposition.

Lexical access and representation in individuals with developmental language impairment: A cross-linguistic study

Abstract The present study is a psycholinguistic investigation of lexical access and representation in individuals with Genetic Language Impairment (GLI) across three languages: English, French and Greek. Based on the findings of pilot on-line psycholinguistic experiments in English-speaking GLI subjects that suggested the existence of differential patterns of word recognition in this population when compared to non-impaired individuals, a series of simple and primed lexical decision tasks were used probing simple, inflected, derived and compound words. The questions addressed concerned the nature of mental representations in subjects with GLI, the effect of morphological relatedness for access and representation and finally the type of word recognition process opted for by these individuals. The findings suggest that GLI individuals, cross-linguistically, are building mental representations that differ in nature and organization from those of non-impaired individuals. Furthermore, while controls may opt for either whole-word access or decomposition depending on the type of representation processed, and depending on frequency and type of task performed, the GLI subjects tested resort only to whole-word access regardless of the input, at least for the tasks used.