Word Naming Experiment Research Articles

Adult L2 learners’ morphological sensitivity in a morphosyllabic language

Abstract This study examined adult L2 learners’ morphological sensitivity in Chinese, a morphosyllabic language, and explored whether there is any modulating effects of L2 proficiency. Two word naming experiments (segment shifting and standard word naming) were administered to three participant groups, including native Chinese speakers, higher L2 Chinese proficiency learners, and lower L2 Chinese proficiency learners. In both experiments, reaction times (RTs) displayed only main effects of Chinese proficiency group and word type. This suggests that the morphological processing of L2 learners did not differ from that of native speakers, although the RTs of L2 learners were longer and exhibited more variability. Concerning error rates, both experiments showed that learners with higher and lower L2 proficiency had significantly higher error rates for words with unreliable morphological cues compared to those with reliable cues. Taken together, these findings indicate that L2 learners developed sensitivity to intraword morphological structure and employed decompositional strategies when reading Chinese words, irrespective of their L2 proficiency levels.

Phonological similarity effects in cross-script word processing

Abstract The present study explored the conditions under which phonological similarity effects arise without orthographic confounds by testing languages with true cognates but divergent scripts. We investigated the similarities and differences between within- and cross-script processing patterns by providing data from an understudied language pair, Korean and Cantonese, which have many cognates but bear no orthographic resemblance. In two word-naming and translation tasks, beginning and intermediate Cantonese-speaking learners of Korean (N = 112) were tested for the processing speed of Sino-Korean words. The results of the word-naming experiments showed that phonologically similar words were processed faster than dissimilar ones, regardless of L2 fluency, especially when the logographic L1 characters were used as primes. However, facilitation by shared phonology was not observed in the translation experiments in either direction. L1-to-L2 forward translation was much faster than L2-to-L1 backward translation, indicating conceptual memory being used as a primary processing pathway. The characteristics of cross-script processing patterns were discussed in terms of the structure of bilingual memory.

Individual word activation and word frequency effects during the processing of opaque idiomatic expressions.

Idiom processing studies have paid considerable attention to the relationship between idiomatic expressions as a whole and their constituent words. Although most research focused on the semantic properties of the constituent words, their orthographic form could also play a role in processing. To test this, we assessed both form and meaning activation of individual words during the processing of opaque idioms. In two primed word naming experiments, Dutch native speakers silently read sentences word by word and then named the last word of the sentence. This target word was embedded in either an idiomatic or a literal context and was expected and correct in this context (COR), semantically related (REL) to the expected word, or unrelated (UNREL) to the expected word. The correct target word in the idiomatic context was always part of an opaque idiom. Faster naming latencies for the idiom-final noun than for the unrelated target in the idiomatic context indicated that the idiom was activated as a whole during processing. In addition, semantic facilitation was observed in the literal context (COR < REL < UNREL), but not in the idiomatic context (COR < REL = UNREL). This is evidence that the idiom-final noun was not activated at the meaning level of representation. However, an inhibitory effect of orthographic word frequency of the idiom-final noun indicated that the idiom-final noun was activated at the form level. These results provide evidence in favour of a hybrid model of idiom processing in which the individual words and the idiom as a whole interact on form and meaning levels of representation.

The role of morphology in word naming in Spanish-speaking children

ABSTRACTThe role of morphology in word recognition during reading acquisition in transparent orthographies is a subject that has received little attention. The goal of this study is to examine the variables affecting the fluency and accuracy for morphologically complex word reading across grade levels in Spanish. We conducted two word-naming experiments in which morphological complexity and word frequency were factorially manipulated. Experiment 1 was a cross-sectional study with 2nd-, 4th- and 6th-grade children as participants. In Experiment 2, a longitudinal study, a sample of the children in 2nd and 4th grades in Experiment 1 were retested with the same stimuli 2 years later in order to explore the evolution of morphology and frequency effects. Analyses of reading latencies and accuracy in both experiments showed that grade and frequency affected both reading fluency and accuracy. Morphology only affected fluency, irrespective of grade. In accordance with previous literature in Italian, we conclude that when learning to read in transparent orthographies, morphology mostly benefits reading fluency since accurate pronunciation can be achieved through grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules.

Word Naming in Bodo-Assamese Bilinguals: The Role of Semantic Context, Cognate Status, Second Language Age of Acquisition and Proficiency.

The current study investigated the effects of the semantic context, cognate status of the word and second language age of acquisition and proficiency in two word naming experiments (Experiment 1 and 2). Three groups of Bodo-Assamese bilinguals named cognate and non-cognate words in their first language, Bodo and second language, Assamese, which were presented in categorized and randomized lists. Experiment 1 demonstrated significant category interference for both cognate and non-cognate words; whereas, in Experiment 2, category interference was observed only in case of cognate words, indicating that naming in L2 was more prone to semantic effects. In Experiment 1, the magnitude of the category interference effect was larger for the low proficient bilinguals, but in Experiment 2, only the high proficient bilinguals demonstrated category interference effect. Further, cognate facilitation effect was not observed in both experiments which is in line with the findings of previous studies. The findings are discussed in light of the predictions of the Revised Hierarchical Model.

Rules Versus Statistics: Insights From a Highly Inflected Language

Inflectional morphology has been taken as a paradigmatic example of rule-governed grammatical knowledge (Pinker, 1999). The plausibility of this claim may be related to the fact that it is mainly based on studies of English, which has a very simple inflectional system. We examined the representation of inflectional morphology in Serbian, which encodes number, gender, and case for nouns. Linguists standardly characterize this system as a complex set of rules, with disagreements about their exact form. We present analyses of a large corpus of nouns which showed that, as in English, Serbian inflectional morphology is quasiregular: It exhibits numerous partial regularities creating neighborhoods that vary in size and consistency. We then asked whether a simple connectionist network could encode this statistical information in a manner that also supported generalization. A network trained on 3,244 Serbian nouns learned to produce correctly inflected phonological forms from a specification of a word's lemma, gender, number, and case, and generalized to untrained cases. The model's performance was sensitive to variables that also influence human performance, including surface and lemma frequency. It was also influenced by inflectional neighborhood size, a novel measure of the consistency of meaning to form mapping. A word-naming experiment with native Serbian speakers showed that this measure also affects human performance. The results suggest that, as in English, generating correctly inflected forms involves satisfying a small number of simultaneous probabilistic constraints relating form and meaning. Thus, common computational mechanisms may govern the representation and use of inflectional information across typologically diverse languages.

The role of grammatical category information in spoken word retrieval.

We investigated the role of lexical syntactic information such as grammatical gender and category in spoken word retrieval processes by using a blocking paradigm in picture and written word naming experiments. In Experiments 1, 3, and 4, we found that the naming of target words (nouns) from pictures or written words was faster when these target words were named within a list where only words from the same grammatical category had to be produced (homogeneous category list: all nouns) than when they had to be produced within a list comprising also words from another grammatical category (heterogeneous category list: nouns and verbs). On the other hand, we detected no significant facilitation effect when the target words had to be named within a homogeneous gender list (all masculine nouns) compared to a heterogeneous gender list (both masculine and feminine nouns). In Experiment 2, using the same blocking paradigm by manipulating the semantic category of the items, we found that naming latencies were significantly slower in the semantic category homogeneous in comparison with the semantic category heterogeneous condition. Thus semantic category homogeneity caused an interference, not a facilitation effect like grammatical category homogeneity. Finally, in Experiment 5, nouns in the heterogeneous category condition had to be named just after a verb (category-switching position) or a noun (same-category position). We found a facilitation effect of category homogeneity but no significant effect of position, which showed that the effect of category homogeneity found in Experiments 1, 3, and 4 was not due to a cost of switching between grammatical categories in the heterogeneous grammatical category list. These findings supported the hypothesis that grammatical category information impacts word retrieval processes in speech production, even when words are to be produced in isolation. They are discussed within the context of extant theories of lexical production.

Influence of prime lexicality, frequency, and pronounceability on the masked onset priming effect

The present study investigates the origins of the masked onset priming effect (MOPE). There are two alternative interpretations that account for most of the evidence reported on the MOPE, so far. The speech planning account (SP) identifies the locus of the MOPE in the preparation of the speech response. In contrast, the dual-route theory proposes that the effect arises as a result of the processing of the prime by the nonlexical route. In a series of masked onset priming word naming experiments we test the validity of these accounts by manipulating the primes' frequency, their lexical status, and pronounceability. We found consistent MOPEs of similar magnitude with high- and low-frequency prime words as well as with pronounceable nonwords. Contrarily, when primes consisted of unpronounceable consonantal strings the effect disappeared, suggesting that pronounceability of the prime is a prerequisite for the emergence of the MOPE. These results are in accordance with the predictions of the SP account. The pattern of effects obtained in the present study further defines the origins of the MOPE.

Age of acquisition effects depend on the mapping between representations and the frequency of occurrence: Empirical and computational evidence1

In the last few years, a number of connectionist models have been described that provide an explanation for age-of-acquisition (AoA) effects in verbal and nonverbal tasks. Further simulations and an empirical study were conducted to test two predictions that arise from these models. The first prediction is that AoA effects will be modulated by the nature of the mapping between representations; effects should be largest for arbitrary mappings (i.e., where there is no relationship between input and output representations such as that found in mapping semantics to phonology, e.g., picture naming), smaller for systematic mappings and minimal for componential representations (such as those found in mapping orthography to phonology for languages with relatively transparent orthographies). The second prediction from the models is that not only AoA but also frequency should influence performance and that these two variables might interact. These two predictions were tested in an empirical study. Performance on a set of 80 picturable nouns that orthogonally varied AoA and word frequency was directly compared in picture and word naming experiments. As predicted, there was a dramatic interaction between AoA and task, with substantial AoA effects in picture naming but not word naming. In addition, there was evidence for an interaction between AoA and frequency in both tasks. These results highlight the importance of the computational mapping between representations when considering both the likely performance in any task and the influence of any underlying factors.

Word Reading and Processing of the Identity and Order of Letters by Children with Low Vision and Sighted Children

Two aspects of word reading were investigated in two word-naming experiments: the identification of the constituent letters of a word and the processing of letter-order information. Both experiments showed qualitative differences between children with low vision and sighted children, but no quantitative or qualitative differences within the group of children with low vision.

Regularity effects in word naming: what are they?

In a word-naming experiment, word-body consistency was crossed with grapheme-to-phoneme regularity to test predictions of current models of word recognition. In the latency and error data, a clear effect of consistency was observed, with the influence of regularity somewhat weaker. In addition, simulation data from three contemporary models of word recognition were obtained for the stimuli used in the experiment in order to compare the models' latencies with those of humans. The simulations showed that the human latency data are most consistent with the parallel-distributed-processing model of Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson (1996), less so with the dual-process model (Zorzi, Houghton, & Butterworth, 1998), and least so with the dual-route-cascaded model (Coltheart & Rastle, 1994).

The effects on priming of word frequency, number of repetitions, and delay depend on the magnitude of priming.

Conflicting findings with respect to the effects of experimental manipulations on priming have been reported in previous studies. It is argued that, in many priming tasks, large amounts of task-relevant information are available from various sources, and that, therefore, the information available from a specific study episode will have only a small impact on overall performance level. Under such circumstances, high levels of baseline performance and small priming effects will be observed. The experiments reported here investigated the hypothesis that a high baseline performance in information-processing tasks that are used to measure priming may constrain priming effects. In a series of word-naming experiments, perceptual difficulty and, therefore, baseline performance was manipulated. Under easy conditions, priming effects were relatively small and were not affected by word frequency, spaced repetition, or delay. Under more difficult conditions, priming effects were larger, and significant effects of all of the above-mentioned experimental manipulations were observed. Under conditions that produced the largest priming effects, a significant relationship between priming and explicit-memory performance could be observed. In the last experiment, it was shown that the characteristics of the retrieval task can substantially affect the magnitude of priming. It is argued that priming effects should be considered to reflect interactions between memory traces and the information-processing components of the priming task.

Being Happy and Seeing ''Happy' ': Emotional State Mediates Visual Word Recognition

Lexical decision and word-naming experiments were conducted to examine influences of emotions in visual word recognition. Emotional states of happiness and sadness were induced with classical music. In the first two experiments, happy and sad participants (and neutral-emotion participants in Experiment 2) made lexical decisions about letter-strings, some of which were words with meanings strongly associated with the emotions happiness, love, sadness, and anger. Emotional state of the perceiver was associated with facilitation of response to words categorically related to that emotion (i.e. happy and sad words). However, such facilitation was not observed for words that were related by valence, but not category, to the induced emotions (i.e. love and anger words). Evidence for categorical influences of emotional state in word recognition was also observed in a third experiment that employed a word-naming task. Together the results support a categorical emotions model of the influences of emotion in information processing (Niedenthal, Setterlund, & Jones, 1994). Moreover, the result of the wordnaming experiment suggests that the effects of emotion are evident at very early stages in cognitive processing.

Word frequency effects in naming for experienced and previously experienced adult readers of Persian

In a word naming experiment, experienced readers of Persian named high frequency transparent Persian words significantly faster than matched low frequency words. There was no such frequency effect for adults who had, during the past decade or more, very little experience in reading materials in Persian due to immigration to the West. Overall, the previously experienced adults named words significantly slower than their experienced counterparts. The implications of this finding in relation to models of visual word recognition are discussed.

The masked repetition priming effect dissipates when increasing the inter-stimulus interval: Evidence from word naming

We report a word naming experiment that investigated the life duration of the masked repetition priming effect for high- and low-frequency words across a range of five inter-stimulus intervals (0, 50, 150, 500 and 1000 ms). The results clearly demonstrate that the masked repetition priming effect is a very short-lived phenomenon since, while it remains robust for ISIs up to and including 150 ms, it dissipates with ISIs of 500 ms and 1000 ms. Moreover, we replicated the classical additive effect of target frequency and masked repetition priming. These results are discussed in relation to different explanations of masked repetition priming effects in visual word recognition.

A study of masked form priming in picture and word naming.

We report a series of picture- and word-naming experiments in which the masked priming paradigm with prime exposures brief enough to prevent prime identification were used. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the prior presentation of the same word prime facilitates both picture and word naming independently of target frequency. In Experiments 2 and 3, primes that were pseudohomophones of picture targets produced facilitatory effects compared with orthographic controls, but these orthographically similar nonword primes did not facilitate picture naming compared with unrelated controls. On the other hand, word targets were primarily facilitated by orthographic prime-target overlap. This marked dissociation in the priming effects obtained with picture and word targets is discussed in relation to different explanations of masked form priming effects in visual word recognition and current models of picture and word naming.

A Dissociation of Frequency and Regularity Effects in Pronunciation Performance Across Young-Adults, Older Adults, and Individuals With Senile Dementia of the Alzheimer-Type

The regularity of a given spelling-to-sound sequence in English primarily influences the ease of naming low-frequency words and produces little influence on the ease of naming high-frequency words. This frequency × regularity interaction has been accommodated within both a single-route connectionist model and dual-route models of pronunciation performance. Recent evidence presented by dual-route theorists suggests that the sublexical route in naming performance demands more attention than the lexical route. The present study further explores this possibility by investigating the word-frequency by regularity interaction across five different groups of subjects that have well-documented changes in attentional capacities. The five groups were healthy young adults, older adults between 60 and 80 years of age, older adults greater than 80 years of age, very mildly demented individuals with senile dementia of the Alzheimers Type (SDAT), and mild/moderately demented SDAT individuals. The response latency results from a simple word-naming experiment indicated that there was a consistent increase in the word-frequency effect across the five subject groups (from young to mildly demented individuals) without any corresponding increase in either the regularity effect or the frequency × regularity interaction. However, the results also indicated that there was an increased likelihood of regularization errors (e.g., pronouncing the word pint such that it rhymes with hint) across the subject groups. These results are viewed as most consistent with a model in which healthy young adults are especially slow to name low-frequency irregular words because they must inhibit inconsistent output from an assembled route and produce the correct output from the addressed route. We argue that the increased likelihood of regularization errors in the healthy aged individuals and to a greater extent in the SDAT individuals may be due to a breakdown in the inhibitory control of partially activated (assembled route) information.

Phonology in multisyllabic word recognition

The present study used two word-naming experiments to investigate whether a phonological representation is computed in the perception of multisyllabic words. In the first experiment, 100- or 250-msec beginning syllable previews were given, followed by the whole word. The results indicated that no phonological representation was computed at 100 msec, but a phonological representation was computed at 250 msec. In Experiment 2, the second syllable was given as a prime for either 100 or 250 msec. The results showed that no phonological representation was computed for the end of a multisyllabic word. Results are discussed in terms of current dual-route theory and connectionist models.

Language in Use

In this paper, a radically innovative view is taken on L1 and L2 lexical knowledge. Instead of considering lexical knowledge and the mechanisms necessary to retrieve lexical knowledge as essentially static and linear, this paper explores the view of considering language use as dynamic and non-linear. This paper aims to complement what we can learn about language processing using the traditional linear statistical methods with using non-linear statistical methods. Variability in L1 and L2 language production is looked at on multiple time scales: seconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years. A longitudinal single subject study is presented that took place over a two-year time span. The experiment discussed concerns a repeated word naming experiment in L1 Dutch and L2 English. The response time latencies obtained from this task are analysed using spectral analysis. This technique focuses on dynamic frequency patterns of variability that have thus far been regarded as irrelevant ‘noise’. Looking at the patterns found within the noise shows they fall within the spectrum of ‘pink noise’, a variability pattern that is associated with the degree of automaticity and control in behaviour. Automatic behaviour shows a significantly different pattern of variability – falling within the spectrum of random or white noise – than more controlled behaviour, falling within the spectrum of pink noise. These techniques have in the past already been applied to language processing in monolingual speakers, but are now for the first time applied to the language processing patterns of an advanced bilingual speaker. The results found here indicate that in the multilingual mind, there is a strong interaction between languages. Spectral analysis shows that the variability of lexical productions in L1 and L2 changes as a function of the recent context of episodic use of the other language. The variability patterns after a 7-day period of exclusively using the L1 were reliably different from the patterns found after a 7-day period of exclusively using the L2. The language used most recently showed a much clearer fractal pattern (‘pink noise’) after being used exclusively for 7 days, while at the same time, the language that had not been used had changed toward the more random pattern, reflecting perturbations from the most recently used language. Recent episodic use of either language was thus found to directly influence performance of the other language. In conclusion, not factoring out time when looking at language performance is expected to lead to many new insights to in the field of L1 and L2 language development.