Memory enhancement for emotional words: Are emotional words more vividly remembered than neutral words?

Individuals are more likely to remember negative information than neutral information. In the experiments reported here, we examined whether individuals were also more likely to remember details of the presentation of negative words, as compared with neutral words. In Experiment 1, the remember-know procedure was used to examine the effect of emotion on the vividness of an individual's memory, showing that remember responses were more frequently assigned to negative words than neutral words. In Experiment 2, a source memory paradigm was used, and again, evidence that individuals' memories were more detailed for negative than for neutral words was found. In Experiments 3-6, we examined the relative contribution of valence and arousal, finding that both dimensions increased the vividness of remembered information (i.e., items with valence only and those that elicited arousal were better remembered than neutral information) but that the effect was greater for words that evoked arousal than for those with valence only. The results support a qualitative, as well as a quantitative, memory benefit for emotional, as compared with neutral, words.     

Are the spoken durations of rare words longer than those of common words?

The effects of word frequency, word length, and practice were examined in oral productions of subjects reading lists of 25 rare or common monosyllabic words. Articulation and pause durations, their ratio, and total reading durations were derived from recordings of subjects’ speech. Recorded speech was sampled at 10 kHz, and a criterion of eight times the mean noise level was used to classify productions as articulation or pause. Lists of high frequency words were read more quickly than lists of low-frequency words. No differences were observed in the articulation component. Pause duration was greater for rare than for common words. The ratio of pause to articulation varied with length and word type. No differences were found for high-frequency words, but the ratio of five-letter words was significantly greater than that of three- or four-letter rare words. Results were discussed in relation to the nature and locus of the word-frequency effect. Criteria for defining and measuring speech productions were also raised.     

Do frequency characteristics of nonfixated words influence the processing of fixated words during reading?

Are readers capable of lexically processing more than one word at a time? In five eye movement experiments, we examined to what extent lexical characteristics of the nonfixated word to the right of fixation influenced readers' eye behaviour on the fixated word. In three experiments, we varied the frequency of the initial constituent of two‐noun compounds, while in two experiments the whole‐word frequency was manipulated. The results showed that frequency characteristics of the parafoveal word sometimes affected eye behaviour prior to fixating it, but the direction of effects was not consistent and the effects were not replicated across all experiments. Follow‐up regression analyses suggested that foveal and parafoveal word length as well as the frequency of the word‐initial trigram of the parafoveal word may modulate the parafoveal‐on‐foveal effects. It is concluded that low‐frequency words or lexemes may under certain circumstances serve as a magnet to attract an early eye movement to them. However, further corroborative evidence is clearly needed.     

Are words represented by nodes?

Semantic priming in a lexical decision task was investigated with concurrent pretarget and posttarget primes. The posttarget prime also served as a pattern mask of the lexical decision target. Forward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related pretarget prime and an unrelated posttarget prime. Backward priming is defined as the presence of a semantically related posttarget prime and an unrelated pretarget prime. Forward and backward priming were compared both when the nonword foils were "legal" and when they were "illegal" with respect to English orthography. Predictions were derived for two general approaches to word recognition: spreading-activation and expectancy-set theories. Both approaches assume that word representations occupy distinct, nonoverlapping locations in memory. Backward-prime facilitation was equivalent to forward-prime facilitation when nonword foils were illegal; however, backward-prime facilitation was not significant when nonword foils were legal. These results challenge both approaches. The proposed solution uses semantic-space (distributed) representations that are functionally unitized by a resonant matching (verification) process.     

What makes words sound similar?

Although similarity plays an important role in accounts of language processing, there are surprisingly few direct empirical studies of the phonological similarity between words, and it is therefore not clear whether similarity comparisons between words involve processes similar to those involved in other cognitive domains. In five experiments, participants chose which of two monosyllabic pseudo-words sounded more similar to a target pseudo-word. Our results are generally consistent with the structural alignment theory of comparisons between complex mental representations, suggesting that phonological word similarity parallels similarity involving other kinds of information including visual objects and scenes, events, and word meanings. We use our results to test new metrics of word similarity, and identify predictions for future similarity research both in the domain of word sounds and in other cognitive domains.     

Do children's number words begin noisy?

How do children acquire exact meanings for number words like three or forty‐seven? In recent years, a lively debate has probed the cognitive systems that support learning, with some arguing that an evolutionarily ancient “approximate number system” drives early number word meanings, and others arguing that learning is supported chiefly by representations of small sets of discrete individuals. This debate has centered around the findings generated by Wynn's ( 1990 , 1992 ) Give‐a‐Number task, which she used to categorize children into discrete “knower level” stages. Early reports confirmed Wynn's analysis, and took these stages to support the “small sets” hypothesis. However, more recent studies have disputed this analysis, and have argued that Give‐a‐Number data reveal a strong role for approximate number representations. In the present study, we use previously collected Give‐a‐Number data to replicate the analyses of these past studies, and to show that differences between past studies are due to assumptions made in analyses, rather than to differences in data themselves. We also show how Give‐a‐Number data violate the assumptions of parametric tests used in past studies. Based on simple non‐parametric tests and model simulations, we conclude that (a) before children learn exact meanings for words like one, two, three, and four, they first acquire noisy preliminary meanings for these words, (b) there is no reliable evidence of preliminary meanings for larger meanings, and (c) Give‐a‐Number cannot be used to readily identify signatures of the approximate number system.     

Are brand names special words? Letter visual-similarity affects the identification of brand names,but not common words

Brand names are often considered a special type of words of special relevance to examine the role of visual codes during reading: unlike common words, brand names are typically presented with the same letter-case configuration (e.g., IKEA, adidas). Recently, Pathak et al. (European Journal of Marketing, 2019, 53 , 2109) found an effect of visual similarity for misspelled brand names when the participants had to decide whether the brand name was spelled correctly or not (e.g., tacebook [baseword: facebook] was responded more slowly and less accurately than xacebook). This finding is at odds with both orthographically based visual-word recognition models and prior experiments using misspelled common words (e.g., viotin [baseword: violin ] is identified as fast as viocin ). To solve this puzzle, we designed two experiments in which the participants had to decide whether the presented item was written correctly. In Experiment 1, following a procedure similar to Pathak et al. (European Journal of Marketing, 2019, 53 , 2109), we examined the effect of visual similarity on misspelled brand names with/without graphical information (e.g., anazon vs. atazon [baseword: amazon ]). Experiment 2 was parallel to Experiment 1, but we focused on misspelled common words (e.g., anarillo vs. atarillo ; baseword: amarillo [yellow in Spanish]). Results showed a sizeable effect of visual similarity on misspelled brand names – regardless of their graphical information, but not on misspelled common words. These findings suggest that visual codes play a greater role when identifying brand names than common words. We examined how models of visual-word recognition can account for this dissociation.     

When does feedback facilitate learning of words?

Some researchers have suggested that although feedback may enhance performance during associative learning, it does so at the expense of later retention. To examine this issue, subjects (N = 258) learned Luganda-English word pairs. After 2 initial exposures to the materials, subjects were tested on each item several times, with the presence and type of feedback varying between subjects. A final test followed after 1 week. Supplying the correct answer after an incorrect response not only improved performance during the initial learning session--it also increased final retention by 494%. On the other hand, feedback after correct responses made little difference either immediately or at a delay, regardless of whether the subject was confident in the response. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Is morphological decomposition limited to low-frequency words?

On the basis of data from masked priming experiments, it has been argued that an automatic process of decomposition is applied to all morphologically structured stimuli, irrespective of their lexical characteristics (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). So far, this claim has been tested only with respect to low-frequency primes and nonword primes. This is a limitation because some models of morphological processing postulate that only high-frequency complex words are recognized as whole forms. Thus, a more stringent test would be to determine whether high-frequency complex words also show evidence of masked priming. We report an experiment that compares masked-priming effects observed when the primes constitute morphologically structured nonwords (e.g., alarmer–ALARM), low-frequency words with a mean frequency of 2 per million (e.g., notional–NOTION), and high-frequency words with a mean frequency of 60 per million (e.g., national–NATION). These three conditions yielded significant and equivalent effects, lending strong support to the notion of a routine form of decomposition that is applied to all morphologically structured stimuli.     

How are number words mapped to approximate magnitudes?

How do we map number words to the magnitudes they represent? While much is known about the developmental trajectory of number word learning, the acquisition of the counting routine, and the academic correlates of estimation ability, previous studies have yet to describe the mechanisms that link number words to nonverbal representations of number. We investigated two mechanisms: associative mapping and structure mapping. Four dot array estimation tasks found that adults' ability to match a number word to one of two discriminably different sets declined as a function of set size and that participants' estimates of relatively large, but not small, set sizes were influenced by misleading feedback during an estimation task. We propose that subjects employ structure mappings for linking relatively large number words to set sizes, but rely chiefly on item-by-item associative mappings for smaller sets. These results indicate that both inference and association play important roles in mapping number words to approximate magnitudes.     

Young children’s age-of-acquisition estimates for spoken words

This study was concerned with the impact of stimulus familiarity on young children's ability to recognize spoken words and make explicit judgments about them. In Experiment 1, 5-year-olds made age-of-acquisition (AOA) estimates for a set of words that were very similar to estimates made by older children and adults. In Experiment 2, young children's picture recognition, mispronunciation detection, and vocabulary monitoring performance all varied systematically with these AOA estimates and with a stimulus-type (intact-mispronounced) manipulation. Subjective AOA estimates (whether from children or from adults) proved to be a better predictor of performance than did two objective familiarity measures and subjective imageability. These results point to considerable metalexical knowledge on the part of young children or explicit sensitivity regarding their own vocabulary knowledge. In addition, the results lend some support to the notion that actual AOA contributes to subjective AOA estimates.     

Three- and four-year-olds’ perceptual confusions for spoken words

Although infants have the ability to discriminate a variety of speech contrasts, young children cannot always use this ability in the service of spoken-word recognition. The research reported here asked whether the reason young children sometimes fail to discriminate minimal word pairs is that they are less efficient at word recognition than adults, or whether it is that they employ different lexical representations. In particular, the research evaluated the proposal that young children’s lexical representations are more “holistic” than those of adults, and are based on overall acoustic-phonetic properties, as opposed to phonetic segments. Three- and four-year-olds were exposed initially to an invariant target word and were subsequently asked to determine whether a series of auditory stimuli matched or did not match the target. The critical test stimuli were nonwords that varied in their degree of phonetic featural overlap with the target, as well as in terms of the position(s) within the stimuli at which they differed from the target, and whether they differed from the target on one or two segments. Data from four experiments demonstrated that the frequency with which children mistook a nonword stimulus for the target was influenced by extent of featural overlap, but not by word position. The data also showed that, contrary to the predictions of the holistic hypothesis, stimuli differing from the target by two features on a single segment were confused with the target more often than were stimuli differing by a single feature on each of two segments. This finding suggests that children use both phonetic features and segments in accessing their mental lexicons, and that they are therefore much more similar to adults than is suggested by the holistic hypothesis.     

Why do non-color words interfere with color naming?

In the non-color-word Stroop task, university students' response latencies were longer for low-frequency than for higher frequency target words. Visual identity primes facilitated color naming in groups reading the prime silently or processing it semantically (Experiment 1) but did not when participants generated a rhyme of the prime (Experiment 3). With auditory identity primes, generating an associate or a rhyme of the prime produced interference (Experiments 2 and 3). Color-naming latencies were longer for nonwords than for words (Experiment 4). There was a small long-term repetition benefit in color naming for low-frequency words that had been presented in the lexical decision task (Experiment 5). Facilitation of word recognition speeds color naming except when phonological activation of the base word increases response competition.     

Children’s emotional norms for 600 French words

The present study provides a French child database containing a large corpus of words (N=600) that were rated on emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative) by French children differing in both age (5, 7, and 9 years old) and sex (girls and boys). Good response reliability was observed in each of the three age groups. The results showed some age differences in the children’s ratings. With increasing age, the percentage of words rated positive decreased, whereas the percentage of neutral words increased and the percentage of negative words remained stable. Our study did not reveal marked differences across sex groups. The database compiled here should become a useful tool for experimental studies in which verbal material is used with children. It would be worthwhile in future research to study how children process emotional words and also to control the emotional variable in the same way as other linguistic variables in the experimental design. The norms from this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.