Stress regularity or consistency? Reading aloud Italian polysyllables with different stress patterns

Stress assignment to three- and four-syllable Italian words is not predictable by rule, but needs lexical look-up. The present study investigated whether stress assignment to low-frequency Italian words is determined by stress regularity, or by the number of words sharing the final phonological segment and the stress pattern (stress neighborhood or consistency). Experiment 1 showed an effect of stress neighborhood: words were read aloud faster and more accurately when they had a prevalence of stress "friends," irrespective of stress regularity. Moreover, when irregularly stressed words have a higher number of stress friends compared to regularly stressed words, they are read even faster (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, using visual lexical decision, no difference related to the numerosity of stress friends was found. It is concluded that reading aloud Italian low-frequency words with different stress patterns is mainly affected by the numerosity of lexical types that share a given final sequence and the stress pattern. The phonological nature of the numerosity of lexical representations affecting reading aloud finds support in the absence of such effect in visual lexical decision. These results have implications for models of reading aloud that go beyond monosyllables.     

Lexical stress,frequency, and stress neighbourhood effects in the early stages of Italian reading development

We examined the development of stress assignment in reading Italian aloud. We investigated frequency effects as a marker of the use of item-specific lexical knowledge in assigning stress together with stress dominance and stress neighbourhood (the number of words sharing both stress and ending) as markers of distributional information regarding properties of the lexicon extracted from spoken language. We tested second- and fourth-graders in a reading-aloud experiment including high- and low-frequency words and nonwords. Results show that despite the regularity of orthography–phonology mappings in Italian and the predominant use of phonological recoding procedures, item-specific lexical knowledge is also used, even by beginning readers. The frequency effect was significant and did not increase with age, while stress errors on low-frequency words decreased with increasing grade. Stress neighbourhood increasingly affected stress assignment on nonwords with older children. Taken together, our findings show that both item-specific knowledge and general information about stress distribution are relevant in children's reading, suggesting the simultaneous use of both lexical and sublexical information. Moreover, as the reading system develops, and knowledge about the relative distribution of stress neighbourhood increases, larger grain-size units are also exploited.     

Deep dysphasia: analysis of a rare form of repetition disorder

"Deep dysphasia" is the parallel in repetition to the reading impairment deep dyslexia. Our patient, S.M., showed part of speech, word/nonword, and concreteness effects in repetition, and he made semantic errors, but his oral reading was relatively spared. Further testing indicated that S.M. did not have difficulty perceiving spoken stimuli or deciding their lexical status, but he was deficient at semantically processing spoken words. Moreover, his phonemic memory was severely impaired. We argue that the routes for repetition (lexical and nonlexical) that function without semantic mediation were defective and that deficits in phonemic memory further diminished their effectiveness, since initial phonological encoding of spoken words was not available to guide the output stages of phonological processing. In addition, the semantically mediated route for repetition was unreliable because semantic processing was faulty and S.M. could not accurately label concepts.     

Developmental surface dyslexia and dysgraphia: An orthographic processing impairment

This study presents a detailed investigation of a young man in his early twenties who has suffered from a severe spelling impairment since childhood, and currently has a spelling age of only 9 years and 2 months. In contrast with the developmental phonological dyslexics reported by Campbell and Butterworth (1985) and Funnell and Davison (1989), his performance on tests of phonological awareness is good. In addition, he can read and spell non-words competently and, unlike normal 9-year-old children, virtually all of his spelling errors are phonologically appropriate. Further analysis of these errors reveals that he has knowledge of many of the different ways in which a given phoneme can be written, and that he uses phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences at the end of a word that are different from those he uses earlier in a word. However, he finds it difficult to spell words that contain uncommon phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences, which is compatible with the view that he has not developed an orthographic spelling lexicon. Although his oral reading of words is prompt and generally accurate, analysis of his lexical decision performance and the way that he defines homophones indicate that he does not have fully specified lexical entries available for reading either. We suggest that he suffers from a general orthographic processing deficit, and relies instead upon the combination of sub-lexical phonology and a lexicon that contains only partial information about way in which words are spelt. This leads to reasonably competent reading, even of many irregular words, but produces very poor spelling. It is argued that qualitatively different types of developmental dyslexia do genuinely exist, but that reading impairments are likely to be much more pronounced in children who have a phonological rather than an orthographic processing deficit.     

Articulatory coding and phonological judgements on written words and pictures: The role of the phonological output buffer

Abstract

The ability of Italian subjects to make phonological judgements was investigated in three experiments. The judgements comprised initial sound similarity and stress assignment on pain of both written words and pictures. Stress assignment on both words and pictures as well as initial sound similarity on pictures required the activation of phonological lexical representations, but this was not necessarily the case for initial sound similarity judgements on word pairs. The first study assessed the effects of concurrent articulatory suppression on the judgements. Experiment 2 used a concomitant task (chewing), which shares with suppression the use of articulatory components but does not involve speech programming and production. The third experiment investigated the effects of unattended speech on the phonological judgements. The results of these three experiments showed that articulatory suppression had a significant disrupting effect on accuracy in all four conditions, while neither articulatory non-speech (chewing) or unattended auditory speech had any effect on the subjects' performance. The results suggest that these phonological judgements involve the operation of an articulatory speech output component, which is not implemented peripherally and does not require the involvement of a non-articulatory input system.     

Orthographic and phonological computation in visual word recognition: Evidence from backward masking in Hebrew

We employed the backward masking paradigm to map the early computation involved in the perception of printed words in Hebrew. By independently manipulating orthographic and phonological overlap between targets and masks, we examined whether orthographic and phonological structure imposes late or early constraints on lexical access. The results demonstrated that the probability of reinstating a masked target depended on both the orthographic and the phonological overlap between the target and the mask. However, whereas phonemic structure seems to constrain lexical access only at short exposure durations, orthographic overlap also exerts its influence at longer durations.     

Phonological encoding in the lexical decision task

In lexical decision experiments, subjects have difficulty in responding NO to non-words which are pronounced exactly like English words (e.g. BRANE). This does not necessarily imply that access to a lexical entry ever occurs via a phonological recoding of a visually-presented word. The phonological recoding procedure might be so slow that when the letter string presented is a word, access to its lexical entry via a visual representation is always achieved before phonological recoding is completed. If prelexical phonological recodings are produced by using grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, such recodings can only occur for words which conform to these rules (regular words), since applications of the rules to words which do not conform to the rules (exception words) produce incorrect phonological representations. In two experiments, it was found that time to achieve lexical access (as measured by YES latency in a lexical decision task) was equivalent for regular words and exception words. It was concluded that access to lexical entries in lexical decision experiments of this sort does not proceed by sometimes or always phonologically recoding visually-presented words.     

Accessing words in speech production: stages, processes and representations.

This paper introduces a special issue of Cognition on lexical access in speech production. Over the last quarter century, the psycholinguistic study of speaking, and in particular of accessing words in speech, received a major new impetus from the analysis of speech errors, dysfluencies and hesitations, from aphasiology, and from new paradigms in reaction time research. The emerging theoretical picture partitions the accessing process into two subprocesses, the selection of an appropriate lexical item (a "lemma") from the mental lexicon, and the phonological encoding of that item, that is, the computation of a phonetic program for the item in the context of utterance. These two theoretical domains are successively introduced by outlining some core issues that have been or still have to be addressed. The final section discusses the controversial question whether phonological encoding can affect lexical selection. This partitioning is also followed in this special issue as a whole. There are, first, four papers on lexical selection, then three papers on phonological encoding, and finally one on the interaction between selection and phonological encoding.     

Phonological assembly in reading: Lexical contribution leads to violation of graphophonological rules

According to current models of reading, the phonological representation-of a-letter string could be generated by means of two different procedures. The first consists in the looking up or addressing of the phonological representation of the appropriate word in the mental lexicon. The second consists in the assignment of a phonological code to the various orthographic units that occur in the letter string and the assembly of them into a unitary phonological representation. However, the various models of phonological assembly differ in the nature of the knowledge that such assembly requires. On the one hand, dual-route theories assert that the assembly process operates by means of extralexical graphophonological rules and, therefore, without reference to lexical knowledge. On the other hand, in analogy theories and interactive models of phonological assembly, the lexical phonological representations of words orthographically close to the letter string (the orthographic neighborhood) are supposed to contribute to the-translation process. The aim of the experiments reported here was to empirically distinguish between these two categories of models. In Experiment 1, subjects were asked to pronounce pseudowords containing the letterg. Results indicate that the phonological representation assigned to the letterg depends on the pronunciation favored by the lexical neighbors. Experiment 2 shows that lexical contribution to phonological assembly also takes place in lexical decision.     

Lexical Anomia: Or the Case of the Missing Lexical Entries

This paper reports the case of an aphasic patient, EE, with a problem in word retrieval. He is consistently unable to produce specific lexical items, which tend to be items of low rated familiarity. His retrieval of these words is not aided by the provision of phonemic cues or extra time for word retrieval. His errors consist primarily of failures to respond, and the provision of semantic information without any attempt at the target. It is argued that this pattern of performance is consistent with the loss of specific lexical items from a phonological lexicon for speech production.

EE is shown to have no impairment in auditory recognition and comprehension of the lexical items that are unavailable for naming. This dissociation is problematic for theories that propose a single phonological lexicon for both word recognition and production, but is easily accounted for by separate input and output lexicons.     

The pseudohomophone effect: The role of visual similarity in non-word decisions

The pseudohomophone effect, that is, the finding that non-words that are pronounced like words (e.g. MEEN) take longer to reject in a lexical decision task than other pronounceable non-words (e.g. NEEN), has been used to support the hypothesis of phonological receding in lexical access. The lexical decision experiments reported here matched pseudohomophones to control non-words that were as visually similar to words as were the pseudohomophones. For both normal and aphasic subjects, reaction times to reject the pseudohomophones were no longer than those for the visual controls. However, the pseudohomophones did take longer to reject than other pronounceable non-words which were not as visually similar to words. The results suggest that most previous findings of the pseudohomophone effect result from the greater visual rather than phonological similarity of the pseudohomophones to words. The absence of a phonological effect on the non-words in the present study implies that phonological coding is an optional rather than a slow, but obligatory process.     

Vowel duration affects visual word identification: evidence that the mediating phonology is phonetically informed

What form is the lexical phonology that gives rise to phonological effects in visual lexical decision? The authors explored the hypothesis that beyond phonological contrasts the physical phonetic details of words are included. Three experiments using lexical decision and 1 using naming compared processing times for printed words (e.g., plead and pleat) that differ, when spoken, in vowel length and overall duration. Latencies were longer for long-vowel words than for short-vowel words in lexical decision but not in naming. Further, lexical decision on long-vowel words benefited more from identity priming than lexical decision on short-vowel words, suggesting that representations of long-vowel words achieve activation thresholds more slowly. The discussion focused on phonetically informed phonologies, particularly gestural phonology and its potential for understanding reading acquisition and performance.     

Interaction and representational integration: evidence from speech errors

We examine the mechanisms that support interaction between lexical, phonological and phonetic processes during language production. Studies of the phonetics of speech errors have provided evidence that partially activated lexical and phonological representations influence phonetic processing. We examine how these interactive effects are modulated by lexical frequency. Previous research has demonstrated that during lexical access, the processing of high frequency words is facilitated; in contrast, during phonetic encoding, the properties of low frequency words are enhanced. These contrasting effects provide the opportunity to distinguish two theoretical perspectives on how interaction between processing levels can be increased. A theory in which cascading activation is used to increase interaction predicts that the facilitation of high frequency words will enhance their influence on the phonetic properties of speech errors. Alternatively, if interaction is increased by integrating levels of representation, the phonetics of speech errors will reflect the retrieval of enhanced phonetic properties for low frequency words. Utilizing a novel statistical analysis method, we show that in experimentally induced speech errors low lexical frequency targets and outcomes exhibit enhanced phonetic processing. We sketch an interactive model of lexical, phonological and phonetic processing that accounts for the conflicting effects of lexical frequency on lexical access and phonetic processing.     

The basis of preference for lexical words in 6-month-old infants

Six-month-old English-learning infants have been shown to prefer English lexical over English grammatical words. The preference is striking because there are few grammatical words in total number but each occurs far more frequently in input speech than any individual lexical word. This could be because lexical words are universally more salient and interesting acoustic and phonological forms than are grammatical words. Alternatively, familiarity may play a role since infants may know some specific lexical words. Here we explore the first possibility by testing Chinese-learning infants’ response to English lexical and grammatical words. These infants, who had virtually no prior exposure to English and thus were unfamiliar with any English words, nevertheless preferred to listen to English lexical words, as in the case of English-learning infants. This finding increases the plausibility that it is the acoustic and phonological salience of lexical words that determines the preference for lexical words in infants.     

Automatic phonological coding of unattended printed words

A lexical decision response to an attended printed word can be slowed when the word is accompanied by an unattended word that is semantically related. Does this hold for an unattended word that is not related to the target word but sounds as if it is? The homophone WASTE can be shown to affect the lexical decision response to RUBBISH, but how does the incongruently related homophone WAIST affect RUBBISH? If incongruent homophones of words related to the attended word can influence processing when they are not being attended to, then it must be through automatic processing into a phonological code, either before or after lexical access. Experiment 1 reports such an effect, and it is concluded that a phonological representation is generated preattentively and influences the semantic processing of the attended word after generation of that representation. Experiment 2 confirms the effect and investigates the possibility that the effect exists because of the strategic use of phonological encoding of attended words. To discourage the use of a phonological strategy for lexical access, all nonwords were pseudohomophones. The influence persisted, however, with attended words still being affected by the presence of incongruent homophones of related words.     

The processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition: typicality effects and orthographic correlates

Many studies that have examined reading at the single-word level have been restricted to the processing of monosyllabic stimuli, and, as a result, lexical stress has not been widely investigated. In the experiments reported here, we used disyllabic words and nonwords to investigate the processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found an effect of stress typicality in naming and lexical decision. Typically stressed words (trochaic nouns and iambic verbs) elicited fewer errors than atypically stressed words (iambic nouns and trochaic verbs). In Experiment 3, we carried out an analysis of 340 word endings and found clear orthographic correlates of both grammatical category and lexical stress in word endings. In Experiment 4, we demonstrated that readers are sensitive to these cues in their processing of nonwords during two tasks: sentence construction and stress assignment. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to psycholinguistic models of single-word reading.     

The processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition: Typicality effects and orthographic correlates

Many studies that have examined reading at the single-word level have been restricted to the processing of monosyllabic stimuli, and, as a result, lexical stress has not been widely investigated. In the experiments reported here, we used disyllabic words and nonwords to investigate the processing of lexical stress during visual word recognition. In Experiments 1 and 2, we found an effect of stress typicality in naming and lexical decision. Typically stressed words (trochaic nouns and iambic verbs) elicited fewer errors than atypically stressed words (iambic nouns and trochaic verbs). In Experiment 3, we carried out an analysis of 340 word endings and found clear orthographic correlates of both grammatical category and lexical stress in word endings. In Experiment 4, we demonstrated that readers are sensitive to these cues in their processing of nonwords during two tasks: sentence construction and stress assignment. We discuss the implications of these findings with regard to psycholinguistic models of single-word reading.     

Phonological decoding or direct access? Regularity effects in lexical decisions of Grade 3 and 4 children

Learning to read fluently involves moving from an effortful phonological decoding strategy to automatic recognition of familiar words. However, little is known about the timing of this transition, or the extent to which children continue to be influenced by phonological factors when recognizing words even as they progress in reading. We explored this question by examining regularity effects in a lexical decision task, as opposed to the more traditionally used reading-aloud task. Children in Grades 3 and 4 made go/no-go lexical decisions on high- and low-frequency regular and irregular words that had been matched for consistency. The children showed regularity effects in their accuracy for low-frequency words, indicating that they were using phonological decoding strategies to recognize unfamiliar words. The size of this effect was correlated with measures of reading ability. However, we found no regularity effects on accuracy for high-frequency words or on response times for either word type, suggesting that even 8-year-old children are already relying predominantly on a direct lexical strategy in their silent reading of familiar words.     

How does the provision of semantic information influence the lexicalization of new spoken words?

The integration of a novel spoken word with existing lexical items can proceed within 24 hours of learning its phonological form. However, previous studies have reported that lexical integration of new spoken words can be delayed if semantic information is provided during learning. One possibility is that this delay in lexical integration reflects reduced phonological processing during learning as a consequence of the need to learn the semantic associations. In the current study, adult participants learnt novel words via a phoneme monitoring task, in which half of the words were associated with a picture referent, and half were phonological forms only. Critically, participants were instructed to learn the forms of the novel words, with no explicit goal to learn the word–picture mappings. Results revealed significant lexical competition effects emerging one week after consolidation, which were equivalent for the picture-present and form-only conditions. Tests of declarative memory and shadowing showed equivalent performance for picture-present and form-only words, despite participants showing good knowledge of the picture associations immediately after learning. These data support the contention that provided phonological information is recruited sufficiently well during learning, the provision of semantic information does not slow the time-course of lexical integration.     

The influence of code‐oriented versus meaning‐oriented approaches to reading instruction on word recognition in the Spanish language

This study was designed to examine the possible effect of instructional method and grade on the development of the competences used in reading isolated words in a transparent orthography (i.e., Spanish). A cross‐sectional design was used with a sample of 202 children who were learning to read by different instructional methods (code‐oriented vs. meaning‐oriented approaches). The effect of instructional method was analysed on reaction times, latency responses, and misreading on lexical decision and naming tasks. Words varied in frequency, length, and positional frequency of syllables (PFS) and the nonwords varied only in length and PFS. Our prediction was that the differences in reaction times and error performance as a function of the variables that allow us to test the routes—such as lexicality, word frequency, PFS, and word length—would be greater in the individuals who learn by a meaning‐oriented approach, which means that this group would be more affected by unfamiliar and longer words, low PFS, and nonwords in comparison to individuals who learn by a code‐oriented approach. This would support the view that individuals who learn by a meaning‐oriented approach have particular difficulties in naming words under conditions that require extensive phonological computation. Reliable effects of instructional method were found both in reaction times and latency responses and also on misreading in words and nonwords. The findings demonstrate superiority in the sublexical analysis in children who were learning by code‐oriented approaches. However, individuals who were learning by meaning‐oriented approaches had particular difficulties in naming words under conditions that require extensive phonological computation.