On the role of the upper part of words in lexical access: Evidence with masked priming

More than 100 years ago, Huey (1908/1968) indicated that the upper part of words was more relevant for perception than the lower part. Here we examined whether mutilated words, in their upper/lower portions (e.g., ), can automatically access their word units in the mental lexicon. To that end, we conducted four masked repetition priming experiments with the lexical decision task. Results showed that mutilated primes produced a sizeable masked repetition priming effect. Furthermore, the magnitude of the masked repetition priming effect was greater when the upper part of the primes was preserved than when the lower portion was preserved—this was the case not only when the mutilated words were presented in lower case but also when the mutilated words were presented in upper case. Taken together, these findings suggest that the front-end of computational models of visual-word recognition should be modified to provide a more realistic account at the level of letter features.     

Slowed lexical access in nonfluent aphasia: a case study.

A list priming paradigm (LPP) was used to examine the hypothesis that nonfluent aphasics are literally slowed down in automatic access to lexical information. In this paradigm, words are presented visually, and the subject's task is to make a lexical decision on each word as quickly as possible after its presentation. As soon as a lexical decision is made on one word, that word is removed and, after a predetermined interword interval, the next word is presented. In this way, a continuous "list" effect is obtained. Prior studies with both college-age and elderly subjects using the LPP have shown that, independently of age, on the LPP, priming obtains at interword delays of 500 to 800 msec, but not at either shorter or longer interword delays. In the study reported here, the LPP was used to examine delays at which priming obtained for LD, a nonfluent aphasic with a lesion primarily in the left frontal region. Examining interword delays ranging from 500 to 1800 msec, the subject showed priming only at a delay of 1500 msec, a considerably longer delay than that at which neurologically intact subjects have shown priming. Based on these results, it is argued that while automatic access is retained, that access is much slower in a nonfluent aphasic than in neurologically intact elderly subjects. These results are discussed in terms of how slowed lexical access might impact on discourse comprehension.     

Domain effects in lexical development: learning words for foods and toys

We investigated 3-year-olds’ and adults’ use of domain cues in learning words for solid and nonsolid material entities. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants heard a novel neutral noun (e.g., “my X”) for a standard solid or nonsolid entity described as either a toy or a food. They then were asked to extend the word to one of two other entities. Both options matched the standard in solidity; but one differed from it in an object-relevant property (shape) and the other in a substance-relevant property (color, texture, or smell). Both children and adults were more likely to select the same-shaped entity if the standard was (1) solid than if it was nonsolid, and (2) described as a toy than if it was described as a food. Their interpretations of novel words for material entities were thus affected not only by perceptual information (about solidity) but also by conceptual information (about domain). In Experiment 3, the novel noun was presented in a syntactic context that suggested the solid entity should be interpreted as an object (e.g., “an X”) and that the nonsolid entity should be interpreted as a substance (e.g., “some X”). For adults, these changes largely eliminated the effect of the entity’s domain (toy, food) on interpretation. We interpret these findings in terms of the proposal that domain cues, like solidity cues, furnish information about whether an entity’s structure should be thought of as arbitrary or nonarbitrary and, hence, about whether a word should be interpreted as naming an object or a substance construal.     

Elicited imitation in lexical development: Evidence from a study of temporal reference

This study examined the use of elicited imitation in investigating lexical development within a semantic domain. For this purpose the acquisition of reference to sequence and simultaneity by 3–5 year old children was examined. Three factors were proposed to account for the order in which lexical items within a semantic field are acquired: restrictedness of a lexical item, congruence with perceptual strategies, and conceptual simplicity. A significantly greater number of correct responses was found in sentences describing sequential events than in simultaneous events. Furthermore, imitations of sentences referring to simultaneity were more degraded than imitations of sentences referring to sequence. The children seemed to begin acquiring reference to temporally related events by learning about words describing serially ordered events. A three stage developmental model is proposed to account for the results.Some of the data reported here are drawn from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Linguistics, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1974.     

Recognizing words and pictures in sentence contexts: a test of lexical modularity

Words or pictures completed sentence fragments to form coherent or incoherent sentences. Subjects made lexical decisions about words and object decisions about pictures. Modality was blocked in Experiment 1 and mixed in Experiment 2. In both experiments there were similar effects of context for words and pictures, contrary to the hypothesis that lexical priming produces the sentence context effect. Mixed conditions produced longer response latencies than blocked conditions but did not interact with the context effect. The finding of no interaction between the effect of context and the mixed-blocked manipulation, supports a version of lexical modularity in which context effects arise as a function of post-access integration processing.     

A study of student assessment of the lexical and emotional characteristics of cancer-related words

IntroductionThe aim of this study was to clarify students’ knowledge and emotional feelings about words used in the announcement of cancer diagnoses.MethodA total of 465 students registered in a higher education institution rated familiarity, valence and arousal, and responded to questions about the definition and the contextual use of 20 cancer-related target words.ResultsThe words were estimated as being unfamiliar and negative, and were poorly defined by the majority of students. Many of these indicators varied according to whether the students reported having a relative diagnosed with cancer, and to their level of vocabulary.DiscussionThis study provides explanatory leads that should help to shed light on the nature of the difficulties students have in understanding medical messages.     

Psychopathy traits and the processing of emotion words: Results of a lexical decision task

Research has indicated that individuals possessing psychopathic traits exhibit a deficit in the processing of emotional stimuli. Lexical decision task studies found that psychopathic individuals do not demonstrate affective facilitation in processing emotional words relative to nonpsychopathic individuals. However, these investigations have not examined processing of discrete affective categories and their relation to the callous/unemotional (F1) and impulse control/antisocial (F2) factors of psychopathy. Sixty undergraduate men completed a self-report measure of psychopathy traits and a lexical decision task assessing response latencies to anger, sadness, fear, and happiness words. Results reflected an association between F2 and a heightened experience of anger, whereas F1 was associated with a diminished experience of sadness. Findings are discussed in terms of the relation to existing research using alternative methods of processing affect.     

The effects of morphology on the processing of compound words: Evidence from naming,lexical decisions and eye fixations

The use of lexemes during the recognition of spatially unified familiar English compounds was examined in naming, lexical decision and sentence‐reading tasks by manipulating beginning and ending lexeme frequencies while controlling overall compound frequencies. All tasks revealed robust ending lexeme frequency effects, with compound processing being more effective when the ending lexeme was a high‐frequency word. Beginning lexeme frequency effects were more elusive and dependent on task demands. Eye movements, recorded during sentence reading, also indicated that the effects of ending lexemes occurred after the first fixation during compound viewing. Together, the results suggest either that the ending lexeme is used as an access code to locate the meaning of the full compound word or that its meaning is coactive with the meaning of the full compound.     

神经重用假说的汉语情绪词汇加工证据

神经重用假说认为对词的情绪效应可以不经语义形成而先行产生, 这更有助于人类适应环境。为了检验这一假说, 设计脑电实验和行为实验, 记录被试加工汉语厌恶情绪词和中性词的特征。结果发现, 170 ms左右厌恶词与中性词的ERPs发生分离, 且在枕部出现情绪刺激视觉注意关联的EPN; 厌恶词与中性词N400差异波溯源定位于脑岛附近, 其最大激活点时间窗口开始于380 ms。这表明在情绪词汇的语义分析之前就出现了情绪效应, 结果支持了神经重用假说。     

Inflected words in production: Evidence for a morphologically rich lexicon

Current evidence suggests that there is a difference between the representations of multimorphemic words in production and perception. In perception, it is widely believed that both whole-word and root representations exist, while in production there is little evidence for whole-word representations. The present investigation demonstrates that whole-word and root frequency independently predict the duration of words suffixed with –ing, –ed, and –s, which reveals that both root and word representations play a role in the production of inflected English words. In a second line of analysis, we find that the number of inflected phonological neighbours independently predicts the duration of monomorphemic words, which extends these results and suggests that whole-word representations exist at the lexical level. Together these results suggest that both root and word representations of inflected words are stored in the lexicon and are relevant for the production of both monomorphemic and multimorphemic words.     

Effects of the psycholinguistic variables on the lexical decision task in Spanish: A study with 2,765 words

In order to explore the role of the main psycholinguistic variables on visual word recognition, several mega-studies have been conducted in English in recent years. Nevertheless, because the effects of these variables depend on the regularity of the orthographic system, studies must also be done in other languages with different characteristics. The goal of this work was to conduct a lexical decision study in Spanish, a language with a shallow orthography and a high number of words. The influence of psycholinguistic variables on latencies corresponding to 2,765 words was assessed by means of linear mixed-effects modeling. The results show that some variables, such as frequency or age of acquisition, have significant effects on reaction times regardless of the type of words used. Other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or imageability, were significant only in specific groups of words. Our results highlight the importance of taking into account the peculiarities of each spelling system in the development of reading models.     

Priming and the effects of sentence and lexical contexts on naming time: Evidence for autonomous lexical processing

Models of language processing which stress the autonomy of processing at each level predict that the semantic properties of an incomplete sentence context should have no influence on lexical processing, either facilitatory or inhibitory. An experiment similar to those reported by Fischler and Bloom (1979) and Stanovich and West (1979, 1981) was conducted using naming time as an index of lexical access time. No facilitatory effects of context were observed for either highly predictable or semantically appropriate (but unpredictable) completions, whereas strong inhibitory effects were obtained for inappropriate completions. When lexical decision time was the dependent measure, the same results were obtained, except that predictable completions now produced strong facilitation. In a further experiment the inhibitory effects of context on lexical decision times for inappropriate targets were maintained, even though unfocussed contexts were used, in which no clear expectancy for a particular completion was involved. These results were interpreted in terms of a two-factor theory which attributes the facilitation observed with the lexical decision task to postaccess decision processes which are not involved in the naming task. The inhibitory effects were attributed to interference resulting from semantic integration. In contrast to the results for sentence contexts, lexical contexts of the doctor-nurse variety produced clear facilitation effects on naming time (but no inhibitory effects). It was also shown that relatively minor variations in the type of neutral context could completely alter the relative importance of facilitation and inhibition.     

Auditory-phonetic projection and lexical structure in the recognition of sine-wave words

Speech remains intelligible despite the elimination of canonical acoustic correlates of phonemes from the spectrum. A portion of this perceptual flexibility can be attributed to modulation sensitivity in the auditory-to-phonetic projection, although signal-independent properties of lexical neighborhoods also affect intelligibility in utterances composed of words. Three tests were conducted to estimate the effects of exposure to natural and sine-wave samples of speech in this kind of perceptual versatility. First, sine-wave versions of the easy and hard word sets were created, modeled on the speech samples of a single talker. The performance difference in recognition of easy and hard words was used to index the perceptual reliance on signal-independent properties of lexical contrasts. Second, several kinds of exposure produced familiarity with an aspect of sine-wave speech: (a) sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker; (b) sine-wave sentences modeled on a different talker, to create familiarity with a sine-wave carrier; and (c) natural sentences spoken by the same talker, to create familiarity with the idiolect expressed in the sine-wave words. Recognition performance with both easy and hard sine-wave words improved after exposure only to sine-wave sentences modeled on the same talker. Third, a control test showed that signal-independent uncertainty is a plausible cause of differences in recognition of easy and hard sine-wave words. The conditions of beneficial exposure reveal the specificity of attention underlying versatility in speech perception.     

Equivalent inter- and intramodality long-term priming: Evidence for a common lexicon for words seen and words heard

Weaker inter- than intramodality long-term priming of words has promoted two hypotheses: (1) separate visual and auditory lexicons and (2) modality dependence of implicit memory. In five experiments, we employed manipulations aimed to minimize study-test asymmetries between the two priming conditions. Activities at visual and auditory study were matched, words were phonologically consistent, and study modality was manipulated between subjects. Equal magnitudes of inter- and intramodality priming were found in experiments with visual and auditory stem completion at test, with visual fragment completion at test, and with visual and auditory perceptual identification at test. A within-subjects experiment yielded the conventional intramodality advantage. The results point to a single amodal lexicon and to modality-independent phonological processing as the basis of implicit word memory.     

Evidence for a cascade model of lexical access in speech production

How word production unfolds remains controversial. Serial models posit that phonological encoding begins only after lexical node selection, whereas cascade models hold that it can occur before selection. Both models were evaluated by testing whether unselected lexical nodes influence phonological encoding in the picture-picture interference paradigm. English speakers were shown pairs of superimposed pictures and were instructed to name one picture and ignore another. Naming was faster when target pictures were paired with phonologically related (bed-bell) than with unrelated (bed-pin) distractors. This suggests that the unspoken distractors exerted a phonological influence on production. This finding is inconsistent with serial models but in line with cascade ones. The facilitation effect was not replicated in Italian with the same pictures, supporting the view that the effect found in English was caused by the phonological properties of the stimuli.     

The role of visual form in lexical access: Evidence from Chinese classifier production

The interface between the conceptual and lexical systems was investigated in a word production setting. We tested the effects of two conceptual dimensions – semantic category and visual shape – on the selection of Chinese nouns and classifiers. Participants named pictures with nouns (“rope”) or classifier–noun phrases (“one-classifier–rope”) in three blocked picture naming experiments. In Experiment 1, we observed larger semantic category interference with phrases than with nouns, suggesting comparable semantic categorical effects on classifier and noun selection. In Experiments 2 and 3, items with similar shapes produced an interference effect when they were named with classifier–noun phrases, but not with bare nouns. This indicates that object shape modulates classifier (but not noun) selection. We conclude that object shape properties can by themselves influence word selection processes just as semantic relationships (captured by semantic category) do. The factors operating during word selection may be more diverse than has been previously thought.     

Using temporal logics of knowledge for specification and verification—a case study

Temporal logics of knowledge are useful for reasoning about situations where the knowledge of an agent or component is important, and where change in this knowledge may occur over time. Here we use temporal logics of knowledge to reason about the game Cluedo. We show how to specify Cluedo using temporal logics of knowledge and prove statements about the knowledge of the players using a clausal resolution calculus for this logic. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using this logic to specify and verify the game Cluedo and describe related implementations.     

Loci of phonological effects in the lexical access of words written in a shallow orthography

Summary Three experiments are reported that extend previous observations on the slowing of lexical decisions by phonologically ambiguous forms of Serbo-Croatian words relative to the phonologically unambiguous forms of the same words. The phonological ambiguity arises from the presence of letters whose phoneme interpretation differs between the two Serbo-Croatian alphabets, the Roman and the Cyrillic. In the first experiment, target words were preceded by asterisks or by context words that were associatively related and alphabetically matched to the targets. The effect of word contexts (i.e., priming) was greater for phonologically ambiguous than for phonologically unambiguous targets. The second experiment manipulated the alphabetic match of context word and target word. The effect of this manipulation was limited to phonologically ambiguous words. The third experiment reproduced the details of the first with the addition of visual degradation of the target stimuli on half of the trials. The results of the first experiment were replicated but no interaction between context and visual degradation was observed. The discussion focused on phonologically mediated access of Serbo-Croatian words. A model was proposed in which phonological codes are assembled prelexically according to weighted grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules.     

Verb retrieval in brain-damaged subjects: 1. Analysis of stimulus, lexical, and conceptual factors

Verb retrieval for action naming was assessed in 53 brain-damaged subjects by administering a standardized test with 100 items. The goal of the study was to gain further insight into the nature of verb processing impairments by investigating the influence of several kinds of stimulus, lexical, and conceptual factors on the subjects' performance at the level of group tendencies and also at the level of individual differences. (1) Stimulus factors: visual complexity, familiarity, image agreement, and one vs. two pictures (which corresponds to ongoing vs. completed actions); (2) lexical factors: name agreement, verb frequency, and whether the root of the target verb has a homophonous noun; (3) conceptual factors: whether the action is done with the hand or the body, whether the action involves one or two core participants, whether the undergoer of the action has a change of internal state, whether the undergoer has a change of spatial location, and whether the actor makes use of an instrument in carrying out the action. The subjects were divided into an impaired group (n = 19) and an unimpaired group (n = 34) on the basis of their overall performance on the test. For both groups of subjects, verb retrieval was significantly affected by the following factors: familiarity, image agreement, name agreement, homophonous noun, and undergoer change of location. These results indicate that, at the level of group analysis, some factors have a stronger influence on verb retrieval for action naming than others. Moreover, the finding that the two groups exhibited the same general pattern of factor sensitivity suggests that although the processing efficiency of the mechanisms that subserve verb retrieval is degraded in the impaired group, the basic functional properties of these mechanisms may not be qualitatively very different from those of the unimpaired group. Further analyses were conducted at the level of individual subjects and revealed a considerable amount of variation with regard to factor sensitivity. Many patterns of associations and dissociations of factors were found across the subjects, which suggests that the task of retrieving verbs for naming actions is quite complex and that different subjects can be influenced by different properties of both the stimuli and the target verbs.     

The embodiment of beauty: Evidence from viewing Chinese concrete words and pictographs

How is beauty embodied? According to the viewpoint of embodied cognition, the aesthetic processing of words or pictographs has roots in their referential archetypes. Four experiments tested whether the beauty of referential archetypes was routinely activated during the explicit and implicit aesthetic evaluations of the font structures of concrete Chinese words and pictographs in congruent or incongruent font colour. Results showed font structures of simplified Chinese words and pictographs were judged to be more beautiful when they referred to beautiful archetypes; and this pattern was reversed when they referred to ugly archetypes. Moreover, judgement was facilitated when font colour was congruent for Chinese words and pictographs referred to beautiful archetypes. For those referred to ugly archetypes, judgement was inhibited in congruent font colour but facilitated in incongruent font colour, suggesting aesthetic perceptions of the font structures of Chinese words and pictographs were derived from their referential natural objects. The spontaneous generation hypothesis of beauty is proposed to account for these findings.