The lexical decision list task: A research note

The lexical decision list task, a paper-and-pencil version of the standard lexical decision task, is introduced and described. Data are reported demonstrating that subjects' responses to manipulations of phonological confusability, stimulus difficulty, and case presentation are analogous to those obtained with the use of the standard task.     

Right hemisphere advantage in lexical decision with two-character Chinese words

It has been suggested that the right hemisphere advantage reported in the literature for single Chinese or kanji characters is the result of perceptual factors rather than unique linguistic features of the orthography. However, no similar right hemisphere advantage for two-character words has ever been found. This study reports on a right hemisphere advantage for high stroke number low frequency two-character Chinese words with short exposure time and low luminance. While there is support for the perceptual-factors explanation for some findings of right hemisphere advantage for Chinese, it is suggested that linguistic factors can still play a part.     

Homophone effects in lexical decision

The role of phonology in word recognition was investigated in 6 lexical-decision experiments involving homophones (e.g., MAID-MADE). The authors' goal was to determine whether homophone effects arise in the lexical-decision task and, if so, in what situations they arise, with a specific focus on the question of whether the presence of pseudohomophone foils (e.g., BRANE) causes homophone effects to be eliminated because of strategic deemphasis of phonological processing. All 6 experiments showed significant homophone effects, which were not eliminated by the presence of pseudohomophone foils. The authors propose that homophone effects in lexical decision are due to the nature of feedback from phonology to orthography.     

Three-step priming in lexical decision

In two experiments, we investigated mediated two-step priming (e.g., from LION to STRIPES via TIGER) and three-step priming (e.g., from MANE to STRIPES via LION and TIGER). Experiment 1 showed robust two-step priming in the double lexical decision task. In Experiment 2, we tested for three-step priming and investigated the possibility that it is not association strength based on free association, but frequency of co-occurrence, that causes three-step priming. Co-occurrence has been proposed as a measure of familiarity and semantic relatedness. Significant three-step priming was obtained. Lexical co-occurrence could not account for the effect. However, a more global measure of semantic similarity that includes the similarity of the contexts in which concepts occur revealed that the three-step pairs were semantically related. If this global measure provides a proper estimate of the semantic relatedness of our items, then three-step priming is consistent not only with spreading activation models, but also with distributed memory models and the compound cue model.     

Repetition priming in an auditory lexical decision task: Effects of lexical status

The effect of lexical status on the time course of repetition priming was examined in an auditory lexical decision task. Words and nonwords were repeated at lags of 0, 1, 4, and 8 items (Experiment 1A) and 0, 2, 4, and 8 items (Experiment 1B). The pattern of repetition effects differed for words and nonwords in that repetition priming for nonwords at lag 0 was significantly greater than for words. The magnitude of this effect decreased when one or more items intervened. A second experiment, replicating Experiment 1A with visual presentation, clarified that the greater magnitude of repetition priming for nonwords at lag 0 is unique to the auditory modality. This finding suggests that in the course of forming a stable perceptual representation, the details of the acoustic/phonological information of an auditory stimulus are more readily available for nonwords than for words. The capacity to carry this phonological information is limited, however, and can only be maintained until another stimulus is encountered.     

Triadic decision making in lexical memory

Word and category recognition was investigated in the context of other stimuli, where the semantic distance relationships among the stimuli were derived from multidimensional scaling. On each trial, three horizontal strings of letters were presented. In the word condition, a positive response was required when the three strings formed three words; in the category condition, a positive response was required when the three strings formed words belonging to the same category. The results indicated that: (a) category decisions take about 150-200 msec longer than do word decisions, (b) word decisions are facilitated by a common categorical membership but semantic distances within the category are relatively unimportant, and (c)within-category semantic distances systematically altered response time for the category condition. It was hypothesized that semantic distance relationships may be sensitized for categorical decisions, but that only large semantic distances function effectively for word decisions.     

Lateralization effects in lexical decision tasks

Subjects were timed as they judged whether items presented to them were English words or not. Comparisons were made between responses to nouns and to verbs, on the one hand, and between concrete and abstract nouns, on the other hand. No asymmetries were found.     

Phonological priming in the lexical decision task: A failure to replicate

Some models of the lexicon predict that recognition of words should produce activation spreading to phonologically related words. Consistent with this prediction, Hillinger (1980) demonstrated priming in a visual lexical decision task for word targets preceded by graphemically similar or graphemically dissimilar primes that rhymed with the target. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether this phonological priming effect occurred automatically or because of subject strategies. Although semantically associated primes produced significant facilitation in Experiment 1, no evidence of phonological priming was obtained. Experiments 2 to 5 were conducted in an attempt to obtain the phonological priming effect. Experiment 5 was a replication of one of Hillinger’s experiments. In none of these experiments was phonological priming observed. These results indicate either that the lexicon is not organized such that spreading activation occurs on the basis of phonological similarity, or that visual lexical decisions are made without phonological mediation.     

Orthographic cues to lexical stress: Effects on naming and lexical decision

Words whose spellings represent regular phonemic patterns, such asmint, show advantages in naming and lexical decision tasks over words, such aspint, that have exceptional relations between orthographic and phonemic patterns. We have extended such phenomena to the domain of lexical stress, by showing that disyllabic words whose spellings are consistent with their stress are easier to process than words whose spellings are misleading about stress. Such words are named more quickly and are pronounced with incorrect stress less often (Experiment 1). They are also classified more quickly and accurately in lexical decision tasks (Experiments 2 and 3). These results indicate that literate speakers have learned orthographic correlates to lexical stress in English. In addition, the similarities between results in the phonemic and prosodic domains indicate that models of reading developed for the former could be extended to the latter area.     

A model for evidence accumulation in the lexical decision task

We present a new model for lexical decision, REM-LD, that is based on REM theory (e.g., ). REM-LD uses a principled (i.e., Bayes' rule) decision process that simultaneously considers the diagnosticity of the evidence for the 'WORD' response and the 'NONWORD' response. The model calculates the odds ratio that the presented stimulus is a word or a nonword by averaging likelihood ratios for lexical entries from a small neighborhood of similar words. We report two experiments that used a signal-to-respond paradigm to obtain information about the time course of lexical processing. Experiment 1 verified the prediction of the model that the frequency of the word stimuli affects performance for nonword stimuli. Experiment 2 was done to study the effects of nonword lexicality, word frequency, and repetition priming and to demonstrate how REM-LD can account for the observed results. We discuss how REM-LD could be extended to account for effects of phonology such as the pseudohomophone effect, and how REM-LD can predict response times in the traditional 'respond-when-ready' paradigm.     

Transposed-letter and laterality effects in lexical decision

Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in transposed-letter similarity effects. In Experiment 1, we created two types of nonwords: nonadjacent transposed-letter nonwords (TRADEGIA; the base word was TRAGEDIA, the Spanish for TRAGEDY) and two-letter different nonwords (orthographic controls: TRATEPIA). In Experiment 2, the controls were one-letter different nonwords (TRAGEPIA) instead of two-letter different nonwords (TRATEPIA). The effect of transposed-letter similarity was substantially greater in the right visual field (left hemisphere) than in the left visual field. Furthermore, nonwords created by transposing two letters were more competitive than the nonwords created by substituting one or two letters of a target word. We examine the implications of these findings for the models of visual word recognition.     

Priming effects on lexical access and decision processes: A signal-detection analysis

Summary Signal-detection methodology was employed to examine the assumption that in a lexical-decision task context effects are primarily the result of post-access processes. Experiment 1, in which prime-relatedness was varied within subjects, found changes in target sensitivity (d) without corresponding changes in the response criterion. This outcome was interpreted as evidence that prior context facilitates lexical access, whereas post-access contributions remain constant across conditions. When prime-relatedness was varied between subjects in Experiment 2, the lexical-decision task showed differing context effects on access processes as well as on post-access processes. It was concluded that subjects adopt a single response criterion suited to maximize task performance. The particular response criterion adopted is a function of the stimulus set rather than a function of the relationship between prime and target on any single trial. Finally, it was concluded that post-access strategies alone are insufficient to account for context effects obtained when typical lexical-decision-task procedures are used, or to account for the magnitude of the differences obtained between the present experiments.     

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.     

Sequential dependencies in the lexical decision task

Two experiments addressed whether response latency in a trial of the lexical decision task is independent of the lexical status of the item presented in the previous trial. In Exp. 1, it was found that both word and nonword responses were significantly slower when the previous trial had involved a nonword than when it had involved a word. In Exp. 2, which employed a different list composition, it was found that responses to nonwords and pseudohomophones were significantly slower when the previous trial had involved a nonword or a pseudohomophone than when it had involved a word. However, responses to words were not influenced by the nature of the previous trial. We concluded that sequential dependencies exist across consecutive trials in the lexical decision task even when there is no semantic, morphological, phonological, or orthographic relationship between the items presented during those trials.     

Word age-of-acquisition and lexical decision making

This paper reports two experiments concerning the effects of word age-of-acquisition and other word attributes on speed of lexical decision. Analyses of group average data indicated that word length, frequency and familiarity were the major determinants of decision speed. Previous reports of age-of-acquisition effects on lexical decision are attributed to failures to control for word familiarity.     

Pseudohomophone priming in lexical decision is not fragile in a sparse lexical neighborhood

In lexical decision, to date few studies in English have found a reliable pseudohomophone priming advantage with orthographically similar primes (the klip-plip effect; Frost, Ahissar, Gotesman, & Tayeb, 2003; see Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006, for a review). On the basis of the Bayseian reader model of lexical decision (Norris, 2006, 2009), we hypothesized that this was because in previous studies, lexical decisions could have been made without finding a match between the input and a unique lexical representation. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that words from dense neighborhoods showed neither an orthographic form priming effect nor a pseudohomophone priming advantage; in contrast, with words from a sparse lexical neighborhood, a sizeable orthographic form priming effect was found, and a robust pseudohomophone priming advantage, which was not limited to the overlap of onset phoneme, was also observed. Identity primes produced greater facilitation than pseudohomophone primes. We consider the implication of these findings for the role of assembled phonology in lexical access.     

Emotion words and categories: evidence from lexical decision

We examined the categorical nature of emotion word recognition. Positive, negative, and neutral words were presented in lexical decision tasks. Word frequency was additionally manipulated. In Experiment 1, “positive” and “negative” categories of words were implicitly indicated by the blocked design employed. A significant emotion–frequency interaction was obtained, replicating past research. While positive words consistently elicited faster responses than neutral words, only low frequency negative words demonstrated a similar advantage. In Experiments 2a and 2b, explicit categories (“positive,” “negative,” and “household” items) were specified to participants. Positive words again elicited faster responses than did neutral words. Responses to negative words, however, were no different than those to neutral words, regardless of their frequency. The overall pattern of effects indicates that positive words are always facilitated, frequency plays a greater role in the recognition of negative words, and a “negative” category represents a somewhat disparate set of emotions. These results support the notion that emotion word processing may be moderated by distinct systems.