Phonographic neighbors,not orthographic neighbors,determine word naming latencies

The orthographic neighborhood size (N) of a word—the number of words that can be formed from that word by replacing one letter with another in its place—has been found to have facilitatory effects in word naming. The orthographic neighborhood hypothesis attributes this facilitation to interactive effects. A phonographic neighborhood hypothesis, in contrast, attributes the effect to lexical print-sound conversion. According to the phonographic neighborhood hypothesis, phonographic neighbors (words differing in one letter and one phoneme, e.g., stove and stone) should facilitate naming, and other orthographic neighbors (e.g., stove and shove) should not. The predictions of these two hypotheses are tested. Unique facilitatory phonographic N effects were found in four sets of word naming mega-study data, along with an absence of facilitatory orthographic N effects. These results implicate print-sound conversion—based on consistent phonology—in neighborhood effects rather than word-letter feedback.     

Evaluating a split processing model of visual word recognition: effects of orthographic neighborhood size

The split fovea theory proposes that visual word recognition of centrally presented words is mediated by the splitting of the foveal image, with letters to the left of fixation being projected to the right hemisphere (RH) and letters to the right of fixation being projected to the left hemisphere (LH). Two lexical decision experiments aimed to elucidate word recognition processes under the split fovea theory are described. The first experiment showed that when words were presented centrally, such that the initial letters were in the left visual field (LVF/RH), there were effects of orthographic neighborhood, i.e., there were faster responses to words with high rather than low orthographic neighborhoods for the initial letters ('lead neighbors'). This effect was limited to lead-neighbors but not end-neighbors (orthographic neighbors sharing the same final letters). When the same words were fully presented in the LVF/RH or right visual field (RVF/LH, Experiment 2), there was no effect of orthographic neighborhood size. We argue that the lack of an effect in Experiment 2 was due to exposure to all of the letters of the words, the words being matched for overall orthographic neighborhood count and the sub-parts no longer having a unique effect. We concluded that the orthographic activation found in Experiment 1 occurred because the initial letters of centrally presented words were projected to the RH. The results support the split fovea theory, where the RH has primacy in representing lead neighbors of a written word.     

What can megastudies tell us about the orthographic structure of English words?

Although the majority of research in visual word recognition has targeted single-syllable words, most words are polysyllabic. These words engender special challenges, one of which concerns their analysis into smaller units. According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants (C) and vowels (V) constrains the orthographic structure of printed words. So far, evidence has been reported only in French with factorial studies of relatively small sets of items. In the present study, we performed regression analyses on corpora of megastudies (English and British Lexicon Project databases) to examine the influence of the CV pattern in English. We compared hiatus words, which present a mismatch between the number of syllables and the number of groups of adjacent vowel letters (e.g., client), to other words, controlling for standard lexical variables. In speeded pronunciation, hiatus words were processed more slowly than control words, and the effect was stronger in low-frequency words. In the lexical decision task, the interference effect of hiatus in low-frequency words was balanced by a facilitatory effect in high-frequency words. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that the configuration of consonant and vowel letters influences the processing of polysyllabic words in English.     

Predicting children's word‐spelling difficulty for common English words from measures of orthographic transparency,phonemic and graphemic length and word frequency

Spencer demonstrated that spelling and reading difficulty for English words can be predicted from a number of factors, including word frequency, phonemic length and measures of orthographic depth and complexity. In this study, spelling difficulty of high frequency words was investigated across five year groups (ages 7 to 11 years) with a wide ranging series of data sources from which to determine word frequency values and orthographic depth measures. A regression model accounted for 52–66% of the variance for 7‐ to 11‐year‐olds and 72% of the variance for the lowest performing quartile group, irrespective of age. The most influential factor, phonetic difference (being the difference in the number of letters and phonemes in a word, and representing grapheme complexity), links the relative influence of large graphemic units in foundation literacy to a similar phenomenon, the ‘whammy’ effect, which provides support for serial processing in the dual route cascade model of word recognition in skilled readers ( Rastle & Coltheart, 1998 ). The study supports recent research on European orthographies, which concludes that both orthographic depth and complexity contribute to delayed acquisition of foundation literacy skills.     

GreekLex: A lexical database of Modern Greek

To conduct experimental investigations into the orthographic processing of Modern Greek, information is needed about the lexical properties known to influence visual word recognition. In this article we introduce GreekLex, a lexical database for Modern Greek, which presents collectively for the first time a series of orthographic measures that can be used for psycholinguistic research. GreekLex consists of 35,304 Modern Greek words ranging in length from 1 to 22 letters, and for each word includes the following statistical information: word length, word-form frequency, lemma frequency, neighborhood density and frequency, transposition neighbors, and addition and deletion neighbors. Furthermore, type and token frequency measures of single letters and bigrams derived from the database are also available. The complete database can be accessed and downloaded freely from www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/GreekLex.     

Effect of consonant/vowel letter organisation on the syllable counting task: evidence from English

Recent studies in alphabetic writing systems have investigated whether the status of letters as consonants or vowels influences the perception and processing of written words. Here, we examined to what extent the organisation of consonants and vowels within words affects performance in a syllable counting task in English. Participants were asked to judge the number of syllables in written words that were matched for the number of spoken syllables but comprised either 1 orthographic vowel cluster less than the number of syllables (hiatus words, e.g., triumph) or as many vowel clusters as syllables (e.g., pudding). In 3 experiments, we found that readers were slower and less accurate on hiatus than control words, even when phonological complexity (Experiment 1), number of reduced vowels (Experiment 2), and number of letters (Experiment 3) were taken into account. Interestingly, for words with or without the same number of vowel clusters and syllables, participants’ errors were more likely to underestimate the number of syllables than to overestimate it. Results are discussed in a cross-linguistic perspective.     

Does length or neighborhood size cause the word length effect?

Jalbert, Neath, Bireta, and Surprenant (2011) suggested that past demonstrations of the word length effect, the finding that words with fewer syllables are recalled better than words with more syllables, included a confound: The short words had more orthographic neighbors than the long words. The experiments reported here test two predictions that would follow if neighborhood size is a more important factor than word length. In Experiment 1, we found that concurrent articulation removed the effect of neighborhood size, just as it removes the effect of word length. Experiment 2 demonstrated that this pattern is also found with nonwords. For Experiment 3, we factorially manipulated length and neighborhood size, and found only effects of the latter. These results are problematic for any theory of memory that includes decay offset by rehearsal, but they are consistent with accounts that include a redintegrative stage that is susceptible to disruption by noise. The results also confirm the importance of lexical and linguistic factors on memory tasks thought to tap short-term memory.     

Effects of parafoveal word length and orthographic features on initial fixation landing positions in reading

Previous research has demonstrated that readers use word length and word boundary information in targeting saccades into upcoming words while reading. Previous studies have also revealed that the initial landing positions for fixations on words are affected by parafoveal processing. In the present study, we examined the effects of word length and orthographic legality on targeting saccades into parafoveal words. Long (8?C9 letters) and short (4?C5 letters) target words, which were matched on lexical frequency and initial letter trigram, were paired and embedded into identical sentence frames. The gaze-contingent boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to manipulate the parafoveal information available to the reader before direct fixation on the target word. The parafoveal preview was either identical to the target word or was a visually similar nonword. The nonword previews contained orthographically legal or orthographically illegal initial letters. The results showed that orthographic preprocessing of the word to the right of fixation affected eye movement targeting, regardless of word length. Additionally, the lexical status of an upcoming saccade target in the parafovea generally did not influence preprocessing.     

Orthographic depth and the interaction of visual and auditory processing in word recognition

We studied the influence of word frequency and orthographic depth on the interaction of orthographic and phonetic information in word perception. Native speakers of English and Serbo-Croatian were presented with simultaneous printed and spoken verbal stimuli and had to decide whether they were equivalent. Decision reaction time was measured in three experimental conditions: Clear print and clear speech, degraded print and clear speech, and clear print and degraded speech. Within each language, the effects of visual and auditory degradation were measured, relative to the undegraded presentation. Both effects of degradation were much stronger in English than in Serbo-Croatian. Moreover, they were the same for high- and low-frequency words in both languages. These results can be accounted for by a parallel interactive processing model that assumes lateral connections between the orthographic and phonological systems at all of their levels. The structure of these lateral connections is independent of word frequency and is determined by the relationship between spelling and phonology in the language: simple isomorphic connections between graphemes and phonemes in Serbo-Croatian, but more complex, many-to-one, connections in English.     

Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database

In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant–vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools.     

The role of syllabic and orthographic properties of letter cues in solving word fragments

The present research examined the role of phonological and orthographic properties of cues in mediating the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The task required subjects to resolve fragmented words when provided with semantically related cues (e.g., spiteful:---DIC----). Phonological properties of the letter cues were manipulated such that the letters either corresponded to the syllables (e.g., DIC in vindictive) or nonsyllables (NDI) in the word. Orthographic properties of the letter cues were manipulated by selecting letter groups that either co-occurred frequently in the language or did not. In two experiments, results revealed little or no effect of the phonological variable (syllables) but a reliable effect of the orthographic variable (letter-cue frequency). Letter cues with a low frequency of co-occurrence in the language led to better completion of the fragmented words. We interpret these findings as support for models of lexical representation that are based on orthographic properties (e.g., Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) rather than those based on phonological constraints.     

Levels of representation in word processing

Abstract

Four experiments are described examining the effects of words frequency, orthographic structure, and letter spacing on a range of tasks designed to tap different levels of representation in word processing. In Experiment 1, the task was lexical decision. Effects of both frequency (high-frequency words were recognized faster than low-frequency words) and orthographic regularity (illegal non-words were rejected faster than legal non-words) were found. In Experiment 2 subjects had to detect a rotated letter within the letter strings. Effects of orthographic structure emerged, with a marked disadvantage for illegal non-words with respect to the other types of string. No difference was found among high-frequency words, lowfrequency words and legal non-words. In Experiment 3, subjects had to detect a letter elevated above the horizontal plan with respect to the rest of the string. Effects of both spatial arrangement of letters and number of letters were found (spaced strings were responded to less accurately than non-spaced strings and seven-letter extra-spaced strings were responded to slower than the other strings). Neither lexical nor orthograpic variables affected this task. In Experiment 4 subjects had to detect the presence of a bold segment contained in one of the letters in the strings. Performance was unaffected by both lexical and spatial variables. The pattern of results is discussed with reference to a multi-stage model of word recognition in which lexical and spatial variables affect processing at different stages. At a feature map level, in which features are extracted from the discontinuities of light intensities, processing is independent of both spatial and lexical factors. At a letter-shape map level, in which spatial relationships between features are coded, spacing between letters affects encoding. At a graphemic map level, in which letter identities and their relative positions within strings are coded, orthographic variables have an effect. Lexicality and frequency affect only subsequent stages of processing, when stored lexical information is retrieved (e.g. for lexical decision).     

The Spanish adaptation of ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words)

This article presents the Spanish adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999). The norms are based on 720 participants' assessments of the translation into Spanish of the 1,034 words included in the ANEW. The evaluations were done in the dimensions of valence, arousal and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM). Apart from these dimensions, five objective (number of letters, number of syllables, grammatical class, frequency and number of orthographic neighbors) and three subjective (familiarity, concreteness and imageability) psycholinguistic indexes are included. The Spanish adaptation of ANEW can be downloaded at www.psychonomic.org.     

The sound of enemies and friends in the neighborhood

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.     

Phonology as the source of syllable frequency effects in visual word recognition: Evidence from French

In order to investigate whether syllable frequency effects in visual word recognition can be attributed to phonologically or orthographically defined syllables, we designed one experiment that allowed six critical comparisons. Whereas only a weak effect was obtained when both orthographic and phonological syllable frequency were conjointly manipulated in Comparison 1, robust effects for phonological and null effects for orthographic syllable frequency were found in Comparisons 2 and 3. Comparisons 4 and 5 showed that the syllable frequency effect does not result from a confound with the frequency of letter or phoneme clusters at the beginning of words. The syllable frequency effect was shown to diminish with increasing word frequency in Comparison 6. These results suggest that visually presented polysyllabic words are parsed into phonologically defined syllables during visual word recognition. Materials and links may be accessed at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Lexical and Metrical Stress in Word Recognition: Lexical or Pre-lexical Influences?

The influence of lexical stress and/or metrical stress on spoken word recognition was examined. Two experiments were designed to determine whether response times in lexical decision or shadowing tasks are influenced when primes and targets share lexical stress patterns (JUVenile–BIBlical [Syllables printed in capital letters indicate those syllables receiving primary lexical stress.]). The results did not support an effect of lexical stress on the organization of lexical memory. In Experiment 3 primes and targets whose first syllables shared lexical stress only (MUDdy–PASta), metrical stress only (alTHOUGH–PASta), both cues (LECtern–PASta), or neither cue (conTROL–PASta) revealed no priming effect. However, targets whose first syllables were strong were responded to faster than targets whose first syllables were weak. Experiment 4 manipulated the metrical stress patterns of bi-syllabic primes and targets. Targets with strong–weak metrical stress patterns were responded to more quickly than those with strong–strong or weak–strong patterns. Although the priming paradigm did not reveal an influence of lexical and metrical stress on the organization of lexical memory, the data do support an influence of strong syllables on the processing of auditorily presented words.     

Orthographic similarity: The case of “reversed anagrams”

How orthographically similar are words such as paws and swap, flow and wolf, or live and evil? According to the letter position coding schemes used in models of visual word recognition, these reversed anagrams are considered to be less similar than words that share letters in the same absolute or relative positions (such as home and hose or plan and lane). Therefore, reversed anagrams should not produce the standard orthographic similarity effects found using substitution neighbors (e.g., home, hose). Simulations using the spatial coding model (Davis, Psychological Review 117, 713-758, 2010), for example, predict an inhibitory masked-priming effect for substitution neighbor word pairs but a null effect for reversed anagrams. Nevertheless, we obtained significant inhibitory priming using both stimulus types (Experiment 1). We also demonstrated that robust repetition blindness can be obtained for reversed anagrams (Experiment 2). Reversed anagrams therefore provide a new test for models of visual word recognition and orthographic similarity.     

Evidence for word length coding during visual word recognition

In a masked priming procedure manipulating orthographic neighbourhood size, the priming word activates a number of word candidates of which the target could be one. Whether the target is one of the candidates or not determines how quickly it is recognised. However, the efficiency of lexical processing may be markedly less if all possible candidates are activated. One solution to this problem is if the visual system uses prime length information to reduce the number of candidates to a more manageable amount. Here, we investigated in two masked priming experiments whether prime length and orthographic information combine to facilitate target word recognition. In Experiment 1, we showed that the efficiency of visual word recognition is not influenced by the length of primes alone. However, when combined with orthographically related primes, word length coding is preserved. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether length priming affects recognition of short and long words differently. Results showed that only short words benefit from a same-length orthographically related prime, and that the priming effect does not generalise to longer words. These results suggest that the length of a word is not an essential feature in lexical processing, but that it can facilitate recognition by constraining the activation of orthographically related words.     

Orthographic neighbors and visual word recognition

Two lexical decision experiments, using words that were selected and closely matched on several criteria associated with lexical access, provide evidence of facilitatory effects of orthographic neighborhood size and no significant evidence of inhibitory effects of orthographic neighborhood frequency on lexical access. The words used in Experiment 1 had few neighbors that were higher in frequency. In Experiment 2, the words employed had several neighbors that were higher in frequency. Both experiments showed that words possessing few neighbors evoked slower responses than those possessing many neighbors. Also, in both experiments, neighborhood size effects occurred even though words from large neighborhoods had more potentially interfering higher-frequency neighbors than words from small neighborhoods.