Phonological priming in auditory word recognition

Cohort theory, developed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), proposes that a "cohort" of all the words beginning with a particular sound sequence will be activated during the initial stage of the word recognition process. We used a priming technique to test specific predictions regarding cohort activation in three experiments. In each experiment, subjects identified target words embedded in noise at different signal-to-noise ratios. The target words were either presented in isolation or preceded by a prime item that shared phonological information with the target. In Experiment 1, primes and targets were English words that shared zero, one, two, three, or all phonemes from the beginning of the word. In Experiment 2, nonword primes preceded word targets and shared initial phonemes. In Experiment 3, word primes and word targets shared phonemes from the end of a word. Evidence of reliable phonological priming was observed in all three experiments. The results of the first two experiments support the assumption of activation of lexical candidates based on word-initial information, as proposed in cohort theory. However, the results of the third experiment, which showed increased probability of correctly identifying targets that shared phonemes from the end of words, did not support the predictions derived from the theory. The findings are discussed in terms of current models of auditory word recognition and recent approaches to spoken-language understanding.     

Semantic context and word frequency effects in visual word recognition

Semantic context and word frequency factors exert a strong influence on the time that it takes subjects to recognize words. Some of the explanations that have been offered for the effects of the two factors suggest that context and frequency should interact, and other explanations imply additivity. In a recent study, Schuberth and Eimas reported that context and frequency effects added to determine their subjects' reaction times in a lexical decision (word vs. nonword) task. The present experiment reexamines this question with improved procedures. The data show that context and frequency do interact, with a semantic context facilitating the processing of low-frequency words more than high-frequency words.     

Facilitation of auditory word recognition

An experiment that investigated facilitation of recognition of spoken words presented in noise IS described, Prior to the test session, the subjects either read words or heard them spoken in one of two. voices while making a semantic judgment upon them. There was a large effect of auditory priming on word recognition that did not depend upon the voice (male or female) of presentation, There were much smaller, but significant, effects of prior visual experience of the words. The implications of these data for the logogen model are discussed.     

The role of syntactic context in word recognition

This study examines the role of syntactic information in word recognition. Subjects made a word-nonword decision regarding a target string that was preceded by a syntactically appropriate word, a semantically related word, or an unrelated word. In Experiment 1, with syntactic and semantic trials assigned to separate blocks, syntactically and semantically appropriate context significantly reduced lexical decision for subsequent target words, compared with unrelated contexts. In Experiment 2, the syntactically and semantically primed trials were either blocked separately or mixed within the same block. Significant syntactic and semantic effects were both observed in the blocked condition, but only the semantic effect was obtained in the mixed condition     

Modality-specific repetition priming of auditory word recognition

Subjects were pretrained on 30 experimental words by matching each to one of three definitions. The pretrained words were presented auditorily, or in their conventional spellings, or phonically misspelt (e.g., LORNE for lawn). The same words were later interleaved randomly with 70 new filler words and presented auditorily in a background of white noise. Only the auditory pretraining led to significantly improved recognition of the experimental words when compared with the recognition scores of a control group of subjects given no form of pretraining.     

Word familiarity and frequency in visual and auditory word recognition

Four experiments investigate printed word frequency and subjective rated familiarity. Words of varied printed frequency and subjective familiarity were presented. A reaction time advantage for high-familiarity and high-frequency words was found in visual (Experiment 1) and auditory (Experiment 2) lexical decision. In Experiments 3 and 4, a cued naming task elicited a naming response after a specified delay after presentation. In Experiment 3, naming of visual words showed a frequency effect with no naming delay. The frequency effect diminished at longer delay intervals. Naming times for auditorily presented words (Experiment 4) showed no frequency effect at any delay. Both naming experiments showed familiarity effects. The relevance of these results are discussed in terms of the role of printed frequency for theories of lexical access, task- and modality-specific effects, and the nature of subjective familiarity.     

Orthographic and phonological activation in auditory and visual word recognition

A discrete-trials color naming (Stroop)’paradigm was used to examine activation along orthographic and phonological dimensions in visual and auditory word recognition. Subjects were presented a prime word, either auditorily or visually, followed 200 msec later by a target word printed in a color. The orthographic and phonological similarity of prime-target pairs varied. Color naming latencies were longer when the primes and targets were orthographically and/or phonologically similar than when they were unrelated. This result obtained for both prime presentation modes. The results suggest that word recognition entails activation of multiple codes and priming of orthographically and phonologically similar words.     

Sentence context modulates visual word recognition and translation in bilinguals

The influence of sentence context constraint on subsequent processing of concrete and abstract cognates and noncognates was tested in three experiments. Target words were preceded by a predictive, high constraint sentence context, by a congruent, low constraint sentence context, or were presented in isolation. Dutch-English bilinguals performed lexical decision in their second language (L2), or translated target words in forward (from L1 to L2) or in backward (from L2 to L1) direction. After reading a high constraint sentence context, cognate and concreteness effects disappeared in lexical decision and strongly decreased in both translation tasks. In contrast, low constraint sentences did not influence cognate and concreteness effects. These results suggest that semantically rich sentences modulate cross-language interaction during word recognition and word translation.     

Prelexical facilitation and lexical interference in auditory word recognition.

Phonological priming effects were examined in an auditory single-word shadowing task. In 6 experiments, target items were preceded by auditorily or visually presented, phonologically similar, word or nonword primes. Results revealed facilitation in response time when a target was preceded by a word or nonword prime having the same initial phoneme when the prime was auditorily presented but not when it was visually presented. Second, modality-independent interference was observed when the phonological overlap between the prime and target increased from 1 to 3 phonemes for word primes but not for nonword primes. Taken together, these studies suggest that phonological information facilitates word recognition as a result of excitation at a prelexical level and increases response time as a result of competition at a lexical level. These processes are best characterized by connectionist models of word recognition.     

Grammatical context constrains lexical competition in spoken word recognition

When perceiving spoken language, listeners must match the incoming acoustic phonetic input to lexical representations in memory. Models that quantify this process propose that the input activates multiple lexical representations in parallel and that these activated representations compete for recognition (Weber & Scharenborg, 2012). In two experiments, we assessed how grammatically constraining contexts alter the process of lexical competition. The results suggest that grammatical context constrains the lexical candidates that are activated to grammatically appropriate competitors. Stimulus words with little competition from items of the same grammatical class benefit more from the addition of grammatical context than do words with more within-class competition. The results provide evidence that top-down contextual information is integrated in the early stages of word recognition. We propose adding a grammatical class level of analysis to existing models of word recognition to account for these findings.     

Sentence context,word recognition,and repetition blindness

When the sentence She ran her best time yet in the rice last week is displayed using rapid serial visual presentation, viewers sometimes misread rice as race (M. C. Potter, A. Moryadas, I. Abrams, & A. Noel, 1993). Seven experiments combined misreading and repetition blindness (RB) paradigms to determine whether misreading of a word because of biasing sentence context represents a genuine perceptual effect. In Experiments 1-4, misreading a word either caused or prevented RB for a downstream word, depending on whether orthographic similarity was increased or decreased. Additional experiments examined temporal parameters of misreading RB and tested the hypothesis that RB results from reconstructive memory processes. Results suggest that the effect of prior context occurs during perception.     

Recognition of interlingual homophones in bilingual auditory word recognition

How do bilinguals recognize interlingual homophones? In a gating study, word identification and language membership decisions by Dutch-English bilinguals were delayed for interlingual homophones relative to monolingual controls. At the same time, participant judgments were sensitive to subphonemic cues. These findings suggest that auditory lexical access is language nonselective but is sensitive to language-specific characteristics of the input. In 2 cross-modal priming experiments, visual lexical decision times were shortest for monolingual controls preceded by their auditory equivalents. Response times to interlingual homophones accompanied by their corresponding auditory English or Dutch counterparts were also shorter than in unrelated conditions. However, they were longer than in the related monolingual control conditions, providing evidence for online competition of the 2 near-homophonic representations. Experiment 3 suggested that participants used sublexical cues to differentiate the 2 versions of a homophone after language nonselective access.     

A context noise model of episodic word recognition

Item noise models of recognition assert that interference at retrieval is generated by the words from the study list. Context noise models of recognition assert that interference at retrieval is generated by the contexts in which the test word has appeared. The authors introduce the bind cue decide model of episodic memory, a Bayesian context noise model, and demonstrate how it can account for data from the item noise and dual-processing approaches to recognition memory. From the item noise perspective, list strength and list length effects, the mirror effect for word frequency and concreteness, and the effects of the similarity of other words in a list are considered. From the dual-processing perspective, process dissociation data on the effects of length, temporal separation of lists, strength, and diagnosticity of context are examined. The authors conclude that the context noise approach to recognition is a viable alternative to existing approaches.     

Context effects in visual word recognition: Lexical relatedness and syntactic context

In three experiments, we investigated how associative word-word priming effects in German depend on different types of syntactic context in which the related words are embedded. The associative relation always concerned a verb as prime and a noun as target. Prime word and target word were embedded in visually presented strings of words that formed either a correct sentence, a scrambled list of words, or a sentence in which the target noun and the preceding definite article disagreed in syntactic gender. In contrast to previous studies (O’Seaghdha, 1989; Simpson, Peterson, Casteel, & Burgess, 1989), associative priming effects were not only obtained in correct sentences but also in scrambled word lists. Associative priming, however, was not obtained when the definite article and the target noun disagreed in syntactic gender. The latter finding suggests that a rather local violation of syntactic coherence reduces or eliminates word-word priming effects. The results are discussed in the context of related work on the effect of gender dis-/agreement between a syntactic context and a target noun.     

Spoken word recognition in context: evidence from Chinese ERP analyses

Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments were conducted to investigate spoken word recognition in Chinese and the effect of contextual constraints on this process. In Experiment 1, three kinds of incongruous words were formed by altering the first, second or both syllables of the congruous disyllabic terminal words in high constraint spoken sentences. Results showed an increase of N400 amplitude in all three incongruous word conditions and a delayed N400 effect in the cohort incongruous condition as compared with the rhyme incongruous and plain incongruous condition. In addition, unlike results in English, we found that the N400 effect in the rhyme incongruous condition disappeared earlier than in the plain incongruous condition. In Experiment 2, three kinds of nonwords derived from sentence congruous words were constructed by altering few or many phonetic features of the onset or the whole of the first syllable, and the resulting nonwords appeared as disyllabic terminal forms in either high or low constraint sentences. All three nonword conditions elicited the N400 component. In addition, in high constraint sentences but not in low, the amplitude and duration of the N400 varied as a function of the degree of phonetic mismatch between the terminal nonword and the expected congruous word.     

Lexical ambiguity, semantic context, and visual word recognition.

Some alternative hypotheses about the recognition of ambiguous words are considered. According to the selective-access hypothesis, prior semantic context biases people to access one meaning of an ambiguous word rather than another in lexical memory during recognition. In contrast, the nonselectiveaccess hypothesis states that all meanings of the word are accessed regardless of the context. We tested certain versions of these hypotheses by having students decide whether selected strings of letters were English words. The stimuli included test sequnces of three words in which the second word had two distinct possible meanings, whereas the first and third words were related to these meanings in various ways. When the first and third words were related to the same meaning of the ambiguous second word (e.g., SAVE-BANK-MONEY), the reaction time to recognize the third word decreased. But when the first and third words were related to different meanings of the second word (e.g., RIVER-BANK-MONEY), the reaction time for the third word was not reliably different from a control sequence with unrelated words. These and other data favor the selective-access hypothesis. Selective access to lexical memory is discussed in relation to models of word recognition.     

Syntactic context effects on word recognition: A developmental study

In the present study, grammatical context effects on word recognition were examined among skilled and less skilled second and sixth grade readers. Of particular interest was how the word decoding ability may correlate with the grammatical context effect. For this purpose the rich case-marking system of the Finnish language was exploited. Recognition latencies for sentence-final nouns were measured as a function of their syntactic agreement with the preceding adjective. The naming and lexical decision tasks were used as critical measures.
The study showed a clear syntactic context effect for each of the four experimental groups. The magnitude of the observed syntactic effect was substantially larger compared to earlier results. Furthermore, the effect emerged both in naming and lexical decision. In naming, less skilled 2nd grade decoders were more affected by grammatical incongruency than their more competent peers, whereas in lexical decision the skilled 6th graders differed from other groups by showing a smaller syntactic effect. The results are discussed in the light of Stanovich's interactive-compensatory model of word recognition.     

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.