Age-related influences on lexical selection and orthographic encoding during homophone spelling

Two experiments investigated age differences in how semantic, syntactic, and orthographic factors influence the production of homophone spelling errors in sentence contexts. Younger and older adults typed auditorily presented sentences containing homophone targets (e.g., blew) that were categorized as having a regular spelling (EW) or an irregular spelling (UE). In Experiment 1, homophones were preceded by an unrelated word, a semantic prime that was congruent with the target's meaning in the sentence (e.g., wind), or a semantic prime incongruent with the target's meaning (e.g., sky) and instead related to the competitor homophone. Experiment 2 manipulated the target's part of speech, where target and competitor homophones shared or differed in part of speech. For both age groups, significant semantic priming occurred, where homophone errors decreased following congruent semantic primes and increased following incongruent primes. However, priming only occurred when homophones shared part of speech. Further, both age groups made more errors on homophones with an irregular than a regular spelling, and this regularity effect was smaller for older adults when homophones shared part of speech. Contrary to many spoken production tasks, older adults made fewer errors overall than younger adults. These findings demonstrate age preservation in lexical selection but age differences in orthographic encoding, resulting in older adults producing fewer errors because of reduced activation to competitor homophones. These findings also illustrate that syntactic factors, such as part of speech, can influence the spellings of individual words.     

Phonological recoding and lexical access

Four experiments are reported that examine the effects of homophony (e.g., SAIL/SALE) on response latency in a lexical decision task. The results indicated that an effect of homophony was evident only if the nonword distractors consisted of legal, pronounceable strings (e.g., SLINT), but that this effect disappeared if the nonwords sounded like English words (e.g., BRANE). An optional encoding strategy is proposed to account for this differential effect. It is suggested that while both graphemic and phonemic encoding occurred simultaneously, naive subjects tended to rely on the outcome of the phonological route. However, when such reliance produced a high error rate (i.e., when the nonwords sounded like English words),. these subjects were able to abandon a phonological strategy and rely on the graphemic encoding procedure instead. Two further aspects of the results are of interest. First, the less frequent member of a homophone pair was slower when compared with a control item if the nonword distractors were of the SLINT type, but not different if they were of the BRANE type. The high-frequency members did not differ from their controls in either nonword environment. Second, in a homophone “repetition” experiment, the frequency order of presentation within pairs of homophones (i.e., the high-frequency member followed by the low-frequency member, or vice versa) had a substantial effect. A spelling recheck procedure and a response-inhibitory mechanism are postulated to incorporate these effects into a dual-encoding direct-access model of word recognition.     

Phonological priming reflects lexical competition

A phonological relationship between a prime and a target produces facilitation when one or two initial phonemes are shared (low-similarity facilitation) but produces interference when more phonemes are shared (high-similarity interference; Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992). Although low-similarity facilitation appears to be a strategic effect (Goldinger, Luce, Pisoni, & Marcario, 1992), this result cannot generalize to high-similarity interference because the two effects are dissociated (Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992). In the present study, strategic processing in high-similarity interference was investigated. The phonological relatedness proportion (PRP) and the prime-target interstimulus interval (ISI) were varied in a shadowing experiment. Low-similarity facilitation was found only with a high PRP and long ISI, but high-similarity interference was found regardless of PRP and ISI. These results suggest that strategies influence low-similarity facilitation, but high-similarity interference reflects automatic processing.     

Phonological activation in anaphoric lexical access (ALA).

Simner and Smyth (1998) propose that anaphoric lexical access (ALA) occurs at an anaphor and targets the lexical entry (specifically, the lemma) of the antecedent. Since the word frequency effect (e.g., Rubenstein et al., 1970) resides at the lexeme (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994) Simner and Smyth predict, and subsequently illustrate, that ALA exhibits no frequency effect. A problem arises, however: if ALA does not access the lexeme, how do we account for phonological priming at anaphor sites (e.g., Tanenhaus et al., 1985)? We claim that this is the result of "incidental" lemma-to-lexeme activation. Furthermore, we argue that since lexeme activation is not crucial to anaphor comprehension, anaphor reading times indicate lemma search times only (therefore there is no frequency effect). An experiment is presented demonstrating that lemma-access during ALA can cause incidental lexeme activation without invoking a frequency effect.     

Phonological neighbourhood spread facilitates lexical decisions

In visual word recognition, words with many phonological neighbours are processed more rapidly than are those with few neighbours. The research reported here tested whether the distribution of phonological neighbours across phoneme positions influences lexical decisions. The results indicate that participants responded more rapidly to words where all phoneme positions can be changed to form a neighbour than they did to those where only a limited number of phoneme positions can be changed to form a neighbour. It is argued that this distribution effect arises because of differences between the two groups of words in how they overlap with their neighbours.     

Phonological processing and lexical access in aphasia

This study explored the relationship between on-line processing of phonological information and lexical access in aphasic patients. A lexical decision paradigm was used in which subjects were presented auditorily with pairs of words or word-like stimuli and were asked to make a lexical decision about the second stimulus in the pair. The initial phonemes of the first word primes, which were semantically related to the real word targets, were systematically changed by one or more than one phonetic feature, e.g., cat-dog, gat-dog, wat-dog. Each of these priming conditions was compared to an unrelated word baseline condition, e.g., nurse-dog. Previous work with normals showed that even a nonword stimulus receives a lexical interpretation if it shares a sufficient number of phonetic features with an actual word in the listener's lexicon. Results indicated a monotonically decreasing degree of facilitation as a function of phonological distortion. In contrast, fluent aphasics showed priming in all phonological distortion conditions relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nonfluent aphasics showed priming only in the undistorted, related word condition relative to the unrelated word baseline. Nevertheless, in a secondary task requiring patients to make a lexical decision on the nonword primes presented singly, all aphasics showed phonological feature sensitivity. These results suggest deficits for aphasic patients in the various processes contributing to lexical access, rather than impairments at the level of lexical organization or phonological organization.     

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.     

Phonological perception by birds: budgerigars can perceive lexical stress

Metrical phonology is the perceptual “strength” in language of some syllables relative to others. The ability to perceive lexical stress is important, as it can help a listener segment speech and distinguish the meaning of words and sentences. Despite this importance, there has been little comparative work on the perception of lexical stress across species. We used a go/no-go operant paradigm to train human participants and budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) to distinguish trochaic (stress-initial) from iambic (stress-final) two-syllable nonsense words. Once participants learned the task, we presented both novel nonsense words, and familiar nonsense words that had certain cues removed (e.g., pitch, duration, loudness, or vowel quality) to determine which cues were most important in stress perception. Members of both species learned the task and were then able to generalize to novel exemplars, showing categorical learning rather than rote memorization. Tests using reduced stimuli showed that humans could identify stress patterns with amplitude and pitch alone, but not with only duration or vowel quality. Budgerigars required more than one cue to be present and had trouble if vowel quality or amplitude were missing as cues. The results suggest that stress patterns in human speech can be decoded by other species. Further comparative stress-perception research with more species could help to determine what species characteristics predict this ability. In addition, tests with a variety of stimuli could help to determine how much this ability depends on general pattern learning processes versus vocalization-specific cues.     

Disorders of lexical selection.

Errors in lexical processing are commonplace in language pathologies resulting from brain injury or disease. This discussion considers some of the major recent developments in the interpretation of such errors. The focus is on behavioral systems, rather than neuroanatomical or neurophysiological issues. The objective is to comment on some plausible mutual implications of generally attested pathologies and normal models of lexical retrieval for production, particularly with respect to the roles of semantic and syntactic categories.     

Phonological ambiguity and lexical ambiguity: effects on visual and auditory word recognition

Three experiments in Serbo-Croatian were conducted on the effects of phonological ambiguity and lexical ambiguity on printed word recognition. Subjects decided rapidly if a printed and a spoken word matched or not. Printed words were either phonologically ambiguous (two possible pronunciations) or unambiguous. If phonologically ambiguous, either both pronunciations were real words or only one was, the other being a nonword. Spoken words were necessarily unambiguous. Half the spoken words were auditorily degraded. In addition, the relative onsets of speech and print were varied. Speed of matching print to speech was slowed by phonological ambiguity, and the effect was amplified when the stimulus was also lexically ambiguous. Auditory degradation did not interact with print ambiguity, suggesting that perception of the spoken word was independent of the printed word.     

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.     

Dissociable lexical and phonological influences on serial recognition and serial recall

The impact of the lexicality of memory items on memory performance was compared in two paradigms, serial recall and serial recognition. Experiments 1 to 3 tested 7- and 8-year-old children. Memory accuracy was only mildly impaired in lists containing nonwords compared with words in a serial recognition task involving judgements of whether the items in two sequences were in the same order (Experiment 1), although a substantial advantage for word over nonword items from the same stimulus pool was found in serial recall (Experiment 2). A stronger influence of lexicality on serial recall than serial recognition was further demonstrated in Experiments 3A and 3B, and in 4A and 4B using adult participants. These experiments also established comparable degrees of sensitivity to the phonological similarity of the memory sequences in the two paradigms. The phonological similarity effect in serial recall was found to arise from increased phoneme order errors, whereas the lexicality effect was due principally to the greater frequency of phoneme identity errors for nonwords. It is proposed that the lexicality effect originates in the redintegration of item information just prior to recall, and that this process is largely bypassed in serial recognition.     

Phonological coding in reading of deaf children: Pseudohomophone effects in lexical decision

The purpose of this study was to find new evidence for phonological coding in written word recognition among deaf Dutch children. A lexical decision task was presented to 48 severely and profoundly deaf children aged from 6 years 8 months to 13 years 5 months, and a control group of Grade 1 hearing children matched on written word recognition. Sixteen pseudohomophones were introduced, closely matched on orthographic similarity with 16 control pseudo-words. Both hearing children and deaf children made significantly more mistakes on pseudohomophones than on control pseudo-words. Although pseudohomophony effects were smaller for deaf than for hearing participants, the findings were taken as evidence that deaf children also used phonological coding during written word recognition.     

Phonological recoding in lexical decision: Effects of spelling-to-sound regularity depend on how regularity is defined

This study is concerned with two contrasting accounts of lexieal access in reading, phonological receding and direct access. Experiment I demonstrated that exception words that have a guide to their pronunciation listed in theOxford Paperback Dictionary (e.g., GAUGE) gave rise to longer lexical decision times than matched regular words (e.g., GRILL). Experiment 2 contrasted three types of words: exceptions that have dictionary-listed pronunciations, exceptions without listed pronunciations, and regular words. Lexieal decision responses to the first type were significantly longer than those produced to the other two types. Nonlisted exception words, however, did not differ from regular words. Experiment 3 confirmed the results of Experiment 2, using pronunciation speed as the dependent measure. Experiment 4 showed that the slower lexical decision times associated with dictionary-listed exception words remain when subjects are given speeded-response instructions. In contrast to earlier studies of a similar kind, these results indicate the existence of a phonological receding stage in reading. Furthermore, they suggest that the phonological recoding system is more flexible than was previously thought.     

A reason to rhyme: phonological and semantic influences on lexical access

During on-line language production, speakers rapidly select a sequence of words to express their desired meaning. The current study examines whether this lexical selection is also dependent on the existing activation of surface properties of the words. Such surface properties clearly matter in various forms of wordplay, including poetry and musical lyrics. The experiments in this article explore whether language processing more generally is sensitive to these properties. Two experiments examined the interaction between phonological and semantic features for written and verbal productions. In Experiment 1, participants were given printed sentences with a missing word, and were asked to generate reasonable completions. The completions reflected both the semantic and the surface features of the preceding context. In Experiment 2, listeners heard sentence contexts, and were asked to rapidly produce a word to complete the utterance. These spontaneous completions again incorporated surface features activated by the context. The results suggest that lexical access in naturalistic language processing is influenced by an interaction between the surface and semantic features of language.     

Constraints of vowels and consonants on lexical selection: Cross-linguistic comparisons

Languages differ in the constitution of their phonemic repertoire and in the relative distinctiveness of phonemes within the repertoire. In the present study, we asked whether such differences constrain spoken-word recognition, via two word reconstruction experiments, in which listeners turned non-words into real words by changing single sounds. The experiments were carried out in Dutch (which has a relatively balanced vowel-consonant ratio and many similar vowels) and in Spanish (which has many more consonants than vowels and high distinctiveness among the vowels). Both Dutch and Spanish listeners responded significantly faster and more accurately when required to change vowels as opposed to consonants; when allowed to change any phoneme, they more often altered vowels than consonants. Vowel information thus appears to constrain lexical selection less tightly (allow more potential candidates) than does consonant information, independent of language-specific phoneme repertoire and of relative distinctiveness of vowels.     

The (mis)reporting of statistical results in psychology journals

In order to study the prevalence, nature (direction), and causes of reporting errors in psychology, we checked the consistency of reported test statistics, degrees of freedom, and p values in a random sample of high- and low-impact psychology journals. In a second study, we established the generality of reporting errors in a random sample of recent psychological articles. Our results, on the basis of 281 articles, indicate that around 18% of statistical results in the psychological literature are incorrectly reported. Inconsistencies were more common in low-impact journals than in high-impact journals. Moreover, around 15% of the articles contained at least one statistical conclusion that proved, upon recalculation, to be incorrect; that is, recalculation rendered the previously significant result insignificant, or vice versa. These errors were often in line with researchers’ expectations. We classified the most common errors and contacted authors to shed light on the origins of the errors.