The effect of grammatical gender and semantic context on lexical access in Italian using a timed word-naming paradigm

The effects of sentence context and grammatical gender on lexical access were investigated in Italian using a timed word-naming paradigm. Large main effects of both sentence context and the gender of the article were observed; the interaction between gender and semantics was significant over subjects. Strong facilitation by both gender and semantics was observed, relative to a neutral-control baseline condition. Results are compared with (1) a prior study with the same design, using a picture-naming paradigm, except that objects described by written words were replaced by pictures (Bentrovato, Devescovi, D'Amico, & Bates, 1999); (2) a separate norming study of timed word reading in a list format, using the same stimuli (D'Amico, Devescovi, & Bates, 2001); and (3) a prior study of German comparing word and picture naming in short, semantically neutral phrases (Jacobsen, 1999). Differences in methodology and in findings between the Italian word naming and the German word naming are compared and discussed. Findings of the present study are interpreted in support of interactive-activation models in which different sources of information are combined on-line to predict, anticipate, or preactivate lexical targets.     

Grammatical Priming of Visual Word Recognition in Fourth grade Children

Previous work examining context effects in children has been limited to semantic context. The current research examined the effects of grammatical priming of word-naming in fourth-grade children. In Experiment 1, children named both inflected and uninflected noun and verb target words faster when they were preceded by grammatically constraining primes than when they were preceded by neutral primes. Experiment 1 used a long stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) interval of 750 msec. Experiment 2 replicated the grammatical priming effect at two SOA intervals (400 msec and 700 msec), suggesting that the grammatical priming effect does not reflect the operation of any gross strategic effects directly attributable to the long SOA interval employed in Experiment 1. Grammatical context appears to facilitate target word naming by constraining target word class. Further work is required to elucidate the loci of this effect.     

A study of masked form priming in picture and word naming

We report a series of picture- and word-naming experiments in which the masked priming paradigm with prime exposures brief enough to prevent prime identification were used. Experiment 1 demonstrates that the prior presentation of the same word prime facilitates both picture and word naming independently of target frequency. In Experiments 2 and 3, primes that were pseudohomophones of picture targets produced facilitatory effects compared with orthographic controls, but these orthographically similar nonword primes did not facilitate picture naming compared with unrelated controls. On the other hand, word targets were primarily facilitated by orthographic prime— target overlap. This marked dissociation in the priming effects obtained with picture and word targets is discussed in relation to different explanations of masked form priming effects in visual word recognition and current models of picture and word naming.     

Picture Naming and Lexical Access in Italian Children and Adults

Italian-speaking adults and 5- to 6-year-old children were compared in a timed picture-naming task, measuring latency as well as name agreement, in relation to frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), picture complexity, word length, word complexity, semantic category, phonological characteristics, and grammatical gender. Although children were slower and less accurate than adults, correlations of dependent variables with lexical predictors were similar in both groups. However, word complexity had effects on adults that were not seen in children, and grammatical gender had effects on children that were not seen in adults. Adult ratings of AoA had strong effects on both groups, but an objective measure of AoA only affected children. Adult and child reaction times were also differentially affected by semantic category (especially animal names). Results have implications for developmental and cross-linguistic studies of lexical access, in and out of context.     

Grammatical constraints on phonological encoding in speech production

To better understand the influence of grammatical encoding on the retrieval and encoding of phonological word-form information during speech production, we examine how grammatical class constraints influence the activation of phonological neighbors (words phonologically related to the target—e.g., MOON, TWO for target TUNE). Specifically, we compare how neighbors that share a target’s grammatical category (here, nouns) influence its planning and retrieval, assessed by picture naming latencies, and phonetic encoding, assessed by word productions in picture names, when grammatical constraints are strong (in sentence contexts) versus weak (bare naming). Within-category (noun) neighbors influenced planning time and phonetic encoding more strongly in sentence contexts. This suggests that grammatical encoding constrains phonological processing; the influence of phonological neighbors is grammatically dependent. Moreover, effects on planning times could not fully account for phonetic effects, suggesting that phonological interaction affects articulation after speech onset. These results support production theories integrating grammatical, phonological, and phonetic processes.     

Gender congruency effects in picture naming

The analysis of speech error corpora in various gender-marked languages has shown that noun substitutions tend to preserve grammatical gender. This result has been taken as an indication that grammatical gender could play a constraining role during the process of lexical selection. To gain insights on the status of grammatical gender in the speech production system, we discuss this hypothesis and we report three picture naming experiments. We attempted to observe gender-marked context effects in the course of error-free speech production. Participants named pictures shortly after processing a prime that was or was not gender marked and that was or was not congruent with the name of the picture. A clear congruency effect was observed, involving both facilitation in the gender congruent conditions and inhibition in gender incongruent conditions. Different interpretations of this effect and of previously reported gender context effects are discussed in the context of current models of speech production.     

French‐learning toddlers use gender information on determiners during word recognition

In gender‐marking languages, the gender of the noun determines the form of the preceding article. In this study, we examined whether French‐learning toddlers use gender‐marking information on determiners to recognize words. In a split‐screen preferential looking experiment, 25‐month‐olds were presented with picture pairs that referred to nouns with either the same or different genders. The target word in the auditory instruction was preceded either by the correct or incorrect gender‐marked definite article. Toddlers’ looking times to target shortly after article onset demonstrated that target words were processed most efficiently in different‐gender grammatical trials. While target processing in same‐gender grammatical trials recovered in the subsequent time window, ungrammatical articles continued to affect processing efficiency until much later in the trial. These results indicate that by 25 months of age, French‐learning toddlers use gender information on determiners when comprehending subsequent nouns.     

Gender Priming in Picture Naming: Modality and Baseline Effects

Gender priming in speech production relates to the issue of whether retrieval of a noun is facilitated by preactivation of its grammatical gender. Such gender-to-lexical entry priming has been considered the mechanism underlying the gender-identity effect in word substitution errors (i.e., a substituted word tends to have the same gender as the target word.) Gender priming was explored in two primed picture-naming experiments with German participants. Primes were presented either visually or auditorily and differed in whether they carried grammatical gender information or not. Unlike inhibition from a gender-incongruent prime, facilitation from a gender-congruent prime was weak, not reliable, and dependent on the baseline and prime modality. Implications for the interpretation of the gender-identity effect are discussed.     

语法性别对认知的影响及其机制

语法性是许多语言中普遍存在的现象。它本质上属于句法属性,但是一定程度上关联着语义,而且会影响个体对物体的分类、知觉、认知加工,以及对二语的学习等认知活动,其对认知的影响程度受任务、语言、语法性透明度等因素调节。语法性影响认知的机制主要有概念水平上的相似性假设;生物性假设;词汇水平上的双选择模型。未来的研究要进一步探究语法性的认知机制、二语学习中语法性习得的认知过程、语法性不同形式性别差异影响的机制。     

Mechanisms of sentence context effects in reading: Automatic activation and conscious attention

In. Experiment I subjects named target words that were preceded by a congruous sentence context, an incongruous sentence context, or no sentence context, under stimulus conditions that were either normal or degraded by contrast reduction. Under normal stimulus conditions, a contextual facilitation effect, but no contextual inhibition effect, was observed. When the target word was degraded, both contextual facilitation and inhibition were observed. Experiment 2 replicated the increase in contextual inhibition under degraded conditions and also demonstrated that inhibition increased as the interval between contextual processing and target-word onset was lengthened. The results were interpreted within the framework of the Posner and Snyder two-process theory of expectancy. Thus, when target-word recognition is rapid, only the fast-acting automatic activation component of context effects has time to operate. When target-word processing is delayed, the conscious-attention mechanism, which is responsible for inhibition effects, becomes operative. The relevance of these results to developmental investigations of the interaction of word recognition and contextual processing is discussed.     

Grammatical gender in the production of single words: some evidence from Greek

The present study investigated the effect of prior grammatical gender information provided by the production of a bare noun on the production of a syntactically unrelated, gender-inflected color adjective. The target language was Greek. A lexical priming task involving picture naming was employed. Participants saw a series of pictures, some in color and some in black-and-white; they had to name a black-and-white picture with the single noun (prime) and a color picture with the appropriately inflected color adjective (target). Prior gender information was shown to affect subsequent production of gender-marked words. The effect was restricted to nouns of one gender class (masculine) only. The implications of these results for the representation and processing of gender in production are discussed.     

Transfer of processing in repetition priming: some inappropriate findings.

Transfer effects in repetition priming were found with both picture and word naming, but varied with the type of prime list. Unmixed lists of word or picture primes produced equivalent intra-modal and cross-modal repetition priming in both picture-naming (Experiment 1) and word-naming (Experiment 5) tasks. However, mixing word and picture primes resulted in greater intra-modal than cross-modal priming for both picture-naming (Experiment 2) and word-naming (Experiment 6) tasks. This mixed-list difference between intra-modal and cross-modal priming was reduced by blocking prime types at input (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that differences in priming as a function of prime stimulus format should be cautiously interpreted when mixed prime lists are used.     

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.     

Early morphological effects in reading: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit in Hebrew

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern. We examined the role of the root morpheme in word identification by assessing the benefit of presentation of a parafoveal preview word derived from the same root as a target word. Although the letter information of the preview was not consciously perceived, a preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated eye-movement measures of first-pass reading (i.e.,first fixation and gaze duration). These results are the first to demonstrate early morphological effects in the context of sentence reading in which no external task is imposed on the reader, and converge with previous findings of morphemic priming in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, and morphemic parafoveal preview benefit effects in a single-word identification task.     

Integration of perceptual information in word access

According to experiential theories of language comprehension, perceptual information plays an essential role when word meanings are accessed. We conducted four experiments to investigate how different types of perceptual information such as colour and shape are combined during word access. One possibility is that the colour and shape of a word's referent are activated independently from one another and are combined in an additive manner. Alternatively, words might activate perceptual representations via a multiplicative integration of colour and shape. Experiment 1 established that participants follow a multiplicative similarity rule when they judge the similarity of schematic pictures to actual fruits and vegetables. In Experiments 2 to 4, participants performed a classification task, a lexical decision task, or a word-naming task on names of fruits and vegetables that were superimposed on a background picture. Responses were facilitated only when both colour and shape of the picture matched the word's referents. Response times were associated negatively with mean similarity ratings and the consistency of these ratings obtained in the first experiment. These results suggest a multiplicative integration of different types of perceptual information during word access.     

Semantic context effects and priming in word association

Two experiments investigated priming in word association, an implicit memory task. In the study phase of Experiment 1, semantically ambiguous target words were presented in sentences that biased their interpretation. The appropriate interpretation of the target was either congruent or incongruent with the cue presented in a subsequent word association task. Priming (i.e., a higher proportion of target responses relative to a nonstudied baseline) was obtained for the congruent condition, but not for the incongruent condition. In Experiment 2, study sentences emphasized particular meaning aspects of nonambiguous targets. The word association task showed a higher proportion of target responses for targets studied in the more congruent sentence context than for targets studied in the less congruent sentence context. These results indicate that priming in word association depends largely on the storage of information relating the cue and target.     

Sentence context effects on lexically ambiguous words: Evidence for a postaccess inhibition process

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the process involved in selecting the contextually appropriate meaning of a homograph. Both experiments employed a grammaticality decision task. In Experiment 1, the primary (more frequent) and secondary (less frequent) meanings of homographs were used as the target items requiring a “yes” decision. The results indicated that the effect of relative frequency of these meanings of homographs was reduced when the target word was preceded either by a semantically congruous or anomalous sentence context relative to when it was preceded by the grammatical morpheme “the” or “to.” Experiment 2 indicated that “no” decisions were consistently slower for syntactically unambiguous, but semantically ambiguous words (e.g., ORGAN, FEET) than for syntactically and semantically unambiguous words (e.g., CENT, LEND), irrespective of the type of preceding context. The results, taken as a whole, are best interpreted within the postaccess inhibition model of sentence-context effects suggested by Forster (1981).     

The maze task: Measuring forced incremental sentence processing time

The maze task is an online measure of sentence processing time that provides an alternative to the standard moving window version of self-paced reading. Rather than each word of the sentence being presented in succession, two words are presented at the same time, and the participant must choose which word is a grammatical continuation of the sentence. This procedure forces the reader into an incremental mode of processing in which each word must be fully integrated with the preceding context before the next word can be considered. Previous research with this technique has not considered whether it is sufficiently sensitive to syntactic complexity effects or to garden path effects. Four experiments are reported demonstrating that reliable differences in processing time for subject relatives and object relatives can be obtained, and that this technique generates garden path effects that correspond closely with the data from eyetracking experiments, but without the spillover effects that are sometimes obtained with eyetracking. It is also shown that the task is sensitive to word frequency effects, producing estimates well in excess of those found with eyetracking.     

Conditions of directed attention inhibit recognition performance for explicitly presented target-aligned irrelevant stimuli

The fate of irrelevant and overtly presented stimuli that was temporally aligned with an attended target in a separate task was explored. Seitz and Watanabe (2003) demonstrated that if an irrelevant motion stimulus was implicit (i.e., subthreshold), a later facilitation for the same motion direction was observed if the previously presented implicit motion (of the same direction) was temporally aligned with the presence of an attended target. Later research, however, demonstrated that if the motion stimulus aligned with the attended target was explicit (i.e., suprathreshold), a later inhibition was observed (Tsushima, Seitz, & Watanabe, 2008). The current study expands on this by using more salient stimuli (words and pictures) in an inattentional blindness paradigm, and suggests that when attention is depleted, recognition for target-aligned task-irrelevant items is impaired in a subsequent recognition task. Participants were required to respond to either immediate picture, or word, repetitions in a stream of simultaneously presented line drawings and written words, and later given a surprise recognition test that measured recognition for the words or the pictures. When analyzing word recognition performance after attention had been directed to the pictures, words that had appeared simultaneously with a picture repetition in the repetition detection task were recognized at levels significantly below chance. The same inhibition was mirrored when testing for picture recognition after having attended to the words in the repetition detection task. These data suggest an inhibitory mechanism that is exhibited in later recognition tests for salient information that was previously unattended and had been simultaneously being presented with an attended target in a different task.     

Expectancy,integration, and interactional processes: Age differences in the nature of words affected by sentence context

Two experiments investigated sentence context effects on the naming times of sentence completion words by third-grade children and college students. Across both experiments, the largest age difference in contextual facilitation was obtained for highly predictable, best completion words. Pronounced age differences in facilitation effects were also present for semantically acceptable target words which were much less predictable in the sentence context than the best completion words. However, age differences in contextual facilitation were negligible for target words which were associatively related to the best completion word, but which were not also semantically acceptable in the sentence context. Thus, the semantic acceptability of the word in the sentence context had a much greater influence on children's as compared to adults' word identification times, both when the word was highly predictable, as well as when it was much less predictable in the sentence context.