语音反馈对汉字高频同音字词形激活的影响

拼音文字的研究发现, 在词汇通达过程中, 语音和词形之间存在着相互作用的共振关系。与高频词比, 低频词能够更有效地引发词形效应。通过2个实验, 探讨了在汉字高频同音字通达中语音激活对词形激活的反馈作用。结果表明, 汉字高频同音字的通达过程受语音激活的反馈影响。在汉字加工的早期, 共享典型部件的汉字之间存在着词形竞争。在高频汉字的通达中, 存在着拼写几率效应, 但对高频同音字而言, 拼写几率效应的促进作用比语音激活的反馈作用要弱。研究结果支持词汇识别的动力系统原则和词汇激活的共振模型。     

The specific-word frequency effect in speech production: Evidence from Spanish and French

The role of word frequency in lexical access during the production of homophones remains unresolved. In the current study, we address whether specific-word (the frequency of occurrence of the word “nun”) or homophone frequency (the summed frequency of words with the pronunciation /nΛn/) determines the production latencies of homophones. In Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a, participants named pictures of high-frequency (e.g., “banco”–a bank: financial institution) and low-frequency (e.g., “banco”–park bench) Spanish (Experiments 1a and 2a) or French (Experiment 3a) homophones and control pictures of nonhomophone words matched in frequency with each of the two uses of the homophones. The naming latencies for low-frequency homophones were longer than those for high-frequency homophones. Furthermore, the naming latencies for homophones were indistinguishable from those for nonhomophone controls matched in specific-word frequency. In Experiments 1b, 2b, and 3b, the participants performed either object decision or picture–word matching tasks with the stimuli used in the corresponding Experiments 1a, 2a, and 3a. There were no reliable differences between high- and low-frequency homophones. The findings support the hypothesis that specific-word and not homophone frequency determines lexical access in speech production.     

Effects of Lexical Prosody and Word Familiarity on Lexical Access of Spoken Japanese Words

Lexical prosody (e.g., stress and pitch accent) has been shown to constrain lexical activation of spoken words in various languages. In the present study, whether or not the constraint of lexical prosody is affected by word familiarity in lexical access of Japanese words was examined using a cross-modal priming task. The stimuli were pairs of prosodically different homophones (minimal accent pairs). When the targets were more familiar members of minimal accent pairs, the responses were facilitated by prior presentations of primes that were prosodically different homophones of the targets, suggesting that lexical prosody did not constrain lexical activation. In contrast, when less familiar members of minimal accent pairs were used as the targets, the prosodically different homophones did not facilitate the responses to the targets. These results suggest that the constraint of lexical prosody is not so strong but is affected by the factor of word relative familiarity.     

SEMANTIC AND PHONOLOGICAL CODING PROCESSES IN SKILLED AND LESS SKILLED READERS' READING OF TEXT

Abstract

Two experiments examine the memory coding processes of skilled and less skilled readers during the reading of connected text. In experiment 1, students read several paragraphs which required a lexical decision about an underlined letter string within a sentence. Underlined letter strings were either synonyms, repeated words, or control words in reference to items in the sentence. Students were later asked to recall words related to their lexical decision, as well as verify the occurrence of sentences from the text. Skilled readers recalled more synonyms than poor readers, whereas no differences emerged between groups in their recall of other types of words related to the lexical task or for the verification of sentences. Experiment 2 procedures were similar to Experiment 1, except that synonyms were replaced with homophones and the sentence verification task included phrases related to the homophones. When compared to less skilled readers, skilled readers recalled more homophones and repeated words, but were more likely to be disrupted in correct verification of sentences with homophones. Taken together, the experiments suggest that along with phonological coding, semantic processing contributes an important amount of variance to deficiencies in the reading of connected text.     

The role of assembled phonology in reading comprehension

The contribution of assembled phonology to phonological effects in reading comprehension was assessed. In Experiment 1, subjects judged the acceptability of sentences with regular, exception, and nonword homophone substitutions and orthographic controls. Significantly more errors occurred to sentences with regular-word homophones than to exception words, and error rates for nonword homophones were low and not significant. Experiment 2 showed that this was not due to differences in the sentence frames. In Experiment 3, the subjects judged as unacceptable those sentences containing an exception word that sounded correct when read according to spelling-to-sound rules. Significantly higher error rates occurred only for low-frequency exception words. Experiment 4 showed that task conditions affect semantic-categorization error rates for nonword homophones. These results indicate that both assembled and addressed phonology contribute to sentence and word comprehension, but the low error rate for nonwords suggests that an early lexical check may be applied.     

Why did I right that? Factors that influence the production of homophone substitution errors

Despite considerable research on language production errors involving speech, little research exists in the complementary domain of writing. Two experiments investigated the production of homophone substitution errors, which occur when a contextually appropriate word (e.g., beech) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beach tree). Participants wrote down auditorily presented sentences containing dominant or subordinate homophones. Homophones were preceded by a lexical prime that overlapped in phonology and orthography (e.g., teacher) or only orthography (e.g., headmaster) with the target homophone. Results showed more substitution errors when the context elicited a subordinate homophone than when it elicited a dominant homophone. Furthermore, both types of primes equivalently increased production of homophone errors relative to control words (e.g., lawyer), suggesting that only orthographic overlap between the prime and target was necessary to influence errors. These results are explained within dual-route models of spelling, which postulate an interaction between lexical and sublexical routes when spelling.     

LIFG-based attentional control and the resolution of lexical ambiguities in sentence context

The role of attentional control in lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in two patients with damage to the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and one control patient with non-LIFG damage. Experiment 1 confirmed that the LIFG patients had attentional control deficits compared to normal controls while the non-LIFG patient was relatively unimpaired. Experiment 2 showed that all three patients did as well as normal controls in using biasing sentence context to resolve lexical ambiguities involving balanced ambiguous words, but only the LIFG patients took an abnormally long time on lexical ambiguities that resolved toward a subordinate meaning of biased ambiguous words. Taken together, the results suggest that attentional control plays an important role in the resolution of certain lexical ambiguities - those that induce strong interference from context-inappropriate meanings (i.e., dominant meanings of biased ambiguous words).     

Why did I right that? Factors that influence the production of homophone substitution errors

Despite considerable research on language production errors involving speech, little research exists in the complementary domain of writing. Two experiments investigated the production of homophone substitution errors, which occur when a contextually appropriate word (e.g., beech) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beach tree). Participants wrote down auditorily presented sentences containing dominant or subordinate homophones. Homophones were preceded by a lexical prime that overlapped in phonology and orthography (e.g., teacher) or only orthography (e.g., headmaster) with the target homophone. Results showed more substitution errors when the context elicited a subordinate homophone than when it elicited a dominant homophone. Furthermore, both types of primes equivalently increased production of homophone errors relative to control words (e.g., lawyer), suggesting that only orthographic overlap between the prime and target was necessary to influence errors. These results are explained within dual-route models of spelling, which postulate an interaction between lexical and sublexical routes when spelling.     

Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words

Three experiments examined the involvement of newly learnt words in lexical competition. Adult participants were familiarized with novel nonsense sequences that overlapped strongly with existing words (e.g. cathedruke, derived from cathedral) through repeated presentation in a phoneme-monitoring task. Experiment 1 looked at the immediate effects of exposure to these sequences, with participants showing familiarity with the form of the novel sequences in a two-alternative forced choice task. The effect of this exposure on lexical competition was examined by presenting the existing words (e.g. cathedral) in a lexical decision task. The immediate effect of the exposure was facilitatory, suggesting that the novel words had activated the representation of the closest real word rather than developing their own lexical representations. In Experiment 2, inhibitory lexical competition effects emerged over the course of 5 days for offset-diverging (e.g. cathedruke-cathedral) but not onset-diverging (e.g. yothedral-cathedral) novel words. Experiment 3 disentangled the roles of time and level-of-exposure in the lexicalization process and assessed the generality of the observed lexical inhibition using pause detection. A single, concentrated exposure session was used, which resulted in good recognition performance soon after. Lexicalization effects were absent immediately after exposure but emerged 1 week later, despite no intervening exposure to the novel items. These results suggest that integrating a novel word into the mental lexicon can be an extended process: phonological information is learnt swiftly, but full integration with existing items develops at a slower rate.     

Language blocking and lexical access in bilinguals

Two experiments are described which compared the effects of mixed- and pure-language lists on lexical decision times with English-French bilinguals. Experiment 1 showed that reaction times are faster in the pure-language presentation than in the mixed-language presentation with words that are orthographically legal letter strings in the other language. The second experiment tested this pure-mixed effect more precisely by comparing different sequences of two successive items and by introducing the language-specific orthography factor. No pure-mixed effect was found for words with language-specific orthographies. The pure-mixed effect was restricted to words containing no language-specific orthographic cues and to the different language sequences, that is, on trials following a language change. These results are not compatible with a selective search process that it strategically modified by pure-language presentation. The role of language-specific orthography in bilingual word recognition is discussed with regard to recent models of word recognition.     

Some linguistic determinants of Swedish word recognition

Native Swedish words and words of foreign origin were studied in a word fill-in task (Experiment 1), in a task in which words were explicitly classified as being native or loan words (Experiment 2), and in a lexical decision task in which a small onset asynchrony was introduced in displaying a word's letter pattern (Experiment 3). The findings obtained show that, both in simple printed word recognition and when asked to make explicit judgments about origin, readers are sensitive to phonological features of words not marked in Swedish orthography. It was further found that previewing a substring of word-initial letters which determines a word's root morpheme will prime recognition, whereas previewing a randomly selected pattern of letters inhibits recognition.     

The KEY to the ROCK: Near-homophony in nonnative visual word recognition

To test the hypothesis that native language (L1) phonology can affect the lexical representations of nonnative words, a visual semantic-relatedness decision task in English was given to native speakers and nonnative speakers whose L1 was Japanese or Arabic. In the critical conditions, the word pair contained a homophone or near-homophone of a semantically associated word, where a near-homophone was defined as a phonological neighbor involving a contrast absent in the speaker’s L1 (e.g., ROCK-LOCK for native speakers of Japanese). In all participant groups, homophones elicited more false positive errors and slower processing than spelling controls. In the Japanese and Arabic groups, near-homophones also induced relatively more false positives and slower processing. The results show that, even when auditory perception is not involved, recognition of nonnative words and, by implication, their lexical representations are affected by the L1 phonology.     

Orthographic vs. phonological irregularity in lexical decision

This experiment investigates whether the influence of spelling-to-sound correspondence on lexical decision may be due to the visual characteristics of irregular words rather than to irregularities in their phonological correspondence. Lexical decision times to three types of word were measured: words with both irregular orthography and spelling-to-sound correspondence (e.g., GHOUL, CHAOS), words with regular orthography but irregular spelling-to-sound correspondence (e.g., GROSS, LEVER), and words regular in both respects (e.g., SHACK, PLUG). Items were presented in upper- and lowercase in order to examine the influence of “word shape” on any irregularity effects obtained. The results showed that irregular words with regular orthographies were identified more slowly than regular words in both upper- and lowercase. Words that are both orthographically and phonologically irregular were identified much more slowly with lowercase presentation. However, with uppercase, the lexical decision time for these items did not differ significantly from those of regular words. These data indicate that previous demonstrations of the regularity effect in lexical decision were not due to the unusual visual characteristics of some of the words sampled. In addition, the data emphasize the role of word shape in word recognition and also suggest that words with unique orthographies may be processed differently from those whose orthography is similar to other words.     

Knowledge of a second language influences auditory word recognition in the native language

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether listening to a second language (L2) is influenced by knowledge of the native language (L1) and, more important, whether listening to the L1 is also influenced by knowledge of an L2. Additionally, we investigated whether the listener's selectivity of lexical access is influenced by the speaker's L1 (and thus his or her accent). With this aim, Dutch-English bilinguals completed an English (Experiment 1) and a Dutch (Experiment 3) auditory lexical decision task. As a control, the English auditory lexical decision task was also completed by English monolinguals (Experiment 2). Targets were pronounced by a native Dutch speaker with English as the L2 (Experiments 1A, 2A, and 3A) or by a native English speaker with Dutch as the L2 (Experiments 1B, 2B, and 3B). In all experiments, Dutch-English bilinguals recognized interlingual homophones (e.g., lief [sweet]-leaf /li:f/) significantly slower than matched control words, whereas the English monolinguals showed no effect. These results indicate that (a) lexical access in bilingual auditory word recognition is not language selective in L2, nor in L1, and (b) language-specific subphonological cues do not annul cross-lingual interactions.     

Do transposed-letter similarity effects occur at a morpheme level? Evidence for morpho-orthographic decomposition

When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter similarity effect (e.g., jugde facilitates JUDGE more than the control jupbe) in polymorphemic and monomorphemic words. If morphological decomposition occurs at early stages of visual word recognition, we would expect an interaction with transposed-letter effects. Experiment 1 was carried out in Basque, which is an agglutinative language. The nonword primes were created by transposing two letters that either crossed the morphological boundaries of suffixes or did not. Results showed a transposed-letter effect for non-affixed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter effect across morpheme boundaries for affixed words. In Experiment 2, this issue was revisited in a non-agglutinative language (Spanish), with prefixed and suffixed word pairs. Again, results showed a significant transposed-letter effect for non-affixed words, whereas there were no signs of a transposed-letter effect across morpheme boundaries for affixed words (both prefixed words and suffixed words). Experiment 3 replicated the previous findings, and also revealed that, for polymorphemic words, transposed-letter priming effects occurred for within-morpheme transpositions. Taken together, these findings support the view that morphological decomposition operates at an early stage of visual word recognition.     

Knowing what a novel word is not: Two-year-olds 'listen through' ambiguous adjectives in fluent speech

Three studies investigated how 24-month-olds and adults resolve temporary ambiguity in fluent speech when encountering prenominal adjectives potentially interpretable as nouns. Children were tested in a looking-while-listening procedure to monitor the time course of speech processing. In Experiment 1, the familiar and unfamiliar adjectives preceding familiar target nouns were accented or deaccented. Target word recognition was disrupted only when lexically ambiguous adjectives were accented like nouns. Experiment 2 measured the extent of interference experienced by children when interpreting prenominal words as nouns. In Experiment 3, adults used prosodic cues to identify the form class of adjective/noun homophones in string-identical sentences before the ambiguous words were fully spoken. Results show that children and adults use prosody in conjunction with lexical and distributional cues to ‘listen through’ prenominal adjectives, avoiding costly misinterpretation.     

Lexical decisions with homophones and homonyms

In two experiments homophones, homonyms, and control words were presented aurally in a lexical decision task. Response times for homophones were significantly faster than those for homonyms and control words, whereas the latter two did not differ. It was concluded that lexical decision times do not provide evidence for multiple entries in the internal lexicon for homonyms. The possibility is considered that the superior performance with homophonic words also does not reflect activation of multiple entries corresponding to multiple meanings, but instead the utilization of orthographic information. This study was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.     

The developmental turnpoint of orthographic consistency effects in speech recognition

The influence of orthography on children's online auditory word recognition was studied from the end of Grade 4 to the end of Grade 9 by examining the orthographic consistency effect in auditory lexical decision. Fourth-graders showed evidence of a widespread influence of orthography in their spoken word recognition system; words with rimes that can be spelled in two different ways (inconsistent) produced longer auditory lexical decision times and more errors than did consistent words. A similar consistency effect was also observed on pseudowords. With adult listeners, on exactly the same material, we replicated the usual pattern of an orthographic consistency effect restricted to words in lexical decision. From Grade 6 onward, this adult pattern of orthographic effect on spoken recognition is already observable.     

Lateralization of lexical codes in auditory word recognition

Three experiments examined the lateralization of lexical codes in auditory word recognition. In Experiment 1 a word rhyming with a binaurally presented cue word was detected faster when the cue and target were spelled similarly than when they were spelled differently. This orthography effect was larger when the target was presented to the right ear than when it was presented to the left ear. Experiment 2 replicated the interaction between ear of presentation and orthography effect when the cue and target were spoken in different voices. In Experiment 3, subjects made lexical decisions to pairs of stimuli presented to the left or the right ear. Lexical decision times and the amount of facilitation which obtained when the target stimuli were semantically related words did not differ as a function of ear of presentation. The results suggest that the semantic, phonological, and orthographic codes for a word are represented in each hemisphere; however, orthographic and phonological representations are integrated only in the left hemisphere.     

A rose by any other name is not the same: the role of orthographic knowledge in homophone confusion errors

Homophone confusion errors were examined in a series of 6 experiments. Across a variety of tasks, readers consistently made more errors on homophone trials than on control trials. These effects were established in Experiment 1 using a semantic-decision task in which participants judged whether pairs of words were related or unrelated. For both related and unrelated trials, error rates were higher for homophones as compared with controls. Results such as these have previously been taken as evidence for the role of phonology in lexical access and reading. However, differences in orthographic knowledge (more specifically, knowledge of spelling-to-meaning correspondences) across participants and homophone items significantly predicted homophone errors across all tasks. In addition, spelling tasks and multiple-choice questionnaires revealed differences in orthographic knowledge across participants and homophone items. Although these results do not rule out a role for phonology in lexical access, they indicate that homophone confusion errors may also be due to factors other than phonology.