Lexical decision in children: sublexical processing or lexical search?

Length effects in the lexical decision latencies of children might indicate that children rely on sublexical processing and essentially approach the task as a naming task. We examined this possibility by means of the effects of neighbourhood size and articulatory suppression on lexical decision performance. Sixty-six beginning and 62 advanced readers performed a lexical decision task in a standard, articulatory suppression, or tapping condition. We found length effects on words and nonwords in the children's lexical decisions. However, the effects of neighbourhood size were similar to those reported for adult lexical decisions, rather than the effects previously found in children's naming. In addition, no effect was found of articulatory suppression. Both findings suggest that, despite clear length effects, children do not adopt a naming task approach but, like adults, base lexical decisions mainly on a lexical search. These results pose a challenge for several computational models of reading.     

Comparing naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times: Word frequency effects and individual differences

Performance on three different tasks was compared: naming, lexical decision, and reading (with eye fixation times on a target word measured). We examined the word frequency effect for a common set of words for each task and each subject. Naming and reading (particularly gaze duration) yielded similar frequency effects for the target words. The frequency effect found in lexical decision was greater than that found in naming and in eye fixation times. In all tasks, there was a correlation between the frequency effect and average response time. In general, the results suggest that both the naming and the lexical decision tasks yield data about word recognition processes that are consistent with effects found in eye fixations during silent reading.     

Cognate effects in sentence context depend on word class,L2 proficiency,and task

Length effects in the lexical decision latencies of children might indicate that children rely on sublexical processing and essentially approach the task as a naming task. We examined this possibility by means of the effects of neighbourhood size and articulatory suppression on lexical decision performance. Sixty-six beginning and 62 advanced readers performed a lexical decision task in a standard, articulatory suppression, or tapping condition. We found length effects on words and nonwords in the children's lexical decisions. However, the effects of neighbourhood size were similar to those reported for adult lexical decisions, rather than the effects previously found in children's naming. In addition, no effect was found of articulatory suppression. Both findings suggest that, despite clear length effects, children do not adopt a naming task approach but, like adults, base lexical decisions mainly on a lexical search. These results pose a challenge for several computational models of reading.     

What does rapid automatized naming measure? A new RAN task compared to naming and lexical decision

The present research investigated the relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) performance, letter-string reading measures of sight vocabulary (SV) and phonetic decoding (PD), and lexical decision. Criterion-based naming rates were obtained from three types of RAN tasks: digits, letters, and letter sounds. Latency measures were obtained from the naming of regular words, exception words, nonwords and pseudohomophones; as well as button press and verbal lexical decision tasks. Regression analyses supported the hypotheses that RAN-Letters latency reflects SV processing in that its variance is uniquely accounted for by exception word naming latency and button press lexical decision latency, and that RAN-Letter Sounds latency best reflects PD processing in that its variance is uniquely accounted for by pseudohomophone and nonword naming latency. Findings are discussed in light of what the RAN tasks are measuring, implications involving visual word recognition models of reading, and the utility of the new RAN-Letter Sounds task with respect to diagnostic and remediation applications.     

汉语多义单字词的识别优势效应

运用词汇判断、简单命名及辨别命名任务,考察汉语多义单字词的识别优势效应。结果显示,在三个任务中均发现了显著的多义词识别优势效应。在词汇判断和简单命名任务中,多义词识别的优势效应表现在低频词中;在辨别命名任务中,多义词识别优势效应同时表现在高、低频词中。实验结果支持了PDP模型,讨论了多义词识别优势效应产生的机制     

The Impact of Sonority on Onset-Rime and Peak-Coda Lexical Decision and Naming of Lexical Items by Children with Different Spelling Ability

The present study used the lexical decision (making YES/NO decision) and the vocalization (naming) paradigms in two reaction time experiments to examine the cohesiveness of onset-rime and peak-coda in the syllable structure of English lexical items. The aim was to study the effect of sonority hierarchy of liquids, nasals and obstruents on the accurate and rapid identification and naming of CCVCC words and pseudowords in relation to the spelling performance of 222 grades 4, 5 and 6 students. In the onset-rime lexical decision and naming tasks nasals were processed faster than the liquids and the obstruents. In the peak-coda lexical decision and naming the obstruents were processed faster than the liquids and nasals. The reaction time results suggest relationship with the spelling of English words even though the significant main effects of grade, spelling performance, mode of response and lexicality of the stimulus items need to be interpreted in the context of statistical interactions.     

Children’s and adults’ use of spelling-sound information in three reading tasks

This research examined the effects of irregular spelling and irregular spelling-sound correspondences on word recognition in children and adults. Previous research has established that, among skilled readers, these irregularities influence the reading of only lower frequency words. However, this research involved the lexical decision and naming tasks, which differ from the demands of normal reading in important ways. In the present experiments, we compared performance on these tasks with that on a task requiring words to be recognized in sentence contexts. Results indicated that adults showed effects of spelling and spelling-sound irregularities in reading lower frequency words on all three tasks, whereas younger and poorer readers also showed effects on higher frequency words. The fact that irregular spelling-sound correspondences affected performance on the sentence task indicates that access of phonological information is not an artifact of having to read a word aloud or perform a lexical decision. Two other developmental trends were observed: As children became more skilled in reading, the effects of irregular spelling were overcome before the effects of irregular spelling-sound correspondences; the latter effects were eliminated on silent reading tasks earlier than on the naming task.     

Associated or dissociated effects of syllable frequency in lexical decision and naming

Most empirical work investigating the role of syllable frequency in visual word recognition has focused on the Spanish language, in which syllable frequency seems to produce a classic dissociation: inhibition in lexical decision tasks but facilitation in naming. In the present study, two experiments were run in German, using identical stimulus materials, in a lexical decision task and a naming task. In both tasks, there was an inhibitory effect for words with a high-frequency first syllable. This pattern of results, suggesting a stronger weight of lexical access in the naming process in German than in Spanish, is discussed with regard to the issue of stress assignment in the two languages and within the framework of word production models. Items, mean response latencies, and accuracy rates per item for both experiments can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

The influence of visualization of orthography on the recognition of written words]

This paper reviews the main research that has been conducted on the role of orthographic neighbourhood in visual word recognition. We focus here on the traditionally defined neighbourhood, that is corresponding to the set of words of the same length sharing all but one letter with the stimulus. Two major theoretical frameworks, namely the activation verification and the interactive activation models, assume that orthographic neighbours are activated when a written word is presented. Predictions formulated by both models for words and pseudowords on the effects of neighbourhood size (N), neighbourhood frequency (NF), and neighbourhood distribution (P), are examined in order to assess the plausibility of serial versus interactive processes. Findings from 27 empirical studies including more than 80 experiments suggest that neighbourhood effects depend on the neighbourhood indexes (N, NF, and P), on the particular tasks (lexical decision, naming, semantic categorization, perceptual identification, and reading), and on the languages (English, French, Spanish, and Dutch) that are used. The results for words can be summarized as follows: (1) In the lexical decision task, the N effect is facilitatory. The NF effect is rather inhibitory, particularly in French and Spanish experiments. The P effect is rather inhibitory in English studies, whereas the P effect for higher frequency neighbours is facilitatory in French. (2) In the perceptual identification task with a single identification response, N and NF effects are inhibitory whatever the language. (3) In the naming task, N and NF effects are facilitatory whatever the language. (4) In the semantic categorization task, an interaction effect between N and NF is found in both English and Spanish. (5) In eye movement studies, the NF effect is inhibitory in both English and French. The issue of lexical versus task-specific processes underlying neighbourhood effects in lexical identification tasks is also examined. On the whole, facilitatory N effects are usually attributed to nonlexical processes of the lexical decision task and of the naming task, whereas inhibitory neighbourhood frequency effects are usually attributed to lexical processes, at least in lexical-decision experiments and in eye-movement studies on normal reading. The distribution of higher frequency neighbours which is found to have a facilitatory effect on French words in lexical-decision experiments can be attributed to lexical processes in the interactive activation framework. The theoretical implications of the data are discussed in light of the original activation verification and interactive activation models and in recently extended versions of these models. We conclude that the lexical inhibition hypothesis which is central in the interactive activation framework is the most appropriate to account for the role of orthographic neighbourhoods in visual word recognition.     

Lexicality and stimulus length effects in Italian dyslexics: role of the overadditivity effect.

The effect of lexicality and stimulus length was studied in 32 third- and fourth-grade Italian dyslexics and in 86 age-matched controls. A visual lexical decision task was used. As proposed by Faust et al. (1999), the results were analyzed in terms of raw reaction time (RT) data and using the z-score transformation to control for the presence of overadditivity effects. In terms of RTs, dyslexics showed a larger difference between words and nonwords (lexicality effect) and between short and long stimuli (length effect) than proficient readers. When data were transformed into z scores, only the group by length interaction remained significant while that with lexicality vanished. This pattern indicates that stimulus length has a specific role in Italian dyslexics' reading deficit; in contrast, slowness in responding to nonwords was not specific but was interpreted as one aspect of dyslexics' general inability to deal with alphabetical material (overadditivity effect).     

Distinguishing common and task-specific processes in word identification: a matter of some moment?

The same 500 words were presented in 6 different word identification tasks (Experiment 1: lexical decision, semantic categorization, and 3 speeded naming tasks; Experiment 2: delayed naming). Reaction time (RT) distributions were estimated for each task and analyses tested for the effects of word frequency and animacy on various parameters of the RT distribution. Low frequency words yielded more skewed distributions than high frequency words in all tasks except delayed naming. The differential skew was most marked for tasks that required lexical discrimination. The semantic categorization task yielded highly skewed distributions for all words, but the word frequency effect was due to shifts in the location of the RT distributions rather than changes in skew. The results are used to evaluate the relative contributions of a common lexical access process and task-specific processes to performance in lexical discrimination and naming tasks.     

How strongly do word reading times and lexical decision times correlate? Combining data from eye movement corpora and megastudies

We assess the amount of shared variance between three measures of visual word recognition latencies: eye movement latencies, lexical decision times, and naming times. After partialling out the effects of word frequency and word length, two well-documented predictors of word recognition latencies, we see that 7–44% of the variance is uniquely shared between lexical decision times and naming times, depending on the frequency range of the words used. A similar analysis of eye movement latencies shows that the percentage of variance they uniquely share either with lexical decision times or with naming times is much lower. It is 5–17% for gaze durations and lexical decision times in studies with target words presented in neutral sentences, but drops to 0.2% for corpus studies in which eye movements to all words are analysed. Correlations between gaze durations and naming latencies are lower still. These findings suggest that processing times in isolated word processing and continuous text reading are affected by specific task demands and presentation format, and that lexical decision times and naming times are not very informative in predicting eye movement latencies in text reading once the effect of word frequency and word length are taken into account. The difference between controlled experiments and natural reading suggests that reading strategies and stimulus materials may determine the degree to which the immediacy-of-processing assumption and the eye–mind assumption apply. Fixation times are more likely to exclusively reflect the lexical processing of the currently fixated word in controlled studies with unpredictable target words rather than in natural reading of sentences or texts.     

Bigram Frequency,Number of Syllables and Morphemes and Their Effects on Lexical Decision and Word Naming

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in word processing tasks. Recently it has also been shown that orthographic redundancy, related to the pattern of bigram frequencies, could not explain the syllable number effect on lexical decision times. This was demonstrated on a large sample of words taken from the British Lexicon Project. In this study we extend this research by examining both lexical decision and word naming times taken from the English Lexicon Project . There was a syllable number effect for both tasks in the expected direction, and this effect was independent of the presence of a bigram trough. The research also examined the role of other bigram related variables and the number of morphemes on lexical decision and word naming times. The number of morphemes had a significant effect on both word processing tasks, with words with more morphemes producing faster reaction times and also fewer errors. This pattern was reversed for nonword lexical decision times. The results are discussed in the light of recent developments in models of reading.     

Ambiguity and synonymy effects in lexical decision,naming, and semantic categorization tasks: interactions between orthography,phonology, and semantics

In this article, ambiguity and synonymy effects were examined in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks. Whereas the typical ambiguity advantage was observed in lexical decision and naming, an ambiguity disadvantage was observed in semantic categorization. In addition, a synonymy effect (slower latencies for words with many synonyms than for words with few synonyms) was observed in lexical decision and naming but not in semantic categorization. These results suggest that (a) an ambiguity disadvantage arises only when a task requires semantic processing, (b) the ambiguity advantage and the synonymy disadvantage in lexical decision and naming are due to semantic feedback, and (c) these effects are determined by the nature of the feedback relationships from semantics to orthography and phonology.     

Processing of Syllables in Production and Recognition Tasks

Empirical evidence for a functional role of syllables in visual word processing is abundant, however it remains rather heterogeneous. The present study aims to further specify the role of syllables and the cognitive accessibility of syllabic information in word processing. The first experiment compared performance across naming and lexical decision tasks by manipulating the number of syllables in words and non-words. Results showed a syllable number effect in both the naming task and the lexical decision task. The second experiment introduced a stimulus set consisting of isolated syllabic and non-syllabic trigrams. Syllable frequency was manipulated in a naming and in a decision task requiring participants to decide on the syllabic status of letter strings. Results showed faster responses for syllables than for non-syllables in both tasks. Syllable frequency effects were observed in the decision task. In summary, the results from these manipulations of different types of syllable information confirm an important role of syllabic units in both recognition and production.     

词素位置概率在中文阅读中的作用：词汇判断和眼动研究

中文词切分的认知机制一直是心理语言学关注的焦点问题之一,研究发现中文读者可使用词素位置概率等语言学线索帮助词切分,而首、尾词素位置概率的重要程度以往研究观点并不一致。本研究通过词汇判断和眼动实验,考察中文读者对首、尾词素位置概率的利用情况。实验1a和1b采用词汇判断任务,考察在不同词频条件下词首与词尾词素位置概率对词汇识别的影响。在错误率和反应时指标上,高频词条件下词首与词尾词素位置概率效应不显著;低频词条件下词首词素位置概率效应显著,词尾词素位置概率效应不显著。实验2a和2b采用句子阅读任务,考察在自然阅读情境中被试对词素位置概率的运用。在凝视时间、回视路径时间和总注视时间指标上,低频词条件下词首词素位置概率效应显著,词尾词素位置概率效应不显著。高频词条件下词首与词尾词素位置概率效应均不显著。词汇判断和眼动证据共同表明,词素位置概率信息是中文读者重要的语言词切分线索,且与词尾词素位置概率相比,词首词素位置概率在词汇切分与识别过程中发挥的作用更大。同时,词素位置概率线索的运用会受到词频的影响,研究结果支持复合词加工的混合通达表征模型。     

Attentional resource demands of visual word recognition in naming and lexical decisions.

Attentional demands of lexical access were assessed with dual-task methodology. Subjects performed an auditory probe task alone (single-task) or combined (dual-task) with either a lexical decision or a naming task. In Experiment 1, probe performance showed a decrement from single- to dual-task conditions during recognition of words in both lexical decision and naming tasks. In addition, decrements in probe performance were larger during processing of low-frequency compared with high-frequency words in both of the word recognition tasks. Experiment 2 showed that the time course of frequency-sensitive demands was similar across lexical decision and naming tasks and that attention is required early in the word recognition sequence. The results support the assumption that lexical access is both frequency sensitive and attention demanding.     

Reading and lexicalization in opaque and transparent orthographies: Word naming and word learning in English and Spanish

Do skilled readers of opaque and transparent orthographies make differential use of lexical and sublexical processes when converting words from print to sound? Two experiments are reported, which address that question, using effects of letter length on naming latencies as an index of the involvement of sublexical letter–sound conversion. Adult native speakers of English (Experiment 1) and Spanish (Experiment 2) read aloud four- and seven-letter high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords in their native language. The stimuli were interleaved and presented 10 times in a first testing session and 10 more times in a second session 28 days later. Effects of lexicality were observed in both languages, indicating the deployment of lexical representations in word naming. Naming latencies to both words and nonwords reduced across repetitions on Day 1, with those savings being retained to Day 28. Length effects were, however, greater for Spanish than English word naming. Reaction times to long and short nonwords converged with repeated presentations in both languages, but less in Spanish than in English. The results support the hypothesis that reading in opaque orthographies favours the rapid creation and use of lexical representations, while reading in transparent orthographies makes more use of a combination of lexical and sublexical processing.     

The effect of word length on lexical decision in dyslexic and normal reading children

In the present study, the effect of word length on lexical decision in dyslexic and normal reading children was investigated. Dyslexics of 10-years old, chronological age controls, and reading age controls read words and pseudowords consisting of 3 to 6 letters in a lexical decision task. Length effects were much stronger in dyslexics and reading age controls than in chronological age controls. These results support the contention that dyslexics continue to rely on a predominantly sub-lexical reading procedure, whereas for normal readers the contribution of a lexical reading procedure increases. The relevance of the findings for current computational models of reading is discussed.     

Lexical factors in the word-superiority effect

In the Reicher-Wheeler paradigm, fluent readers can identify letters better when they appear in a word than when they appear in either a pronounceable pseudoword (a lexicality effect) or a single letter (a word-letter effect). It was predicted that if both of these effects involve a lexical factor, then adult acquired dyslexic subjects whose deficit prevents access to visual word form should show disruptions of the normal effects on the Reicher-Wheeler task. The results were that dyslexic subjects as well as matched control subjects showed a lexicality effect; however, while the control subjects showed a normal word-letter effect, the dyslexic subjects showed a reverse letter-superiority effect. Both effects, however, showed a systematic variation: As performance on lexical decision improved, the subjects' performance on words in the Reicher-Wheeler task was better than that for all the other conditions. These subject correlations were replicated by using data from a second lexical decision experiment, which utilized the same words and pseudowords that were used in the Reicher-Wheeler task. In addition, an item analysis showed that the words that the subjects had discriminated correctly in lexical decision showed a significant advantage over those that they had not, as well as an improvement relative to the other conditions. These results suggest that there is a lexical factor underlying the lexicality and word-letter effects, and it is proposed that the abnormal letter-superiority effect can be accounted for as the manifestation of other competing factors.