Rapid naming is affected by association but not by syntax

Three experiments are reported that focused on the grammatical and associative relationship between a single-word context and a to-be-named target in the Serbo-Croatian language. Unlike in studies using the English language, word class need not be violated in order to obtain grammatical incongruency: all word pairs, therefore, can be semantically plausible. Experiment 1 contrasted naming with lexical decision using associative and grammatical priming, a replication of Seidenberg, Waters, Sanders, and Langer’s (1984) study. With associative priming, both lexical decision and naming were facilitated significantly, but with grammatical priming, only lexical decision was affected significantly. Heeding observations of West and Stanovich (1986), in Experiment 2 we used stimuli known to produce a robust grammatical congruency effect on lexical decision (130 msec) and a procedure designed to slow naming latencies. Again, no grammatical congruency effect for naming was obtained. Finally, because Experiment 1, which used a row of Xs as the neutral context, showed an associative priming effect on naming pseudowords, Experiment 3 used a neutral context that was linguistic. An associative priming effect was found for words but not for pseudowords. Results were discussed in terms of pre- and postlexical loci of contextual effects.     

Ability to stand alone and processing of open-class and closed-class words: Isolation versus context

Four experiments investigating processing of closed-class and open-class words in isolation and in sentence contexts are reported. Taft (1990) reported that closed-class words which could not meaningfully stand alone and open-class words which could not meaningfully stand alone incurred longer lexical decision responses than did control words. Taft also reported that closed-class and open-class words which could stand alone meaningfully were not associated with longer lexical decision responses than were control words. Experiments 1 and 2 replicated Taft 's effect of ability to stand alone on lexical decision responses to closed-class and open-class words presented in isolation. In Experiments 3 and 4, the same lexical decision targets were presented as part of semantically neutral context sentences in a moving window paradigm. The stand-alone effect was not present in Experiments 3 and 4. The results suggest Toft's conclusion that meaningfulness of a word influences lexical decision needs revision. An explanation is provided according to which support from message level and syntactic and lexical sources in sentence contexts influence words' perceived “meaningfulness.”     

Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.     

Closed-class words as first syllables do interfere with lexical decisions for nonwords: implications for theories of agrammatism

It has been proposed that a principal cause of the agrammatism of some Broca's aphasics is that such patients, unlike normal subjects, are unable to make use of a special retrieval mechanism for closed-class ("function") words (D. C. Bradley, 1978, Computational distinctions of vocabulary type, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis; D. C. Bradley, M. F. Garrett, & E. B. Zurif, 1980. In D. Caplan (Ed.), Biological studies of mental processes). The main evidence for the existence of such a mechanism consisted of two observations: (1) the recognition of open-class words was observed to be frequency-sensitive, but that of closed-class words was not; and (2) lexical decisions for nonwords which began with open-class words were delayed, whereas there was no such interference for nonwords which began with closed-class words. However, the first of these observations has proved nonreplicable (e.g., B. Gordon & A. Caramazza, 1982, Brain and Language, 15, 143-160, 1983, Brain and Language, 19, 335-345; J. Segui, J. Mehler, W. Frauenfelder, & J. Morton, 1982, Neuropsychologia, 20, 615-627), and in the present paper, three lexical decision experiments are reported in which it is found that, when certain confounding variables are controlled, nonwords which begin with closed-class words are subject to interference. Moreover, contrary to a suggestion of Kolk and Blomert (1985, Brain and Language, 26, 94-105) the interference is independent of the presence of closed-class items in the lexical decision word list. It seems, then, that closed-class words are not qualitatively different from open-class words with respect either to frequency sensitivity or to nonword interference, and in consequence, the above proposed explanation of agrammatism is left without major empirical support.     

中文双字词的具体性效应研究

通过词汇决定任务来考察中文双字词的具体性效应,并检验双重编码理论和语境有效性模型对具体性效应的预测。实验一在刺激单独呈现的条件下操纵词的频率,结果发现在低频的情况下对抽象词的判断时间显著长于具体词,但是在中频情况下没有显著差异;实验二用低频具体词和低频抽象词做重复启动实验,发现重复启动不能消除具体性效应;实验三为低频具体词和低频抽象词提供句子语境,结果发现在一致性句子语境条件下具体性效应消失。以上实验结果既不完全符合双重编码理论的预测,也不完全符合语境有效性模型的预测。     

The activation of semantic memory: Effects of prime exposure,prime-target relationship,and task demands

Priming facilitation was examined under conditions of brief incremental prime exposures (28, 43, 71, and 199 msec) under masked conditions for two types of lexical relationships (associative-semantic pairs, such as "wolf-fox," and semantic-feature pairs, such as "whale-dolphin") and in two tasks (primed lexical decision and semantic categorization). The results of eight experiments revealed, first, that priming elicits faster response times for semantic-feature pairs. The associative-semantic pairs produced priming only at the longer prime exposures. Second, priming was observed earlier for semantic categorization than for the lexical decision task, in which priming was observed only at the longer stimulus onset asynchronies. Finally, our results allowed us to discredit the congruency hypothesis, according to which priming is due to a common categorical response for the prime and target words. The implications of these results for current theories of semantic priming are discussed.     

Grammatical priming of inflected nouns by the gender of possessive adjectives

Two experiments examined the effect on lexical decision times for inflected Serbo-Croatian nouns when the nouns were preceded by possessive adjectives (my, your, our). For any given pairing the possessive adjective and the noun agreed always in number (singular) and case (nominative) but only agreed half of the time in gender (masculine or feminine). Lexical decisions were faster when the noun targets were of the same gender as their primes. This gender congruency/incongruency effect was shown to hold whether the inflections of the adjective and noun were the same (as is the case for typical Serbo-Croatian nouns) or different (as is the case for atypical Serbo-Croatian nouns). The results are discussed in terms of a postlexical influence of grammatical processing on the recognition of individual words.     

Gradients versus dichotomies: How strength of semantic context influences event-related potentials and lexical decision times

In experiments devoted to word recognition and/or language comprehension, reaction time in the lexical decision task is perhaps the most commonly used behavioral dependent measure, and the amplitude of the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP) is the most common neural measure. Both are sensitive to multiple factors, including frequency of usage, orthographic similarity to other words, concreteness of word meaning, and preceding semantic context. All of these factors vary continuously. Published results have shown that both lexical decision times and N400 amplitudes show graded responses to graded changes of word frequency and orthographic similarity, but a puzzling discrepancy in their responsivity to the strength of a semantic context has received little attention. In three experiments, we presented pairs of words varying in the strengths of their semantic relationships, as well as unrelated pairs. In all three experiments, N400 amplitudes showed a gradient from unrelated to weakly associated to strongly associated target words, whereas lexical decision times showed a binary division rather than a gradient across strengths of relationship. This pattern of results suggests that semantic context effects in lexical decision and ERP measures arise from fundamentally different processes.     

Dual Processing of Open- and Closed-Class Words

A series of articles in the past two decades has suggested differential processing of open- and closed-class lexical items by normal adults. Difficulties in replicating a crucial study (Bradley, 1978), however, have weakened the dual route hypothesis. We matched 16 French open-class items to 16 closed-class items for phonological structure, word length, and relative word frequency. Three agrammatic aphasics were asked to read each word in isolation and in a sentence context. Error analysis revealed strikingly more phonological errors on closed-class than open-class items. Dysfluencies were greater on closed-class items and contributed to greater overall reading time for the closed-class words, consistent with a two-route model for the production of closed- and open-class lexical items in Broca's aphasics and, thus, normals.     

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.     

Dissociative affective and associative priming effects in the lexical decision task: yes versus no responses to word targets reveal evaluative judgment tendencies

The affective priming effect (AP; i.e., shorter evaluative or lexical decision latencies for affectively congruent prime-target pairs) has often been interpreted as evidence for spreading activation from the prime to affectively congruent targets. The present study emphasizes the view that in the lexical decision task, the prime-target configuration is implicitly evaluated as a question of the form "Is (prime) (target)?" (e.g., "Is death wise?") so that there is a tendency to affirm in cases of congruency and to negate in cases of incongruency. Therefore, after establishing the AP with the lexical decision task in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 the assignment of yes responses to words and nonwords was varied. For the word = yes condition, the AP emerged, whereas the data pattern was reversed for the word = no condition. In Experiment 3, a comparable pattern of results was not found for symmetrical or backward associatively related prime-target pairs.     

Conceptual combinations and relational contexts in free association and in priming in lexical decision and naming

Words known to have strong associates of a particular relational type were embedded in lists of other words with relations of the same type or in lists of words with relations of a different type (e.g.close-far in a list of other opposite pairs or in a list of synonym pairs). In free association, the probability of a response consistent with the relational context was higher than the probability of a response inconsistent with the context. In lexical decision and naming, significant priming was obtained for related pairs of words only when their relation was consistent with the relational context of the list in which they were embedded. The priming effects were obtained when the stimulus onset asynchrony between prime and target words was short (250 msec for lexical decision and 300 msec for naming), indicating that the effects were due to automatic retrieval processes. These findings point to the importance of the particular relations between words in the retrieval of information from memory, an aspect of processing overlooked by current memory models.     

On the representation of Portuguese gender-inflected words in the mental lexicon

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is controlled. The results do not provide support for a full form representation of gender-inflected words. They suggest that grammatical category, or the nature of the inflectional process involved (lexical or syntactic), affects the way words are represented and accessed. Shorter recognition latencies were obtained for nouns drawn from Feminine dominant gender-inflected pairs than from Masculine dominant pairs whereas a tendency in the opposite direction was observed in adjectives. The effect of frequency dominance appears, nevertheless, to be restricted to feminine nouns. The data are compatible with the view that masculine nouns and adjectives are represented as gender-unmarked forms. These results are discussed in relation to current dual-access models of word recognition and to the notion of "interpretability" of lexico-syntactic features, as put forward in the Minimalist Program of Generative Linguistics.     

Competition in lexical processing of Italian noun/verb homographs

The study investigates the lexical representation of Italian noun/verb homographs, introducing a factor which has been analysed in production studies: the specific-word frequency (SWF). The SWF parameter allows to understand whether the grammatical class information is specified within the lexical knowledge or it is selected during post-lexical stages. We ran six lexical decision tasks employing the priming paradigm and a grammatical decision task to investigate the lexical representation of noun/verb homographs. In addition, we sought to determine the role played by the frequency of representations and the temporal activation of the grammatical class information. Our findings support the claim that these forms have independent representations for each syntactic role they can play. We interpreted these findings in the light of what we call the “Nominal Dominance” effect, which affects the lexical access of noun/verb homographs. We also discuss the relation between nominal dominance and lexical frequency.     

Phonological priming in spoken word recognition: Task effects

In two experiments, we examined the role of phonological relatedness between spoken items using both the lexical decision task and the shadowing task. In Experiment 1, words were used as primes and overlaps of zero (control), one, two, or all four or five (repetition) phonemes were compared. Except for the repetition conditions, in which facilitation was found, phonological overlap resulted in interference on word responses. These effects occurred in both tasks but were larger in lexical decision than in shadowing. The effects that were evident in shadowing can be attributed to an attentional mechanism linked to the subjects' expectancies of repetitions. The extra effects obtained in lexical decision can be interpreted by taking into account both activation of the response corresponding to the prime's lexical status and postlexical processes that check for phonological congruency between prime and target. In Experiment 2, some modifications were introduced to prevent the involvement of strategic factors, and pseudowords were used as primes. No effect at all was observed in shadowing, whereas in lexical decision interference effects occurred, which is consistent with the hypothesis that lexical decision may be negatively affected by finding a phonological discrepancy at the same time as the primed response is reactivated. Neither experiment provided evidence for the occurrence of phonological priming in the perceptual processing of words.     

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.     

Effect of Representational Distance Between Meanings on Recognition of Ambiguous Spoken Words

Previous research indicates that mental representations of word meanings are distributed along both semantic and syntactic dimensions such that nouns and verbs are relatively distinct from one another. Two experiments examined the effect of representational distance between meanings on recognition of ambiguous spoken words by comparing recognition of unambiguous words, noun–verb homonyms, and noun–noun homonyms. In Experiment 1, auditory lexical decision was fastest for unambiguous words, slower for noun–verb homonyms, and slowest for noun–noun homonyms. In Experiment 2, response times for matching spoken words to pictures followed the same pattern and eye fixation time courses revealed converging, gradual time course differences between conditions. These results indicate greater competition between meanings of ambiguous words when the meanings are from the same grammatical class (noun–noun homonyms) than when they are from different grammatical classes (noun–verb homonyms).     

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.     

A morphological effect obtains for isolated words but not for words in sentence context

The effect of morphological complexity on word identification was studied in three experiments conducted in Finnish, employing the same set of target nouns. In Experiment 1, the target nouns were presented in isolation, and lexical decision times were employed as lexical access measures. In Experiments 2 and 3, the same words were embedded in sentence contexts, where both the inflected and non-inflected forms were equally plausible, and eye fixation patterns (Exp. 2) and lexical decision latencies (Exp. 3) were recorded. The experiment with isolated words replicated previous lexical decision studies by showing more effortful processing for inflected than monomorphemic nouns. However, this morphological complexity effect did not generalise to the context experiments; fixation durations and response latencies were highly similar for inflected and monomorphemic words. It is suggested that, at least for the type of inflected nouns studied, the morphological effect observed for isolated words may derive from the syntactic and/or semantic level and not necessarily from the lexical level, as previously assumed.     

Gender and lexical access in Italian

Two new procedures were employed to investigate the effects of semantic and grammatical gender on lexical access in Italian and to investigate the interaction of gender with other factors that are known to influence lexical access in other languages. The gender-monitoring task requires a conscious decision about the gender of each noun, whereas the word repetition task does not require explicit attention to gender. In both tasks, single words are presented out of context, under speeded conditions. Both procedures proved to be sensitive indices of word recognition, with reaction times that are closely tied to the point at which words can be uniquely identified (although some processing before and after the uniqueness point was seen). In both tasks, reaction times were strongly affected by phonological factors (e.g., length, number of syllables, and presence of frication on the initial consonant). Phonological transparency of gender marking had a reliable effect on gender monitoring but had no effect on word repetition, suggesting that explicit attention to gender may be a factor affecting utilization of this phonological cue. Semantic factors (including semantic gender) had no effect on performance. Frequency and age of acquisition had very small effects when other factors were controlled. Implications for current models of lexical access are discussed, with special reference to the role of gender.