Imagery, concreteness, and lexical complexity

Both imageability and lexical complexity are shown to be influential in determining performance in free recall. However, both features may be confounded with an item's concreteness, and all three factors are controlled in a second experiment. Lexical complexity is shown not to have any effect on recall when imageability and concreteness are both controlled. Further, imageability is found to have an effect in the case of abstract words, but not in the case of concrete words. This result is replicated using English nominalizations. It is suggested that concreteness is a feature which is to be distinguished from imageability.     

Orthographic neighborhood and concreteness effects in the lexical decision task

The experiment reported here investigated the sensitivity of concreteness effects to orthographic neighborhood density and frequency in the visual lexical decision task. The concreteness effect was replicated with a sample of concrete and abstract words that were not matched for orthographic neighborhood features and in which concrete words turned out to have a higher neighborhood density than abstract words. No consistent effect of concreteness was found with a sample of concrete and abstract words matched for orthographic neighborhood density and frequency and having fewer neighbors and higher-frequency neighbors than the words of the first sample. Post hoc analyses of the results showed that orthographic neighborhood density was not a nuisance variable producing a spurious effect of concreteness but, instead, that the existence of higher-frequency neighbors constitutes a necessary condition for concreteness effects to appear in the lexical decision task. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that semantic information is accessed and used to generate the responses in lexical decision when inhibition from orthographic forms delays the target word recognition.     

Frequency,not age of acquisition,affects Italian word naming

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the claim that age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency effects are reduced or nonexistent in languages that have very regular letter-to-sound mappings, like Italian. The first two experiments (Exp. 1, Exp. 2) showed that frequency variables affect reading aloud and lexical decision in Italian. Variables interpretable as pertaining to a semantic component, including AoA, affected lexical decision but not reading aloud. In Experiments 3 and 4, a measure of frequency—child written word frequency (ChFreq)—and AoA were manipulated. Reading performance was affected by word frequency but not by AoA (Exp. 3), whereas lexical decision was affected by both variables (Exp. 4). In Experiments 5 and 6, ChFreq and AoA were manipulated orthogonally. Only frequency affected reading aloud, with no main effect or interaction involving AoA (Exp. 5). The effects of AoA and frequency interacted in Experiment 6 for lexical decision due to a larger effect of AoA for low frequency words than high frequency words. These results show that in languages with a transparent orthography word frequency may affect reading aloud in the absence of an effect of AoA because Italian readers employ lexical nonsemantic reading aloud. The effect of child written frequency points to the efficiency of the mappings between those orthographic and phonological word forms that were frequently encountered when learning to read.     

Age of acquisition, word frequency, and the role of phonology in the lexical decision task

In five experiments, we examined the respective roles of word age of acquisition (AoA) and frequency in the lexical decision task. The two variables were manipulated orthogonally (while controlling for concreteness and length) in fully factorial designs. Experiment 1 was a conventional lexical decision task, and Experiments 2-5 involved various attempts to interfere with reliance upon phonology. In Experiment 2, only orthographically illegal nonwords were used; in Experiment 3, pseudohomophone nonwords; in Experiment 4, articulatory suppression by the recitation of a nursery rhyme; and in Experiment 5, articulatory suppression by the repetition of a single word. The same basic pattern of results was observed in all experiments: There were main effects of both AoA and frequency, which interacted in such a way that the AoA effect was larger for low- than for high-frequency words. Although the AoA effect was reduced by manipulations intended to interfere with phonological processing, the manipulations did not eliminate the effect. The results are discussed in terms of current models of reading in which it is proposed that AoA has its primary effect on the retrieval of lexical phonology, which appears to be consulted automatically in the lexical decision task.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in visual word recognition: evidence from expert vocabularies

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists and chemists showed an advantage in lexical decision for late-acquired/high-frequency words (e.g. a psychologist responding to cognition) over late-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. a chemist responding to cognition), revealing a frequency effect when words are perfectly matched. However, contrary to theories that exclude AoA as a factor, performance was similar for the late-acquired/high-frequency and early-acquired/low-frequency words (e.g. dragon) even though their cumulative frequencies differed by more than an order of magnitude. This last finding was replicated with geologists using geology words matched with early-acquired words in terms of concreteness (Experiment 2). Most interestingly, Experiment 3 yielded the same pattern of results in naming while controlling for imageability, a finding that is particularly problematic for parallel distributed processing models of reading.     

An eye movement corpus study of the age-of-acquisition effect

In the present study, we investigated the effects of word-level age of acquisition (AoA) on natural reading. Previous studies, using multiple language modalities, showed that earlier-learned words are recognized, read, spoken, and responded to faster than words learned later in life. Until now, in visual word recognition the experimental materials were limited to single-word or sentence studies. We analyzed the data of the Ghent Eye-tracking Corpus (GECO; Cop, Dirix, Drieghe, & Duyck, in press), an eyetracking corpus of participants reading an entire novel, resulting in the first eye movement megastudy of AoA effects in natural reading. We found that the ages at which specific words were learned indeed influenced reading times, above other important (correlated) lexical variables, such as word frequency and length. Shorter fixations for earlier-learned words were consistently found throughout the reading process, in both early (single-fixation durations, first-fixation durations, gaze durations) and late (total reading times) measures. Implications for theoretical accounts of AoA effects and eye movements are discussed.     

Deep dysphasia: analysis of a rare form of repetition disorder

"Deep dysphasia" is the parallel in repetition to the reading impairment deep dyslexia. Our patient, S.M., showed part of speech, word/nonword, and concreteness effects in repetition, and he made semantic errors, but his oral reading was relatively spared. Further testing indicated that S.M. did not have difficulty perceiving spoken stimuli or deciding their lexical status, but he was deficient at semantically processing spoken words. Moreover, his phonemic memory was severely impaired. We argue that the routes for repetition (lexical and nonlexical) that function without semantic mediation were defective and that deficits in phonemic memory further diminished their effectiveness, since initial phonological encoding of spoken words was not available to guide the output stages of phonological processing. In addition, the semantically mediated route for repetition was unreliable because semantic processing was faulty and S.M. could not accurately label concepts.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in pure alexia

Pure alexia is an acquired reading disorder in which previously literate adults adopt a letter-by-letter processing strategy. Though these individuals display impaired reading, research shows that they are still able to use certain lexical information in order to facilitate visual word processing. The current experiment investigates the role that a word's age of acquisition (AoA) plays in the reading processes of an individual with pure alexia (G.J.) when other lexical variables have been controlled. Results from a sentence reading task in which eye movement patterns were recorded indicated that G.J. shows a strong effect of AoA, where late-acquired words are more difficult to process than early-acquired words. Furthermore, it was observed that the AoA effect is much greater for G.J. than for age-matched control participants. This indicates that patients with pure alexia rely heavily on intact top-down information, supporting the interactive activation model of reading.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in pure alexia

Pure alexia is an acquired reading disorder in which previously literate adults adopt a letter-by-letter processing strategy. Though these individuals display impaired reading, research shows that they are still able to use certain lexical information in order to facilitate visual word processing. The current experiment investigates the role that a word's age of acquisition (AoA) plays in the reading processes of an individual with pure alexia (G.J.) when other lexical variables have been controlled. Results from a sentence reading task in which eye movement patterns were recorded indicated that G.J. shows a strong effect of AoA, where late-acquired words are more difficult to process than early-acquired words. Furthermore, it was observed that the AoA effect is much greater for G.J. than for age-matched control participants. This indicates that patients with pure alexia rely heavily on intact top-down information, supporting the interactive activation model of reading.     

Age-of-acquisition norms for a set of 1,749 Portuguese words

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important psycholinguistic variable that affects the speed and accuracy of lexical processing in tasks such as word naming, picture naming, and lexical decision. In the present work, we collected AoA ratings for 1,749 Portuguese words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), using a 9-point scale that was first proposed by Carroll and White (1973). We analyzed the relation between AoA ratings and other psycholinguistic variables (length measures, neighborhood density, written-word frequency, familiarity, imageability, and concreteness), and we assessed reliability by correlating our ratings with those from other databases presented for Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Italian. The full database can be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Age-of-acquisition affects word naming in Italian only when stress is irregular

In Italian, effects of age of acquisition (AoA) have been found in object naming, semantic categorization of words and lexical decision, but not in word naming (reading aloud). The lack of an AoA effect in Italian word naming is replicated in Experiment 1 which involved reading aloud two-syllable words which all have regular spelling-sound correspondences and regular stress patterns. Studies of English word naming have reported stronger effects of AoA for irregular or exception words than for words with regular, consistent spelling-sound correspondences. There are no grapheme-phoneme irregularities in Italian, but words containing three or more syllables can carry either regular stress on the penultimate syllable or irregular stress on the antepenultimate syllable. Experiment 2 found effects of AoA on reading three-syllable words for words with irregular stress. The results are interpreted in terms of the 'mapping hypothesis' of AoA, with effects arising as a result of a difficulty to generalize earlier-acquired patterns to irregular late-acquired words.     

习得年龄对客体和动作图画口语命名的不同影响：ERP研究

词汇习得年龄指人们最早理解单词意义时的年龄, 已有研究发现早习得词汇的阅读反应时间短于晚习得词汇, 研究者对于词汇习得年龄效应的认知机制存在争论。本研究运用事件相关电位技术, 考察了词汇习得年龄(早与晚)对客体图画和动作图画命名的影响。研究中采用图画命名任务, 要求被试在看到图画后迅速且准确地说出图画名称。结果发现早习得名词的命名快于晚习得名词, 而早习得动词的命名却慢于晚习得动词; 习得年龄对于名词产生的影响发生在图画呈现后的250~300 ms之间, 表现为早习得名词波幅小于晚习得名词, 而习得年龄对于动词产生的影响发生在图画呈现后的200~600 ms之间, 表现为早习得动词波幅大于晚习得动词。这表明名词产生中的习得年龄效应发生在词汇选择阶段, 支持了语义假设的观点; 动词产生过程中的习得年龄效应出现在多个加工阶段, 包括了词汇选择、音韵编码和语音编码阶段, 这与动词语义的多重性及其与动作相关的脑区激活有关, 支持了网络可塑性假说的观点。     

Contrasting graded effects of semantic similarity and association across the concreteness spectrum

Evidence from healthy individuals and neuropsychological patients with deep dyslexia or semantic refractory access dysphasia suggests that abstract and concrete concepts have different dependencies upon associative and similarity-based representational frameworks. However, the importance of information about semantic similarity for concepts that lie across the full concreteness spectrum has not been investigated. Here we report the performance of healthy individuals on an odd-one-out task involving semantically related word triplets that showed continuous variation for the key variables of concreteness, similarity strength, and association strength. In addition, data from a stroke aphasic patient tested on a matching-to-sample task based on the same abstract, middle-concreteness, and concrete stimuli are also presented. The effects of similarity and association strength upon performance were both shown to interact significantly with concreteness, but in opposite directions. The effect of semantic similarity increased with concreteness but the effect of association decreased with concreteness. This research provides further evidence for the proposal that abstract and concrete words have different dependencies upon associative and similarity-based information. It also develops the proposal by providing data that are consistent with a graded and not binary or ungraded model of the relationship between concreteness and these two forms of semantic relationship.     

Contrasting graded effects of semantic similarity and association across the concreteness spectrum

Evidence from healthy individuals and neuropsychological patients with deep dyslexia or semantic refractory access dysphasia suggests that abstract and concrete concepts have different dependencies upon associative and similarity-based representational frameworks. However, the importance of information about semantic similarity for concepts that lie across the full concreteness spectrum has not been investigated. Here we report the performance of healthy individuals on an odd-one-out task involving semantically related word triplets that showed continuous variation for the key variables of concreteness, similarity strength, and association strength. In addition, data from a stroke aphasic patient tested on a matching-to-sample task based on the same abstract, middle-concreteness, and concrete stimuli are also presented. The effects of similarity and association strength upon performance were both shown to interact significantly with concreteness, but in opposite directions. The effect of semantic similarity increased with concreteness but the effect of association decreased with concreteness. This research provides further evidence for the proposal that abstract and concrete words have different dependencies upon associative and similarity-based information. It also develops the proposal by providing data that are consistent with a graded and not binary or ungraded model of the relationship between concreteness and these two forms of semantic relationship.     

Subjective age-of-acquisition norms for 600 Turkish words from four age groups

The main purpose of this study was to report age-based subjective age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 600 Turkish words. A total of 115 children, 100 young adults, 115 middle-aged adults, and 127 older adults provided AoA estimates for 600 words on a 7-point scale. The intraclass correlations suggested high reliability, and the AoA estimates were highly correlated across the four age groups. Children gave earlier AoA estimates than the three adult groups; this was true for high-frequency as well as low-frequency words. In addition to the means and standard deviations of the AoA estimates, we report word frequency, concreteness, and imageability ratings, as well as word length measures (numbers of syllables and letters), for the 600 words as supplemental materials. The present ratings represent a potentially useful database for researchers working on lexical processing as well as other aspects of cognitive processing, such as autobiographical memory.     

When does a deep dyslexic make a semantic error? The roles of age-of-acquisition, concreteness, and frequency

Semantic reading errors are the central and defining feature of deep dyslexia. This study compared the words the deep dyslexic patient LW read correctly with those she omitted and those to which she produced semantic errors in terms of their concreteness, age-of-acquisition, frequency, and length. Semantic errors were made to less concrete, later-acquired, and shorter words than were read correctly; there was no reliable effect of word frequency. More importantly, the actual semantic errors produced were later-acquired than the stimulus words, but they were not more concrete or reliably more frequent. These results implicate age-of-acquisition in the process that produces semantic errors. It is proposed that concreteness determines the specificity of the semantic system to activate a set of candidate responses and that age-of-acquisition biases the ease with which certain words can be selected from this set to be produced as reading responses.     

Independent effects of word concreteness and word valence on immediate serial recall

The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g. happy) were used to investigate these effects. Participants completed study-test trials with 7-item study lists consisting of positive or negative words with either high or low concreteness (Experiments 1 and 2) and neutral (i.e. non-emotion) words with either high or low concreteness (Experiment 2). In serial recall performance, we replicated the typical item concreteness effect (concrete words are better recalled than abstract words) and obtained an item valence effect (positive/neutral words are better recalled than negative words). However, there was no concreteness × valence interaction. We conclude that both word valence and word concreteness independently contribute to the serial order retention of emotion words in the immediate serial recall task.     

Concreteness effects in different tasks: Implications for models of short-term memory

This study investigates concreteness effects in tasks requiring short-term retention. Concreteness effects were assessed in serial recall, matching span, order reconstruction, and free recall. Each task was carried out both in a control condition and under articulatory suppression. Our results show no dissociation between tasks that do and do not require spoken output. This argues against the redintegration hypothesis according to which lexical-semantic effects in short-term memory arise only at the point of production. In contrast, concreteness effects were modulated by task demands that stressed retention of item versus order information. Concreteness effects were stronger in free recall than in serial recall. Suppression, which weakens phonological representations, enhanced the concreteness effect with item scoring. In a matching task, positive effects of concreteness occurred with open sets but not with closed sets of words. Finally, concreteness effects reversed when the task asked only for recall of word positions (as in the matching task), when phonological representations were weak (because of suppression), and when lexical semantic representations overactivated (because of closed sets). We interpret these results as consistent with a model where phonological representations are crucial for the retention of order, while lexical-semantic representations support maintenance of item identity in both input and output buffers.     

Concreteness effects in different tasks: implications for models of short-term memory

This study investigates concreteness effects in tasks requiring short-term retention. Concreteness effects were assessed in serial recall, matching span, order reconstruction, and free recall. Each task was carried out both in a control condition and under articulatory suppression. Our results show no dissociation between tasks that do and do not require spoken output. This argues against the redintegration hypothesis according to which lexical-semantic effects in short-term memory arise only at the point of production. In contrast, concreteness effects were modulated by task demands that stressed retention of item versus order information. Concreteness effects were stronger in free recall than in serial recall. Suppression, which weakens phonological representations, enhanced the concreteness effect with item scoring. In a matching task, positive effects of concreteness occurred with open sets but not with closed sets of words. Finally, concreteness effects reversed when the task asked only for recall of word positions (as in the matching task), when phonological representations were weak (because of suppression), and when lexical semantic representations overactivated (because of closed sets). We interpret these results as consistent with a model where phonological representations are crucial for the retention of order, while lexical-semantic representations support maintenance of item identity in both input and output buffers.