Illusions of familiarity caused by cohort activation

Subjects took part in an auditory lexical decision task followed by an auditory test of recognition memory for words presented in this task. Subjects categorized their recognition judgments as based on either recollection (“remember” responses) or familiarity (“know” responses). Distractor items in the recognition test included the base words from which the nonwords used in the lexical decision task were derived. Consistent with the findings of Wallace, Stewart, Sherman, and Mellor (1995), more false alarms were made to “late” base words (where the corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme near the end of the word) than to “early” base words (corresponding nonwords were created by changing a phoneme at the beginning of the word). However, this effect was found in “know” responses but not in “remember” responses. The findings are attributed to enhanced fluency with which the base words are processed following their implicit activation at encoding.     

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.     

Tracing the time course of picture--word processing

A number of independent lines of research have suggested that semantic and articulatory information become available differentially from pictures and words. The first of the experiments reported here sought to clarify the time course by which information about pictures and words becomes available by considering the pattern of interference generated when incongruent pictures and words are presented simultaneously in a Stroop-like situation. Previous investigators report that picture naming is easily disrupted by the presence of a distracting word but that word naming is relatively immune to interference from an incongruent picture. Under the assumption that information available from a completed process may disrupt an ongoing process, these results suggest that words access articulatory information more rapidly than do pictures. Experiment 1 extended this paradigm by requiring subjects to verify the category of the target stimulus. In accordance with the hypothesis that picture access the semantic code more rapidly than words, there was a reversal in the interference pattern: Word categorization suffered considerable disruption, whereas picture categorization was minimally affected by the presence of an incongruent word. Experiment 2 sought to further test the hypothesis that access to semantic and articulatory codes is different for pictures and words by examining memory for those items following naming or categorization. Categorized words were better recognized than named words, whereas the reverse was true for pictures, a result which suggests that picture naming involves more extensive processing than picture categorization. Experiment 3 replicated this result under conditions in which viewing time was held constant. The last experiment extended the investigation of memory differences to a situation in which subjects were required to generate the superordinate category name. Here, memory for categorized pictures was as good as memory for named pictures. Category generation also influenced memory for words, memory performance being superior to that following a yes--no verification of category membership. These experiments suggest a model of information access whereby pictures access semantic information were readily than name information, with the reverse being true for words. Memory for both pictures and words was a function of the amount of processing required to access a particular type of information as well as the extent of response differentiation necessitated by the task.     

词汇具体性对情绪名词效价加工影响的ERP研究

具体性和抽象性是词汇同一特性的两极, 是直接影响词汇加工过程的重要因素。本研究采用快速序列视觉呈现范式, 结合脑电技术探讨在有限注意资源内, 词汇具体性对情绪名词加工过程的影响。结果发现：名词加工早期和晚期阶段的ERP成分受到情绪效价的调节, 情绪词比中性词诱发了更大的N170和LPC波幅; 名词加工早期和晚期阶段的ERP成分也受到词汇具体性的调节, 具体词比抽象词诱发了更大的N170和LPC波幅; 词汇具体性影响情绪名词加工的晚期阶段, LPC波幅能够分辨出不同情绪效价的抽象词, 对于具体词仅能区分出情绪与非情绪, 这说明抽象词可能比具体词负载了更多的情绪信息, 反映出对情绪信息的精细加工过程。     

Shock and awe: Distinct effects of taboo words on lexical decision and free recall

Taboo stimuli are highly arousing, but it has been suggested that they also have inherent taboo-specific properties such as tabooness, offensiveness, or shock value. Prior studies have shown that taboo words have slower response times in lexical decision and higher recall probabilities in free recall; however, taboo words often differ from other words on more than just arousal and taboo properties. Here, we replicated both of these findings and conducted detailed item analyses to determine which word properties drive these behavioural effects. We found that lexical-decision performance was best explained by measures of lexical accessibility (e.g., word frequency) and tabooness, rather than arousal, valence, or offensiveness. However, free-recall performance was primarily driven by emotional word properties, and tabooness was the most important emotional word property for model fit. Our results suggest that the processing of taboo words is influenced by distinct sets of factors and by an intrinsic taboo-specific property.     

Lexical access of resyllabified words: Evidence from phoneme monitoring

Resyllabification is a phonological process in which consonants are attached to syllables other than those from which they originally came. In four experiments, we investigated whether resyllabified words, such as "my bike is" pronounced as "mai.bai.kis," are more difficult to recognize than nonresyllabified words. Using a phoneme-monitoring task, we found that phonemes in resyllabified words were detected more slowly than those in nonresyllabified words. This difference increased when recognition of the carrier word was made more difficult. Acoustic differences between the target words themselves could not account for the results, because cross-splicing the resyllabified and nonresyllabified carrier words did not change the pattern. However, when nonwords were used as carriers, the effect disappeared. It is concluded that resyllabification increases the lexical-processing demands, which then interfere with phoneme monitoring.     

Orthographic processing of polysyllabic words by native and nonnative English speakers

How polysyllabic English words are analyzed in silent reading was examined in three experiments by comparing lexical decision responses to words physically split on the screen. The gap was compatible either with the Maximal Onset Principle or the Maximal Coda Principle. The former corresponds to the spoken syllable (e.g., ca det), except when the word has a stressed short first vowel (e.g., ra dish), while the reverse is true for the latter (giving cad et and rad ish). Native English speakers demonstrated a general preference for the Max Coda analysis and a correlation with reading ability when such an analysis did not correspond with the spoken syllable. Native Japanese speakers, on the other hand, showed a Max Onset preference regardless of the type of word, while native Mandarin Chinese speakers showed no preference at all. It is concluded that a maximization of the coda is the optimal representation of polysyllabic words in English and that poorer native readers are more influenced by phonology than are better readers. The way that nonnative readers mentally represent polysyllabic English words is affected by the way such words are structured in their native language, which may not lead to optimal English processing.     

Effects of chronic non-clinical depression on the use of positive and negative words in language contexts

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of chronic non-clinical depression (ChD) on the use of ambiguous and unambiguous emotional words in language contexts. Participants with ChD and normal non-depressed (ND) participants' responses to positive and negative stimulus words on a free association word test were compared using the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model of memory's context density metric, a measure of the range of contexts in which a word is used in language. ChD participants generated negative words that were used in more restricted contexts than ND participants. However, ND and ChD participants used positive words in a similar range of contexts. The results suggest that people with ChD tend to use negative words that are probably more negative in connotation, yet they are not impaired with respect to using words in contexts where positive words are required.     

Rapid recognition at 10 months as a predictor of language development

Infants' ability to recognize words in continuous speech is vital for building a vocabulary. We here examined the amount and type of exposure needed for 10-month-olds to recognize words. Infants first heard a word, either embedded within an utterance or in isolation, then recognition was assessed by comparing event-related potentials to this word versus a word that they had not heard directly before. Although all 10-month-olds showed recognition responses to words first heard in isolation, not all infants showed such responses to words they had first heard within an utterance. Those that did succeed in the latter, harder, task, however, understood more words and utterances when re-tested at 12 months, and understood more words and produced more words at 24 months, compared with those who had shown no such recognition response at 10 months. The ability to rapidly recognize the words in continuous utterances is clearly linked to future language development.     

The neural basis of the right visual field advantage in reading: an MEG analysis using virtual electrodes

Right-handed participants respond more quickly and more accurately to written words presented in the right visual field (RVF) than in the left visual field (LVF). Previous attempts to identify the neural basis of the RVF advantage have had limited success. Experiment 1 was a behavioral study of lateralized word naming which established that the words later used in Experiment 2 showed a reliable RVF advantage which persisted over multiple repetitions. In Experiment 2, the same words were interleaved with scrambled words and presented in the LVF and RVF to right-handed participants seated in an MEG scanner. Participants read the real words silently and responded "pattern" covertly to the scrambled words. A beamformer analysis created statistical maps of changes in oscillatory power within the brain. Those whole-brain maps revealed activation of the reading network by both LVF and RVF words. Virtual electrode analyses used the same beamforming method to reconstruct the responses to real and scrambled words in three regions of interest in both hemispheres. The middle occipital gyri showed faster and stronger responses to contralateral than to ipsilateral stimuli, with evidence of asymmetric channeling of information into the left hemisphere. The left mid fusiform gyrus at the site of the 'visual word form area' responded more strongly to RVF than to LVF words. Activity in speech-motor cortex was lateralized to the left hemisphere, and stronger to RVF than LVF words, which is interpreted as representing the proximal cause of the RVF advantage for naming written words.     

Reinstating study context produces unconscious influences of memory

Having read a word does more to benefit its later perceptual identification when many, rather than few, of the words in the test list have been previously read. Some have suggested that this proportion overlap effect is produced by an intentional use of recognition memory or recall in the perceptual identification task. Contrary to this account, we found that words that are easily recognized (words generated from an anagram at study) do not gain more from increasing overlap than do words that are poorly recognized (words read at study). These findings are problematic for claims that word perception relies on a module, such as a logogen system, that is separate from the rest of memory.     

Lexical priming and sound-to-spelling contingency effects in nonword spelling

Campbell (1983) demonstrated that nonword spelling may be influenced by the spelling patterns of previously heard, rhyming words (“lexical priming”). We report an experiment that compares two nonword spelling tasks: an experimental (“priming”) task, in which nonwords were preceded by rhyming words of different spellings (as in Campbell's task), and a free-spelling task in which only nonwords are presented. The frequency of production of critical spelling patterns was significantly greater in the experimental task than in the free-spelling task (a lexical priming effect). However, there were, and equally for both tasks, significant and substantial effects of sound-to-spelling contingency (i.e. the frequency with which spelling patterns represent vowel phonemes in words): subjects produced more high-contingency (i.e. common) spelling patterns of vowels than low-contingency (rare) spellings. Further, within high-contingency spelling patterns, subjects more frequently produced the most common spelling correspondence of vowels than the second most common spelling. The results are interpreted within a proposed model of assembled spelling, in which it is suggested that there exist a set of probabilistic sound-to-spelling mappings that relate vowel phonemes to weighted lists of alternative spelling patterns ordered by sound-to-spelling contingency, but that the selection of a spelling pattern from such lists is open to lexical influence.     

Determinants of the word-frequency effect in recognition memory

Possible determinants of the word-frequency effect (WFE), that is, the finding that lowfrequency (LF) words are recognized more accurately than high-frequency (HF) words, are evaluated. Three studies examined the view that, since HF words have more meanings than LF words, it is less likely that the word sense tagged at time of presentation will be accessed at time of test and a correct response will be made. To ensure the same word sense was accessed at time of presentation and time of test in the case of both HF and LF words, sentence contexts used during presentation were combined with cuing procedures at time of test. Recognition performance improved, but the WFE was unaltered even when the identical sentence context was used during presentation and test. A fourth study considered GlarLzer and Bowles’ (19761 suggestion that associates of both HF and LF words tend to be HF words that are (1)likely to be activated and derivatively encoded during presentation and (2) likely to include a number of distractors from the recognition test sufficient to impair performance on HF words. Analysis of associative responses of subjects to HF and LF words, and the errors they made, support strongly such an interference-type interpretation of the WFE.     

The influence of selection for response on repetition priming of word identification.

Repetition priming of word identification was examined using study tasks that required participants either to search for targets appearing in rapid serial visual presentation of word lists or to read aloud a list of target words. Nontarget words embedded in search lists produced a small amount of repetition priming on a masked word identification test, independent of presentation duration in the search list (200-1,000 ms), but no priming when they appeared as targets in a second search task used at test. For both test tasks, words that were originally encoded in a read-aloud task or served as detected targets during a search task generated more priming than nontarget words from search lists. These results suggest that priming effects are strongest when study tasks require an item to be selected as the basis for an overt response, even though the information on which study and test responses are based may be different.     

The probability of the least likely non-length-controlled bigram affects lexical decision reaction times

The frequency effect, by which high frequency words are recognized with more ease than low frequency words, is one of the most robust effects in cognitive psychology. Frequency interacts with many word-level variables, to the extent that most effects reported in word recognition literature have an impact only on low frequency words. This has been taken as evidence that high frequency words are accessed in a special way, via either an addressed pathway as in the dual-route model or an assembled pathway as in a PDP model. Under either model, sublexical effects should have no bearing on the ease with which representations for high frequency words are accessed. In this article, however, we describe a series of studies that examine a sublexical effect (namely nonlength controlled minimal bigram frequency) that is only found for high frequency words, suggesting that sublexical processing must play a role in the recognition of even high frequency words.     

Interpretation of homophones related to threat in anxiety states

In previous studies, we have established that anxiety states are characterized by an attentional bias that favors the processing of threatening stimuli. In the present study we extend this finding to ambiguous stimuli, specifically, homophones with spellings that correspond to either a threatening or a neutral meaning. As predicted, clinically anxious subjects used the threatening spellings relatively more than did controls, whereas recovered subjects were intermediate in this respect. Threatening words were associated with greater skin conductance responses than were neutral words, but the groups did not differ in their electrodermal reactions to homophones. We take these findings as evidence that, although the different meanings of ambiguous stimuli may be processed in parallel by all subjects, an interpretive bias operates such that anxiety-prone individuals tend to become preferentially aware of the more threatening meaning of such events.     

Functional MRI evidence for an abstract, not perceptual, word-form area

Previous studies have found an area in left ventral visual cortex that responds more to words and pseudowords than to consonant strings. Does this area respond to the perceptual form of wordlike stimuli, or is it responding to some more abstract, linguistic property, such as orthographic regularity (i.e., conformity with the spelling rules of the language)? During a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment, participants read alternating-case words and pseudowords, which are orthographically regular but are perceptually unfamiliar. These stimuli activated the same area that was activated by pure-case words and pseudowords. These results suggest that the response of the so-called word-form area is not based on perceptual familiarity but rather on some more abstract feature such as orthographic regularity.     

Filling a gap in the semantic gradient: Color associates and response set effects in the Stroop task

In the Stroop task, incongruent color associates (e.g., LAKE) interfere more with color identification than neutral words do (e.g., SEAT). However, color associates have historically been related to colors in the response set. Response set membership is an important factor in Stroop interference, because color words in the response set interfere more than color words not in the response set. It has not been established whether response set membership plays a role in the ability of a colorassociate to interfere with color identification. This issue was addressed in two experiments (one using vocal responses and one using manual responses) by comparing the magnitude of interference caused by color associates related to colors in the response set with that of interference caused by color associates unrelated to colors in the response set. The results of both experiments show that color associates unrelated to colors in the response set interfered with color identification more than neutral words did. However, the amount of interference was less than that from color associates that were related to colors in the response set. In addition, this pattern was consistent across response modalities. These results are discussed with respect to various theoretical accounts of Stroop interference.     

The effect of stress on the linguistic generalization of bilingual individuals

Spanish-English coordinate bilinguals were subjects in a GSR linguistic conditioning experiment using strong and mild buzzer conditions and spoken stimuli. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of two lists of words and one of two levels of buzzer sounds. A Spanish word from the Spanish list and an English word from the English list functioned as a conditioned word (CS). The lists were Spanish and English words related semantically and phonemically and unrelated to the CS. Generalization was studied under conscious and unconscious conditions. We found that both buzzer conditions resulted in significantly greater GSR responses to semantic and phonemic words than to words unrelated to the CS. Generalization to semantic words was not significantly greater than to phonemic words. There was a tendency toward greater phonemic than semantic generalization in the strong buzzer condition. The opposite was observed regarding the mild buzzer. The results were the same in both lists and languages. Under a conscious and unstressful condition, generalization to semantic words was found to be more prominent than to phonemic words. This suggests that under normal condition semantic generalization is mediated by conscious cognition. We concluded that strong emotion produces an increase in phonemic, as compared to semantic, generalization in both languages. Hence, primitivization of the subjects' cognitive and linguistic functioning is assumed to have occurred. These results are important in understanding the deleterious effect that stressful situations may have on linguistic functioning and cognition in bilinguals.     

Connection between the evaluation of positive or negative valence and verbal responses to a lexical decision making task]

Evaluation of the positive or negative valence of a stimulus is an activity that is part of any emotional experience that has been mostly studied using the affective priming paradigm. When the prime and the target have the same valence (e.g. positive prime and positive target), the target response is facilitated as a function of opposing valence conditions (e.g. negative prime and positive target). These studies show that this evaluation is automatic but depends on the nature of the task's implied response because the priming effects are only observed for positive responses, not for negative responses. This result was explained in automatic judgmental tendency model put forth by Abelson and Rosenberg (1958) and Klauer and Stern (1992). In this model, affective priming assumes there is an overlap between both responses, the first response taking precedence as a function of the prime-target valence, and the second response one that is required by the task. We are assuming that another type of response was not foreseen under this model. In fact, upon activating the valence for each of the prime-target elements, two preliminary responses would be activated before the response on the prime-target valence relationship. These responses are directly linked to the prime and target evaluation independently of the prime-target relationship. This hypothesis can be linked to the larger hypothesis whereby the evaluative process is related to two distinct motivational systems corresponding to approach and avoidance behaviour responses (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1990; Neuman & Strack, 2000; Cacciopo, Piester & Bernston, 1993). In this study, we use the hypothesis that when a word leads to a positive valence evaluation, this favours a positive verbal response and inversely, a negative valence word favours a negative response. We are testing this hypothesis outside the affective priming paradigm to study to what extent evaluating a word, even when it is not primed, activates both motivational systems and consequently, positive verbal responses for approach and negative responses for avoidance. To validate this hypothesis, we are re-using both versions of the lexical decision task proposed by Wentura (2000). The classic version leads participants to a positive response for words, and the modified version leads to a no response. This experiment, carried out with thirty-two participants, measures the influence on response time of two experimental factors, the intrasubject valence of words (positive and negative) and the inter-subject factor (yes and no responses to words). Results show an interaction between the type of response and word valence. It is temporally more onerous to give a no response to positive words than to negative words. This result confirms that there is a direct relation between the evaluation of a valence stimulus and the response to this stimulus, a relation that had up to now been essentially observed with motor behaviours, and more rarely with verbal responses. We propose integrating the existence of this link between evaluation and verbal response (yes and no) in interpreting the effects of affective priming.