The effect of visual complexity and word frequency on eye movements during Chinese reading

Eye movements of native Chinese readers were monitored when they read sentences containing single-character target words orthogonally manipulated for frequency and visual complexity (number of strokes). Both factors yielded strong main effects on skipping probability but no interaction, with readers skipping visually simple and high frequency words more often. However, an interaction between frequency and complexity was observed on the fixation times on the target words with longer fixations for the low frequency, visually complex words. The results demonstrate that visual complexity and frequency have independent influences on saccadic targeting behaviour during Chinese reading but jointly influence fixation durations and that these two factors differently impact fixation durations and saccade targeting during reading.     

影响汉语动词、名词识别因素的回归分析

采用回归分析的方法,考察了6个因素对汉语动词、名词识别的影响。结果表明,各变量间有一定的相关,也有相对的独立性。词频、获得年龄和义符熟悉性对词汇识别有显著影响。情境获得性与具体性相关显著,当回归模型中包含情境获得性时,具体性的作用减弱。获得年龄与义符熟悉性在名词回归方程中的解释量大于在动词中的。汉语动词和名词的回归模式既与拼音文字有明显差异,也有一定的共性。这是由汉字的特殊性和语言的共性共同决定的。     

Episodic intertrial learning of younger and older adults: Effects of word frequency

ABSTRACT

Older adults have a demonstrable episodic memory deficit. The present study aimed to investigate whether the age deficit in episodic memory was influenced by stimulus characteristics known to produce differences in memory performance in younger adults, specifically word frequency. An intertrial paradigm was used whereby participants studied high- or low-frequency lists over several study-test trials, and the loss and gain of individual items was measured across trials; putative measures of consolidation and encoding. The results show that high-frequency words are recalled significantly better than low-frequency words. Older adults acquired high-frequency words at a greater rate across trials than they did for low-frequency words, an effect not evident in the younger adults. Older adults were found to have deficits in both encoding and consolidation as measured by losses and gains of items across trials. The results support the inter-item association theory of the word frequency effect on recall, with the age differences suggesting that memory deficits are sensitive to stimuli characteristics – one interpretation being that the ease of processing of the stimuli at encoding facilitates later recall.     

The effects of age of acquisition and frequency trajectory on object naming: Comments on Pérez (2007)

Pérez (2007) reported that objective age of acquisition (AoA) was a major determinant of adult object naming latencies when frequency trajectory and cumulative frequency were included in the same regression analysis. In this comment, we discuss several issues concerning the influence of frequency trajectory and AoA and argue that objective AoA is a behavioural outcome and a natural covariate of frequency trajectory. Bonin, Barry, Méot, and Chalard (2004) argued that the critical test of age-limited learning effects is finding an effect of frequency trajectory when AoA was not included as a factor. This critical test was lacking in Pérez's (2007) study, but several re-analyses of his data show that frequency trajectory is a reliable predictor of naming speed when objective AoA is not included in the regression. We conclude that frequency trajectory remains an important independent variable for the study of the effects of age-limited learning.     

The bigram trough hypothesis and the syllable number effect in lexical decision

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in various word processing tasks. It has, however, been suggested that syllable effects may be caused by orthographic redundancy. In particular, it has been proposed that the presence of bigram troughs at syllable boundaries cause what are seen as syllable effects. We investigated the bigram trough hypothesis as an explanation of the number of syllables effect for lexical decision in five-letter words and nonwords from the British Lexicon Project. The number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times along with word frequency and orthographic similarity. The presence of a bigram trough did not. For nonwords, the number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times only for nonwords with relatively long decision times. The presence of a bigram trough made no contribution. The evidence presented suggests that the bigram trough cannot be an explanation of the syllable number effect in lexical decision. A comparison of the results from words and nonwords is interpreted as providing some support for dual-route models of reading.     

Lexical stress,frequency, and stress neighbourhood effects in the early stages of Italian reading development

We examined the development of stress assignment in reading Italian aloud. We investigated frequency effects as a marker of the use of item-specific lexical knowledge in assigning stress together with stress dominance and stress neighbourhood (the number of words sharing both stress and ending) as markers of distributional information regarding properties of the lexicon extracted from spoken language. We tested second- and fourth-graders in a reading-aloud experiment including high- and low-frequency words and nonwords. Results show that despite the regularity of orthography–phonology mappings in Italian and the predominant use of phonological recoding procedures, item-specific lexical knowledge is also used, even by beginning readers. The frequency effect was significant and did not increase with age, while stress errors on low-frequency words decreased with increasing grade. Stress neighbourhood increasingly affected stress assignment on nonwords with older children. Taken together, our findings show that both item-specific knowledge and general information about stress distribution are relevant in children's reading, suggesting the simultaneous use of both lexical and sublexical information. Moreover, as the reading system develops, and knowledge about the relative distribution of stress neighbourhood increases, larger grain-size units are also exploited.     

SUBTLEX-UK: A new and improved word frequency database for British English

We present word frequencies based on subtitles of British television programmes. We show that the SUBTLEX-UK word frequencies explain more of the variance in the lexical decision times of the British Lexicon Project than the word frequencies based on the British National Corpus and the SUBTLEX-US frequencies. In addition to the word form frequencies, we also present measures of contextual diversity part-of-speech specific word frequencies, word frequencies in children programmes, and word bigram frequencies, giving researchers of British English access to the full range of norms recently made available for other languages. Finally, we introduce a new measure of word frequency, the Zipf scale, which we hope will stop the current misunderstandings of the word frequency effect.     

Picture–word interference reveals inhibitory effects of syllable frequency on lexical selection

While previous research has shown that high syllable frequency can facilitate speech production at the level of phonological/phonetic encoding, little is known about its influence on prephonological processes, specifically lexical selection. The current study used a picture–word interference (PWI) task to (a) shed light on the stages of lexical access where syllable frequency is relevant, and (b) inform as to whether lexical selection is accomplished via competition among activated word options. Participants named pictures whose names had high-frequency (HF) and low-frequency (LF) first syllables while ignoring phonologically related (same first syllable) or unrelated distractor words that were presented simultaneously. Word frequency was also manipulated, as half of the targets were HF words, and half were LF words. Results revealed inhibitory syllable frequency effects in all conditions, such that targets with HF first syllables were named more slowly than targets with LF first syllables. However, inhibitory syllable frequency effects were exacerbated in conditions thought to reflect heightened lexical competition, specifically in the presence of phonologically related distractors and for targets with low word frequency. These findings reveal novel evidence for first-syllable frequency effects on lexical selection and offer further support for models proposing delays at lexical selection due to activation of nontarget competitors.     

On the advantages of word frequency and contextual diversity measures extracted from subtitles: The case of Portuguese

We examined the potential advantage of the lexical databases using subtitles and present SUBTLEX-PT, a new lexical database for 132,710 Portuguese words obtained from a 78 million corpus based on film and television series subtitles, offering word frequency and contextual diversity measures. Additionally we validated SUBTLEX-PT with a lexical decision study involving 1920 Portuguese words (and 1920 nonwords) with different lengths in letters (M?=?6.89, SD?=?2.10) and syllables (M?=?2.99, SD?=?0.94). Multiple regression analyses on latency and accuracy data were conducted to compare the proportion of variance explained by the Portuguese subtitle word frequency measures with that accounted by the recent written-word frequency database (Procura-PALavras; P-PAL; Soares, Iriarte, et al., 2014 Soares, A. P., Iriarte, A., Almeida, J. J., Simões, A., Costa, A., França, P.,?… Comesaña, M. (2014). Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): Uma nova medida de frequência lexical do Português Europeu contemporâneo [Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A new measure of word frequency for contemporary European Portuguese]. Psicologia: Reflexão e Crítica, 27, 110–123.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). As its international counterparts, SUBTLEX-PT explains approximately 15% more of the variance in the lexical decision performance of young adults than the P-PAL database. Moreover, in line with recent studies, contextual diversity accounted for approximately 2% more of the variance in participants' reading performance than the raw frequency counts obtained from subtitles. SUBTLEX-PT is freely available for research purposes (at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases).     

Exploring the relationship between gamma-band activity and maths anxiety

ABSTRACT

Previous research has outlined high anxiety in connection with gamma modulation, identifying that gamma-band activity (40–100?Hz) correlates with processing of threat perception, attention and anxiety. Maths anxiety research has also noted the involvement of these aspects, yet this has not been investigated from a neurophysiological standpoint. Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to research gamma-band activity in relation to maths anxiety over two studies. The first measured gamma differences during the processing of complex addition and multiplication stimuli. Results identified differences between high and low maths anxious individuals; significantly greater gamma power was observed in those with high maths anxiety than those with low maths anxiety. As a control condition was not used, the second study replicated the design, but also applied a non-numerical control condition amongst the other stimuli sets. This showed significantly greater gamma activity in high maths anxious individuals across numerical conditions, but not in the non-numerical condition. High maths anxious individuals likely show attentional bias and threat perception to numerical-based stimuli, as indexed by gamma power. This study provides the first evidence of greater gamma-band activity in high maths anxious individuals and serves as a foundation for the exploration of gamma activity in high maths anxious individuals.