Suprasegmental lexical stress cues in visual speech can guide spoken-word recognition

Visual cues to the individual segments of speech and to sentence prosody guide speech recognition. The present study tested whether visual suprasegmental cues to the stress patterns of words can also constrain recognition. Dutch listeners use acoustic suprasegmental cues to lexical stress (changes in duration, amplitude, and pitch) in spoken-word recognition. We asked here whether they can also use visual suprasegmental cues. In two categorization experiments, Dutch participants saw a speaker say fragments of word pairs that were segmentally identical but differed in their stress realization (e.g., ?ca-vi from cavia “guinea pig” vs. ?ka-vi from kaviaar “caviar”). Participants were able to distinguish between these pairs from seeing a speaker alone. Only the presence of primary stress in the fragment, not its absence, was informative. Participants were able to distinguish visually primary from secondary stress on first syllables, but only when the fragment-bearing target word carried phrase-level emphasis. Furthermore, participants distinguished fragments with primary stress on their second syllable from those with secondary stress on their first syllable (e.g., pro-?jec from projector “projector” vs. ?pro-jec from projectiel “projectile”), independently of phrase-level emphasis. Seeing a speaker thus contributes to spoken-word recognition by providing suprasegmental information about the presence of primary lexical stress.     

Does frequency trajectory influence word identification? A cross-task comparison

In a series of six experiments, the influence of frequency trajectory in visual word recognition was investigated. In Experiment 1, frequency trajectory was found to exert a strong and reliable influence on age of acquisition (AoA) ratings. In word reading (Experiment 2), lexical decision (Experiments 3 and 6), proper name decision (Experiment 4), progressive demasking (Experiment 5), and a multiple regression analysis of lexical decision times taken from the French Lexicon Project, the effect of frequency trajectory was not reliable. In contrast, in all the experiments and in the multiple regression analysis, cumulative frequency had a strong and reliable influence on word recognition times. The findings firmly establish that in alphabetic languages such as French, age-limited learning effects do not surface readily in word recognition. In contrast, the total exposure to words across the lifetime is a strong determinant of word recognition speed. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Spelling–stress regularity effects are intact in developmental dyslexia

The current experiment investigated conflicting predictions regarding the effects of spelling–stress regularity on the lexical decision performance of skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia. In both reading groups, lexical decision responses were significantly faster and significantly more accurate when the orthographic structure of a word ending was a reliable as opposed to an unreliable predictor of lexical stress assignment. Furthermore, the magnitude of this spelling–stress regularity effect was found to be equivalent across reading groups. These findings are consistent with intact phoneme-level regularity effects also observed in dyslexia. The paper discusses how findings of intact spelling–sound regularity effects at both prosodic and phonemic levels, as well as other similar results, can be reconciled with the obvious difficulties that people with dyslexia experience in other domains of phonological processing.     

Deterioration of the phonological processing skills in adults with an acquired severe hearing loss

Phonological processing was examined in a group of individuals with an acquired severe hearing loss and compared to a group of matched normal hearing individuals. The hearing-impaired group was significantly slower and less accurate when performing a visual rhyme-judgement task, and produced fewer rhyming word pairs on a rhyme-generation task than the normal hearing group. In contrast, the hearing-impaired group performed on a par with the normal hearing group on verbal working memory tasks. It is concluded that specific aspects of the phonological system deteriorate in this population as a function of auditory deprivation. In particular, the phonological representations are impaired and this impairment also affects the ability to rapidly perform phonological operations (i.e., analyse and compare). In contrast, phonological processing involved in verbal working memory is preserved in this population.     

Lending a hand to signed language acquisition: Enactment and iconicity enhance sign recall in hearing adult American Sign Language learners

Abstract

Evidence over the last 15 years has suggested that dual (imagery and verbal) coding explanations of concreteness effects in memory for word lists do not generalise well to memory for sentences and paragraphs. In contrast, an alternative framework based on relative differences in relational and distinctive processing has been shown to account for the effects of imagery and concreteness in these contexts and others. This paper describes recent research on free and cued recall of word lists and evaluates it with respect to the two models. The evidence suggests that whereas dual processing systems may be involved in the encoding of verbal materials, dual memory codes are insufficient to explain concreteness effects in recall. Better memory for high-as compared to low-imagery words depends on the use of paradigms that facilitate inter-item relational processing, independent of whether or not imagery is involved.     

Speech prosody and developmental dyslexia: Reduced phonological awareness in the context of intact phonological representations

Recent research indicates that awareness of the rhythmic patterns present in spoken language (i.e., prosody) may be an important and relatively overlooked predictor of reading ability. Two studies investigated the prosodic processing abilities of skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia. Participants with dyslexia showed reduced awareness of lexical and metrical stress and these skills were found to be significantly associated with, and predictive of, phonological decoding ability. In contrast, the same individuals showed normal patterns of stress based priming at magnitudes similar to controls. These results—suggesting reduced phonological awareness in the context of intact phonological representations—are consistent with recent findings reported in the domain of phonemic processing. Implications for the phonological deficit theory of dyslexia are discussed.     

Voluntary language switching in English–Spanish bilingual children

Although bilingual children frequently switch between languages, the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the emerging ability to control language choice are unknown. We examined the mechanisms of voluntary language switching in English–Spanish bilingual children during a picture-naming task under two conditions: (1) single-language naming in English and in Spanish; (2) either-language naming, when the children could use whichever language they wanted. The mechanism of inhibitory control was examined by analysing local switching costs and global mixing costs. The mechanism of lexical accessibility was examined by analysing the properties of the items children chose to name in their non-dominant language. The children exhibited significant switching costs across both languages and asymmetrical mixing costs; they also switched into their non-dominant language most frequently on highly accessible items. These findings suggest that both lexical accessibility and inhibition contribute to language choice during voluntary language switching in children.     

Predicting stress patterns in an unpredictable stress language: The use of non-lexical sources of evidence for stress assignment in Russian

The main goal of this research was to examine how readers of Russian assign stress to disyllabic words. In particular, we tested the claim that the process of stress assignment in Russian can only be accomplished lexically. Eleven potential non-lexical sources of evidence for stress in Russian were examined in regression and factorial studies. In Study 1, onset complexity, coda complexity, the orthography of the first syllable (CVC1), of the second syllable (CVC2), and of the ending of the second syllable (VC2) were found to be probabilistically associated with stress in Russian disyllables. In Studies 2 and 3, it was shown that Russian speakers do use 3 of these cues (CVC1, CVC2, and VC2) when making stress-assignment decisions. These results provide evidence against the idea that the nature of stress in the Russian language is so unpredictable that stress assignment can only be accomplished lexically. These results also suggest that any successful model of stress assignment in Russian needs to contain mechanisms allowing these 3 orthographic cues to play a role in the stress-assignment process.     

Music-to-language transfer effect: may melodic ability improve learning of tonal languages by native nontonal speakers?

In tonal languages, as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tones. Previous studies suggest that lexical tones are processed by native listeners as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information. This study aims at verifying if, in nontonal languages speakers, the discrimination of lexical Mandarin tones varies in function of the melodic ability. Forty-six students with no previous experience of Mandarin or any other tonal language were presented with two short lists of spoken monosyllabic Mandarin words and invited to perform a same–different task trying to identify whether the variation were phonological or tonal. Main results show that subjects perform significantly better in identifying phonological variations rather than tonal ones and interestingly, the group with a high melodic ability (assessed by Wing subtest 3) shows a better performance exclusively in detecting tonal variations.     

Repetition priming within and between the two cerebral hemispheres

Two experiments explored repetition priming benefits in the left and right cerebral hemispheres. In both experiments, a lateralized lexical decision task was employed using repeated target stimuli. In the first experiment, all targets were repeated in the same visual field, and in the second experiment the visual field of presentation was switched following repetition. Both experiments demonstrated hemispheric specialization for the task (a RVF advantage for word identification) and hemispheric interaction for word processing (lexicality priming from contralateral distracters). In the first experiment, words were identified more quickly and accurately following repetition, with repetition facilitating faster but fewer correct responses for non-words. Complex interactions between visual field of first and second presentation in the second experiment indicate asymmetric interhemispheric repetition priming effects. These results provide a broad picture of hemispheric asymmetries in word processing and of complex interaction between the hemispheres during word recognition.