Becoming a written word: Eye movements reveal order of acquisition effects following incidental exposure to new words during silent reading

We know that from mid-childhood onwards most new words are learned implicitly via reading; however, most word learning studies have taught novel items explicitly. We examined incidental word learning during reading by focusing on the well-documented finding that words which are acquired early in life are processed more quickly than those acquired later. Novel words were embedded in meaningful sentences and were presented to adult readers early (day 1) or later (day 2) during a five-day exposure phase. At test adults read the novel words in semantically neutral sentences. Participants’ eye movements were monitored throughout exposure and test. Adults also completed a surprise memory test in which they had to match each novel word with its definition. Results showed a decrease in reading times for all novel words over exposure, and significantly longer total reading times at test for early than late novel words. Early-presented novel words were also remembered better in the offline test. Our results show that order of presentation influences processing time early in the course of acquiring a new word, consistent with partial and incremental growth in knowledge occurring as a function of an individual’s experience with each word.     

Brain reflections of words and their meaning

The neurobiological organization of meaningful language units, morphemes and words, has been illuminated by recent metabolic and neurophysiological imaging studies. When humans process words from different categories, sets of cortical areas become active differentially. The meaning of a word, more precisely aspects of its reference, may be crucial for determining which set of cortical areas is involved in its processing. Word-related neuron webs with specific cortical distributions might underlie the observed category-specific differences in brain activity. Neuroscientific principles can explain these differential topographies.     

Word frequency and root-morpheme frequency effects on processing of Korean particle-suffixed words

Two experiments investigated the roles of the frequency of the root morpheme and the frequency of the whole word for a particular type of suffixed word in Korean in which the suffixed word can be thought of as a phrase (e.g., grandson-with). In both experiments, sentence frames were constructed so that they could have one of two target words that varied on frequency characteristics in the same location in the sentence. In Experiment 1, the frequency of the root morpheme was varied with the frequency of the word controlled, and in Experiment 2, the frequency of the word was varied with the frequency of the root morpheme controlled. Word frequency had a significant effect on fixation times, whereas root morpheme frequency did not. The results were surprising as native Korean speakers view the root morpheme as the “word” (analogous to how English readers would view a noun followed by a prepositional phrase).     

Corpus-based estimates of word association predict biases in judgment of word co-occurrence likelihood

This paper draws a connection between statistical word association measures used in linguistics and confirmation measures from epistemology. Having theoretically established the connection, we replicate, in the new context of the judgments of word co-occurrence, an intriguing finding from the psychology of reasoning, namely that confirmation values affect intuitions about likelihood. We show that the effect, despite being based in this case on very subtle statistical insights about thousands of words, is stable across three different experimental settings. Our theoretical and empirical results suggest that factors affecting traditional reasoning tasks are also at play when linguistic knowledge is probed, and they provide further evidence for the importance of confirmation in a new domain.     

Word order and information status in child language

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously mentioned referents ("old" or accessible information) first, before they introduce referents that have not yet been mentioned in the discourse ("new" or inaccessible information) at both sentential and phrasal levels. Here we ask whether a similar principle influences ordering patterns at the phrasal level in children who are in the early stages of combining words productively. Prior research shows that when conveying semantic relations, children reproduce language-specific ordering patterns in the input, suggesting that they do not have a bias for any particular order to describe "who did what to whom". But our findings show that when they label "old" versus "new" referents, 3- to 5-year-old children prefer an ordering pattern opposite to that of adults (Study 1). Children's ordering preference is not derived from input patterns, as "old-before-new" is also the preferred order in caregivers' speech directed to young children (Study 2). Our findings demonstrate that a key principle governing ordering preferences in adults does not originate in early childhood, but develops: from new-to-old to old-to-new.     

Being forward not backward: lexical limits to masked priming

This study investigated whether masked priming is mediated by existing memory representations by determining whether nonwords targets would show repetition priming. To avoid the potential confound that nonword repetition priming would be obscured by a familiarity response bias, the standard lexical decision and naming tasks were modified to make targets unfamiliar. Participants were required to read a target string from right to left (i.e., "ECAF" should be read as "FACE") and then make a response. To examine if priming was based on lexical representations, repetition primes consisted of words when read forwards or backwards (e.g., "face", "ecaf") and nonwords (e.g., "pame", "emap"). Forward and backward primes were used to test if task instruction affected prime encoding. The lexical decision and naming tasks showed the same pattern of results: priming only occurred for forward primes with word targets (e.g., "face-ECAF"). Additional experiments to test if response priming affected the LDT indicated that the lexical status of the prime per se did not affect target responses. These results showed that the encoding of masked primes was unaffected by the novel task instruction and support the view that masked priming is due to the automatic triggering of pre-established computational processes based on stored information.     

Bootstrapping word order in prelexical infants: a Japanese-Italian cross-linguistic study

Learning word order is one of the earliest feats infants accomplish during language acquisition [Brown, R. (1973). A first language: The early stages, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.]. Two theories have been proposed to account for this fact. Constructivist/lexicalist theories [Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children have adult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74(3), 209-253.] argue that word order is learned separately for each lexical item or construction. Generativist theories [Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.], on the other hand, claim that word order is an abstract and general property, determined from the input independently of individual words. Here, we show that eight-month-old Japanese and Italian infants have opposite order preferences in an artificial grammar experiment, mirroring the opposite word orders of their respective native languages. This suggests that infants possess some representation of word order prelexically, arguing for the generativist view. We propose a frequency-based bootstrapping mechanism to account for our results, arguing that infants might build this representation by tracking the order of functors and content words, identified through their different frequency distributions. We investigate frequency and word order patterns in infant-directed Japanese and Italian corpora to support this claim.     

Prototypicality in sentence production

Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase—a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable. Experiment 1 revealed that an appropriate conceptual framework was necessary to yield the typicality effect. Experiment 2 tested ad hoc categories that do not have prior representations in long-term memory and yielded no typicality effect. Experiment 3 used carefully matched sentences in which two category members appeared in the same or in different phrases. Typicality affected word order only when the two words appeared in the same phrase. These results are consistent with an account in which typicality has its origin in conceptual structure, which leads to differences in lexical accessibility in appropriate contexts.     

Is there an Effect of Print Exposure on the Word Frequency Effect and the Neighborhood Size Effect?

Orthographic and phonological processing skills have been shown to vary as a function of reader skill (Stanovich & West, Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 402-433, 1989; Unsworth & Pexman, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56A, 63-81, 2003). One variable known to contribute to differences between readers of higher and lower skill is amount of print exposure: higher skilled readers read more often than lower skilled readers, and their increased print exposure is associated with faster responding to words and nonwords in lexical decision tasks. The present experiments examined the effect of print exposure on the word frequency effect and neighborhood size effect. We conclude that the different outcomes reported in previous studies (Chateau & Jared, Memory and Cognition, 28, 143-153, 2000; Lewellen, Goldinger, Pisoni, & Greene, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 316-330, 1993) were due to the type of nonwords used in the lexical decision task (regular nonwords versus pseudohomophones). Our results are explained in terms of differences in the reliance on orthographic and phonological information between readers of higher and lower print exposure.     

Code-switching effects in bilingual word recognition: a masked priming study with event-related potentials

Two experiments tested language switching effects with bilingual participants in a priming paradigm with masked primes (duration of 50 ms in Experiment 1 and 100 ms in Experiment 2). Participants had to monitor target words for animal names, and ERPs were recorded to critical (non-animal) words in L1 and L2 primed by unrelated words from the same or the other language. Both experiments revealed language priming (switching) effects that depended on target language. For target words in L1, most of the language switch effect appeared in the N400 ERP component, with L2 primes generating a more negative going wave than L1 primes. For L2 target words, on the other hand, the effects of a language switch appeared mainly in an earlier ERP component (N250) peaking at approximately 250 ms post-target onset, and showing greater negativity following an L1 prime than an L2 prime. This is the first evidence for fast-acting language-switching effects occurring in the absence of overt task switching.