Stimulus affectivity of the Danish Word Association Test as measured by response heterogeneity and Rasch scaled number of prolonged reaction times

With the purpose of increasing the knowledge of the psychometric properties of the 70-item Danish Word Association Test, data from three samples of non-patients and psychiatric patients (N = 326) were used to provide two measures of affectivity of the stimulus words, response heterogeneity and reaction time prolongation. It was possible to fit an item response theory one-parameter measurement (Rasch) model to the number of reaction time prolongations (> or =3 seconds) for 54 of the stimulus words. Correlation between Rasch-model item parameters and response heterogeneity was high (r = 0.86), while no correlation was found between either of these measures and frequency of the stimulus words in the Danish language. Both measures of stimulus affectivity supported a theoretically based classification of stimulus words as emotional or neutral. Response heterogeneity measures and Rasch measurement item and person parameters for reaction time prolongations are provided.     

汉语儿童英汉语语音意识和英语单词认读能力的关系

本研究考察了小学儿童语音意识和英语单词认读的关系。一系列相关和回归分析发现,英、汉语语音意识与英语单词认读有密切关系,但这种关系随年级变化而变化,英语语音意识对汉语儿童英语单词认读并不具有稳定的预测力;而且并不总是最有预测力的因素。结果说明,与英语本族语儿童相比,语音意识在汉语儿童的英语单词认读学习中起了不同的作用。     

Physical and conceptual priming effects on picture and word identification

In the study phase of these experiments, subjects were asked to think of an item suggested by the omission in an incomplete sentence, and then look at a picture or word describing an item and say whether it was the same as theirs. In the test phase, they were asked to identify studied and nonstudied items presented briefly in either picture or word form. Subjects were then required to recall the words or pictures shown in the study phase. Experiment 1, with a within-subjects design, revealed that the studied pictures were identified more readily than studied words and nonstudied pictures. This indicates a physical priming effect. In word identification, studied words were identified more readily than nonstudied words; however, there was no difference between studied words and studied pictures, and the performance for studied pictures and nonstudied items were largely the same. The physical priming effect on picture identification was also shown in Experiment 2, with a between-subjects design. Different processing mechanisms in picture and word identification are discussed.     

“Passion” versus “patience”: the effects of valence and arousal on constructive word recognition

Accumulating evidence suggests that emotional information is often recognised faster than neutral information. Several studies examined the effects of valence and arousal on word recognition, but yielded partially diverging results. Here, we used two alternative versions of a constructive recognition paradigm in which a target word is hidden by a visual mask that gradually disappears, to investigate whether the emotional properties of words influence their speed of recognition. Participants were instructed either to classify the incrementally appearing word as emotional or non-emotional (semantic categorisation task) or to decide whether the appearing letter string is an existing word or not (lexical decision task). Results from both tasks revealed faster recognition times for high- compared to low-arousing words, and for positive compared to negative or neutral words. These findings indicate a recognition advantage for emotionally positive and highly arousing stimuli that persists even when visual word recognition is hampered and participants are encouraged to make more active, semantic inferences to generate the meaning of the emerging word.     

Auditory word identification in dyslexic and normally achieving readers

The integrity of phonological representation/processing in dyslexic children was explored with a gating task in which children listened to successively longer segments (gates) of a word. At each gate, the task was to decide what the entire word was. Responses were scored for overall accuracy as well as the children's sensitivity to coarticulation from the final consonant. As a group, dyslexic children were less able than normally achieving readers to detect coarticulation present in the vowel portion of the word, particularly on the most difficult items, namely those ending in a nasal sound. Hierarchical regression and path analyses indicated that phonological awareness mediated the relation of gating and general language ability to word and pseudoword reading ability.     

The Level of Detail in Infants' Word Learning

ABSTRACT— This article summarizes recent findings on infant word learning and recognition. Infants initially store very detailed representations of words, including details that are not truly necessary for word recognition. As they are exposed to more varied productions of words, they develop more sophisticated knowledge about which details are important, and streamline their representations, allowing them to better recognize words across different contexts, speakers, and environments.     

字体大小和呈现位置对多媒体课件文字理解的影响

本研究通过多媒体教室现场实验和实验室实验,以判断成语的感情色彩为测试任务,探讨字体大小和位置对多媒体课件文字理解的影响。结果表明,字体尺寸大于0．26°视角时,位于多媒体教室不同座位区域的被试都能较好地理解多媒体课件呈现的文字内容,而文字呈现位置对多媒体课件文字理解的影响较小。     

中文词汇切分对眼动数据的影响

该研究使用眼动研究中的“边界”技术范式,材料中的关键词为前两个字为双字词的三字词,如“服务员”,和非三字词,如“服务体”,考察可能存在的中文词汇切分策略对眼动时间指标的影响。实验使用2×2被试内设计,第一个因素是三字词的词频：高频和低频,第二个因素为不同词频条件下的非三字词基线。实验结果是三字词预视条件下的注视时间短于非三字词预视条件下的注视时间。结果表明自然阅读中的词汇切分策略确实存在,并且可以在眼动的时间指标上表现出来,结果还暗示在词汇切分过程中,读者在心理词典中对三字词的搜索是必需的过程。     

Lexical and sublexical processes in the perception of transposed-letter anagrams

Evidence from priming and lexical decision tasks suggests that nonwords created by transposing adjacent letter pairs (TL nonwords) are very effective in activating lexical representations of their base words, because the process of orthographic matching tolerates minor changes in letter position. However, this account disregards the possible role of sublexical processing in reading. TL nonwords are perceptually ambiguous, with lexical and sublexical processing giving rise to conflicting interpretations. The consequences of this ambiguity were investigated in a lexical decision experiment with primes that were either high or low bigram frequency TL versions of target words. Priming effects were much larger for low BF primes (e.g., pucnh-PUNCH) than for high BF primes (e.g., panit-PAINT). This finding is interpreted as evidence that lexical activation can be inhibited by competing output resulting from sublexical processing of TL letter string. We conclude that phonological processing is an important determinant of responses to TL stimuli, and we consider how this interpretation might be accommodated within the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model of word recognition.