Lexical and sentence context effects in word recognition.

Three experiments examined lexical and sentence-level contributions to contextual facilitation effects in word recognition. Subjects named target words preceded by normal or scrambled sentence contexts that contained lexical associates of the target. In Experiment 1, normal sentences showed facilitation for related targets and inhibition for unrelated targets. Experiment 2 eliminated syntactically anomalous targets among unrelated items and showed only facilitation for related targets. In neither experiment was there any effect of relatedness for scrambled stimuli. Experiment 3 included syntactically normal but semantically anomalous sentences to test whether the failure of scrambled sentences to show priming was due to their syntactic incoherence. Normal sentences again showed contextual facilitation, but neither scrambled nor anomalous sentences showed such effects. The results indicate that there are sentence-context effects that do not arise solely from intralexical spreading activation and suggest that context facilitates the identification of a lexical candidate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical selection is not by competition: A reinterpretation of semantic interference and facilitation effects in the picture-word interference paradigm.

The dominant view in the field of lexical access in speech production maintains that selection of a word becomes more difficult as the levels of activation of nontarget words increase-selection by competition. The authors tested this prediction in two sets of experiments. First, the authors show that participants are faster to name pictures of objects (e.g., "bed") in the context of semantically related verb distractors (e.g., sleep) compared with unrelated verb distractors (e.g., shoot). In the second set of experiments, the authors show that target naming latencies (e.g., "horse") are, if anything, faster for within-category semantically close distractor words (e.g., zebra) than for within-category semantically far distractor words (e.g., whale). In the context of previous research, these data ground a new empirical generalization: As distractor words become semantically closer to the target concepts-all else being equal-target naming is facilitated. This fact means that lexical selection does not involve competition, and consequently, that the semantic interference effect does not reflect a lexical level process. This conclusion has important implications for models of lexical access and interpretations of Stroop-like interference effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of syntactic expectations on speech segmentation.

Although the effect of acoustic cues on speech segmentation has been extensively investigated, the role of higher order information (e.g., syntax) has received less attention. Here, the authors examined whether syntactic expectations based on subject-verb agreement have an effect on segmentation and whether they do so despite conflicting acoustic cues. Although participants detected target words faster in phrases containing adequate acoustic cues ("spins" in take spins and "pins" in takes pins), this acoustic effect was suppressed when the phrases were appended to a plural context (those women take spins/*takes pins [with the asterisk indicating a syntactically unacceptable parse]). The syntactically congruent target ("spins") was detected faster regardless of the acoustics. However, a singular context (that woman *take spins/takes pins) had no effect on segmentation, and the results resembled those of the neutral phrases. Subsequent experiments showed that the discrepancy was due to the relative time course of syntactic expectations and acoustics cues. Taken together, the data suggest that syntactic knowledge can facilitate segmentation but that its effect is substantially attenuated if conflicting acoustic cues are encountered before full realization of the syntactic constraint. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic activation of phonological information in reading: evidence from the semantic relatedness decision task

A semantic relatedness decision task was used to investigate whether phonological recording occurs automatically and whether it mediates lexical access in visual word recognition and reading. In this task, subjects read a pair of words and decided whether they were related or unrelated in meaning. In Experiment 1, unrelated word-homophone pairs (e.g., LION-BARE) and their visual controls (e.g., LION-BEAN) as well as related word pairs (e.g., FISH-NET) were presented. Homophone pairs were more likely to be judged as related or more slowly rejected as unrelated than their control pairs, suggesting phonological access of word meanings. In Experiment 2, word-pseudohomophone pairs (e.g., TABLE-CHARE) and their visual controls (e.g., TABLE-CHARK) as well as related and unrelated word pairs were presented. Pseudohomophone pairs were more likely to be judged as related or more slowly rejected as unrelated than their control pairs, again suggesting automatic phonological recording in reading.     

Global context effect in normal and scrambled musical sequences.

The processing of chords is facilitated when they are harmonically related to the context in which they appear. The purpose of this study was to assess whether this harmonic priming effect depends on the version (normal vs. scrambled) of the context chord sequences. Normal sequences were scrambled by permuting chords two-by-two (Experiment 1) or four-by-four (Experiments 2 and 3). Normal chord sequences were judged less coherent than scrambled-sequences. However, normal chord sequences showed facilitation for harmonically related rather than for unrelated targets, and this effect of relatedness did not diminish for scrambled sequences (Experiments 1–3). The data of musicians and nonmusicians were interpreted with Bharucha's (1987) spreading activation framework. Simulations suggested that harmonic priming results from activation that spreads via schematic knowledge of Western harmony and accumulates in short-term memory over the course of the chord sequence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In search of perceptual influences of sentence context on word recognition.

A major issue in the study of word perception concerns the nature (perceptual or nonperceptual) of sentence context effects. The authors compared effects of legal, word replacement, nonword replacement, and transposed contexts on target word performance using the Reicher-Wheeler task to suppress nonperceptual influences of contextual and lexical constraint. Experiment 1 showed superior target word performance for legal (e.g., "it began to flap/flop") over all other contexts and for transposed over word replacement and nonword replacement contexts. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with higher constraint contexts (e.g., "the cellar is dark/dank") and Experiment 3 showed that strong constraint contexts improved performance for congruent (e.g., "born to be wild") but not incongruent (e.g., mild) target words. These findings support the view that the very perception of words can be enhanced when words are presented in legal sentence contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition: A dissociation of lexical and semantic processing.

These experiments illustrate 2 new dissociations in word-recognition tasks. In one, relatedness facilitated lexical decision but impaired searching for a common letter in the same pairs of words (a cross-over interaction between relatedness and task). In the other dissociation, lexicality facilitated performance (words processed faster than nonwords) while relatedness impaired performance (related words processed slower than unrelated words) in the letter search task. Two classes of explanation are discussed. In the first, the perception of relatedness serves to focus attention to the word level, thereby making explicit letter level processing more difficult and/or increasing the number of competing lexical entries via priming. In the second, spreading inhibition makes related words more difficult to process than unrelated words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths.

Immediate effects of verb-specific syntactic (subcategorization) information were found in a cross-modal naming experiment, a self-paced reading experiment, and an experiment in which eye movements were monitored. In the reading studies, syntactic misanalysis effects in sentence complements (e.g., "The student forgot the solution was…") occurred at the verb in the complement (e.g., was) for matrix verbs typically used with noun phrase complements but not for verbs typically used with sentence complements. In addition, a complementizer effect for sentence-complement-biased verbs was not due to syntactic misanalysis but was correlated with how strongly a particular verb prefers to be followed by the complementizer that. The results support models that make immediate use of lexically specific constraints, especially constraint-based models, but are problematic for lexical filtering models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A study of relative-position priming with superset primes.

Four lexical decision experiments are reported that use the masked priming paradigm to study the role of letter position information in orthographic processing. In Experiments 1 and 2, superset primes, formed by repetition of 1 or 2 letters of the target (e.g., jusstice-JUSTICE) or by insertion of 1 or 2 unrelated letters (e.g., juastice-JUSTICE), generated significant priming compared with unrelated primes and did not differ significantly from an identity priming condition. In Experiment 3, identity primes generated significantly faster responses than subset primes formed by removal of 2 letters from the target (e.g., jutie-JUSTICE), and subset primes generated faster responses than substitution primes formed by substitution of 2 letters of the target with unrelated letters (e.g., jumlice-JUSTICE). In Experiment 4, insertion of 3 unrelated letters continued to generate facilitation relative to unrelated primes but significantly less so than the identity prime condition. The authors discuss the implications of these results for letter-position coding schemes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preschoolers' default assumptions about word meaning: Proper names designate unique individuals.

Ninty 4-year olds took part in this experiment. Children heard a novel word (e.g., "X") uttered in an ambiguous sentence frame (e.g., "This Y is X", where "Y" was a basic-level count noun, such as "dog") and applied to either 1 or 2 drawings of familiar animals. This word could be construed either as a proper name (e.g., "This dog is Fred") or as an adjective (e.g., "This dog is red"). Children were more likely to interpret the words as a proper name (and less likely to interpret it as an adjective) if it was applied to 1 than if it was applied to 2 objects. Children thus made a default assumption that, in order to be a proper name, a word should be applied to only 1 individual. However, children overrode this default assumption if sufficient contextual information (from additional syntactic cues) indicated that they should do so. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

This cat has nine lives? Children's memory for genericity in language.

Generic noun phrases ("Birds lay eggs") are important for expressing knowledge about abstract kinds. The authors hypothesized that genericity would be part of gist memory, such that young children would appropriately recall whether sentences were presented as generic or specific. In 4 experiments, preschoolers and college students (N = 280) heard a series of sentences in either generic form (e.g., "Bears climb trees") or specific form (e.g., "This bear climbs trees") and were asked to recall the sentences following a 4-min distractor task. Participants in all age groups correctly distinguished between generic and specific noun phrases (NPs) in their recall, even when forgetting the details of the NP form. Memory for predicate content (e.g., "climb trees") was largely unaffected by genericity, although memory for category labels (e.g., "bear") was at times better for those who heard sentences with generic wording. Overall, these results suggest that generic form is maintained in long-term memory even for young children and thus may serve as the foundation for constructing knowledge about kinds. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of "neighborhood size" in reading and lexical decision.

Assessed the effects of neighborhood size ("N")—the number of words differing from a target word by exactly 1 letter (i.e., "neighbors")—on word identification. In Exps 1 and 2, the frequency of the highest frequency neighbor was equated, and N had opposite effects in lexical decision and reading. In Exp 1, a larger N facilitated lexical decision judgments, whereas in Experiment 2, a larger N had an inhibitory effect on reading sentences that contained the words of Exp 1. Moreover, a significant inhibitory effect in Exp 2 that was due to a larger N appeared on gaze duration on the target word, and there was no hint of facilitation on the measures of reading that tap the earliest processing of a word. In Exp 3, the number of higher frequency neighbors was equated for the high-N and low-N words, and a larger N caused target words to be skipped significantly more and produced inhibitory effects later in reading, some of which were plausibly due to misidentification of the target word when skipped. Regression analyses indicated that, in reading, increasing the number of higher frequency neighbors had a clear inhibitory effect on word identification and that increasing the number of lower frequency neighbors may have a weak facilitative effect on word identification. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic vigilance for negative words in lexical decision and naming: Comment on Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (2006).

An automatic vigilance hypothesis states that humans preferentially attend to negative stimuli, and this attention to negative valence disrupts the processing of other stimulus properties. Thus, negative words typically elicit slower color naming, word naming, and lexical decisions than neutral or positive words. Larsen, Mercer, and Balota (see record 2006-04603-006) analyzed the stimuli from 32 published studies, and they found that word valence was confounded with several lexical factors known to affect word recognition. Indeed, with these lexical factors covaried out, Larsen et al. found no evidence of automatic vigilance. The authors report a more sensitive analysis of 1011 words. Results revealed a small but reliable valence effect, such that negative words (e.g., "shark") elicit slower lexical decisions and naming than positive words (e.g., "beach"). Moreover, the relation between valence and recognition was categorical rather than linear; the extremity of a word's valence did not affect its recognition. This valence effect was not attributable to word length, frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, contextual diversity, first phoneme, or arousal. Thus, the present analysis provides the most powerful demonstration of automatic vigilance to date. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual lexical access in context: Evidence from eye movements during reading.

Current models of bilingualism (e.g., BIA+) posit that lexical access during reading is not language selective. However, much of this research is based on the comprehension of words in isolation. The authors investigated whether nonselective access occurs for words embedded in biased sentence contexts (e.g., A. I. Schwartz & J. F. Kroll, 2006). Eye movements were recorded as French–English bilinguals read English sentences containing cognates (e.g., piano), interlingual homographs (e.g., coin, meaning corner in French), or matched control words. Sentences provided a low or high semantic constraint for target-language meanings. Both early-stage comprehension measures (e.g., first fixation duration, gaze duration, and skipping) and late-stage comprehension measures (e.g., go-past time and total reading time) showed significant cognate facilitation and interlingual homograph interference for low-constraint sentences. For high-constraint sentences, however, only early-stage comprehension measures were consistent with nonselective access. There was no evidence of cognate facilitation or interlingual homograph interference for late-stage comprehension measures. Thus, nonselective bilingual lexical access at early stages of comprehension is rapidly resolved in semantically biased contexts at later stages of comprehension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word stem and word fragment completion following semantic activation and elaboration.

In 5 experiments, Ss made timed lexical decisions to target words (or nonwords) preceded by primes that were semantically related or unrelated to them. Subsequently, a stem or fragement completion task was administered as an implicit memory test (e.g., complete bu for butter), followed by an explicit recognition test of memory for the previously seen primes and targets. Conditions of presentation for the lexical decision task were varied across experiments. In Exp 1, both semantic relatedness and semantic elaboration (primes vs targets) influenced performance on both the implicit and explicit tests. In Exps 2–5, a dissociation was obtained between the tests, with reliable effects of relatedness and eleaboration obtained for recognition but not completion. The notion of presemantic representations (E. Tulving and D. L. Schacter [see PA, Vol 77:16343] and Schacter [see PA, Vol 80:368]) is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relatedness-of-meaning effect for ambiguous words in lexical-decision tasks: When does relatedness matter?

Effects of the number of meanings (NOM) and the relatedness of those meanings (ROM) were examined for Japanese Katakana words using a lexical-decision task. In Experiment 1, only a NOM advantage was observed. In Experiment 2, the same Katakana words produced a ROM advantage when Kanji words and nonwords were added. Because the Kanji nonwords consisted of unrelated characters whereas the Kanji words consisted of related characters, participants may have used the relatedness of activated meanings as a cue in making lexical decisions in this experiment, artificially creating a ROM advantage for Katakana words. Consistent with this explanation, no ROM effect for Katakana words was observed in Experiment 3 when the Kanji nonwords consisted of characters with similar (i.e., related) meanings. These results pose a further challenge to the position that the speed of semantic coding is modulated by ROM for ambiguous words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Morphological and orthographic similarity in visual word recognition.

The differential impact of orthographic and morphological relatedness on visual word recognition was investigated in a series of priming experiments in Dutch and German. With lexical decision and naming tasks, repetition priming and contiguous priming procedures, and masked and unmasked prime presentation, a pattern of results emerged with qualitative differences between the effects of morphological and form relatedness. With lexical decision, mere orthographic similarity between primes and targets (e.g., keller–KELLE, cellar–ladle) produced negative effects, whereas morphological relatedness (e.g., kellen–KELLE, ladles–ladle) consistently resulted in facilitation. With the naming task, positive priming effects were found for morphological as well as for mere form similarity. On the basis of these results, a model of the lexicon is proposed in which information about word form is represented separately from morphological structure and in which processing at the form level is characterized in terms of activation of, and competition between, form-related entries. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic priming in the lexical decision task: Roles of prospective prime-generated expectancies and retrospective semantic matching.

In semantic priming paradigms for lexical decisions, the probability that a word target is semantically related to its prime (the relatedness proportion) has been confounded with the probability that a target is a nonword, given that it is unrelated to its prime (the nonword ratio). This study unconfounded these two probabilities in a lexical decision task with category names as primes and with high- and low-dominance exemplars as targets. Semantic priming for high-dominance exemplars was modulated by the relatedness proportion and, to a lesser degree, by the nonword ratio. However, the nonword ratio exerted a stronger influence than did the relatedness proportion on semantic priming for low-dominance exemplars and on the nonword facilitation effect (i.e., the superiority in performance for nonword targets that follow a category name rather than a neutral XXX prime). These results suggest that semantic priming for lexical decisions is affected by both a prospective prime-generated expectancy, modulated by the relatedness proportion, and a retrospective target/prime semantic matching process, modulated by the nonword ratio. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociated identity and semantic priming in Broca's aphasia: how controlled processing produces inhibitory semantic priming

Broca's aphasics performed a lexical decision task in a semantic priming experiment in which the proportion of related words was manipulated with a sufficiently long stimulus onset asynchrony for expectancy-based, strategic processing to operate. The control subjects showed the typical increase in semantic facilitation as relatedness proportion increased. However, the aphasic subjects demonstrated the opposite effect such that inhibitory semantic priming occurred as relatedness proportion increased even though, in a second experiment, these same aphasics showed an increase in facilitatory identity priming as relatedness proportion increased. This striking dissociation of identity and semantic priming for the aphasics was interpreted as supporting the "center-surround" theory (Carr & Dagenbach, 1990), which accounts for the same dissociation found in the normal population under challenging word-recognition conditions.     

Semantic and phonological codes interact in single word production.

The relationship between semantic–syntactic and phonological levels in speaking was investigated using a picture naming procedure with simultaneously presented visual or auditory distractor words. Previous results with auditory distractors have been used to support the independent stage model (e.g., H. Schriefers, A. S. Meyer, & W. J. M. Levelt, 1990), whereas results with visual distractors have been used to support an interactive view (e.g., P. A. Starreveld & W. La Heij, 1996). Experiment 1 demonstrated that with auditory distractors, semantic effects preceded phonological effects, whereas the reverse pattern held for visual distractors. Experiment 2 indicated that the results for visual distractors followed the auditory pattern when distractor presentation time was limited. Experiment 3 demonstrated an interaction between phonological and semantic relatedness of distractors for auditory presentation, supporting an interactive account of lexical access in speaking. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)