Representational aspects of word imageability and word frequency as assessed through word association.

Assessed the effects of word imageability and word frequency (WF) in word association (WA). Exps 1 and 2 employed the discrete WA task, whereas Exp 3 used the continued WA task. Data from Exps 1–3 showed that word imageability strongly determines responding in WA, whereas WF hardly affects it. Exp 4 (lexical decision) and 5 (word naming) explored the possibility that WF effects on the word-recognition stage in WA might have interfered with any effect of WF on the association-retrieval stage, a possibility that was not borne out by data. Exps 6–8 examined whether the absence of frequency effects on WA in Exps 1–3 might have been due to the fact that the WF classes had a restricted range. A new set of stimulus materials was constructed, with frequency classes further apart. Some small effects of this variable on WA were found. Results point out that the concept nodes for high-imageability words contain more information than those of low-imageability words and that relatively strong links depart fron the former type of nodes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Influence of age and processing stage on visual word recognition.

Used a lexical-decision task in 3 different experiments to examine whether age differences in word recognition were consistent across processing stage. In all experiments, word frequency and length were manipulated. In Exps 1 and 2, encoding difficulty was varied, and in Exp 3, response selection difficulty was varied. In all 3 experiments, there were no age differences for word frequency. However, in Exps 1 and 2, older adults showed a larger decrement for encoding. In Exp 3, age differences were larger when response selection load increased. These results suggest that age differences in word recognition occur because older adults exhibit primarily peripheral- rather than central-processing decrements. The implications of these data for generalized and localized slowing models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Specific-word frequency is not all that counts in speech production: Comments on Caramazza, Costa, et al. (2001) and new experimental data.

A. Caramazza, A. Costa, M. Miozzo, and Y. Bi (2001) reported a series of experiments demonstrating that the ease of producing a word depends only on the frequency of that specific word but not on the frequency of a homophone twin. A. Caramazza, A. Costa, et al. concluded that homophones have separate word form representations and that the absence of frequency-inheritance effects for homophones undermines an important argument in support of 2-stage models of lexical access, which assume that syntactic (lemma) representations mediate between conceptual and phonological representations. The authors of this article evaluate the empirical basis of this conclusion, report 2 experiments demonstrating a frequency-inheritance effect, and discuss other recent evidence. It is concluded that homophones share a common word form and that the distinction between lemmas and word forms should be upheld. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word familiarity and frequency in visual and auditory word recognition.

Four experiments investigated printed word frequency and subjective rated familiarity. Words of varied printed frequency and subjective familiarity were presented. A reaction time (RT) advantage for high-familiarity and high-frequency words was found in visual (Exp 1) and auditory (Exp 2) lexical decision. In Exps 3 and 4, a cued naming task elicited a naming response after a specified delay after presentation. In Exp 3, naming of visual words showed a frequency effect with no naming delay. The frequency effect diminished at longer delay intervals. Naming times for auditorily presented words (Exp 4) showed no frequency effect at any delay. Both naming experiments showed familiarity effects. The relevance of these results are discussed in terms of the role of printed frequency for theories of lexical access, task- and modality-specific effects, and the nature of subjective familiarity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 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)     

Repetition blindness between words: Nature of the orthographic and phonological representations involved.

Repetition Blindness (RB) is the failure to recall the 2nd instance of a rapidly presented word. Five experiments investigated the orthographic and phonological representations involved in RB. Exps 1 and 2 found that the RB effect between orthographic neighbors is modulated by the relative frequency of the words, but not their absolute frequency. Exp 3 showed that the reduced RB effect between neighbors as compared with identical words is due to the reduced orthographic overlap, not to a lack of morphological or semantic overlap. Exps 4 and 5 showed that the RB effect occurs between phonologically related items, and that phonological and frequency properties of the target's orthographic neighbors affect the size of the effect. It is concluded that orthographic RB and phonological RB are sensitive to the target's neighborhood organization and arise from similar mechanisms, but at different stages of processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Typography manipulations can affect priming of word stem completion in older and younger adults.

The experiments reported here investigated whether changes of typography affected priming of word stem completion performance in older and younger adults. Across all experiments, the typeface in which a word appeared at presentation either did or did not match that of its 3-letter stem at test. In Exp 1, no significant evidence of a typography effect was found when words were presented with a sentence judgment or letter judgment task. However, subsequent experiments revealed that, in both older and younger adults, only words presented with a syllable judgment task gave rise to the typography effect (Exps 2–4). Specifically, perforance was greater when the presentation and test typeface matched than when they did not. Exp 5, which used stem-cued recall, did not reveal a difference between syllable and letter judgment tasks. These findings highlight the complex nature of word stem completion performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cue depreciation: When word fragment completion is undermined by prior exposure to lesser fragments.

Studied impairment in ability to think of a previously studied item resulting from a change in extra-item context from study to test in 5 experiments, using a total of 156 Ss (primarily university students). The following results were obtained: a fragment (e.g, r-i--rop) of a just-studied word (raindrop) was shown to be less readily completed if it was presented bit by bit (r------p, r----r-p, r-i--r-p, r-i--rop) rather than all at once (Exps I, III, IV, and V). No such effect was found if the word had not been studied beforehand (Exps II–V). This pattern of results occurred even when fragments of studied and nonstudied words occurred in the same test and under conditions in which Ss could not tell whether a given fragment was of a studied or nonstudied word (Exps IV and V). In addition, for words that had been studied beforehand, the impairment was shown to increase systematically with the number of steps involved in the presentation of the word fragment (Exp III) and also to persist when the time allowed for completion of the final version of the fragment was increased from 4 sec to a full minute (Exp V). The target words are appended. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enhanced feeling of recognition: Effects of identifying and manipulating test items on recognition memory.

This study showed that, regardless of its actual status, a test item was more likely to be judged as old if, before making an old–new judgment, Ss attempted to (1) identify a test word or a test picture's name (Exps 1 and 2) or (2) to work on a normally presented test word, such as reversing the letter order of the word or constructing a word that rhymed with the test word (Exp 3). Exp 1 replicated the enhanced feeling of recognition effect reported by M. Watkins and Z. F. Peynircio?lu (1990). Exp 2 extended the effect to a cross-modality priming situation. Exp 3 further extended the finding by showing that the effect could occur for reasons having nothing to do with the perception of test items. Finally, Exp 4 showed that increased exposure to test items alone cannot produce the enhanced feeling of recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic interference and orthographic facilitation in definition naming.

Semantic interference and orthographic facilitation are common findings in Stroop-like color and picture-naming tasks. The authors investigated whether these context effects are also obtained when, instead of colors or pictures, definitions are used as target stimuli. In Exp 1, both effects were obtained when definitions of colors such as "the color of tomatoes?" had to be named. This finding was replicated in Exp 2, in which the definitions were taken from a larger set of semantic categories. The remaining 4 experiments showed that the semantic interference effect cannot be attributed to a strategic match or nonmatch decision (Exp 3) and does not show up when the distractor word precedes the definition (Exps 4, 5, and 6). The findings are discussed in relation to accounts of context effects in naming tasks and in relation to word-retrieval problems in the tip-of-the-tongue state. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval of lexical–syntactic features in tip-of-the tongue states.

Italian speakers who signaled that they were in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state were asked to recognize the grammatical gender and the initial and the final phonemes of the unavailable word. The proportions of gender and phoneme hits that occurred with "don't know" (DK) responses were adopted as baselines for chance-level performance. Participants were more accurate in recognizing the grammatical gender and the initial but not the final phoneme of target words when they were in TOT than in DK states. The availability of gender in TOT states suggests the independence of syntactic from phonological information in lexical access. However, the retrieval of gender was far from perfect for TOT words, and it was no better than recognition of the initial phoneme. These results are problematic for the notion that the selection of a lemma is synonymous with the retrieval of the word's syntactic features. The implications of these results for the distinction between lemma and lexeme levels of representation in lexical access are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The revelation effect: When disguising test items induces recognition.

Documented here is a bias whereby items are more likely to be judged as having been presented beforehand if they are disguised in some way and so have to be discovered or "revealed." The bias was found for test words that were unfolded letter by letter (Exps 1 and 3), presented with their letters either transposed (Exps 2 and 3) or individually rotated (Exps 4 and 5) or rotated as a whole (Exp 5), and for test numbers that were presented in the form of Roman numerals (Exp 6) or equations (Exp 7). The bias occurred both for items that were presented beforehand and for those that were not. No bias was found when words were judged, not for prior occurrence, but for typicality as category instances (Exp 8), lexicality (Exp 9), frequency of general usage (Exp 10), or number of times encountered during the preceding week (Exp 11). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The locus of the lexical shift in phoneme identification.

The lexical identification shift is used as a measure of speech processing in the phoneme identification task (W. F. Ganong, 1980). Interactive (bottom-up and top-down) models of word recognition account for the shift by claiming that lexical knowledge feeds back to a prelexical level and aids speech processing. Autonomous models (bottom-up only) maintain that the shift arises by other means and at later stages of processing. The locus of the lexical shift was investigated by using detection theory analysis procedures to measure perceptual changes in phoneme processing. Lexical status (word–nonword) of the utterance was varied in Exps 1 and 3 and was found to influence phoneme processing. In Exp 2 the effects of a postperceptual manipulation, monetary payoff, did not show up in the detection theory analysis. Implications of the results for both classes of models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Orientation-dependent priming effects in the perception of biological motion.

In a serial 2-choice reaction time (RT) task, Ss discriminated between a biological motion walker and a similar distractor. The point-light walker appeared in 1 of 2 possible in-depth orientations: The figure was walking either to the right or to the left in the sagittal plane. Reliable priming effects were established in consecutive trials but only when priming and primed walkers had the same in-depth orientation. This orientation-dependent priming effect was not tempered when priming and primed figures had different directions of articulatory motion (Exps 1–6), different starting positions in the step cycle (Exp 2), different point-light localizations (Exp 3), or when the figures were translating (Exps 4–6). The data converge with neurophysiological findings that suggest that object recognition is accomplished by accessing high-level, orientation-dependent representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of braille word recognition.

Skilled blind readers read French nouns with the uniqueness point in different locations, presented in unabbreviated braille, and either pronounced each item (Exp 1) or classified it as to gender (Exps 1–3). As in previous studies with spoken words, effects of uniqueness point location on recognition reaction time (RT) were taken as demonstrating on-line lexical access. For braille words, significant effects were obtained in Exp 1 in the 2 tasks. In Exp 2, blind Ss demonstrated comparable relative uniqueness point effects for gender classification of braille and of spoken words, showing that on-line lexical access is not specific to speech. Exp 3 showed that the effect of uniqueness point location is limited to the higher frequency words. Finally, mean finger scanning speed did not differ between the pre- and post-uniqueness point regions of the words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sagacious judgment via word association.

Based on K. E. Scheibe's (1979) concepts of the mask and the prediction mode of sagacity, 4 experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that awareness of subtle cues accounts for success on a judgment task that requires recognizing the implications of target persons' word associations. Preliminary studies with 7 undergraduates identified word associations but not facial expressions or reaction times as relevant to success on the task. Thus, it was hypothesized that successful judges would be more accurate than unsuccessful judges in assessing the diagnosticity of word association clues. 30 undergraduate social welfare majors participated in Exp I; Exp II was a replication of Exp I using 73 high school students. Both Exps I and II involved a video presentation. Exp III involved a pencil-and-paper version of the judgment task used in Exps I and II. Ss were 76 undergraduates. Exp IV tested the generalizability of the previous results across S groups. 12 American and 14 foreign-born undergraduates (e.g., Malaysian, Taiwanese, Colombian, and Nigerian) served as Ss. Overall findings show that the predicted relation emerged in all 4 studies, despite variations in the task and S groups (varying in age, nationality, and amount of psychology-related training). Results are generally consistent with expectations based on Scheibe's analysis of sagacity and provide a basis for research on the judgment task in terms of personality correlates of cue utilization, individual differences in depth of processing, and ability to draw pragmatic implications. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Short-term memory for the timing of auditory and visual signals.

Short-term memory for the timing of irregular sequences of signals has been said to be more accurate when the signals are auditory than when they are visual. No support for this contention was obtained when the signals were beeps vs flashes (Exps 1 and 3) nor when they were sets of spoken vs typewritten digits (Exps 4 and 5). On the other hand, support was obtained both for beeps vs flashes (Exps 2 and 5) and for repetitions of a single spoken digit vs repetitions of a single typewritten digit (Exp 6) when the Ss silently mouthed a nominally irrelevant item during sequence presentation. Also, the timing of sequences of auditory signals, whether verbal (Exp 7) or nonverbal (Exps 8 and 9), was more accurately remembered when the signals within each sequence were identical. The findings are considered from a functional perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Guilty by mere association: Evaluative conditioning and the spreading attitude effect.

Five experiments investigated the phenomenon that attitude formation is not confined to the co-occurrence of an attitudinal object with an evaluated experience. The pairing of a target with a (dis)liked person not only affects the evaluation of the previously neutral person but spreads to other individuals who are (pre)associated with the target (spreading attitude effect). Exps 1 and 2 provided evidence for the spreading attitude effect in appetitive as well as aversive evaluative conditioning. Exp 3 showed that the spreading attitude effect is a robust phenomenon resistant to extinction. Exp 4 demonstrated that attitude spread can be transferred to 2nd-order conditioning. Finally, Exp 5 supports the notion that the spreading attitude effect is not dependent on cognitive resources. Implications for social as well as applied psychology are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Representation of Homophones: Evidence From the Distractor-Frequency Effect.

Current models of word production offer different accounts of the representation of homophones in the lexicon. The investigation of how the homophone status of a word affects lexical access can be used to test theories of lexical processing. In this study, homophones appeared as word distractors superimposed on pictures that participants named orally. The authors varied distractor frequency, a variable that has been shown to modulate the interference that distractors produce on picture naming. The results of 3 experiments converged in showing that words interfered in proportion to their individual frequency in the language, even if they have high-frequency homophone mates. This effect of specific-word frequency is compatible with models that assume (a) distinct lexical representations for the individual homophones and (b) that access to such representations is modulated by frequency. The authors discuss the extent to which current models of word production satisfy these constraints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Auditory word recognition: Extrinsic and intrinsic effects of word frequency.

Two experiments investigated the influence of word frequency in a phoneme identification task. Speech voicing continua were constructed so that one endpoint was a high-frequency word and the other endpoint was a low-frequency word (e.g., best–pest). Exp 1 demonstrated that ambiguous tokens were labeled such that a high-frequency word was formed (intrinsic frequency effect). Exp 2 manipulated the frequency composition of the list (extrinsic frequency effect). A high-frequency list bias produced an exaggerated influence of frequency; a low-frequency list bias showed a reverse frequency effect. Reaction time (RT) effects were discussed in terms of activation and postaccess decision models of frequency coding. Results support a late use of frequency in auditory word recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)