Lexical inhibition and sublexical facilitation are surprisingly long lasting.

When a listener hears a word (beef), current theories of spoken word recognition posit the activation of both lexical (beef) and sublexical (/b/, /i/, /f/) representations. No lexical representation can be settled on for an unfamiliar utterance (peef). The authors examined the perception of nonwords (peef) as a function of words or nonwords heard 10-20 min earlier. In lexical decision, nonword recognition responses were delayed if a similar word had been heard earlier. In contrast, nonword processing was facilitated by the earlier presentation of a similar nonword (baff-paff). This pattern was observed for both word-initial (beef-peef), and word-final (job-jop) deviation. With the word-in-noise task, real word primes (beef) increased real word intrusions for the target nonword (peef), but only consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) intrusions were increased with similar pseudoword primes (baff-paff). The results across tasks and experiments support both a lexical neighborhood view of activation and sublexical representations based on chunks larger than individual phonemes (CV or VC sequences). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When does length cause the word length effect?

The word length effect, the finding that lists of short words are better recalled than lists of long words, has been termed one of the benchmark findings that any theory of immediate memory must account for. Indeed, the effect led directly to the development of working memory and the phonological loop, and it is viewed as the best remaining evidence for time-based decay. However, previous studies investigating this effect have confounded length with orthographic neighborhood size. In the present study, Experiments 1A and 1B revealed typical effects of length when short and long words were equated on all relevant dimensions previously identified in the literature except for neighborhood size. In Experiment 2, consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC) words with a large orthographic neighborhood were better recalled than were CVC words with a small orthographic neighborhood. In Experiments 3 and 4, using two different sets of stimuli, we showed that when short (1-syllable) and long (3-syllable) items were equated for neighborhood size, the word length effect disappeared. Experiment 5 replicated this with spoken recall. We suggest that the word length effect may be better explained by the differences in linguistic and lexical properties of short and long words rather than by length per se. These results add to the growing literature showing problems for theories of memory that include decay offset by rehearsal as a central feature. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of spoken word learning and recognition: Studies with artificial lexicons.

The time course of spoken word recognition depends largely on the frequencies of a word and its competitors, or neighbors (similar-sounding words). However, variability in natural lexicons makes systematic analysis of frequency and neighbor similarity difficult. Artificial lexicons were used to achieve precise control over word frequency and phonological similarity. Eye tracking provided time course measures of lexical activation and competition (during spoken instructions to perform visually guided tasks) both during and after word learning, as a function of word frequency, neighbor type, and neighbor frequency. Apparent shifts from holistic to incremental competitor effects were observed in adults and neural network simulations, suggesting such shifts reflect general properties of learning rather than changes in the nature of lexical representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Examining the Interactivity of Lexical Orthographic and Phonological Processing.

The number and type of connections involving different levels of orthographic and phonological representations differentiate between several models of spoken and visual word recognition. At the sublexical level of processing, Borowsky, Owen, and Fonos (1999) demonstrated evidence for direct processing connections from grapheme representations to phoneme representations (i.e., a sensitivity effect) over and above any bias effects, but not in the reverse direction. Neural network models of visual word recognition implement an orthography to phonology processing route that involves the same connections for processing sublexical and lexical information, and thus a similar pattern of cross-modal effects for lexical stimuli are expected by models that implement this single type of connection (i.e., orthographic lexical processing should directly affect phonological lexical processing, but not in the reverse direction). Furthermore, several models of spoken word perception predict that there should be no direct connections between orthographic representations and phonological representations, regardless of whether the connections are sublexical or lexical... (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Masked inhibitory priming in English: Evidence for lexical inhibition.

Predictions derived from the interactive activation (IA) model were tested in 3 experiments using the masked priming technique in the lexical decision task. Experiment 1 showed a strong effect of prime lexicality: Classifications of target words were facilitated by orthographically related nonword primes (relative to unrelated nonword primes) but were inhibited by orthographically related word primes (relative to unrelated word primes). Experiment 2 confirmed IA's prediction that inhibitory priming effects are greater when the prime and target share a neighbor. Experiment 3 showed a minimal effect of target word neighborhood size (N) on inhibitory priming but a trend toward greater inhibition when nonword foils were high-N than when they were low-N. Simulations of 3 different versions of the IA model showed that the best fit to the data is produced when lexical inhibition is selective and when masking leads to reset of letter activities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Equal homophonic priming with words and pseudohomophones.

The hypothesis that the earliest representations in visual processing of print are activated word-specific units leads to the expectation that homophonic priming (HP) should be greater for word pairs than pseudohomophone pairs. Ten experiments with naming disconfirmed this hypothesis. At interstimulus intervals of 0, 129, 516, and 930 ms, HP for pseudohomophones (e.g., HOEZ-hoze vs. HOGZ-hoze) equaled HP for words (e.g., KNOWS-nose vs. KNEES-nose). The complementary finding of negative HP with pseudohomophones relative to positive HP with words was found in an additional investigation of lexical decision. The results confirm a critical early stage in visual word recognition, in which words are represented in purely phonological form, and implicate equal speeds in dual-route models for nonlexical and lexical processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical priming from partial-word previews.

Two naming and 2 lexical decision experiments examined the use of partial-word previews in visual word recognition. Replicating results of an earlier reading study, the results of Exps 1 and 2 revealed significant benefits from position-specific beginning- and ending-letter previews. Furthermore, benefits from beginning letters were greater for words than for pseudowords. Ending-letter previews showed no corresponding lexical superiority. Exp 3 revealed that preview of position-specific letters from the beginning plus the ending part of target stimuli, which did not reveal a unique word-beginning letter sequence, facilitated the classification of words but not pseudowords. The results support a 2-route model of lexical access in which some partial-word previews afford activation of specific lexical representations, and some partial-word previews afford activation of subword representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Eye movement control during reading: Effects of word frequency and orthographic familiarity.

Word frequency and orthographic familiarity were independently manipulated as readers' eye movements were recorded. Word frequency influenced fixation durations and the probability of word skipping when orthographic familiarity was controlled. These results indicate that lexical processing of words can influence saccade programming (as shown by fixation durations and which words are fixated). Orthographic familiarity, but not word frequency, influenced the duration of prior fixations. These results provide evidence for orthographic, but not lexical, parafoveal-on-foveal effects. Overall, the findings have a crucial implication for models of eye movement control in reading: There must be sufficient time for lexical factors to influence saccade programming before saccade metrics and timing are finalized. The conclusions are critical for the fundamental architecture of models of eye movement control in reading- namely, how to reconcile long saccade programming times and complex linguistic influences on saccades during reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Prosodic phonological representations early in visual word recognition.

Two experiments examined the nature of the phonological representations used during visual word recognition. We tested whether a minimality constraint (R. Frost, 1998) limits the complexity of early representations to a simple string of phonemes. Alternatively, readers might activate elaborated representations that include prosodic syllable information before lexical access. In a modified lexical decision task (Experiment 1), words were preceded by parafoveal previews that were congruent with a target's initial syllable as well as previews that contained 1 letter more or less than the initial syllable. Lexical decision times were faster in the syllable congruent conditions than in the incongruent conditions. In Experiment 2, we recorded brain electrical potentials (electroencephalograms) during single word reading in a masked priming paradigm. The event-related potential waveform elicited in the syllable congruent condition was more positive 250-350 ms posttarget compared with the waveform elicited in the syllable incongruent condition. In combination, these experiments demonstrate that readers process prosodic syllable information early in visual word recognition in English. They offer further evidence that skilled readers routinely activate elaborated, speechlike phonological representations during silent reading. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Not all negative words slow down lexical decision and naming speed: Importance of word arousal.

Previously the authors (see record 2006-04603-006) analyzed sets of words used in emotion Stroop experiments and found little evidence of automatic vigilance, for example, slower lexical decision time (LDT) or naming speed for negative words after controlling for lexical features. If there is a slowdown evoked by word negativity, most studies to date overestimate the effect because word negativity is often confounded with lexical features that promote slower word recognition. Estes and Adelman (this issue; see record 2008-09984-001) analyze a new set of words, controlling for important lexical features, and find a small but significant effect for word negativity. Moreover, they conclude the effect is categorical. The authors analyze the same data set but include the arousal value of each word. The authors find nonlinear and interaction effects in predicting LDT and naming speed. Not all negative words produce the generic slowdown. Paradoxically, negative words that are moderate to low on arousal produce more LDT slowing than negative words higher on arousal. This finding presents a theoretical and empirical challenge to researchers wishing to understand the boundaries of the automatic vigilance effect. (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)     

Vowel Duration Affects Visual Word Identification: Evidence That the Mediating Phonology Is Phonetically Informed.

What form is the lexical phonology that gives rise to phonological effects in visual lexical decision? The authors explored the hypothesis that beyond phonological contrasts the physical phonetic details of words are included. Three experiments using lexical decision and 1 using naming compared processing times for printed words (e.g., plead and pleat) that differ, when spoken, in vowel length and overall duration. Latencies were longer for long-vowel words than for short-vowel words in lexical decision but not in naming. Further, lexical decision on long-vowel words benefited more from identity priming than lexical decision on short-vowel words, suggesting that representations of long-vowel words achieve activation thresholds more slowly. The discussion focused on phonetically informed phonologies, particularly gestural phonology and its potential for understanding reading acquisition and performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of word frequency and case alternation effects on fixation times in reading: Evidence for lexical control of eye movements.

Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences in which high-frequency and low-frequency target words were presented either in normal font (e.g., account) or case alternated (e.g., aCcOuNt). The influence of the word frequency and case alternation manipulations on fixation times was examined. Although both manipulations had comparable effects on standard first-pass fixation measures, word frequency, but not case alternation was found to influence the duration of the first fixation in trials with multiple first-pass fixations. Assuming that lexical processing is more often incomplete at the termination of the first in multiple first-pass fixations than at the end of single first-pass fixations, the present findings provide strong evidence for an influence of word frequency on early lexical processing. Importantly, such a demonstration of a fast acting influence of a lexical variable on fixation times satisfies a critical prerequisite for establishing lexical control of eye movements in reading. (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)     

Lexical characteristics of words used in emotional Stroop experiments.

Validity of the emotional Stroop task hinges on equivalence between the emotion and the control words in terms of lexical features related to word recognition. The authors evaluated the lexical features of 1,033 words used in 32 published emotional Stroop studies. Emotion words were significantly lower in frequency of use, longer in length, and had smaller orthographic neighborhoods than words used as controls. These lexical features contribute to slower word recognition and hence are likely to contribute to delayed latencies in color naming. The often-replicated slowdown in color naming of emotion words may be due, in part, to lexical differences between the emotion and control words used in the majority of such studies to date. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Long-term priming of neighbours biases the word recognition process: Evidence from a lexical decision task.

The role of orthographically similar words (i.e., neighbours) in the word recognition process has been studied extensively using short-term priming paradigms (e.g., Colombo, 1986). Here we demonstrate that long-term effects of neighbour priming can also be obtained. Experiment 1 showed that prior study of a neighbour (e.g., TANGO) increased later lexical decision performance for similar words (e.g., MANGO), but decreased performance for similar pseudowords (e.g., LANGO). Experiment 2 replicated this bias effect and showed that the increase in lexical decision performance due to neighbour priming is selectively due to words from a relatively sparse neighbourhood. Explanations of the bias effect in terms of lexical activation and episodic memory retrieval are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Frequency effects in spoken and visual word recognition: Evidence from dual-task methodologies.

The authors report 3 dual-task experiments concerning the locus of frequency effects in word recognition. In all experiments, Task 1 entailed a simple perceptual choice and Task 2 involved lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an underadditive effect of word frequency arose for spoken words. Experiment 2 also showed underadditivity for visual lexical decision. It was concluded that word frequency exerts an influence prior to any dual-task bottleneck. A related finding in similar dual-task experiments is Task 2 response postponement at short stimulus onset asynchronies. This was explored in Experiment 3, and it was shown that response postponement was equivalent for both spoken and visual word recognition. These results imply that frequency-sensitive processes operate early and automatically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Rhyme priming of pictures and words: A lexical activation account.

Orthographically/phonologically related primes have typically been found to facilitate processing of target words. This phenomenon is usually explained in terms of spreading activation between nodes for orthographically/phonologically similar words in lexical memory. The phenomenon was explored in a series of studies involving the manipulations of prime and target type (word or picture) and prime and target task (naming or categorization). Generally, the results support the lexical activation explanation. Named primes, which activate lexical memory, facilitate processing in all target tasks involving lexical access (word and picture naming and word categorization), independent of prime type. Categorized primes show the expected Prime Type?×?Relatedness interaction with word primes, which activate lexical memory, producing much more facilitation than picture primes. Finally, unlike in semantic priming studies, increased depth of processing of a word prime decreased the size of the priming effects. Apparently, initial activation levels in lexical memory are not maintained when semantic processing of the prime is required. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What the reader's eye tells the mind's ear: silent reading activates inner speech

Although copious research has investigated the role of phonology in reading, little research has investigated the precise nature of the entailed speech representations. The present study examined the similarity of "inner speech" in reading to overt speech. Two lexical decision experiments (in which participants gave speeded word/nonword classifications to letter strings) assessed the effects of implicit variations in vowel and word-initial consonant length. Responses were generally slower for phonetically long stimuli than for phonetically short stimuli, despite equal orthographic lengths. Moreover, the phonetic length effects displayed principled interactions with common factors known to affect lexical decisions, such as word frequency and the similarity of words to nonwords. Both phonetic length effects were stronger among slower readers. The data suggest that acoustic representations activated in silent reading are best characterized as inner speech rather than as abstract phonological codes.     

Automaticity and word perception: Evidence from Stroop and Stroop dilution effects.

The Stroop effect is cut in half by adding a neutral word to the display. D. Kahneman and D. Chajczyk's (see record 1984-05774-001) "attention capture" account of "Stroop dilution" holds word recognition to be involuntary but strictly serial. The authors compared attention capture to 3 alternatives involving parallel rather than serial processing: In the lexicon, activation is divided among multiple words; postlexically, multiple words race for access to response processes; or prelexically, feature processing is degraded by multiple patterns whether or not they are words. Results support the latter. Multiple patterns are processed in parallel. If any are color words, Stroop effects occur but are reduced because any color word's input to lexical memory is lower in quality than if a single color word were the only pattern. Thus, lexical encoding is involuntary but can operate on several input representations in parallel, with effectiveness determined by input quality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)