Interpreting chicken-scratch: Lexical access for handwritten words.

Handwritten word recognition is a field of study that has largely been neglected in the psychological literature, despite its prevalence in society. Whereas studies of spoken word recognition almost exclusively employ natural, human voices as stimuli, studies of visual word recognition use synthetic typefaces, thus simplifying the process of word recognition. The current study examined the effects of handwriting on a series of lexical variables thought to influence bottom-up and top-down processing, including word frequency, regularity, bidirectional consistency, and imageability. The results suggest that the natural physical ambiguity of handwritten stimuli forces a greater reliance on top-down processes, because almost all effects were magnified, relative to conditions with computer print. These findings suggest that processes of word perception naturally adapt to handwriting, compensating for physical ambiguity by increasing top-down feedback. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension of concrete and abstract words in semantic dementia.

The vast majority of brain-injured patients with semantic impairment have better comprehension of concrete than abstract words. In contrast, several patients with semantic dementia (SD), who show circumscribed atrophy of the anterior temporal lobes bilaterally, have been reported to show reverse imageability effects, that is, relative preservation of abstract knowledge. Although these reports largely concern individual patients, some researchers have recently proposed that superior comprehension of abstract concepts is a characteristic feature of SD. This would imply that the anterior temporal lobes are particularly crucial for processing sensory aspects of semantic knowledge, which are associated with concrete not abstract concepts. However, functional neuroimaging studies of healthy participants do not unequivocally predict reverse imageability effects in SD because the temporal poles sometimes show greater activation for more abstract concepts. The authors examined a case-series of 11 SD patients on a synonym judgment test that orthogonally varied the frequency and imageability of the items. All patients had higher success rates for more imageable as well as more frequent words, suggesting that (1) the anterior temporal lobes underpin semantic knowledge for both concrete and abstract concepts, (2) more imageable items—perhaps because of their richer multimodal representations—are typically more robust in the face of global semantic degradation and (3) reverse imageability effects are not a characteristic feature of SD. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concreteness-dependent associative priming: Separate lexical organization for concrete and abstract words.

Four experiments used associated, unrelated, and neutral ({blank}–word) pairs that varied on prime and target concreteness. In Experiment 1, associated targets were named faster than neutral targets when primes and targets were homogeneous for concreteness (i.e., concrete–concrete or abstract–abstract), but not when they were heterogeneous (i.e., concrete–abstract or abstract–concrete). Experiments 2 and 3, using lexical decision, showed priming for all pairs irrespective of prime and target concreteness. In Experiment 4, the prime was presented for 16.7 ms, followed immediately by a 168-ms random letter mask. Lexical decision times showed priming similar to that in Experiment 1. If priming in Experiments 1 and 4 reflected lexical processes, whereas priming in Experiments 2 and 3 entailed postlexical processes, then lexical processes may be functionally distinct for concrete versus abstract words. These findings are more consistent with dual-coding than common-coding explanations of concreteness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonemic storage of concrete and abstract words with auditory presentation.

Conducted 2 experiments in which Ss' recognition memory for aurally presented concrete and abstract nouns was tested. In Exp I, 56 undergraduates heard study and test lists of 20 concrete and abstract nouns. The test list contained the same 20 nouns plus 20 new nouns which rhymed or did not rhyme with the study stimuli. In Exp II, 56 new undergraduates heard the same lists as in Exp I, but also heard lists in which concrete distractors rhymed with abstract study items and vice versa. Results show that false recognition depends upon the phonemic similarity of distractors to study words, and that the effect is independent of the concreteness of the words or whether the distractor matches the study word in concreteness. While the results may be inconsistent with aspects of the dual process theory of verbal coding, they may indicate that learners use phonemic attributes for recognition when imaginal attributes are insufficient. The appearance of an overall effect of concreteness on false alarms indicates that auditory presentation can produce imagery codes. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Electrophysiologic dissociations in memory encoding of abstract and concrete words

This study examined memory encoding of auditorily presented abstract and concrete nouns. 22 subjects performed various blocks of a free recall memory task in which lists of 22 either abstract or concrete words had to be memorized. Consistent with a large variety of memory studies, recall performance was better for concrete than for abstract words. When the event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during study were selectively averaged for those words that were subsequently recalled and those subsequently not recalled, the ERPs were more positive going for words that were subsequently recalled. These Dm effects (Difference due to memory) started around 500 ms post-stimulus and differed in timing and scalp topography for both types of words: For abstract words, they were present in an early (i.e., 600 to 1100 ms) time interval at parieto-occipital electrodes only. In contrast, for concrete words, Dm effects were obtained with a broad topographic distribution in the 600 to 1000 ms time range and were also present in a late time interval (1100 to 1600 ms) at fronto-central recording sites. The topographical dissociations of the Dm effects in the early time interval are taken to reflect the larger distinctiveness of concrete words during encoding, whereas the late effects presumably play a functional role in elaborative processing of concrete words. The results do not agree with models of word concreteness that propose separate processing systems for the two types of words, and rather support those models that propose quantitative differences in the processing of abstract and concrete words.     

Differential effects of normal aging on recollection of concrete and abstract words.

Verbal memory is known to be affected by word features. Concrete words are remembered better than abstract words (concreteness effect), presumably due to the concurrent activation of image-based and/or semantic associations. Vivid remembering during recognition (recollection) has been linked to the hippocampus and is thought to be more affected by healthy aging than familiarity-based recognition. Recent evidence also implicated the hippocampus in the processing of concrete words. Based on these observations, we hypothesized age-related changes in recollection to affect concrete words more than abstract words. This prediction was tested in a cross-sectional design with three consecutive age groups (mean ages 21 years, 42 years, and 61 years). Changes in recollection, but not familiarity, across ages were significantly modulated by word concreteness. Recollection of concrete words showed a steady decline across age, while recollection of abstract words decreased only from young to middle age, leading to a reduced concreteness effect in the oldest group. These findings are consistent with the idea that changes in hippocampally mediated recollective processes during aging affect concrete words more than abstract words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical access and age.

Lexical access, the time required to recover the meaning of a word, was measured in 12 young (mean age 24 yrs) and 12 old (mean age 73 yrs) Ss. Access time was unaffected by age, and a word-naming task. The facilitative effect of semantic associations between words was also comparable in young and old Ss. These results were obtained both under normal viewing conditions and under degraded conditions with overall latencies considerably increased. Findings indicate that aging does not affect either the encoding of the stimulus or access to the associated lexical entry, both directly and indirectly via contextual cues. This sparing of linguistic function is considered to underlie the preservation of verbal intelligence with age. (52 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical access in children and adults.

Investigated the retrieval of words from lexical memory in 12 kindergartners, 11 1st graders, 11 3rd graders, and 11 graduate students. Ss named color slides depicting 100 stimulus pictures. Picture-naming latency was the dependent variable. Results of multiple-regression analyses indicate that the codability of pictorial representations of a concept and the frequency of the concept's label contributed to the prediction of naming latency. The effects of these sociolinguistic variables were relatively constant across all age groups. Results support a model of vocabulary growth in which the lexicons of both children and adults in a language community are internally structured and accessed along parameters that reflect the salience of concepts and linguistic events in the environment. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical access in aphasic and nonaphasic speakers.

An interactive 2-step theory of lexical retrieval was applied to the picture-naming error patterns of aphasic and nonaphasic speakers. The theory uses spreading activation in a lexical network to accomplish the mapping between the conceptual representation of an object and the phonological form of the word naming the object. A model developed from the theory was parameterized to fit normal error patterns. It was then "lesioned" by globally altering its connection weight, decay rates, or both to provide fits to the error patterns of 21 fluent aphasic patients. These fits were then used to derive predictions about the influence of syntactic categories on patient errors, the effect of phonology on semantic errors, error patterns after recovery, and patient performance on a single-word repetition task. The predictions were confirmed. It is argued that simple quantitative alterations to a normal processing model can explain much of the variety among patient patterns in naming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differences in tachistoscopic recognition between abstract and concrete words as a function of visual half-field and frequency

This experiment demonstrated that the greater right visual half-field (VHF) superiority for abstract words than for concrete words reported in two previous studies generalized to an independent, larger sample of abstract and concrete nouns. In addition, degree of concreteness was found to be positively related to overall recognition, with high concrete words averaging 38% correct, moderate concrete words averaging 30% correct, and abstract words averaging 20% correct. Analyses of ratio scores indicated that high frequency abstract words showed a significantly larger right VHF asymmetry than high frequency moderately concrete words or high frequency high concrete words. Groups of abstract, moderately concrete and high concrete words were also matched on right VHF recognition, to evaluate whether differences in VHF asymmetry were secondary to the differences in overall recognition. A significant interaction between VHF and word class was found, again indicating larger right VHF superiority for the abstract words. The data are consistent with previous suggestions that some left VHF concrete words are recongized by the right hemisphere.     

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)     

The representation of abstract words: Why emotion matters.

Although much is known about the representation and processing of concrete concepts, knowledge of what abstract semantics might be is severely limited. In this article we first address the adequacy of the 2 dominant accounts (dual coding theory and the context availability model) put forward in order to explain representation and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. We find that neither proposal can account for experimental findings and that this is, at least partly, because abstract words are considered to be unrelated to experiential information in both of these accounts. We then address a particular type of experiential information, emotional content, and demonstrate that it plays a crucial role in the processing and representation of abstract concepts: Statistically, abstract words are more emotionally valenced than are concrete words, and this accounts for a residual latency advantage for abstract words, when variables such as imageability (a construct derived from dual coding theory) and rated context availability are held constant. We conclude with a discussion of our novel hypothesis for embodied abstract semantics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical access and phonological decoding in adult dyslexic subtypes.

Lexical access and phonological decoding were tested in 100 normal adult readers and 21 adult dyslexic individuals. Within the dyslexic sample, 11 dysphonetic dyslexic and 10 dyseidetic dyslexic participants were classified on the basis of spelling patterns. In the 1st experiment, adult dyseidetic readers showed a marked deficit on the lexical-access decision task in comparison with adult dysphonetic readers. In the 2nd experiment, the phonological-decoding decision task did not separate the subtypes. A lexical-access deficit in adult dyseidetic dyslexia cannot be explained in terms of a developmental delay. A phonological-decoding deficit in adult dyseidetic dyslexia may be explained by increased involvement of the lexical procedure in phonological assembly under an analogy strategy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reversal and extradimensional shifts in abstract and concrete schizophrenics.

72 concrete schizophrenics, defined in terms of conceptual sorting difficulties, were trained under 1 of 3 discrimination-learning conditions: reversal (R) shift, extradimensional (ED) shift, or control. 72 abstract schizophrenics were similarly divided, 1/2 of the Ss in each condition received verbal reinforcement, and 1/2 received candy reinforcement. Results indicated that concrete Ss required significantly more trials to learn the shift concepts than abstract Ss. Both R and ED shifts produced negative transfer relative to control conditions, but there was no significant difference between the 2 shift conditions. No differential effect was attributable to the different reinforcers. Results were discussed in terms of 2-stage discrimination-learning models and Goldstein's theory of schizophrenic concreteness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context and the recallability of concrete and abstract sentences.

Examined the influence of contextual information on the recall of abstract and concrete sentences in 3 experiments, using 216 undergraduates. In Exp I, concrete and abstract target sentences were presented in either a coherent paragraph context or a random paragraph context. In the random context, Ss recalled more concrete target sentences than abstract ones, but there was no difference between the 2 groups when the sentences were presented in a coherent context. Exp II extended this finding by adding a moderately coherent context that used many of the same nouns as the coherent paragraph, but it was not as thematically coherent. Exp II replicated the results of Exp I and found that the moderately coherent context provided intermediate facilitation for the recall of abstract sentences relative to the random context and the coherent context; context structure had no effect on the recall of concrete sentences. In Exp III, the target sentences were abstract and the concreteness of the context was varied. Abstract context sentences were recalled as well as concrete context sentences if the contexts formed a coherent paragraph; if the context was a randomly ordered list of sentences, concrete context sentences were recalled better than abstract context sentences. Results were interpreted in terms of the differential availability of contextual information for abstract and concrete materials and support the context availability model. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Choice words on open access

Drawn by rates only slightly higher than traditional HMOs, consumers have hurried to sign up for open-access plans. Yet what works for patients may work against doctors who assume the financial risks.     

Concrete words are easier to recall than abstract words: Evidence for a semantic contribution to short-term serial recall.

Immediate serial recall and maximal speech rate were assessed for concrete and abstract words differing in length. Experiment 1 showed large advantages for spoken recall of concrete words that were independent of speech rate. Experiment 2 showed an equivalent effect with written, rather than spoken, recall. Experiment 3 showed that the concreteness effect was still present when recall was backward rather than forward. In all 3 experiments, concrete words enjoyed an advantage that was roughly constant across all serial positions (with the possible exception of the 1st and last items). Experiment 4 used a matching-span procedure and showed that when there was no requirement for linguistic output, the effect of concreteness (but not the effect of word length) was eliminated. It is argued that semantic coding exerts powerful effects in verbal short-term memory tasks that have generally been underestimated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical access without attention? Explorations using dichotic priming.

The authors used lexical decision in a dichotic listening situation and measured identity priming across channels to explore whether unattended stimuli can be processed lexically. In 6 experiments, temporal synchronization of prime and target words was manipulated, and acoustic saliency of the unattended prime was varied by embedding it in a carrier sentence or in babble speech. When the prime was acoustically salient, a cross-channel priming effect emerged, and participants were aware of the prime. When the prime was less salient, no identity priming was found, and participants failed to notice the prime. Saliency was manipulated in ways that did not degrade the prime. Results are inconsistent with models of late filtering, which predict equal priming irrespective of prime saliency. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Partial knowledge of abstract words in patients with cortical degenerative conditions.

Partial knowledge is a common but rarely studied consequence of damage to conceptual representations and is characterized by the retained ability to retrieve crude, superordinate information but not specific, detailed information about a conceptual entity. Previous studies have described partial knowledge for concrete items particularly following semantic dementia (SD). The present study was designed to investigate the occurrence of partial knowledge effects in the conceptual domain of abstract words. A novel 3-level synonym comprehension test was administered to 9 patients with SD, 20 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD), and 40 healthy control subjects. All subject groups showed weaker performance on tasks requiring a fine specification of word meaning compared with those for which a broad sense of meaning or valence was necessary. However, this gradient of partial knowledge was significantly greater for SD and AD subjects than for controls. These results demonstrate that partial knowledge is a general property of a degraded knowledge base and is not restricted to the concrete word domain. It constitutes a normal phenomenon that is exacerbated in the context of neurodegenerative disease. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)