Similar attentional, frequency, and associative effects for pseudohomophones and words

Between the presentation and recall of 1 or 5 digits, Ss performed a secondary task of naming a visually presented letter string--a pseudohomophone (e.g., FOLE, HOAP) or its real-word counterpart (FOAL, HOPE). Memory load interacted with frequency (HOPE vs. FOAL, HOAP vs. FOLE) but not with lexicality (HOPE vs. HOAP, FOAL vs. FOLE). This outcome counters models in which nonwords are named by a slow (resource-expensive) process that assembles phonology and words are named by a fast (resource-inexpensive) process that accesses lexical phonology. When the associative priming-of-naming task was secondary to the memory task, pseudohomophone associative priming (HOAP-DESPAIR, FOLE-HORSE) equaled associative priming (HOPE-DESPAIR, FOAL-HORSE) and was affected in the same way by memory load. Assembled phonology seems to underlie the naming of both words and nonwords.     

Interacting sources of information in word naming: A study of individual differences.

Hypothetically, words can be named by spelling–sound translation rules or by looking up a phonological code in a lexicon. Following J. Baron and C. Strawson (see record 1977-00326-001), naming performance was measured as a function of skill with each route, using sets of stimuli varying in reliance on either route. Ss were 73 college students. "Phoenicians" were defined to be better with rules than with look-up; "Chinese" were better at look-up than with rules. As predicted by Baron and Strawson, Phoenicians named low-frequency regular words and nonwords faster than Chinese. Contrary to predictions, Phoenicians were also faster at naming irregular words of various frequencies. Implications of these results for various dual-route models vs single-route models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategic control in a naming task: Changing routes or changing deadlines?

S. Monsell, K. E. Patterson, A. Graham, C. H. Hughes, and R. Milroy (1992) reported that high-frequency irregular words are named faster when presented in a "pure" block than when mixed with nonwords. They attributed this effect to a de-emphasis of an assembly route in the pure block. The current authors replicated this effect in Experiment 1. In Experiments 2 and 3, similar effects resulted from mixing high- and low-frequency regular words with nonwords and from mixing high- and low-frequency irregular words together. Further, in all cases, the more slowly named stimuli were named faster in mixed blocks than in pure blocks. An alternative to the de-emphasis account, which is based on strategic control of initiation of articulation, was supported in Experiment 4 by confirming the alternative account's novel prediction of a regularity effect for high-frequency words in pure blocks. Implications for the single- versus dual-route debate and for interpretations of strategy effects in general are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Illusory words: The roles of attention and of top–down constraints in conjoining letters to form words.

Conducted 3 experiments with 40 undergraduates to confirm that illusory recombinations of letters can be seen when several words or letter-strings are presented too briefly to allow focused attention to each item in turn and to explore the role of lexical entries in promoting or preventing these preceptual errors. Overall findings indicate that when attention was divided among 4 briefly exposed syllables, Ss mistakenly detected targets whose letters were present in the display but in the wrong combinations. These illusory conjunctions were somewhat more frequent when the target was a word and when the distractors were nonwords, but the effects of lexical status were small and did not reach significance in free report of the same displays. Search performance was further impaired if the nonwords were unpronouncable consonant strings rather than increased conjunction errors. Results are discussed in relation to feature-integration theory and to current models of word perception. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Imageability effects in word naming: An individual differences analysis.

The present research was designed to extend research by Strain et al (1995) who found that imageability facilitates naming of low-frequency irregular words. The authors hypothesized that the impact of imageability on naming performance will vary with phonological reading ability. For participants who score high in phonological reading ability, the effect of imageability should be seen primarily on naming of low-frequency exception words where the orthography-to-phonology mappings are not strong. For participants who score low in phonological reading ability, the mapping of orthography onto phonology is presumably inefficient for all types of low-frequency words. Accordingly, for these participants, it was predicted that imageability would affect naming of both exception and regular words. 90 college students served as Ss. Exp 1 shows that the impact of imageability on word naming varies with phonological coding skill. In Exp 2, the effect of imageability on naming low-frequency irregular words was shown to occur across an extended set of items. Together, the present findings support the notion that semantics may play a role in phonological coding when the mappings between orthography and phonology are weak. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The representation of sublexical orthographic-phonologic correspondences: evidence from phonological dyslexia

Although there is considerable evidence that grapheme and body units are involved in assembling phonology from print, there is little evidence supporting the involvement of syllabic representations. We provide evidence on this point from a phonological dyslexic patient (ML) who, as a result of brain damage, is relatively unable to read nonwords. ML was found to be able to perform tasks assumed to reflect processes involved in assembled phonology (i.e. segmentation, orthographic-phonologic conversion, and blending) when the units involved were syllables, but demonstrated considerable difficulty when they were onset, body, or phoneme units. Additionally, both ML and matched controls were much better able to find words in an anagrams task (Treiman & Chafetz, 1987) when they resulted from the combination of segments corresponding to syllables than when they did not. It is suggested that the relationship between print and sound is represented at multiple levels (including the syllable) (Shallice, Warrington, & McCarthy, 1983) and that ML's nonword reading impairment is the result of disruption of representations below the level of the syllable.     

Brain potentials as indices of orthographic and phonological interaction during word matching.

Studied the interaction between orthographic and phonological codes in a same–different judgment task by requiring 40 undergraduates to decide if 2 visually presented words either looked alike or rhymed. Word pairs were selected from 4 lists: words rhymed and looked alike, rhymed but did not look alike, looked alike but did not rhyme, or neither looked alike nor rhymed. The reaction time (RT) and percent error increased when there was a conflict between the orthography and phonology of the words. The N200 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) indicated that Ss were capable of detecting phonological differences between words within 260 msec from the presentation of a word pair. The amplitude of the N200s also varied with the degree of mismatch between words. N200s were largest when both the orthography and phonology mismatched, of intermediate amplitude when either orthography or phonology mismatched, and smallest when both orthograpy and phonology matched. P300 latency was consistent with RT, increasing whenever there was a conflict between the 2 codes. Behavioral measures and the ERP data suggest that the extraction of the orthographic and phonological aspects of words occurs early in the information-processing sequence. (55 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of spatial attention in visual word processing.

Ss made lexical decisions on a target letter string presented above or below fixation. In Exps 1 and 2, target location was cued 100 msec in advance of target onset. Responses were faster on validly than on invalidly cued trials. In Exp 3, the target was sometimes accompanied by irrelevant stimuli on the other side of fixation; in such cases, responses were slowed (a spatial filtering effect). Both cuing and filtering effects on response time were additive with effects of word frequency and lexical status (words vs nonwords). These findings are difficult to reconcile with claims that spatial attention is less involved in processing familiar words than in unfamiliar words and nonwords. The results can be reconciled with a late-selection locus of spatial attention only with difficulty but are easily explained by early selection models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Word perception and misperception in context.

When reading lists of words and nonwords at 100 msec/word, Ss reported words accurately but frequently converted nonwords such as dack into similarly spelled words such as duck or deck. In sentences, both nonwords and anomalous words were misread as appropriate words, but the bias was greater for nonwords. Word associations in lists (e.g., sailor–dack–vessel) produced a similar bias, but when sentence meaning was pitted against such associations the lexical effect was largely overridden. Sentences in which biasing context appeared only after the critical item reduced but did not eliminate the context effect, suggesting that multiple word candidates remained active while at least the next 3 words were processed. These results support a 2-stage modular interactive model: The 1st stage is stimulus driven and emits multiple weighted candidates that are combined interactively with contextual information in a 2nd stage. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategies for visual word recognition and orthographical depth: A multilingual comparison.

We investigated the psychological reality of the concept of orthographical depth and its influence on visual word recognition by examining naming performance in Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian. Experiment 1 revealed that the lexical status of the stimulus (high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords) significantly affected naming in Hebrew (the deepest of the three orthographies). This effect was only moderate in English and nonsignificant in Serbo-Croatian (the shallowest of the three orthographies). Moreover, only in Hebrew did lexical status have similar effects on naming and lexical decision performance. Experiment 2 revealed that semantic priming effects in naming were larger in Hebrew than in English and completely absent in Serbo-Croatian. Experiment 3 revealed that a large proportion of nonlexical tokens (nonwords) in the stimulus list affects naming words in Hebrew and in English, but not in Serbo-Croatian. Results support the orthographical depth hypothesis and suggest, in general, that in shallow orthographies phonology is generated directly from print, whereas in deep orthographies phonology is derived from the internal lexicon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attribute information and the feeling-of-knowing.

Demonstrated with 24 undergraduates that feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgments about unrecalled items predict subsequent recognition performance with accuracy. The purpose of the experiment was to examine the relation between access to partial attribute information and the tendency to make positive or negative FOK judgments about an unrecalled item from a recent study episode. 52 words with extreme connotations of good or bad were paired with semantically neutral words, and 28 buffer pairs also were included to minimize the target words. Results indicate that when Ss made positive FOK judgments, attribute identification was more accurate than when Ss made negative FOK judgments. However, positive guesses were also made even when Ss did not have access to accurate attribute information. The results suggest that FOK judgments depend on access to an attribute of an unrecalled item, but they do not exclude other variables and referents as sources for the same phenomenon. (French abstract) (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategic effects in word naming: Examining the route-emphasis versus time-criterion accounts.

K. Rastle and M. Coltheart (1999) demonstrated that both nonwords and low-frequency regular words are named more slowly when mixed with first-phoneme irregular word fillers (e.g., CHEF) than when mixed with third-phoneme irregular word fillers (e.g., GLOW). Those authors suggested that their effects were due to a strategic de-emphasis of the nonlexical route when first-phoneme irregular fillers were used. An alternative explanation is that these results simply reflect a more lax position of a time criterion (S. J. Lupker, P. Brown, and L. Colombo, 1997) in the first-phoneme irregular filler condition. We contrasted these 2 accounts in 4 experiments. In all experiments, target naming latencies were longer when the fillers were harder to name, regardless of whether the fillers were nonwords or exception words. These results strongly favor a time-criterion account of K. Rastle and M. Coltheart's effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic effects in single-word naming.

Three experiments demonstrated that, for lower frequency words, reading aloud is affected not only by spelling-sound typicality but also by a semantic variable, imageability. Participants were slower and more error prone when naming exception words with abstract meanings (e.g., scarce ) than when naming either abstract regular words (e.g., scribe ) or imageable exception words (e.g., soot ). It is proposed that semantic representations of words have the largest impact on translating orthography to phonology when this translation process is slow or noisy (i.e., for low-frequency exceptions) and that words with rich semantic representations (i.e., high-imageability words) are most likely to benefit from this interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abstract word deficits in aphasia: Evidence from semantic priming.

J.G. and D.E. are nonfluent aphasic patients who appear to have selective problems with abstract words on a variety of standard tests. Such a pattern would normally be interpreted as indicating a central semantic deficit for abstract words. The authors show that this is not the case by means of a semantic priming task that tests for implicit knowledge of the meanings of abstract and concrete words. Spoken word pairs that were either abstract or concrete synonyms (e.g., street-road or luck-chance) were presented; both Ss showed priming for the abstract and concrete pairs. The researchers followed up by asking the Ss to produce definitions to spoken abstract and concrete words; these definitions were also normal. The priming and definition data suggest that the semantic representations of abstract words in these Ss were relatively unimpaired. The researchers found that the Ss have problems only with spoken abstract words in just those tasks where normal controls also have difficulty. In contrast, they clearly have deficits in reading abstract words aloud, which may be due to problems with output phonology. Implications of these data for claims concerning hemispheric differences in the representation of abstract and concrete words are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pathway selection's utility for control of word recognition

Regularity effects signify assembled phonology: the nonlexical pathway in word recognition. Assembled phonology may be strategically controlled. When task conditions do not favor its use, such as when a lexical decision task includes pseudohomophone (durt) foils, an alternative pathway is selected. Consequently, regularity effects will be reduced or absent. This prediction was tested in 3 lexical decision experiments using several definitions of word regularity. Word regularity was crossed in factorial designs with nonword lexicality, the degree to which nonword foils mimic the properties of actual words. Regularity effects to words were large and most reliable in pseudohomophone conditions, opposite to the tested prediction. Instead, the observed pattern corroborated a resonance account with parametric control.     

Strategical invariance in lexical access: The reappearance of the pseudohomophone effect.

Examined the relationship between the presence of homophones and the appearance of the pseudohomophone effect, using 26 undergraduates. Ss were exposed to 10 pseudohomonyms, 10 nonwords, and 20 homophonic words or 20 nonhomophonic words in the 1st trial and to 15 pseudohomophones, 15 nonwords, and 30 nonhomophonic words during the 2nd trial. Ss' reaction time (RT) to a lexical decision task was recorded. Ss exposed to homophonic words during the 1st trial showed greater RT for decisions on pseudohomophones (pseudohomophone effect). Results support the conclusion of I. Dennis et al (1985) that the presence of homophones encourages a strategy of lexical decision making that changes the use made of phonological evidence. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Recognition and lexical decision without detection: Unconscious perception?

Stimulus detection and concurrent measures of stimulus recognition were compared to establish whether perception occurs in the absence of detection. The target stimuli were familiar words (Experiments 1 and 2), nonwords (Experiment 3), or both words and nonwords (Experiment 4). On each trial, either a stimulus or a blank field was presented. Ss first decided whether a stimulus had been presented and then made either a forced-choice recognition decision (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) or a lexical decision (Experiment 4). Both words and nonwords were recognized and discriminated following correct decisions (i.e., hits). However, in the absence of stimulus detection (i.e., misses), only words were recognized or discriminated. These qualitatively different patterns of results following hits and misses for words and nonwords suggest that stimulus detection may provide an adequate measure of conscious awareness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Two routes or one in reading aloud? A connectionist dual-process model.

A connectionist study of word reading is described that emphasizes the computational demands of the spelling–sound mapping in determining the properties of the reading system. It is shown that the phonological assembly process can be implemented by a two-layer network, which easily extracts the regularities in the spelling–sound mapping for English from training data containing many exception words. It is argued that productive knowledge about spelling–sound relationships is more easily acquired and used if it is separated from case-specific knowledge of the pronunciation of known words. It is then shown how the interaction of assembled and retrieved phonologies can account for the combined effects of frequency and regularity–consistency and for the reading performance of dyslexic patients. It is concluded that the organization of the reading system reflects the demands of the task and that the pronunciations of nonwords and exception words are computed by different processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)