Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Evidence from masked phonological priming.

Bilingual written language representation was investigated with the masked phonological priming paradigm. Pseudohomophonic and control primes of French target words were used to show that Dutch–French bilinguals exhibit the same pattern of phonological and orthographic priming as native French speakers, which suggests that the same processes underlie first- and second-language processing. It was also found that for bilinguals, but not monolinguals, it is possible to prime a target word of the second language with a homophonic stimulus (either word or nonword) of the first language. This interlingual phonological priming effect was of the same size as the intralingual priming effect. Implications for theories of bilingual written language representation and for the interpretation of the masked phonological priming paradigm are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Testing the multiple in the multiple read-out model of visual word recognition.

This study provided a test of the multiple criteria concept used for lexical decision, as implemented in J. Grainger and A. M. Jacobs's (1996) multiple read-out model. This account predicts more inhibition (or less facilitation) from a masked neighbor when accuracy is stressed more but more facilitation (or less inhibition) when the speed of responding is emphasized more. The authors tested these predictions by stressing accuracy (Experiment 1) and response speed (Experiment 2). The results of Experiment 1 showed a stronger neighbor-inhibition effect in the stress-on-accuracy condition than in the control condition. The results of Experiment 2 showed facilitation because of the neighbor prime in the stress-on-speed condition relative to the control condition. These results corroborate the multiple criteria account. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategic effects in associative priming with words, homophones, and pseudohomophones.

G. Lukatela and M. T. Turvey (1994x) showed that at a 57-ms prime-presentation duration, the naming of a visually presented target word (frog) is primed not only by an associate word (toad) but also by a homophone (towed) and a pseudohomophone (tode) of the associate. At a 250-ms prime presentation, priming with the homophone was no longer observed. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated these priming effects in the Dutch language. Next, the authors extended the priming paradigm to a word/legalnon-word lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) and a word/pseudohomophone decision task (Experiment 4). Phonologically mediated associative priming was observed in all conditions with pseudohomophonic primes but not with homophonic primes. The latter did not prime at a 250-ms prime-presentation time and at 57 ms in the word/pseudohomophone task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naming two-digit Arabic numerals: Evidence from masked priming studies.

The authors investigated how 2-digit Arabic numerals are named by looking at the effects of masked primes on the naming latencies. Target numerals were named faster when prime and target shared a digit at the same position (e.g., the target 28 primed by 18 and 21). In contrast, naming latencies were slower when prime and target shared 1 or 2 digits at noncorresponding places (e.g., the target 28 primed by 82, 86, or 72). Subsequent experiments showed that these priming effects were situated at the level of the verbal production of the Arabic numerals. The data point to a nonsemantically mediated route from visual input to verbal output in the naming of 2-digit Arabic numerals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Effect of Age of Acquisition in Visual Word Processing: Further Evidence for the Semantic Hypothesis.

The authors investigated whether the meaning of visually presented words is activated faster for early-acquired words than for late-acquired words. They addressed the issue using the semantic Simon paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are instructed to decide whether a stimulus word is printed in uppercase or lowercase letters. However, they have to respond with a verbal label ("living" or "nonliving") that is either congruent with the meaning of the word (e.g., saying "living" to the stimulus DOG) or incongruent (e.g., saying "nonliving" to the stimulus dog). Results showed a significant congruency effect that was stronger for early-acquired words than for late-acquired words. The authors conclude that the age of acquisition is an important variable in the activation of the meaning of visually presented words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Journal Impact Factors and Self-Citations: Implications for Psychology Journals.

Comments on the study by J. G. Adair and N. Vohra (see record 2003-02034-002) of changes in the number of references and citations in psychology journals as a consequence of the current knowledge explosion. They made a striking observation of the sometimes excessive number of self-citations in psychology journals. However, after this illustration, no further attention was paid to the issue of self-citation. Therefore, an important underexplored question is to what extent impact factors of psychology journals are artificially inflated or deflated by self-citations. For the present article, the authors used the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) databases Web of Science (WoS) and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) as the basis of our analyses. From each article (including empirical articles and literature reviews) in five high-, five middle-, and five low-ranked journals in psychology published in 1998 and 1999, they collected the number of self-citations and other-citations in 2000 from the WoS. Data analyses show that, compared with low- and middle-impact psychology journals, the true citation counts of high-impact psychology journals are actually underestimated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Phonological priming from the second to the first language.

In this study, the authors show that cross-lingual phonological priming is possible not only from the 1st language (L1) to the 2nd language (L2), but also from L2 to L1. In addition, both priming effects were found to have the same magnitude and to not be related to differences in word naming latencies between L1 and L2. The findings are further evidence against language-selective access models of bilingual word processing and are more in line with strong phonological models of visual word recognition than with the traditional dual-route models. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arabic number reading: On the nature of the numerical scale and the origin of phonological recoding.

Models of human number representation are based mainly on evidence from indirect sources such as number comparison tasks and findings on acquired dyscalculia. Researchers have rarely looked at the processing times of individual numbers. The experiments described in this article indicate that this neglect may have been unwarranted because number reading times considerably constrain the range of acceptable theoretical models. In particular, it is found that the time to process an Arabic integer from 1 to 99 is a function of the logarithm of the number magnitude, the frequency of the number, and sometimes the syllable length of the number name. In addition, processing a number facilitates the processing of a subsequent number with a close value. The effects of number magnitude and number priming are found for number naming as well, indicating that phonological recoding in silent reading (as evidenced by the syllable-length effect) happens after the internal semantic numerical representation has been accessed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Whorfian hypothesis and numerical cognition: is 'twenty-four' processed in the same way as 'four-and-twenty'?

Recent theoretical developments have redefined a Whorfian effect as a processing difference due to the language of the individual, and no longer as a marker for or against linguistic determinism. Within this framework. Whorfian effects can be used to investigate whether a particular part of the cognitive system is penetrable by language processes or forms an encapsulated module, provided the experimenter ensures that the target language difference is not caused by peripheral input or output processes. In this article, we examine the possibility of a Whorfian effect in numerical cognition by making use of the fact that in the Dutch number naming system the order of tens and units is reversed (i.e. 24 is read 'four-and-twenty'). In a first experiment, we asked native French- and Dutch-speaking students to name the solution of addition problems with a two-digit and a single-digit operand (e.g. 20 + 4 =?, 24 + 1 =?). The order of the operands was manipulated (20 + 4 vs. 4 + 20) as well as the presentation modality (Arabic vs. verbal). Three language differences emerged from this study. Experiment 2, however, showed that these differences were all due to input or output processes rather than differences in the addition operation (i.e. the differences between Dutch and French disappeared when subjects were asked to type the answer rather than pronounce it). On the basis of these findings, we question the idea that mathematical operations are based on verbal processes.