Semantic priming between spoken words in adults and children.

Used an auditory lexical decision paradigm to determine occurrence of semantic priming between spoken words and to investigate the organization of the mental lexicon in preliterate children. 30 undergraduates and 24 1st-grade children (aged 6 yrs 2 mo to 7 yrs) were tested on a lexical decision task in which Ss had to decide whether pairs of spoken items were words. In both groups, significant facilitation was found for semantically related words compared with unrelated ones. Results indicate that semantic priming occurred in the auditory modality. The fact that children benefited at least as much from and often more than adults from an appropriate semantic context suggests that the lexicon of the child is organized in the same way as the adult's as early as 6 to 7 yrs of age. (French abstract) (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A listener's investigation of printed word processing.

Examines the time course of lexical access in written-word recognition by comparing words with early and late uniqueness points (UPs). Three experiments, which used a normal (simultaneous) presentation of the letters under 3 different tasks (gender classification, naming, and semantic classification) provided no evidence for sequential processing. Rather, a small advantage in favor of words with late UP was found, which may be interpreted in terms of the lower n-gram frequencies of early-UP words. Exp 4 supported this interpretation and discussed an alternative interpretation in terms of parafoveal preview of the initial letters. A last experiment, which used an incremental presentation of the word letters, gave rise to a UP effect comparable in size to that obtained in an auditory study, suggesting that a temporal distribution of the signal is a sufficient condition for directional processing. (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)     

Semantic, repetition and rime priming between spoken words: behavioral and electrophysiological evidence

Semantic, phonological and repetition priming for auditorily presented words were examined, using both behavioral reaction times (RTs) and electrophysiological event-related potentials (ERPs) measures. On critical trials, a word prime was followed by a word target that was semantically or phonologically related (rime) or not related (control) to the prime. Pairs of word-pseudoword items served as fillers. Participants were asked to respond to word targets in the RT experiment and to pseudowords in the ERP experiment. In each experiment stimuli were presented once and then repeated in the very same way. RTs were found to be fastest for semantic, intermediate for rime and slowest for control targets; large repetition effects occurred for all targets. ERPs results showed that both semantic and phonological priming influenced the same component, namely the N400, whose amplitude was smallest to semantic, intermediate to rime and largest to control targets; repetition effects were only found for semantic trials.     

Phonological priming between monosyllabic spoken words.

Phonological priming between 3-phoneme monosyllabic spoken words was examined as a function of the early or late position of the phonological overlap between the words and of prime–target relative frequency. The pairs of words had either the 2 beginning or the 2 final phonemes in common. Four experiments were conducted, each using a different combination of interstimulus interval (ISI; either 20 msec or 500 msec) and task (either lexical decision or shadowing). Facilitation was consistently found between words with final overlap in both tasks and was not affected by either absolute or relative word frequency. The size of the effect decreased as the ISI increased. Significant priming effects were not obtained between words with initial overlap, although an inhibitory trend was found in the shadowing task at the short ISI for the low–high relative frequency condition. It is suggested that the facilitatory effect of final overlap is prelexical. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Influence of the Phonological Characteristics of a Language on the Functional Units of Reading: A Study in French.

Taft (1992) reported results supporting the idea that the "Body of the BOSS" (BOB) is an important unit in the visual recognition of English polysyllabic words. "BOSS" refers to the orthographically-defined first syllable of a word (e.g., the lam of lament); "Body" refers to the part of that syllable which follows the initial consonant(s) (e.g., the am of lam). The primary evidence supporting this notion was that the pronunciation of an ambiguously pronounceable nonword could be biased by the pronunciation of a preceding word when they shared their BOB, but not when they shared their phonologically-defined first syllable. Three experiments were conducted in French, to examine whether the syllable dominates as a unit of orthographic representation when the language has a clear phonological syllable structure. To construct ambiguously pronounceable nonwords, upper case letters were used and the first syllable always contained an E, which could be pronounced either as é or e. Nonwords (e.g., MERANE) were preceded by an upper case version of a word sharing a BOB (e.g., feroce) or a first syllable (e.g., méduse). The pronunciation of the nonword's E was biased by the syllable and not by the BOB, implying that the syllable, but not the BOB, is a relevant structure in the processing of visually presented French words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)