scholarly journals Interplay of bigram frequency and orthographic neighborhood statistics in language membership decision

2015 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 578-596 ◽  
Author(s):  
YULIA OGANIAN ◽  
MARKUS CONRAD ◽  
ARASH ARYANI ◽  
HAUKE R. HEEKEREN ◽  
KATHARINA SPALEK

Language-specific orthography (i.e., letters or bigrams that exist in only one language) is known to facilitate language membership recognition. Yet the contribution of continuous sublexical and lexical statistics to language membership decisions during visual word processing is unknown. Here, we used pseudo-words to investigate whether continuous sublexical and lexical statistics bias explicit language decisions (Experiment 1) and language attribution during naming (Experiment 2). We also asked whether continuous statistics would have an effect in the presence of orthographic markers. Language attribution in both experiments was influenced by lexical neighborhood size differences between languages, even in presence of orthographic markers. Sublexical frequencies of occurrence affected reaction times only for unmarked pseudo-words in both experiments, with greater effects in naming. Our results indicate that bilinguals rely on continuous language-specific statistics at sublexical and lexical levels to infer language membership. Implications are discussed with respect to models of bilingual visual word recognition.

Author(s):  
Diane Pecher ◽  
Inge Boot ◽  
Saskia van Dantzig ◽  
Carol J. Madden ◽  
David E. Huber ◽  
...  

Previous studies (e.g., Pecher, Zeelenberg, & Wagenmakers, 2005) found that semantic classification performance is better for target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the same semantic class (e.g., living) compared to target words with orthographic neighbors that are mostly from the opposite semantic class (e.g., nonliving). In the present study we investigated the contribution of phonology to orthographic neighborhood effects by comparing effects of phonologically congruent orthographic neighbors (book-hook) to phonologically incongruent orthographic neighbors (sand-wand). The prior presentation of a semantically congruent word produced larger effects on subsequent animacy decisions when the previously presented word was a phonologically congruent neighbor than when it was a phonologically incongruent neighbor. In a second experiment, performance differences between target words with versus without semantically congruent orthographic neighbors were larger if the orthographic neighbors were also phonologically congruent. These results support models of visual word recognition that assume an important role for phonology in cascaded access to meaning.


2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 214-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ardi Roelofs

Dijkstra and Van Heuven sketch the BIA+ model for visual word processing in bilinguals. BIA+ differs in a number of respects from its predecessor, BIA, the leading implemented model of bilingual visual word recognition. Notably, BIA+ contains a new processing component that deals with task demands. BIA+ has not been computationally implemented yet and design decisions still need to be taken. In this commentary, I outline a proposal for modeling the control of tasks in BIA+.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efthymia C Kapnoula ◽  
Athanassios Protopapas ◽  
Steven J. Saunders ◽  
Max Coltheart

We evaluated the dual route cascaded (DRC) model of visual word recognition using Greek behavioural data on word and nonword naming and lexical decision, focusing on the effects of syllable and bigram frequency. DRC was modified to process polysyllabic Greek words and nonwords. The Greek DRC and native speakers of Greek were presented with the same sets of word and nonword stimuli, spanning a wide range on several psycholinguistic variables, and the sensitivity of the model to lexical and sublexical variables was compared to the effects of these factors on the behavioural data. DRC pronounced correctly all the stimuli and successfully simulated the effects of frequency in words, and of length and bigram frequency in nonwords. However, unlike native speakers of Greek, DRC failed to demonstrate sensitivity to word length and syllabic frequency. We discuss the significance of these findings in constraining models of visual word recognition.


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