Effects of polysemy in lexical decision and naming: An alternative to lexical access accounts.

Author(s):  
Yasushi Hino ◽  
Stephen J. Lupker
2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 404-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rory Turnbull ◽  
Sharon Peperkamp

Abstract Lexical priming is known to arise from phonological similarity between prime and target, and this phenomenon is an important component of our understanding of the processes of lexical access and competition. However, the precise nature of the role of phonological similarity in lexical priming is understudied. In the present study, two experiments were conducted in which participants performed auditory lexical decision on CVC targets which were preceded by primes that either matched the target in all phonemes (CVC condition), in the first two phonemes (CV_ condition), the last two phonemes (_VC condition), the initial and last phonemes (C_C condition) or no phonemes (unrelated condition). Relative to the unrelated condition, all conditions except CV_ led to facilitation of response time to target words. The _VC and C_C conditions led to equivalent facilitation magnitude, while the CV_ condition showed neither facilitation nor inhibition. Accounting for these results requires appeal to processes of lexical competition and also to the notion that phonemes do not lend equivalent phonological similarity; that is, vowels and consonants are processed differently.


2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria De Martino ◽  
Giulia Bracco ◽  
Francesca Postiglione ◽  
Alessandro Laudanna

Abstract In some languages the grammatical gender of nouns can be probabilistically detected using formal cues; for instance, in Italian, the majority of feminine nouns end in ‘-a’(e.g., casa, ‘home’) and the majority of masculine nouns end in ‘-o’ (e.g., albero, ‘tree’). It has been hypothesized that the match/mismatch between the formal information of the suffix and the abstract grammatical information on gender affects lexical processing of nouns. An alternative account is that a default option available for gender poses constraints to mechanisms of lexical access for words exhibiting gender markers in the surface form. In the present study, nouns with highly predictive gender suffix (regular), nouns whose gender cannot be recovered from surface form (opaque) and nouns with misleading gender suffix (irregular) were compared in two reading aloud and two lexical decision experiments. Results confirmed that regular nouns are processed better than irregular nouns. No difference was detected between masculine and feminine opaque nouns. The results allow the conclusion that a formal gender feature (the gender orthographic regularity) is more likely to affect lexical processing of bare nouns than the activation of a gender default option.


2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 883-894 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABIENNE CHETAIL ◽  
STEPHANIE MATHEY

ABSTRACTThe aim of the study was to investigate the syllable activation hypothesis in French beginning readers. Second graders performed a lexical decision task in which bisyllabic words were presented in two colours that either matched the syllable boundaries or not. The data showed that the children were sensitive to syllable match and to syllable complexity. In addition, good readers were slowed down while poor readers were speeded up by syllable match. These findings suggest that syllables are functional units of lexical access in children and that syllable activation is influenced by reading level.


1984 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-458 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remo Job ◽  
Giuseppe Sartori

In this paper we report some clinical data relevant to the issue of whether or not words are decomposed into their constituent morphemes prior to lexical access during reading. The data were obtained from a crossed phonological dyslexic patient who produced many derivational errors in reading aloud. The experimental investigation consisted of a series of tests requiring either reading words and non-words aloud or lexical decision tasks. The results are interpreted as supporting decomposition models of lexical access. In particular, a revised version of the logogen model—which postulates visual recognizers for affixes—seems to fit the data very well.


1993 ◽  
Vol 77 (3_suppl) ◽  
pp. 1091-1096 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brendan Weekes

This study investigated the relationship between episodic visual memory and word recognition using a novel test of episodic visual memory. 40 subjects learned a set of pseudo-orthographic stimuli which were processed in terms of visual form and structure information during study. Subsequent recognition was better for more frequently and elaboratively processed stimuli, indicating performance was dependent on episodic visual memory. Recognition-test performance was also associated with visual lexical decision but not auditory lexical decision. It was concluded that recognition-test performance was associated with operation of episodic visual memory but independent of lexical access and thereby provides a useful diagnostic tool for the neuropsychological investigation of surface dyslexia.


1986 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Wilding

An experiment is reported which showed that in a lexical decision task semantic priming by a related preceding word and repetition of target words produce additive effects on decision latency. Previous models of lexical access and modifications of them are discussed, and it is argued that some such models predict an interaction of priming and repetition, while others are insufficiently precise to make a prediction. It is suggested that the generality of effects across tasks requiring lexical access must be established and the components of complex effects must be separated before an adequate model can be devised to account for the data.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Azevedo ◽  
Ruth Ann Atchley ◽  
Eva Kehayia

The current research utilizes lexical decision within an oddball ERP paradigm to study early lexical processing. Nineteen undergraduate students completed four blocks of the oddball lexical decision task (Nonword targets among Words, Word targets among Nonwords, Word targets among Pseudowords, and Pseudoword targets among Words). We observed a reliable P3 ERP component in conditions where the distinction between rare and frequent trials could be made solely based on lexical status (Words among Nonwords and Nonwords among Words). We saw a reliable P3 to rare words among frequent pseudowords, but no P3 was observed when participants were asked to detect pseudowords in the context of frequent word stimuli. We argue that this observed modulation of the P3 results is consistent with psycholinguistic literature that suggests that two criteria are available during lexical access when performing a lexicality judgement, a non-lexical criterion that relies on global activation at the word level and a lexical criterion that relies on activation of a lexical representation (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Grainger & Jacobs, 1996).


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