Aphasia, Dyslexia and the Phonological Coding of Written Words

1977 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. E. Patterson ◽  
A. J. Marcel

A possible account of the reading difficulty of certain aphasic-dyslexic patients includes the notion that they are impaired in translating the written word into a phonological code via grapheme-phoneme conversion rules. This notion was tested in two experiments, both utilizing orthographically regular non-words (like dake) as stimuli. The first experiment provides an analysis of two patients' (largely successful) attempts to repeat non-words, and their (almost totally unsuccessful) attempts to read them. Second, in a lexical decision task (is this written letter-string a word or not?), the finding that normals are slowed by non-words homophonic with real words (like flore) was replicated using a modified technique. This effect, attributable to phonological coding, was not shown by the patients. At the same time, their ability to discriminate between words and non-words was essentially intact. Consideration was given to mechanisms which might underlie such patients' correct and erroneous readings of words and non-words.

1980 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Kirsner ◽  
Heather L. Brown ◽  
S. Abrol ◽  
N. K. Chadha ◽  
N. K. Sharma

Forty-eight Hindi-English bilinguals completed two blocks of trials where each trial involved presentation of a letter string requiring a lexical decision. In the first block subjects were exposed to 22 words and 11 non-words in either English or Hindi. In the second block the original words were repeated in either the same language or in the alternative language. In this block the old (repeated) words were mixed with 22 new words, and 22 non-words. Twelve subjects were included in each of the four groups given by the factorial combination of blocks and languages. Reaction time in the lexical decision task was facilitated when words were repeated in the same language (109 and 125 ms in the English-English and Hindi-Hindi groups respectively), but little or no facilitation was observed in the inter-lingual conditions (-22 and 23 ms in the Hindi-English and English-Hindi conditions respectively). The results support the view that lexical representation in bilinguals is language-specific.


1979 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 489-507 ◽  
Author(s):  
Max Coltheart ◽  
Derek Besner ◽  
Jon Torfi Jonasson ◽  
Eileen Davelaar

In lexical decision experiments, subjects have difficulty in responding NO to non-words which are pronounced exactly like English words (e.g. BRANE). This does not necessarily imply that access to a lexical entry ever occurs via a phonological recoding of a visually-presented word. The phonological recoding procedure might be so slow that when the letter string presented is a word, access to its lexical entry via a visual representation is always achieved before phonological recoding is completed. If prelexical phonological recodings are produced by using grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules, such recodings can only occur for words which conform to these rules (regular words), since applications of the rules to words which do not conform to the rules (exception words) produce incorrect phonological representations. In two experiments, it was found that time to achieve lexical access (as measured by YES latency in a lexical decision task) was equivalent for regular words and exception words. It was concluded that access to lexical entries in lexical decision experiments of this sort does not proceed by sometimes or always phonologically recoding visually-presented words.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 164-181 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID M. SIDHU ◽  
GABRIELLA VIGLIOCCO ◽  
PENNY M. PEXMAN

abstractIn contrast to arbitrariness, a recent perspective is that words contain both arbitrary and iconic aspects. We investigated iconicity in word recognition, and the possibility that iconic words have special links between phonological and semantic features that may facilitate their processing. In Experiment 1, participants completed a lexical decision task (“Is this letter string a word?”) including words varying in their iconicity. Notably, we manipulated stimulus presentation conditions such that the items were visually degraded for half of the participants; this manipulation has been shown to increase reliance on phonology. Responses to words higher in iconicity were faster and more accurate, but this did not interact with condition. In Experiment 2 we explicitly directed participants’ attention to phonology by using a phonological lexical decision task (“Does this letter string sound like a word?”). Responses to words that were higher in iconicity were once again faster. These results demonstrate facilitatory effects of iconicity in lexical processing, thus showing that the benefits of iconic mappings extend beyond those reported for language learning and those argued for language evolution.


1982 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Randi C. Martin

The pseudohomophone effect, that is, the finding that non-words that are pronounced like words (e.g. MEEN) take longer to reject in a lexical decision task than other pronounceable non-words (e.g. NEEN), has been used to support the hypothesis of phonological receding in lexical access. The lexical decision experiments reported here matched pseudohomophones to control non-words that were as visually similar to words as were the pseudohomophones. For both normal and aphasic subjects, reaction times to reject the pseudohomophones were no longer than those for the visual controls. However, the pseudohomophones did take longer to reject than other pronounceable non-words which were not as visually similar to words. The results suggest that most previous findings of the pseudohomophone effect result from the greater visual rather than phonological similarity of the pseudohomophones to words. The absence of a phonological effect on the non-words in the present study implies that phonological coding is an optional rather than a slow, but obligatory process.


2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hélène Maire ◽  
Renaud Brochard ◽  
Jean-Luc Kop ◽  
Vivien Dioux ◽  
Daniel Zagar

Abstract. This study measured the effect of emotional states on lexical decision task performance and investigated which underlying components (physiological, attentional orienting, executive, lexical, and/or strategic) are affected. We did this by assessing participants’ performance on a lexical decision task, which they completed before and after an emotional state induction task. The sequence effect, usually produced when participants repeat a task, was significantly smaller in participants who had received one of the three emotion inductions (happiness, sadness, embarrassment) than in control group participants (neutral induction). Using the diffusion model ( Ratcliff, 1978 ) to resolve the data into meaningful parameters that correspond to specific psychological components, we found that emotion induction only modulated the parameter reflecting the physiological and/or attentional orienting components, whereas the executive, lexical, and strategic components were not altered. These results suggest that emotional states have an impact on the low-level mechanisms underlying mental chronometric tasks.


Author(s):  
Xu Xu ◽  
Chunyan Kang ◽  
Kaia Sword ◽  
Taomei Guo

Abstract. The ability to identify and communicate emotions is essential to psychological well-being. Yet research focusing exclusively on emotion concepts has been limited. This study examined nouns that represent emotions (e.g., pleasure, guilt) in comparison to nouns that represent abstract (e.g., wisdom, failure) and concrete entities (e.g., flower, coffin). Twenty-five healthy participants completed a lexical decision task. Event-related potential (ERP) data showed that emotion nouns elicited less pronounced N400 than both abstract and concrete nouns. Further, N400 amplitude differences between emotion and concrete nouns were evident in both hemispheres, whereas the differences between emotion and abstract nouns had a left-lateralized distribution. These findings suggest representational distinctions, possibly in both verbal and imagery systems, between emotion concepts versus other concepts, implications of which for theories of affect representations and for research on affect disorders merit further investigation.


1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. Pexman ◽  
C. I. Racicot ◽  
Stephen J. Lupker

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