The processing of Chinese compound words with ambiguous morphemes in sentence context

2018 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Shen ◽  
Xingshan Li ◽  
Alexander Pollatsek
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Processing Route ◽  
Compound Words ◽  
Fixation Durations ◽  
Subordinate Meaning ◽  
Whole Word ◽  
Boundary Paradigm ◽  
Dominant Condition ◽  
Target Words

We employed a boundary paradigm to investigate how Chinese two-character compounds (i.e., compound words) are processed during reading. The first character of the compound was an ambiguous morpheme that had a dominant and subordinate meaning. In Experiment 1, there were three previews of the second character: identical to the target character; the preview provided subordinate biasing information (the subordinate condition); the preview provided dominant biasing information (the dominant condition). An invisible boundary was inserted between the two characters. We found that gaze durations and go-past times on the compounds were longer in the subordinate condition than those in the dominant or identical conditions. In Experiment 2, the semantic similarity between target and preview words in the dominant condition was manipulated to determine whether the differences in fixation durations in Experiment 1 resulted from the semantic similarity between the preview and target words. There were significant fixation duration differences on the target word between the dominant and subordinate conditions only when the preview and target words were semantically related. This finding indicated that the whole-word meaning plays an important role in processing Chinese compounds and that the whole-word access route is the principal processing route in reading two-character compounds in Chinese.

scholarly journals Listeners and Readers Generalise Their Experience With Word Meanings Across Modalities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Anne Gilbert ◽  
Matthew H. Davis ◽  
M. Gareth Gaskell ◽  
Jennifer M Rodd
Keyword(s):  
Priming Effect ◽  
Word Association ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Ambiguous Word ◽  
Semantic Relatedness ◽  
Recent Experience ◽  
Word Meanings ◽  
Ambiguous Words ◽  
Subordinate Meaning ◽  
Target Words

Research has shown that adults’ lexical-semantic representations are surprisingly malleable. For instance, the interpretation of ambiguous words (e.g. bark) is influenced by experience such that recently encountered meanings become more readily available (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013). However the mechanism underlying this word-meaning priming effect remains unclear, and competing accounts make different predictions about the extent to which information about word meanings that is gained within one modality (e.g. speech) is transferred to the other modality (e.g. reading) to aid comprehension. In two web-based experiments, ambiguous target words were primed with either written or spoken sentences that biased their interpretation toward a subordinate meaning, or were unprimed. About 20 minutes after the prime exposure, interpretation of these target words was tested by presenting them in either written or spoken form, using word association (Experiment 1, N=78) and speeded semantic relatedness decisions (Experiment 2, N=181). Both experiments replicated the auditory unimodal priming effect shown previously (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013) and revealed significant cross-modal priming: primed meanings were retrieved more frequently and swiftly across all primed conditions compared to the unprimed baseline. Furthermore, there were no reliable differences in priming levels between unimodal and cross-modal prime-test conditions. These results indicate that recent experience with ambiguous word meanings can bias the reader’s or listener’s later interpretation of these words in a modality-general way. We identify possible loci of this effect within the context of models of long-term priming and ambiguity resolution.

The Direction of Affective Priming as a Function of Trait Anxiety When Naming Target Words With Regular and Irregular Pronunciation

2004 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 180-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael P. Berner ◽  
Markus A. Maier
Keyword(s):  
Trait Anxiety ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Naming Task ◽  
Affective Priming ◽  
Priming Effects ◽  
Expected Effect ◽  
Negative Affective Priming ◽  
Whole Word ◽  
German Data ◽  
Target Words

Abstract. Results from an affective priming experiment confirm the previously reported influence of trait anxiety on the direction of affective priming in the naming task ( Maier, Berner, & Pekrun, 2003 ): On trials in which extremely valenced primes appeared, positive affective priming reversed into negative affective priming with increasing levels of trait anxiety. Using valenced target words with irregular pronunciation did not have the expected effect of increasing the extent to which semantic processes play a role in naming, as affective priming effects were not stronger for irregular targets than for regular targets. This suggests the predominant operation of a whole-word nonsemantic pathway in reading aloud in German. Data from neutral priming trials hint at the possibility that negative affective priming in participants high in trait anxiety is due to inhibition of congruent targets.

scholarly journals Distraction by deviant sounds during reading: An eye-movement study

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (7) ◽  
pp. 1863-1875 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin R Vasilev ◽  
Fabrice BR Parmentier ◽  
Bernhard Angele ◽  
Julie A Kirkby
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Time Course ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Repeated Sequence ◽  
Reading Performance ◽  
Sequence Capture ◽  
Fixation Durations ◽  
Movement Study ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
Target Words

Oddball studies have shown that sounds unexpectedly deviating from an otherwise repeated sequence capture attention away from the task at hand. While such distraction is typically regarded as potentially important in everyday life, previous work has so far not examined how deviant sounds affect performance on more complex daily tasks. In this study, we developed a new method to examine whether deviant sounds can disrupt reading performance by recording participants’ eye movements. Participants read single sentences in silence and while listening to task-irrelevant sounds. In the latter condition, a 50-ms sound was played contingent on the fixation of five target words in the sentence. On most occasions, the same tone was presented (standard sound), whereas on rare and unexpected occasions it was replaced by white noise (deviant sound). The deviant sound resulted in significantly longer fixation durations on the target words relative to the standard sound. A time-course analysis showed that the deviant sound began to affect fixation durations around 180 ms after fixation onset. Furthermore, deviance distraction was not modulated by the lexical frequency of target words. In summary, fixation durations on the target words were longer immediately after the presentation of the deviant sound, but there was no evidence that it interfered with the lexical processing of these words. The present results are in line with the recent proposition that deviant sounds yield a temporary motor suppression and suggest that deviant sounds likely inhibit the programming of the next saccade.

Orthographic Overlap and Category Size in Unconscious Category Priming

2008 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
pp. 350-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Abrams
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Category Size ◽  
Category Priming ◽  
Whole Word ◽  
Comparable Magnitude ◽  
Novel Words

Van den Bussche and Reynvoet (2007, Experiment 1 ) report unconscious priming of comparable magnitude from novel words belonging to small and large categories, evidence that they interpret as demonstrating independence from category size of priming that involves semantic analysis. Three experiments raise the possibility that the findings in Experiment 1c of Van den Bussche and Reynvoet reflect subword processing, not semantic analysis. In Experiments 1 and 2, priming was obtained from primes and targets that shared approximately the same degree of subword features as in Experiment 1c of Van den Bussche and Reynvoet, but no priming occurred when sharing of features was minimized. Experiment 3 demonstrated priming driven by subword features when those features were set in opposition to whole-word meaning. These results indicate that orthographic overlap must be considered a potentially important confound in findings that ostensibly support priming mediated by semantic analysis.

The development of whole-word representations in compound word processing: Evidence from eye fixation patterns of elementary school children

2011 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
TUOMO HÄIKIÖ ◽  
RAYMOND BERTRAM ◽  
JUKKA HYÖNÄ
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
School Children ◽  
Elementary School Children ◽  
Word Processing ◽  
Reading Development ◽  
Sixth Graders ◽  
Second Graders ◽  
Fixation Durations ◽  
Whole Word

ABSTRACTThe role of morphology in reading development was examined by measuring participants’ eye movements while they read sentences containing either a hyphenated (e.g., ulko-ovi “front door”) or concatenated (e.g., autopeli “racing game”) compound. The participants were Finnish second, fourth, and sixth graders (aged 8, 10, and 12 years, respectively). Fast second graders and all four and sixth graders read concatenated compounds faster than hyphenated compounds. This suggests that they resort to slower morpheme-based processing for hyphenated compounds but prefer to process concatenated compounds via whole-word representations. In contrast, slow second graders’ fixation durations were shorter for hyphenated than concatenated compounds. This implies that they process all compounds via constituent morphemes and that hyphenation comes to aid in this process.

Semantic Similarity Measurement Using Knowledge-Augmented Multiple-prototype Distributed Word Vector

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Lu ◽  
Kailun Shi ◽  
Yuanyuan Cai ◽  
Xiaoping Che
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Similarity Measurement ◽  
Prototype Model ◽  
Concept Definition ◽  
Relational Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Similarity Measurement

Recent years, textual semantic similarity measurements play an important role in Natural Language Processing. The semantic similarity between concepts or terms can be measured by various resources like corpora, ontologies, taxonomies, etc. With the development of deep learning, distributed vector models are constructed for extracting the latent semantic information from corpora. Most of existing models create a single prototype vector to represent the meaning of a word such as CBOW. However, due to lexical ambiguity, encoding word meaning with a single vector is problematic. In this work, the authors propose a knowledge-augmented multiple-prototype model by using corpora and ontologies. Based on the distributed word vector learned by the CBOW model, the authors append the concept definition and the relational knowledge vector into the target word vector to enrich the semantic information of the word. Finally, the authors perform the experiments on well-known datasets to verify the efficiency of the authors' approach.

Parts Outweigh the Whole (Word) in Unconscious Analysis of Meaning

2000 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 118-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Abrams ◽  
Anthony G. Greenwald
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Priming ◽  
Word Processing ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Related Word ◽  
Semantic Classification ◽  
Word Level ◽  
Whole Word ◽  
Level Of Analysis

In unconscious semantic priming, an unidentifiable visually masked word (the prime) facilitates semantic classification of a following visible related word (the target). Three experiments reported here provide evidence that masked primes are analyzed mainly at the level of word parts, not whole-word meaning. In Experiment 1, masked nonword primes composed of subword fragments of earlier-viewed targets functioned as effective evaluative primes. (For example, after repeated classification of the targets angel and warm, the nonword anrm acted as an evaluatively positive masked prime.) Experiment 2 showed that this part-word processing was potent enough to oppose analysis at the whole-word level. Thus, smile functioned as an evaluatively negative (!) masked prime after repeated classification of smut and bile. Experiment 3 found no priming when masked word primes contained no parts of earlier targets. These results suggest that robust unconscious priming (a) is driven by analysis of part-word information and (b) requires previous classification of visible targets that contain the fragments later serving as primes. Contrary to a widely held view, analysis of subliminal primes appears not to function at the level of analysis of complete words.

Semantic Similarity Measurement Using Knowledge-Augmented Multiple-prototype Distributed Word Vector

2020 ◽  
pp. 737-749
Author(s):  
Wei Lu ◽  
Kailun Shi ◽  
Yuanyuan Cai ◽  
Xiaoping Che
Keyword(s):  
Deep Learning ◽  
Semantic Similarity ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Word Meaning ◽  
Similarity Measurement ◽  
Prototype Model ◽  
Concept Definition ◽  
Relational Knowledge ◽  
Semantic Similarity Measurement

Recent years, textual semantic similarity measurements play an important role in Natural Language Processing. The semantic similarity between concepts or terms can be measured by various resources like corpora, ontologies, taxonomies, etc. With the development of deep learning, distributed vector models are constructed for extracting the latent semantic information from corpora. Most of existing models create a single prototype vector to represent the meaning of a word such as CBOW. However, due to lexical ambiguity, encoding word meaning with a single vector is problematic. In this work, the authors propose a knowledge-augmented multiple-prototype model by using corpora and ontologies. Based on the distributed word vector learned by the CBOW model, the authors append the concept definition and the relational knowledge vector into the target word vector to enrich the semantic information of the word. Finally, the authors perform the experiments on well-known datasets to verify the efficiency of the authors' approach.

The measurement of whole-word productions

2002 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 713-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID INGRAM
Keyword(s):  
Sample Size ◽  
Cochlear Implants ◽  
Bilingual Children ◽  
Phonological Acquisition ◽  
Central Measure ◽  
Target Form ◽  
Whole Word ◽  
Mean Length Of Utterance ◽  
Target Words

Attempts to measure phonological acquisition have largely focused on segments, with less effort made to examine whole-word productions. This article proposes four measures designed to estimate a child's whole-word abilities: 1. the PHONOLOGICAL MEAN LENGTH OF UTTERANCE, a measure of whole-word complexity for both child and target words, 2. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD PROXIMITY, a measure of the proximity between the child's word and its target form, 3. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD CORRECTNESS, a measure of the number of words produced correctly relative to the sample size, and 4. the PROPORTION OF WHOLE-WORD VARIABILITY, a measure of how often a child produces words in distinct phonological shapes. The central measure is the Phonological Mean Length of Utterance, which can be used to identify a child's stage of acquisition, to assess proximity to target words, and to evaluate the complexity of words. The value of the new measures will be demonstrated through preliminary applications to a range of contexts; i.e. monolingual children acquiring English (five children, 0;11 to 1;5), Cantonese (one child, 1;7), and Spanish (5 children, 2;2 to 2;11), bilingual children acquiring Hungarian-English (one child, 2;0) and Spanish-English (3 children, 2;4 to 2;11), children with phonological impairment (eighteen children, 2;11 to 5;3), and children with cochlear implants (six children, 4;5 to 7;11).

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