Arousal and emotional valence interact in written word recognition

A group of children with speech-language impairments was identified in kindergarten and given a battery of speech-language tests and measures of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming. Subjects were followed in first and second grades and administered tests of written word recognition and reading comprehension. The children with speech-language impairments were found to perform less well on reading tests than a nonimpaired comparison group. Subjects’ performance on standardized measures of language ability in kindergarten was observed to be closely related to reading outcome, especially reading comprehension. Measures of phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming, on the other hand, were found to be the best predictors of written word recognition. The implications of these findings for the early identification and remediation of reading disabilities are discussed.

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Decomposition in a non-concatenated morphological structure involves more than just the roots: Evidence from fast priming

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology ◽

10.1080/17470218.2016.1250788 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 71 (1) ◽

pp. 85-92 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

Author(s):

Avital Deutsch ◽

Hadas Velan ◽

Tamar Michaly

Keyword(s):

Word Recognition ◽

Morphological Structure ◽

Facilitatory Effect ◽

Sentence Reading ◽

Priming Paradigm ◽

Written Word ◽

Complex Words ◽

Phonological Unit ◽

Word Pattern

Complex words in Hebrew are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: a consonantal root embedded in a nominal or verbal word-pattern morpho-phonological unit made up of vowels or vowels and consonants. Research on written-word recognition has revealed a robust effect of the roots and the verbal-patterns, but not of the nominal-patterns, on word recognition. These findings suggest that the Hebrew lexicon is organized and accessed via roots. We explored the hypothesis that the absence of a nominal-pattern effect reflects methodological limitations of the experimental paradigms used in previous studies. Specifically, the potential facilitative effect induced by a shared nominal-pattern was counteracted by an interference effect induced by the competition between the roots of two words derived from different roots but with the same nominal-pattern. In the current study, a fast-priming paradigm for sentence reading and a “delayed-letters” procedure were used to isolate the initial effect of nominal-patterns on lexical access. The results, based on eye-fixation latency, demonstrated a facilitatory effect induced by nominal-pattern primes relative to orthographic control primes when presented for 33 or 42 ms. The results are discussed in relation to the role of the word-pattern as an organizing principle of the Hebrew lexicon, together with the roots.

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Pupillary responses to affective words in bilinguals' first versus second language

10.1101/506998 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Wilhelmiina Toivo ◽

Christoph Scheepers

Keyword(s):

Second Language ◽

Word Recognition ◽

Emotional Valence ◽

Control Group ◽

Emotional Involvement ◽

Pupillary Responses ◽

Emotional Resonance ◽

Post Trial ◽

Specific Control ◽

Late Bilinguals

Late bilinguals often report less emotional involvement in their second language, a phenomenon called reduced emotional resonance in L2. The present study measured pupil dilation in response to high- versus low-arousing words (e.g., riot vs. swamp) in German-English and Finnish-English late bilinguals, both in their first and in their second language. A third sample of English monolingual speakers (tested only in English) served as a control group. To improve on previous research, we controlled for lexical confounds such as length, frequency, emotional valence, and abstractness – both within and across languages. Results showed no appreciable differences in post-trial word recognition judgements (98% recognition on average), but reliably stronger pupillary effects of the arousal manipulation when stimuli were presented in participants' first rather than second language. This supports the notion of reduced emotional resonance in L2. Our findings are unlikely to be due to differences in stimulus-specific control variables or to potential word-recognition difficulties in participants' second language. Linguistic relatedness between first and second language (German-English vs. Finnish-English) was also not found to have a modulating influence.

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