scholarly journals Age of Acquisition and Spoken Words: Examining Hemispheric Differences in Lexical Processing

2022 ◽  
pp. 002383092110684
Author(s):  
Julio González-Alvarez ◽  
Teresa Cervera-Crespo
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
Hemispheric Differences ◽  
Objective Criterion ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Spoken Words

The relationship between the age of acquisition (AoA) of words and their cerebral hemispheric representation is controversial because the experimental results have been contradictory. However, most of the lexical processing experiments were performed with stimuli consisting of written words. If we want to compare the processing of words learned very early in infancy—when children cannot read—with words learned later, it seems more logical to employ spoken words as experimental stimuli. This study, based on the auditory lexical decision task, used spoken words that were classified according to an objective criterion of AoA with extremely distant means (2.88 vs. 9.28 years old). As revealed by the reaction times, both early and late words were processed more efficiently in the left hemisphere, with no AoA × Hemisphere interaction. The results are discussed from a theoretical point of view, considering that all the experiments were conducted using adult participants.

scholarly journals Judging the Animacy of Words: The Influence of Typicality and Age of Acquisition in a Semantic Decision Task

2017 ◽  
Vol 70 (10) ◽  
pp. 2094-2104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romy Räling ◽  
Sandra Hanne ◽  
Astrid Schröder ◽  
Carla Keßler ◽  
Isabell Wartenburger
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Processing ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Semantic Category ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Semantic Domain ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Semantic Decision ◽  
Semantic Decision Task ◽  
Main Effects

The age at which members of a semantic category are learned (age of acquisition), the typicality they demonstrate within their corresponding category, and the semantic domain to which they belong (living, non-living) are known to influence the speed and accuracy of lexical/semantic processing. So far, only a few studies have looked at the origin of age of acquisition and its interdependence with typicality and semantic domain within the same experimental design. Twenty adult participants performed an animacy decision task in which nouns were classified according to their semantic domain as being living or non-living. Response times were influenced by the independent main effects of each parameter: typicality, age of acquisition, semantic domain, and frequency. However, there were no interactions. The results are discussed with respect to recent models concerning the origin of age of acquisition effects.

Interlingual homograph recognition: Effects of task demands and language intermixing

1998 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
TON DIJKSTRA ◽  
HENK VAN JAARSVELD ◽  
SJOERD TEN BRINKE
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Task Demands ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Stimulus List ◽  
Task Requirements ◽  
Series Of Experiments ◽  
Interlingual Homographs

A series of three lexical decision experiments showed that interlingual homographs may be recognized faster than, slower than, or as fast as monolingual control words depending on task requirements and language intermixing. In Experiment 1, Dutch bilingual participants performed an English lexical decision task including English/Dutch homographs, cognates, and purely English control words. Reaction times to interlingual homographs were unaffected by the frequency of the Dutch reading and did not differ from monolingual controls. In contrast, cognates were recognized faster than controls. In Experiment 2, Dutch participants again performed an English lexical decision task on homographs, but, apart from nonwords, Dutch words were included which required a “no” reaction. Strong inhibition effects were obtained which depended on the relative frequency difference of the two readings of the homograph. These turned into frequency-dependent facilitation effects in Experiment 3, where participants performed a general lexical decision task, responding “yes” if a word of either language was presented. It is argued that bilingual word recognition models can only account for the series of experiments if they explain how lexical processing is affected by task demands and stimulus list composition.

scholarly journals On the Relationship between Frequency, Features, and Markedness in Inflection: Experimental Evidence from Russian Nouns

Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 130
Author(s):  
Jeff Parker
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Frequency Features ◽  
Inflectional Affixes

Markedness has a long tradition in linguistics as a way to describe linguistic asymmetries. In this paper, I investigate an argument about the necessity of markedness as a tool for capturing the structural distribution of inflectional affixes and predicting the behavioral consequences of that distribution. Based on evidence from German adjectives, Clahsen et al. argue that the number of specified features of inflectional affixes (which I argue represents a type of markedness) affects reaction times in lexical access. Affixes’ features, however, overlap with how frequently they occur. Clahsen et al. investigate only three affixes in German, leaving open questions about the relationship between the two factors and whether features are necessary as a predictor of lexical processing. In this paper, I use a larger set of inflectional affixes in Russian to test the relationship between affix features and affix frequency. I find that the two traits of affixes are correlated based on frequencies from a corpus and that in a lexical decision task, affix frequency is the better predictor of response times. My results suggest that we should question the necessity of featural markedness for explaining how inflectional structure is processed and, more generally, that both corpus and experimental data suggest a surprisingly close relationship between affix features and affix frequency.

scholarly journals Task Context Effects in Bilingual Nonword Processing

2009 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Lemhöfer ◽  
Ralph Radach
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Lexical Decision Task ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Context Effects ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Task Context ◽  
Nonword Processing

To investigate the language-specific or language-integrated nature of bilingual lexical processing in different task contexts, we studied how bilinguals process nonwords that differ in their relative resemblance to the bilinguals’ two languages in different versions of the lexical decision task. Unbalanced German-English bilinguals performed a pure-German, a pure-English, and a mixed lexical decision task on the same set of nonwords that were either very English-like or very German-like. Rejection latencies for these two nonword categories were reversed in the pure-English and pure-German conditions: Nonwords that were more similar to the current target language were rejected more slowly. In the mixed task, reaction times were generally slower, and nonwords resembling the participants’ subdominant language (English) were harder to reject. The results suggest that task context substantially alters the criteria for the word/nonword decision in bilinguals.

scholarly journals German in childhood and Latin in adolescence: On the bidialectal nature of lexical access in English

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo E. Hernandez ◽  
Juliana Ronderos ◽  
Jean Philippe Bodet ◽  
Hannah Claussenius-Kalman ◽  
My V. H. Nguyen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Nonnative Speakers ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds

AbstractThe nature of word etymology, long a topic of interest in linguistics, has been considered to a much lesser extent in the word recognition literature. The present study created a database of overlapping words from the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and a database with the age of acquisition (AoA) norms which were categorized as either Germanic or Latin-based. Results revealed that Germanic words were learned earlier than Latin-based words. Germanic words also showed slower reaction times and higher accuracy relative to Latin-based words even when controlling for AoA, word frequency, and length. Additionally, analyses were conducted using a publicly available database that used the English Crowdsourcing Project (ECP) data with native and second language (L2) English speakers. The results with native speakers were similar to those collected with the ELP. However, nonnative speakers showed better accuracy and faster reaction times for Latin-based words compared to Germanic words. The findings support a bidialectal view of English in that Germanic words serve as the base of lexical processing during childhood, whereas Latin-based words fill in the lexical space across adolescence and into early adulthood. Furthermore, L2 speakers appear to acquire English via more advanced Latin-based vocabulary relative to native speakers. These results carry implications for theories of word recognition and the processing of lexical items in populations that come from linguistically diverse backgrounds.

scholarly journals German in childhood and Latin in adolescence: On the bidialectal nature of lexical access in English

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arturo E Hernandez ◽  
Juliana Ronderos ◽  
Tres Bodet ◽  
Hannah Claussenius-Kalman ◽  
Ferenc Bunta
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Lexical Access ◽  
Lexical Processing ◽  
Early Adulthood ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Linguistically Diverse ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Diverse Backgrounds ◽  
Lexical Items

The nature of word etymology, long a topic of interest in linguistics, has been considered to a much lesser extent in the word recognition literature. The present study created a database of overlapping words from the English Lexicon Project and a database with age of acquisition (AoA) norms which were categorized as either Germanic or Latin-based. Results revealed that Germanic words were learned earlier than Latin-based words. Germanic words also showed lower reaction times and higher accuracy relative to Latin-based words even when controlling for AoA, word frequency and length. The findings support a bidialectal view of English in that Germanic words serve as the base of lexical processing during childhood, whereas Latin-based words fill in the lexical space across adolescence and into early adulthood. These results carry implications for theories of word recognition and the processing of lexical items in populations that come from linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Individual Differences and Hemispheric Asymmetry While Processing Emotional Words

2014 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 137-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay M. Niccolai ◽  
Thomas Holtgraves
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Hemispheric Asymmetry ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Decision Task ◽  
Depression And Anxiety ◽  
Hemispheric Differences ◽  
Affective Valence ◽  
Emotional Words ◽  
Emotion Words ◽  
The Right

This research examined differences in the perception of emotion words as a function of individual differences in subclinical levels of depression and anxiety. Participants completed measures of depression and anxiety and performed a lexical decision task for words varying in affective valence (but equated for arousal) that were presented briefly to the right or left visual field. Participants with a lower level of depression demonstrated hemispheric asymmetry with a bias toward words presented to the left hemisphere, but participants with a higher level of depression displayed no hemispheric differences. Participants with a lower level of depression also demonstrated a bias toward positive words, a pattern that did not occur for participants with a higher level of depression. A similar pattern occurred for anxiety. Overall, this study demonstrates how variability in levels of depression and anxiety can influence the perception of emotion words, with patterns that are consistent with past research.

Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation

2015 ◽  
Vol 62 (5) ◽  
pp. 346-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Franco ◽  
Julia Eberlen ◽  
Arnaud Destrebecqz ◽  
Axel Cleeremans ◽  
Julie Bertels
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Learning ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Visual Presentation ◽  
Detection Task ◽  
Speech Segmentation ◽  
Auditory Presentation ◽  
Indirect Measure ◽  
Speech Stream ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Presentation Procedure

Abstract. The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure is a method widely used in visual perception research. In this paper we propose an adaptation of this method which can be used with auditory material and enables assessment of statistical learning in speech segmentation. Adult participants were exposed to an artificial speech stream composed of statistically defined trisyllabic nonsense words. They were subsequently instructed to perform a detection task in a Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation (RSAP) stream in which they had to detect a syllable in a short speech stream. Results showed that reaction times varied as a function of the statistical predictability of the syllable: second and third syllables of each word were responded to faster than first syllables. This result suggests that the RSAP procedure provides a reliable and sensitive indirect measure of auditory statistical learning.

Timber Auctions in the Context of the Modern Auction Theory

2007 ◽  
pp. 86-94
Author(s):  
A. Manakov
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Auction Theory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Theoretical Point ◽  
English Auction ◽  
Analysis And Evaluation

The article provides theoretical analysis and evaluation of the timber auctions reforms in Russia. The author shows that the mechanism of the "combined auctions", which functioned until recently, is more appropriate from the theoretical point of view (and from the point of view of the Russian practice) as compared to the officially approved format of the English auction.

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