The Effects of Orthographic Neighborhood Size and the Influence of Individual Differences in Linguistic Skills During the Recognition of Chinese Words

There are still inconsistencies as to whether frequency and orthographic neighborhood size affect the reading and recognition of Chinese words. In addition, research on Chinese reading still adheres to the view that “all skilled readers read in the same way” and pays little attention to the influence of individual differences in linguistic skills on word recognition. In this research, we studied the recognition of Chinese two-character words in a lexical decision task (LDT) by manipulating neighborhood size and word frequency and controlling the frequency of the initial constituent character. Individual differences in linguistic skills were assessed through tests of spelling and reading comprehension. The results showed that: (1) A larger orthographic neighborhood size of the initial character had a facilitative effect on Chinese word recognition. The orthographic neighborhood size effect is modulated by word frequency, but this modulation effect was not stable. (2) Spelling and reading comprehension skills are good indicators to assess individual differences in Chinese linguistic skills, and they are significantly correlated. (3) Individual differences in linguistic skills influence the neighborhood size effect, which is moderated by word frequency.

Eye Movement Measures of Within-Language and Cross-Language Activation During Reading in Monolingual and Bilingual Children and Adults: A Focus on Neighborhood Density Effects

We used eye movement measures of first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) paragraph reading to investigate how the activation of multiple lexical candidates, both within and across languages, influences visual word recognition in four different age and language groups: (1) monolingual children; (2) monolingual young adults; (3) bilingual children; and (4) bilingual young adults. More specifically, we focused on within-language and cross-language orthographic neighborhood density effects, while controlling for the potentially confounding effects of orthographic neighborhood frequency. We found facilitatory within-language orthographic neighborhood density effects (i.e., words were easier to process when they had many vs. few orthographic neighbors, evidenced by shorter fixation durations) across the L1 and L2, with larger effects in children vs. adults (especially the bilingual ones) during L1 reading. Similarly, we found facilitatory cross-language neighborhood density effects across the L1 and L2, with no modulatory influence of age or language group. Taken together, our findings suggest that word recognition benefits from the simultaneous activation of visually similar word forms during naturalistic reading, with some evidence of larger effects in children and particularly those whose words may have differentially lower baseline activation levels and/or weaker links between word-related information due to divided language exposure: bilinguals.

A Spatiotemporal Map of Reading Aloud

Reading words aloud is a foundational aspect of the acquisition of literacy. The rapid rate at which multiple distributed neural substrates are engaged in this process can only be probed via techniques with high spatiotemporal resolution. We used direct intracranial recordings in a large cohort to create a holistic yet fine-grained map of word processing, enabling us to derive the spatiotemporal neural codes of multiple word attributes critical to reading: lexicality, word frequency and orthographic neighborhood. We found that lexicality is encoded by early activity in mid-fusiform (mFus) cortex and precentral sulcus. Word frequency is also first represented in mFus followed by later engagement of the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and inferior parietal sulcus (IPS), and orthographic neighborhood is encoded solely in the IPS. A lexicality decoder revealed high weightings for electrodes in the mFus, IPS, anterior IFG and the pre-central sulcus. These results elaborate the neural codes underpinning extant dual-route models of reading, with parallel processing via the lexical route, progressing from mFus to IFG, and the sub-lexical route, progressing from IPS to anterior IFG.

BasiScript

This short paper introduces BasiScript, a 9-million-word corpus of contemporary Dutch texts written by primary school children. The data were collected over three years with 17,216 children contributing texts throughout this period. Each word token in the corpus is annotated with the correct orthographical form, the associated lemma and the part of speech. The most frequent polysemous words have been annotated for word meaning, while all words in the lexicon that was derived from the BasiScript corpus have been annotated for corpus and subcorpora frequency, dispersion, length, family size, family frequency, orthographic neighborhood size, and orthographic neighborhood frequency. Images of the texts are available to researchers. The present article describes the corpus and presents a comparison of BasiScript with BasiLex (a Dutch corpus with texts primary school children are likely to read, completed in 2015) by means of frequency profiling.

Attentional modulation of orthographic neighborhood effects during reading: Evidence from event-related brain potentials in a psychological refractory period paradigm

It is often assumed that word reading proceeds automatically. Here, we tested this assumption by recording event-related potentials during a psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, requiring lexical decisions about written words. Specifically, we selected words differing in their orthographic neighborhood size – the number of words that can be obtained from a target by exchanging a single letter – and investigated how influences of this variable depend on the availability of central attention. As expected, when attentional resources for lexical decisions were unconstrained, words with many orthographic neighbors elicited larger N400 amplitudes than those with few neighbors. However, under conditions of high temporal overlap with a high priority primary task, the N400 effect disappeared. This finding indicates strong attentional influences on the incidental processing of orthographic neighbors during word reading, providing novel evidence against the automaticity of processes involved in word reading. Furthermore, in conjunction with the observation of an underadditive interaction between stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and orthographic neighborhood size in lexical decision performance, commonly taken to indicate automaticity, our results raise issues concerning the standard logic of cognitive slack in the PRP paradigm.