SpaVerb-WN—A megastudy of naming times for 4562 Spanish verbs: Effects of psycholinguistic and motor content variables

Several studies have been carried out in various languages to explore the role of the main psycholinguistic variables in word naming, mainly in nouns. However, reading of verbs has not been explored to the same extent, despite the differences that have been found between the processing of nouns and verbs. To reduce this research gap, we present here SpaVerb-WN, a megastudy of word naming in Spanish, with response times (RT) for 4562 verbs. RT were obtained from at least 20 healthy adult participants in a reading-aloud task. Several research questions on the role of syllable frequency, word length, neighbourhood, frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and the novel variable ‘motor content’ in verb naming were also examined. Linear mixed-effects model analyses indicated that (1) RT increase in with increasing word length and with decreasing neighbourhood size, (2) syllable frequency does not show a significant effect on RT, (3) AoA mediates the effect of motor content, with a positive slope of motor content at low AoA scores and a negative slope at high AoA scores, and (4) there is an interaction between word frequency and AoA, in which the AoA effect for low-frequency verbs gradually decreases as frequency increases. The results are discussed in relation to existing evidence and in the context of the consistency of the spelling–sound mappings in Spanish.

On the processing of nonwords in word naming and auditory lexical decision

Nonwords are often used to clarify how lexical processing takes place in the absence of semantics. This study shows that nonwords are not semantically vacuous. We used Linear Discriminative Learning (Baayen et al., 2019) to estimate the meanings of nonwords in the MALD database (Tucker et al., 2018) from the speech signal. We show that measures gauging nonword semantics significantly improve model fit for both acoustic durations and RTs. Although nonwords do not evoke meanings that afford conscious reflexion, they do make contact with the semantic space, and the angles and distances of nonwords with respect to actual words co-determine articulation and lexicality decisions.

Patterns of Language Impairment in Early ALS

ABSTRACTObjective.To investigate the incidence and nature of language change and its relationship to executive dysfunction in a population-based incident ALS sample, with the hypothesis that patterns of frontotemporal involvement in early ALS extend beyond areas of executive control to regions associated with language processing.Methods.One hundred and seventeen population-based incident ALS cases without dementia and 100 controls matched by age, sex and education were included in the study. A detailed assessment of language processing including lexical processing, word spelling, word reading, word naming, semantic processing and syntactic/grammatical processing was undertaken. Executive domains of phonemic verbal fluency, working memory, problem-solving, cognitive flexibility and social cognition were also evaluated.Results.Language processing was impaired in this incident cohort of individuals with ALS, with deficits in the domains of word naming, orthographic processing and syntactic/grammatical processing. Conversely, phonological lexical processing and semantic processing were spared. While executive dysfunction accounted in part for impairments in grammatical and orthographic lexical processing, word spelling, reading and naming, primary language deficits were also present.Conclusions.Language impairment is characteristic of ALS at early stages of the disease, and can develop independently of executive dysfunction, reflecting selective patterns of frontotemporal involvement at disease onset. Language change is therefore an important component of the frontotemporal syndrome associated with ALS.

Word-Finding Behaviors of Discourse Production Task in Healthy Elderly Adults

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate whether there is a difference in word-finding behaviors in the discourse production task according to the age group of the elderly, from the young-old to the old-old.Methods: A total of 103 healthy elderly adults (55 to 85 years old) participated in this study. To exanimation of word-finding behaviors in the discourse, a picture description task was used. And, as the word naming task, the confrontational naming and the verbal fluency tasks were used.Results: First, according to the age group, the difference in the ratio of word-finding behaviors were statistically significant. Especially, there were significant differences according to the age group of the elderly in word-finding behaviors of repetitions, empty words, insertions, and delays. Second, the difference in performances of word naming task (Korean version-Boston Naming Test and semantic verbal fluency) according to the age group of the elderly was found to be significant. Finally, the performance of the word naming task showed a significant correlation with the ratio of word-finding behaviors in the discourse production task.Conclusion: This study has clinical significance in that it analyzed various word-finding behaviors in a natural environment where the problem of naming appears in elderly adults.

The hunt for the Age of Acquisition effect: It’s in the links!

The Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect is such that words acquired early in life are processed more quickly than later-acquired words. One explanation for the AoA effects is the arbitrary mapping hypothesis (Ellis & Lambon-Ralph, 2000), stating that the AoA effects are more likely to occur in items that have an arbitrary, rather than a systematic, nature between input and output. Previous behavioural findings have shown that the AoA effects are larger in pictorial than word items. However, no behavioural studies have attempted to directly assess the AoA effects in relation to the connections between representations. In the first two experiments, 48 participants completed a word-picture verification task (Experiments 1A and 2A), together with a spoken (Experiment 1B) or written (Experiment 2B) picture naming task. In the third and fourth experiments, 48 participants complete a picture-word verification task (Experiments 3A and 4A), together with a spoken (Experiment 3B) or written (Experiment 4B) word naming task. For each pair of experiments the subtraction of the naming latencies from the verification tasks for each item per participant was calculated (Experiments 1-4C; e.g. Santiago, Mackay, Palma & Rho, 2000). Results showed that early-acquired items were responded to more quickly than late-acquired ones for all experiments, except for Experiment 3B (spoken word naming) where the AoA effect was shown for only low-frequency words. In addition, the subtraction results for pictorial stimuli demonstrated strong AoA effects. This strengthens the case for the AM hypothesis, also suggesting the AoA effect resides in the connections between representations.

Retrieving L2 word stress from orthography: Evidence from word naming and cross-modal priming

In this paper we investigated how L1 word stress affects L2 word naming for cognates and non-cognates in two lexical stress languages, Brazilian Portuguese (BP, L1) and American English (AE, L2). In Experiment 1, BP-AE bilinguals named a mixed list of disyllabic moderate frequency words in L1 (Portuguese) and L2 (English). In Experiment 2, Portuguese-English bilinguals named English (L2) disyllabic target words presented simultaneously with auditory Portuguese (L1) disyllabic primes. It is concluded that word stress has a task-dependent role to play in bilingual word naming and must be incorporated in bilingual models of lexical production and lexical perception and reading aloud models.

The Influence of Phonomotor Treatment on Word Retrieval: Insights From Naming Errors

Purpose An increasing number of anomia treatment studies have coupled traditional word retrieval accuracy outcome measures with more fine-grained analysis of word retrieval errors to allow for more comprehensive measurement of treatment-induced changes in word retrieval. The aim of this study was to examine changes in picture naming errors after phonomotor treatment. Method Twenty-eight individuals with aphasia received 60 hr of phonomotor treatment, an intensive, phoneme-based therapy for anomia. Confrontation naming was assessed pretreatment, immediately posttreatment, and 3 months posttreatment for trained and untrained nouns. Responses were scored for accuracy and coded for error type, and error proportions of each error type (e.g., semantic, phonological, omission) were compared: pre- versus posttreatment and pretreatment versus 3 months posttreatment. Results The group of treatment participants improved in whole-word naming accuracy on trained items and maintained their improvement. Treatment effects also generalized to untrained nouns at the maintenance testing phase. Additionally, participants demonstrated a decrease in proportions of omission and description errors on trained items immediately posttreatment. Conclusions Along with generalized improved whole-word naming accuracy, results of the error analysis suggest that a global (i.e., both lexical–semantic and phonological) change in lexical knowledge underlies the observed changes in confrontation naming accuracy following phonomotor treatment.