Phonological priming in auditory word recognition : Initial overlap facilitation effect varies as a function of target word frequency

International audience

Manulex-infra: Distributional characteristics of grapheme—phoneme mappings, and infralexical and lexical units in child-directed written material

It is well known that the statistical characteristics of a language, such as word frequency or the consistency of the relationships between orthography and phonology, influence literacy acquisition. Accordingly, linguistic databases play a central role by compiling quantitative and objective estimates about the principal variables that affect reading and writing acquisition. We describe a new set of Web-accessible databases of French orthography whose main characteristic is that they are based on frequency analyses of words occurring in reading books used in the elementary school grades. Quantitative estimates were made for several infralexical variables (syllable, grapheme-to-phoneme mappi…

Musical structure modulates semantic priming in vocal music.

It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A.,Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. Cognition, 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further by investigating how musical harmony may potentially interfere with the processing of words in vocal music. Eight-chord sung sentences were presented, their last word being either semantically related (La girafe a un tres grand cou, The giraffe has a very long neck) or unrelated to the previous linguistic context (La girafe a un tres grand pied, The gi…

Learning nonadjacent dependencies : No need for algebraic-like computations.

Is it possible to learn the relation between 2 nonadjacent events? M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002) claimed this to be possible, but only in conditions suggesting the involvement of algebraic-like computations. The present article reports simulation studies and experimental data showing that the observations on which Pena et al. grounded their reasoning were flawed by deep methodological inadequacies. When the invalid data are set aside, the available evidence fits exactly with the predictions of a theory relying on ubiquitous associative mechanisms. Because nonadjacent dependencies are frequent in natural language, this reappraisal has far-reaching implications for t…

Do Phonological Codes Constrain the Selection of Orthographic Codes in Written Picture Naming?

Sound-to-print consistency of picture labels was manipulated in five experiments to investigate whether phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes in written picture naming. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants wrote down picture names which were inconsistent or consistent in the phono-orthographic mapping defined either at the level of the word unit, i.e., heterographic homophones versus nonhomophones (Experiment 1), or at the sublexical level (Experiment 2). In neither experiment did phonographic consistency affect written latencies. Although more errors were observed for inconsistent than for consistent picture names, the observation of a similar error pattern in an…

Inhibitory priming in auditory word recognition: Is it really the product of response biases ?

Les études en amorçage phonologique ont révélé des temps de réponse plus lents lorsque des mots cibles sont précédés d’une amorce partageant avec eux les premiers phonèmes. Cependant, l’interprétation de l’effet d’amorçage inhibiteur est source de controverses. Alors que certains auteurs ont interprété l’effet comme reflétant des processus lexicaux, Pitt et Shoaf (2002) ont émis l’hypothèse que l’effet résulterait d’une surprise des participants lorsqu’ils rencontrent le premier essai relié. Pour éviter un tel biais de réponse, nous avons inclus des amorces et des cibles reliées dans la session d’entraînement, et nous avons comparé comme l’ont fait Pitt et  Shoaf, l’amplitude de l’effet sur…

Musical stucture modulates semantic priming in vocal music.

International audience

Les effets de compétition lors de la reconnaissance des mots parlés : Quand l'inhibition bottom-up joue un rôle

Is perception a two-way street ?The case of feedback consistency in visual word recognition

It is generally assumed that during reading, the activation produced over orthographic units feeds forward to phonological units. Supporting interactive models of word recognition, Stone, Vanhoy, and Van Orden (1997) recently claimed that phonological activation reverberates to orthographic processing units and consequently constrains orthographic encoding. They found that the consistency of the relations between phonology and orthography (feedback consistency) influenced lexical decision performance. We explored the effect in five experiments conducted with French words. Although feedback consistency affected writing performance, no significant effect was observed in lexical decision even …

Apprendre sa langue maternelle , une question de statistique ?

in "Pour La Science", janvier

The exploitation of distributional information in syllable processing

There is now growing evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical regularities embedded into linguistic utterances, but the exact nature of the distributional information to which human performance is sensitive is an issue that has been surprisingly neglected as yet. In order to address this issue, we first propose an overview of some basic measures of association, going from the simple co-occurrence frequency to the normative measure of contingency, rw: We then report an experiment collecting judgments of word-likeness as a function of the relationship between the phonemes composing the rimes (VC). The contingency between Vs and Cs, as assessed by rw; was the best predictor of chi…

A new set of 299 pictures for psycholinguistic studies : French norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, age of acquisition, and naming latencies.

Pictures are often used as stimuli in studies of perception, language, and memory. Since performances on different sets of pictures are generally contrasted, stimulus selection requires the use of standardized material to match pictures across different variables. Unfortunately, the number of standardized pictures available for empirical research is rather limited. The aim of the present study is to provide French normative data for a new set of 299 black-and-white drawings. Alario and Ferrand (1999) were closely followed in that the pictures were standardized on six variables: name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisit…

Masked form priming in writing words from pictures: evidence for direct retrieval of orthographic codes.

Three experiments used the masked priming paradigm to investigate the role of orthographic and phonological information in written picture naming. In all the experiments, participants had to write the names of pictures as quickly as possible under three different priming conditions. Nonword primes could be: (1) phonologically and orthographically related to the picture name; (2) orthographically related as in (1) but phonologically related to a lesser degree than in (1); (3) orthographically and phonologically unrelated except for the first consonant (or consonant cluster). Orthographic priming effects were observed with a prime exposure duration of 34 ms (Experiments 1 and 2) and of 51 ms …

Lexical competition in phonological priming: Assessing the role of phonological match and mismatch lengths between primes and targets

In five experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B replicate and extend Slowiaczek and Hamburger's (1992) observation that inhibitory effects occur when the prime and the target share the first three phonemes (e.g., /bRiz/-/bRik/) but not when they share the first two phonemes (e.g., /bRepsilonz/-/bRik/). This observation suggests that lexical competition depends on the length of the phonological match between the prime and the target. However, Experiment 2 revealed that an overlap of two phonemes is sufficient to cause an inhibitory effect provided that the primes mismatched the targets only on the…

New evidence for chunk-based models in word segmentation.

International audience; : There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables. As an alternative, chunk-based models posit that the sensitivity to statistics results from other processes, whereby many potential chunks are considered as candidate words, then selected as a function of their relevance. These two classes of models have proven to be difficult to dissociate. We propose here a procedure, which lea…

Consistency and word-frequency effects on spelling among first- to fifth-grade French children : A regression-based study.

We describe a large-scale regression study that examines the influence of lexical (word frequency, lexical neighborhood) and sublexical (feedforward and feedback consistency) variables on spelling accuracy among first, second, and third- to fifth-graders. The wordset analyzed contained 3430 French words. Predictors in the stepwise regression analyses were grade-level-based and compiled from child-directed written materials. In all grades, feedforward consistency and word frequency had independent effects. However, whereas the feedforward-consistency contribution remained high and did not vary across grades, the impact of word frequency exhibited a massive jump between first and second grade…

L'influence de la consistance des relations phono graphiques et grapho-phonologiques dans la production orthographique chez l'enfant du CP au CM2 : une étude en régressions multiples avec des normes distributionnelles par niveau scolaire

Do we need algebraic-like computations? A reply to Bonatti, Pena, Nespor, and Mehler (2006).

L. L. Bonatti, M. Pena, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2006) argued that P. Perruchet, M. D. Tyler, N. Galland, and R. Peereman (2004) confused the notions of segmentation and generalization by ignoring the evidence for generalization in M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002). In this reply, the authors reformulate and complement their initial arguments, showing that their way of dealing with segmentation and generalization is not due to confusion or ignorance but rather to the fact that the tests used in Pena et al. make it likely that neither segmentation nor generalization were captured in their experiments. Finally, the authors address the challenge posed by Pena et al. of a…

Orthographic and Phonological Neighborhoods in Naming: Not All Neighbors Are Equally Influential in Orthographic Space

Abstract The neighborhood size effect refers to the finding that single word naming is faster for stimuli that are orthographically similar to numerous lexical entries. We explored the nature of this phenomenon in five experiments with French pseudowords and words, and we examined the orthographic and the phonological characteristics of neighbors through quantitative analyses of a word corpus. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that the facilitatory effect of neighborhood size was determined by a subset of neighbors, called phonographic neighbors, which are also phonologically similar to the target letter string. Experiments 3 to 5 aimed at assessing the influence of phonographic neighbors as a fun…

Manulex-Infra: Distributional characteristics of grapheme-phoneme mappings, infra-lexical and lexical units in child-directed written material.

International audience

Inhibitory priming effects in auditory word recognition: when the target’s competitors conflict with the prime word

International audience

Where is the syllable priming effect in visual word recognition?

Recent studies using the masked priming paradigm have reported facilitating effects of syllable primes in French and English word naming (Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996; Ferrand, Segui, & Humphreys, 1997). However, other studies have not been able to replicate these effects in Dutch and English (Schiller, 1998, 1999, 2000). In Experiment 1, using the same stimuli and procedure as Ferrand et al. (1996), we did not replicate the syllable priming effect in French. In Experiments 2a and 2b, when prime duration was increased (from 30 to 45 and 60 ms), we did not obtain a syllable priming effect. In Experiment 3, with 60 participants and exactly the same procedure as Ferrand et al. (1996), we a…