Search results for "Lexical access"
showing 10 items of 22 documents
Prefix Stripping Re-Re-Revisited: MEG Investigations of Morphological Decomposition and Recomposition
2019
We revisit a long-standing question in the psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic literature on comprehending morphologically complex words: are prefixes and suffixes processed using the same cognitive mechanisms? Recent work using Magnetoencephalography (MEG) to uncover the dynamic temporal and spatial responses evoked by visually presented complex suffixed single words provide us with a comprehensive picture of morphological processing in the brain, from early, form-based decomposition, through lexical access, grammatically constrained recomposition, and semantic interpretation. In the present study, we find that MEG responses to prefixed words reveal interesting early differences in the la…
The CogALex-IV Shared Task on the Lexical Access Problem
2014
The shared task of the 4th Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon (CogALexIV) was devoted to a subtask of the lexical access problem, namely multi-stimulus association. In this task, participants were supposed to determine automatically an expected response based on a number of received stimulus words. We describe here the task definition, the theoretical background, the training and test data sets, and the evaluation procedure used for ranking the participating systems. We also summarize the approaches used and present the results of the evaluation. In conclusion, the outcome of the competition are a number of systems which provide very good solutions to the problem.
On the nature of consonant/vowel differences in letter position coding: Evidence from developing and adult readers
2016
In skilled adult readers, transposed-letter effects (jugde-JUDGE) are greater for consonant than for vowel transpositions. These differences are often attributed to phonological rather than orthographic processing. To examine this issue, we employed a scenario in which phonological involvement varies as a function of reading experience: a masked priming lexical decision task with 50-ms primes in adult and developing readers. Indeed, masked phonological priming at this prime duration has been consistently reported in adults, but not in developing readers (Davis, Castles, & Iakovidis, 1998). Thus, if consonant/vowel asymmetries in letter position coding with adults are due to phonological inf…
Does consonant–vowel skeletal structure play a role early in lexical processing? Evidence from masked priming
2017
Published online: 02 November 2017 Is the specific consonant–vowel (CV) letter combination of a word a basic source of information for lexical access in the early stages of processing? We designed two masked priming lexical decision experiments to respond to this question by directly examining the role of CV skeletal structure in written-word recognition. To that aim, each target word was preceded by a one-letter different nonword prime that kept the same CV skeletal structure or not. We also included an identity prime as a control. Results showed faster word identification times in the CV congruent condition than in the CV incongruent condition when a consonant was replaced from the target…
ESTUDIO SOBRE EL LENGUAJE Y LAS FUNCIONES EJECUTIVAS DE UN CASO DE SÍNDROME DE X-FRÁGIL
2014
Abstract:STUDY ON LANGUAGE AND EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS OF A CASE OF FRAGILE X SYNDROMEThe main objective of this study is to compare a subject with a clinical diagnosis of Fragile X Syndrome with other disorders (ADHD, Mental Retardation and ASD) in executive functioning and language. The language variables analyzed are lexical knowledge, lexical access, free induced verbal fluency, comprehension instruction and verbal reasoning. On the other hand, the executive functioning variables evaluated are visual and auditory memory, visual and auditory attention, and visual and auditory planning and inhibition. After evaluation, it is checked that Fragile X Syndrome resembles to Mental Retardation and …
Phrasal prosody constrains word segmentation in French 16-month-olds
2011
Infants who are in the process of acquiring their mother tongue have to find a way of segmenting the continuous speech stream into word-sized units. We present an experiment showing that French 16-month-olds are able to exploit phonological phrase boundaries in order to constrain lexical access. Using the conditioned head-turning technique, we showed that infants trained to turn their head for a bisyllabic word responded more often to sentences that contained this word, than to sentences that contained both syllables of this word separated by a phonological phrase boundary. We compare these results with similar results obtained with English-speaking infants, and discuss their implication fo…
Letter-case information and the identification of brand names.
2014
A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task (‘is it a brand name?’): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the s…
The role of the frequency of constituents in compound words: evidence from Basque and Spanish.
2008
Recent data from compound word processing suggests that compounds are recognized via their constituent lexemes (Juhasz, Starr, Inhoff, & Placke, 2003). The present lexical decision experiment manipulated orthogonally the frequency of the constituents of compound words in two languages: Basque and Spanish. Basque and Spanish diverge widely in their morphological properties and in the number of existing compound words. Furthermore, the head lexeme (i.e., the most meaningful lexeme related to the whole-word meaning) in Spanish tends to be the second lexeme, whereas in Basque the percentage is more distributed. Results showed a facilitative effect of the frequency of the second lexeme, in both …
How are words with diacritical vowels represented in the mental lexicon? Evidence from Spanish and German
2021
Recent research has shown that the omission of diacritics in words does not affect the initial contact with the lexical entries, as measured by masked priming. In the present study, we directly examined whether diacritics’ omission slows down lexical access using a single-presentation semantic categorisation task (“is the word an animal name?”). We did so in a language in which diacritics reflect lexical stress but not vowel quality (Spanish; e.g. ratón [mouse] vs. raton; Experiment 1) and in a language in which diacritics reflect vowel quality but not lexical stress (German; e.g. Kröte vs. Krote; Experiment 2). In Spanish, word response times were similar for words with diacritics that wer…
Are root letters compulsory for lexical access in Semitic languages? The case of masked form-priming in Arabic.
2014
Do Semitic and Indo-European languages differ at a qualitative level? Recently, it has been claimed that lexical space in Semitic languages (e.g., Hebrew, Arabic) is mainly determined by morphological constraints, while lexical space in Indo-European languages is mainly determined by orthographic constraints (Frost, Kugler, Deutsch, & Forster, 2005). One of the key findings supporting the qualitative difference between Semitic and Indo-European languages is the absence of masked form priming in Hebrew/Arabic with productive words. Here we examined whether masked form priming occurs in Arabic words when one of the letters from the productive root is replaced in the prime stimulus by another …