Search results for "Lexical decision task"
showing 10 items of 122 documents
The effects of length and transposed-letter similarity in lexical decision: evidence with beginning, intermediate, and adult readers.
2007
Do length and transposed-letter effects reflect developmental changes on reading acquisition in a transparent orthography? Can computational models of visual word recognition accommodate these changes? To answer these questions, we carried out a masked priming lexical decision experiment with Spanish beginning, intermediate, and adult readers (N=36, 44, and 39; average age: 7, 11, and 22 years, respectively). Target words were either short or long (6.5 vs. 8.5 letters), and transposed-letter primes were formed by the transposition of two letters (e.g. aminal-ANIMAL) or by the substitution of two letters (orthographic control: arisal-ANIMAL). Children showed a robust length effect (i.e. long…
Does viotin activate violin more than viocin? On the use of visual cues during visual-word recognition.
2013
The vast majority of neural and computational models of visual-word recognition assume that lexical access is achieved via the activation of abstract letter identities. Thus, a word’s overall shape should play no role in this process. In the present lexical decision experiment, we compared word-like pseudowords like viotín (same shape as its base word: violín) vs. viocín (different shape) in mature (college-aged skilled readers), immature (normally reading children), and immature/impaired (young readers with developmental dyslexia) word-recognition systems. Results revealed similar response times (and error rates) to consistent-shape and inconsistent-shape pseudowords for both adult skille…
Blocking by word frequency and neighborhood density in visual word recognition: A task-specific response criteria account
2004
International audience; Effects of blocking words by frequency class (high vs. low) and neighborhood density (high vs. low) were examined in two experiments using progressive demasking and lexical decision tasks. The aim was to examine the predictions of a task-specific response criteria account of list-blocking effects. Distinct patterns of blocking effects were obtained in the two tasks. In the progressive demasking task, a pure-list disadvantage was obtained to low frequency-high density words, whereas high frequency-low density produced a trend toward a pure-list advantage. In lexical decision, high-frequency words showed a pure-list advantage that was strongest in high-density words, w…
Does Bold Emphasis Facilitate the Process of Visual-Word Recognition?
2014
AbstractThe study of the effects of typographical factors on lexical access has been rather neglected in the literature on visual-word recognition. Indeed, current computational models of visual-word recognition employ an unrefined letter feature level in their coding schemes. In a letter recognition experiment, Pelli, Burns, Farell, and Moore-Page (2006), letters in Bookman boldface produced more efficiency (i.e., a higher ratio of thresholds of an ideal observer versus a human observer) than the letters in Bookman regular under visual noise. Here we examined whether the effect of bold emphasis can be generalized to a common visual-word recognition task (lexical decision: “is the item a wo…
Do transposed-letter effects occur across lexeme boundaries?
2006
A masked priming lexical decision experiment was conducted to examine whether or not assignment of letter position in a word can be influenced by lexeme boundaries. The experiment was run in Basque, which is a strongly agglutinating language with a high proportion of inflected and compound words. Nonword primes were created by transposing two nonadjacent letters that crossed or did not cross morphological boundaries. Specifically, we compared morphologically complex prime-target pairs (e.g., arbigide-ARGIBIDE) with orthographic controls (e.g., arkipide-ARGIBIDE; note that ARGIBIDE is a compound of ARGI + BIDE) and noncompound pairs (e.g., ortakila--ORKATILA) with orthographic controls (e.g.…
Gaze position reveals impaired attentional shift during visual word recognition in dysfluent readers
2014
Effects reflecting serial within-word processing are frequently found in pseudo- and non-word recognition tasks not only among fluent, but especially among dyslexic readers. However, the time course and locus of these serial within-word processing effects in the cognitive hierarchy (i.e., orthographic, phonological, lexical) have remained elusive. We studied whether a subject’s eye movements during a lexical decision task would provide information about the temporal dynamics of serial within-word processing. We assumed that if there is serial within-word processing proceeding from left to right, items with informative beginnings would attract the gaze position and (micro-)saccadic eye movem…
How is Visual Recognition Entrained by Auditory Background Rhythms?
2014
AbstractRecent studies have reported that the oscillations of auditory attention entrained by a background rhythmic sequence can influence performance in visual recognition tasks. We have designed an experimental paradigm in which a visual item (either a bisyllabic word or a familiar face) is displayed on screen in two consecutive parts while a musical rhythm is played in the background. Depending on the timing conditions, the first or the second part of the item could be presented either in-synchrony or out-of-synchrony with the beats of the auditory rhythm. In a first series of experiments, participants performed a lexical decision task on bisyllabic 5-letter strings. Results show that wh…
Do Grading Gray Stimuli Help to Encode Letter Position?
2021
Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gra…