Orthography-phonology consistency in English: Theory- and data-driven measures and their impact on auditory vs. visual word recognition

Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we investigated their independent and composite effects on human reading behavior using large-scale databases. Study 1 found effects on adults' naming responses of both feedforward consistency (orthography to phonology) and feedback consistency (phonology to orthography). Study 2 found feedback but no feedforward consistency effects on visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, with the best predictor being a composite measure of consistency across grapheme, rime, OVC, and word-initial letter-phoneme. In Study 3, we explicitly modeled the reading process with forward and backward flow in a bidirectionally connected neural network. The model captured latent dimensions of quasi-regular mapping that explain additional variance in human reading and spelling behavior, compared to the established measures. Together, the results suggest interactive activation between phonological and orthographic word representations. They also validate the role of computational analyses of language to better understand how print maps to sound, and what properties of natural language affect reading complexity.

The Primacy of Experience in Language Processing: Semantic Priming Is Driven Primarily by Experiential Similarity

The organization of semantic memory, including memory for word meanings, has long been a central question in cognitive science. Although there is general agreement that word meaning representations must make contact with sensory-motor and affective experiences in a non-arbitrary fashion, the nature of this relationship remains controversial. One prominent view proposes that word meanings are represented directly in terms of their experiential content (i.e., sensory-motor and affective representations). Opponents of this view argue that the representation of word meanings reflects primarily taxonomic structure, that is, their relationships to natural categories. In addition, the recent success of language models based on word co-occurrence (i.e., distributional) information in emulating human linguistic behavior has led to proposals that this kind of information may play an important role in the representation of lexical concepts. We used a semantic priming paradigm designed for representational similarity analysis (RSA) to quantitatively assess how well each of these theories explains the representational similarity pattern for a large set of words. Crucially, we used partial correlation RSA to account for intercorrelations between model predictions, which allowed us to assess, for the first time, the unique effect of each model. Semantic priming was driven primarily by experiential similarity between prime and target, with no evidence of an independent effect of distributional or taxonomic similarity. Furthermore, only the experiential models accounted for unique variance in priming after partialling out explicit similarity ratings. These results support experiential accounts of semantic representation and indicate that, despite their good performance at some linguistic tasks, the distributional models evaluated here do not encode the same kind of information used by the human semantic system.

The Access to Grammatical Number in Spanish Children and Adults

In Spanish, the plural form in plural dominant frequency pairs, like "diente/dientes" [tooth/teeth], occurs more frequently than the corresponding singular form. On the other hand, for the singular dominant frequency pairs such as "cometa/cometas" [kite/kites], the singular form is more common than the plural. The recognition of singular forms by adult readers is dependent on the dominance factor, while the identification of plural forms relies on the frequency of the stem. Given that age and reading experience may influence morphological processing of words, we investigate the representation of singulars and plurals in Spanish primary school children in Third Grade (8/9) and Sixth Grade (11/12) and adults through a lexical decision task. Though children's lexical decisions were twice as slow as adults, the pattern of morphological processing was consistent across ages: dominant plural forms resulted in decision times that were comparable to those of non-dominant singular forms, while recognition of singular-dominant forms was quicker than recognition of plural non-dominant forms. It appears that singulars are accessed and stored in the lexical memory as separate entities, while plurals depend on their morphological closer relatives, in this case, the singular forms.

Inhibition of lexical representations after violated semantic predictions

There is a consensus that humans predict upcoming words during sentence processing. Prediction makes language comprehension fast and efficient if this anticipatory processing is accurate. However, often times, predictions are not correct. There is a lack of research investigating the cognitive operations at play when predictions are violated. According to several proposals, such violations lead to an inhibition of the predicted word to facilitate the integration of the unexpected word. Across four experiments, we have tested whether predicted words are indeed inhibited when listeners encounter unexpected stimuli, and whether the linguistic status (word or sound) and semantic congruency of a word (plausible or implausible) influences this purported inhibitory process. Using a Cross-Modal Lexical Priming paradigm, we showed that when predictions are violated, the activation of the predicted word is inhibited, resulting in increased reaction times. These inhibitory effects appear to be language specific, in that they are only observed after unexpected words, as opposed to non-linguistic sounds (tones). However, contrary to a long-held assumption in the field of sentence processing, inhibitory effects are not modulated by the semantic congruency of the unexpected word (i.e., whether the unexpected word is plausible within the sentence context). Indeed, in the current study, any linguistic information that violated listeners' semantic prediction resulted in the inhibition of the predicted word. Thus, the current findings are more compatible with a view in which unexpected linguistic events that are meaningful engage inhibitory processes with the specific purpose of inhibiting the predicted, though out-of-date, word.

How trial-to-trial learning shapes mappings in the mental lexicon: Modelling lexical decision with linear discriminative learning

Trial-to-trial effects have been found in a number of studies, indicating that processing a stimulus influences responses in subsequent trials. A special case are priming effects which have been modelled successfully with error-driven learning (Marsolek, 2008), implying that participants are continuously learning during experiments. This study investigates whether trial-to-trial learning can be detected in an unprimed lexical decision experiment. We used the Discriminative Lexicon Model (DLM; Baayen et al., 2019), a model of the mental lexicon with meaning representations from distributional semantics, which models error-driven incremental learning with the Widrow-Hoff rule. We used data from the British Lexicon Project (BLP; Keuleers et al., 2012) and simulated the lexical decision experiment with the DLM on a trial-by-trial basis for each subject individually. Then, reaction times were predicted with Generalized Additive Models (GAMs), using measures derived from the DLM simulations as predictors. We extracted measures from two simulations per subject (one with learning updates between trials and one without), and used them as input to two GAMs. Learning-based models showed better model fit than the non-learning ones for the majority of subjects. Our measures also provide insights into lexical processing and individual differences. This demonstrates the potential of the DLM to model behavioural data and leads to the conclusion that trial-to-trial learning can indeed be detected in unprimed lexical decision. Our results support the possibility that our lexical knowledge is subject to continuous changes.

Ratings of valence, arousal, happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise for 24,000 Dutch words

Emotion is a fundamental aspect of human life and therefore is critically encoded in language. To facilitate research into the encoding of emotion in language and how emotion associations affect language processing, we present a new set of emotion norms for over 24,000 Dutch words. The emotion norms include ratings of two key dimensions of emotion: valence and arousal, as well as ratings on discrete emotion categories: happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, and surprise. We show that emotional information can predict word processing, such that responses to positive words are facilitated in contrast to neutral and negative words. We also demonstrate how the ratings of emotion are related to personality characteristics. The data are available via the Open Science Framework ( https://osf.io/9htuv/ ) and serve as a valuable resource for research into emotion as well as in applied settings such as healthcare and digital communication.

Electrophysiological evidence of discontinuities in the propagation of lexical decision processes across the motor hierarchy

This research assessed the propagation of decisional effects across multiple electrophysiological indexes related to motor-response implementation within a lexical decision task, a paradigmatic case of a 2-alternative choice task on linguistic stimuli. By co-registering electroencephalographic and electromyographic data, we focused on the lexicality effect (i.e., the difference between responses to words and nonwords), and we tracked its influence across indexes of motor-response planning (indexed by effector-selective lateralization of beta-frequency desynchronizations), programming (indexed by the lateralized readiness potential) and execution (indexed by the chronometric durations of muscular responses). In addition, we explored corticomuscular coherence as the potential physiological underpinning of a continuous mapping of information between stimulus evaluation and response channels. The results revealed lexicality effects only on indexes of motor planning and execution, with no reliable involvement of the other measures. This pattern is discussed with reference to the hypothesis of multiple decisional components exerting different influences across the motor-hierarchy.

Just a mark: Diacritic function does not play a role in the early stages of visual word recognition

A very common feature in most writing systems is the presence of diacritics: distinguishing marks that are added for various linguistic reasons. Most models of reading, however, have not yet captured the nature of these marks. Recent priming experiments in several languages have attempted to resolve how diacritical letters are represented in the visual word recognition system. Since the function and appearance of diacritics can change from one language to the other, it is hard to interpret the accumulated evidence. With this in mind, we conducted two masked priming lexical decision experiments in Hungarian, a transparent orthography with a wide use of diacritic vowels that allows for clear-cut manipulations. In the two experiments, we manipulated the presence or absence of the same diacritic (i.e., the acute accent) on two specific sets of letters that behave differently. In Experiment 1, the manipulation changed only the length of vowels, whereas in Experiment 2, it also changed the quality (e.g., a↝/ɒ/ vs. á↝/aː/). In both experiments, we found that primes with an omitted diacritic work just as good as the identity primes (nema→NÉMA = néma→NÉMA [mute]), whereas the addition of a diacritic comes with a cost (mése→MESE > mese→MESE [tale]). This asymmetry favors a purely perceptual account of the very early stages of word recognition, making it blind to the function of diacritics. We suggest that the linguistic functions of diacritics originate at later processing stages.

Emotionality effects in Korean visual word recognition: Evidence from lab-based and web-based lexical decision tasks

Previous studies have shown that processes of word recognition are influenced by the emotional content of a word. This pattern is most readily explained by the motivated attention and affective states model (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 1997), which states that emotional stimuli are motivationally significant and capture attention. Drawing on this theoretical account, the current study compared lexical decision response times to positive and negative emotion words versus neutral words across two experimental environments - a traditional lab-based environment and a web-based environment. In addition, the experiment was conducted using Korean words presented to native Korean speakers in order to test whether the emotionality effect emerges in a non-English language. The results revealed faster response times to emotion words versus neutral words across both experimental environments with no evidence of a difference between the two environments. These findings provide important evidence that emotion words successfully attract attention and facilitate word processing even in situations where participants might be more easily distracted than they would be in a traditional lab setting. This work also constitutes the first demonstration of an emotionality effect in Korean word recognition, thus providing further evidence that the emotionality effect may be a language-universal phenomenon.

Malay Lexicon Project 2: Morphology in Malay word recognition

Morphological processing in visual word recognition has been extensively studied in a few languages, but other languages with interesting morphological systems have received little attention. Here, we examined Malay, an Austronesian language that is agglutinative. Agglutinative languages typically have a large number of morphemes per word. Our primary aim was to facilitate research on morphological processing in Malay by augmenting the Malay Lexicon Project (a database containing lexical information for almost 10,000 words) to include a breakdown of the words into morphemes as well as morphological properties for those morphemes. A secondary goal was to determine which morphological variables influence Malay word recognition. We collected lexical decision data for Malay words that had one prefix and one suffix, and first examined the predictive power of 15 morphological and four lexical variables on response times (RT). Of these variables, two lexical and three morphological variables emerged as strong predictors of RT. In GAMM models, we found a facilitatory effect of root family size, and inhibitory effects of prefix length and prefix percentage of more frequent words (PFMF) on RT. Next, we explored the interactions between overall word frequency and several of these predictors. Of particular interest, there was a significant word frequency by root family size interaction in which the effect of root family size is stronger for low-frequency words. We hope that this initial work on morphological processing in Malay inspires further research in this and other understudied languages, with the goal of developing a universal theory of morphological processing.

The Impact of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Reading Processes: A Systematic Review

The current systematic review examines the behavioral effects of TMS on reading. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to targeted nodes of the brain's reading network has been shown to impact reading. Extracted data included (a) study characteristics, (b) methodology, (c) targeted nodes, (d) control paradigm, (e) type of reading task, (f) adverse effects, and (g) main findings. Data was classified by type of reading task: 1) phonological processing, 2) semantic judgment, 3) lexical decision, 4) whole word reading, and 5) visual or text characteristics. Seventy records from 46 studies (n = 844) were identified. Results indicate that TMS modulates semantic judgments when focused in the anterior aspects of the reading circuit, phonological processes after stimulation within the dorsal circuit, and impacts single word recognition and contextual reading when administered to the ventral circuit. Findings suggest that changes in specific behavioral aspects of reading following TMS may contribute to identification of foci for use as part of reading interventions.

Lateralized reading in the healthy brain: A behavioral and computational study on the nature of the visual field effect

Despite its widespread use to measure functional lateralization of language in healthy subjects, the neurocognitive bases of the visual field effect in lateralized reading are still debated. Crucially, the lack of knowledge on the nature of the visual field effect is accompanied by a lack of knowledge on the relative impact of psycholinguistic factors on its measurement, thus potentially casting doubts on its validity as a functional laterality measure. In this study, an eye-tracking-controlled tachistoscopic lateralized lexical decision task (Experiment 1) was administered to 60 right-handed and 60 left-handed volunteers and word length, orthographic neighborhood, word frequency, and imageability were manipulated. The magnitude of visual field effect was bigger in right-handed than in left-handed participants. Across the whole sample, a visual field-by-frequency interaction was observed, whereby a comparatively smaller effect of word frequency was detected in the left visual field/right hemisphere (LVF/RH) than in the right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LH). In a subsequent computational study (Experiment 2), efficient (LH) and inefficient (RH) activation of lexical orthographic nodes was modelled by means of the Naïve Discriminative Learning approach. Computational data simulated the effect of visual field and its interaction with frequency observed in the Experiment 1. Data suggest that the visual field effect can be biased by word frequency. Less distinctive connections between orthographic cues and lexical/semantic output units in the RH than in the LH can account for the emergence of the visual field effect and its interaction with word frequency.

Decision times in orthographic processing: a cross-linguistic study

Reading comparisons across transparent and opaque orthographies indicate critical differences that may reveal the mechanisms involved in orthographic decoding across orthographies. Here, we address the role of criterion and speed of processing in accounting for performance differences across languages. We used binary tasks involving orthographic (words-pseudowords), and non-orthographic materials (female-male faces), and analyzed results based on Ratcliff's Diffusion model. In the first study, 29 English and 28 Italian university students were given a lexical decision test. English observers made more errors than Italian observers while showing generally similar reaction times. In terms of the diffusion model, the two groups differed in the decision criterion: English observers used a lower criterion. There was no overall cross-linguistic difference in processing speed, but English observers showed lower values for words (and a smaller lexicality effect) than Italians. In the second study, participants were given a face gender judgment test. Female faces were identified slower than the male ones with no language group differences. In terms of the diffusion model, there was no difference between groups in drift rate and boundary separation. Overall, the new main finding concerns a difference in decision criterion limited to the orthographic task: English individuals showed a more lenient criterion in judging the lexicality of the items, a tendency that may explain why, despite lower accuracy, they were not slower. It is concluded that binary tasks (and the Diffusion model) can reveal cross-linguistic differences in orthographic processing which would otherwise be difficult to detect in standard single-word reading tasks.

Altered activity in functional brain networks involved in lexical decision making in bipolar disorder: An fMRI case-control study

BACKGROUND

Brain networks involved in language, attentional and response processes are detectable by fMRI during lexical decision (LD). Here, we investigated possible abnormalities in the functional networks involved in LD in patients with bipolar disorder (BD).

METHODS

fMRI and behavioural data were compared between BD (n = 25) and control (n = 21), with groups matched for age and sex. The functional brain networks involved in LD were extracted by manipulating the "word-likeness" of LD stimuli and using a multidimensional analysis method.

RESULTS

Attentional, response and language processes were captured in separate function-specific brain networks (default mode network, response network, linguistic processing network, respectively) in the BD and control groups, replicating the results of our previous study in an independent group of healthy adults. Behaviourally, the BD group showed higher performance than the control group in the LD task. Activity in the default mode network (DMN) and the linguistic processing network (LPN) did not differ between the groups, but the BD group had higher activation than the control group in the response network (RESP).

LIMITATIONS

Due to the small sample, the study is underpowered, capable of only detecting large effects.

CONCLUSIONS

The results suggest that BD may be associated with sustained activity in the RESP network, which might contribute to psychomotor dysfunction in BD. Future studies should investigate the possible link between altered RESP activation and psychomotor disturbances in BD, as well as the basis for altered RESP activity in BD.

The Persian Lexicon Project: minimized orthographic neighbourhood effects in a dense language

In recent years large datasets of lexical processing times have been released for several languages, including English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Such datasets have enabled us to study, compare, and model the global effects of many psycholinguistic measures such as word frequency, orthographic neighborhood (ON) size, and word length. We have compiled and publicly released a frequency and ON dictionary of 64,546 words and 1800 plausible NWs from a language that has been relatively little studied by psycholinguists: Persian. We have also collected visual lexical decision reaction times for 1800 Persian words and nonwords. Persian offers an interesting psycholinguistic environment for several reasons, including that it has few long words and has resultantly dense orthographic neighborhoods. These characteristics provide us with an opportunity to contrast how these factors affect lexical access by comparing them to several other languages. The results suggest that sensitivity to word length and orthographic neighbourhood may reflect the statistical structure of a particular language, rather than being a universal element of lexical processing. The dictionary and LDRT data are available from https://osf.io/tb4m6/ .

Familiarity ratings for 24,325 simplified Chinese words

The present work collected familiarity norms for 20,275 two-character, 1231 three-character, and 2819 four-character simplified Chinese words from 1300 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The familiarity of each word was rated on a 7-point scale by at least 21 participants. The results supported the reliability and validity of the present familiarity ratings, which is the first large familiarity database for Chinese in the field. These familiarity norms can be downloaded from the supplemental materials. Furthermore, the contribution of familiarity to Chinese lexical processing was investigated using the present familiarity ratings and previous data (lexical features and visual lexical decision), mainly from two major Chinese lexicon projects, MELD-SCH and CLP. Regression analysis suggests that familiarity explained a substantial percentage of the variance in lexical processing of both simplified and traditional Chinese words, over and above the effects of word frequency and other lexical features, including age of acquisition (AoA). Further analysis identified a significantly greater familiarity effect for lower-frequency words than that for higher-frequency words. Together, among the first, our findings support the important contribution of familiarity with Chinese words to lexical processing, especially for low-frequency words.

Raeding with the fingres: Towards a universal model of letter position coding

Letter position coding in word recognition has been widely investigated in the visual modality (e.g., labotarory is confusable with laboratory), but not as much in the tactile modality using braille, leading to an incomplete understanding of whether this process is modality-dependent. Unlike sighted readers, braille readers do not show a transposed-letter similarity effect with nonadjacent transpositions (e.g., labotarory = labodanory; Perea et al., 2012). While this latter finding was taken to suggest that the flexibility in letter position coding was due to visual factors (e.g., perceptual uncertainty in the location of visual objects (letters)), it is necessary to test whether transposed-letter effects occur with adjacent letters to reach firm conclusions. Indeed, in the auditory modality (i.e., another serial modality), a transposed-phoneme effect occurs for adjacent but not for nonadjacent transpositions. In a lexical decision task, we examined whether pseudowords created by transposing two adjacent letters of a word (e.g., laboartory) are more confusable with their base word (laboratory) than pseudowords created by replacing those letters (laboestory) in braille. Results showed that transposed-letter pseudowords produced more errors and slower responses than the orthographic controls. Thus, these findings suggest that the mechanism of serial order, while universal, can be shaped by the sensory modality at play.

Cerebellar tDCS does not modulate language processing performance in healthy individuals

Clinical and neuroscientific studies in healthy volunteers have established that the cerebellum contributes to language comprehension and production. Yet most evidence is correlational and the exact role of the cerebellum remains unclear. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of the right cerebellum in unimpaired language comprehension and production using non-invasive brain stimulation. In this double-blind, sham-controlled experiment, thirty-six healthy participants received anodal or sham transcranial direct current (tDCS) stimulation to the right cerebellum while performing a lexical decision, sentence comprehension, verbal fluency and a non-language control task. Active tDCS did not modulate performance in any of the tasks. Additional exploratory analyses suggest difficulty-specific performance modulation in the sentence comprehension and lexical decision task, with tDCS improving performance in easy trials of the sentence comprehension task and difficult trials in the lexical decision task. Overall, our findings provide no evidence for the involvement of the right posterior cerebellum in language processing. Further research is needed to dissociate the influence of task difficulty of the underlying cognitive processes.

Compositionality of the Constituent Characters in Chinese Two-Character-Word Recognition by Adult Readers of High and Low Chinese Proficiency

In Chinese, the graphic units are Chinese characters, most of which are compound characters. Since a compound character can be different from another one in being regarded as composed of components (compositionality), readers might have developed a compositionality awareness of the constituent characters in two-character word (2C-word) recognition. Two experiments were conducted in a lexical decision task on the same set of 2C-words, the first constituent characters of which were manipulated in compositionality. Given that a Chinese character is more difficult to recognize when it is presented upside-down than when it is presented in an upright orientation and that it is inevitable to perceive the constituent characters in 2C-word recognition, we manipulated the first constituent characters' presentation orientation to increase the task difficulty. The two constituent characters of a 2C-word target were displayed simultaneously in a trial in Experiment 1 but were shown sequentially in Experiment 2. Participants were two cohorts of adult Chinese native speakers (CNS1s and CNS2s). CNS1s had a significantly lower level of reading proficiency than CNS2s. The influence of orientation was observed in both CNS1s and CNS2s' performance across the two experiments, but only CNS2s' reaction times seemed to have indicated the effect of compositionality in Experiment 2. Skilled readers are more likely than less skilled readers to be conscious of compositionality of the first constituent characters, which are presented separately from the second ones, in 2C-word recognition.

Lexico-semantic access and audiovisual integration in the aging brain: Insights from mixed-effects regression analyses of event-related potentials

We investigated how aging modulates lexico-semantic processes in the visual (seeing written items), auditory (hearing spoken items) and audiovisual (seeing written items while hearing congruent spoken items) modalities. Participants were young and older adults who performed a delayed lexical decision task (LDT) presented in blocks of visual, auditory, and audiovisual stimuli. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed differences between young and older adults despite older adults' ability to identify words and pseudowords as accurately as young adults. The observed differences included more focalized lexico-semantic access in the N400 time window in older relative to young adults, stronger re-instantiation and/or more widespread activity of the lexicality effect at the time of responding, and stronger multimodal integration for older relative to young adults. Our results offer new insights into how functional neural differences in older adults can result in efficient access to lexico-semantic representations across the lifespan.

Now you see it, now you don't: Flanker presence induces the word concreteness effect

Can the presence of unrelated flanker words change the way that lexical decisions are made to target words in the flankers task? Here we examined the impact of flanker presence on the effects of word concreteness. Target words had high or low concreteness ratings (e.g., fork, free) and were either presented in isolation or flanked to the left and right by an unrelated word (e.g., cold free cold) that was irrelevant for the task. Results revealed that the facilitatory effect of concreteness (faster responses to concrete words compared with abstract words) was significantly greater in the presence of flankers. A control experiment revealed the same pattern with pseudoword and nonword flankers. We conclude that the mere presence of flanking letter strings causes a greater depth of processing of target words. We further speculate that this might arise by flankers inducing a more “sentence-like” context by the presence of multiple, spatially distinct letter strings, that prohibits the use of more superficial decision processes and can be used to make lexical decisions to isolated words.

Discovering the brain stages of lexical decision: Behavioral effects originate from a single neural decision process

Lexical decision (LD) - judging whether a sequence of letters constitutes a word - has been widely investigated. In a typical lexical decision task (LDT), participants are asked to respond whether a sequence of letters is an actual word or a nonword. Although behavioral differences between types of words/nonwords have been robustly detected in LDT, there is an ongoing discussion about the exact cognitive processes that underlie the word identification process in this task. To obtain data-driven evidence on the underlying processes, we recorded electroencephalographic (EEG) data and applied a novel machine-learning method, hidden semi-Markov model multivariate pattern analysis (HsMM-MVPA). In the current study, participants performed an LDT in which we varied the frequency of words (high, low frequency) and "wordlikeness" of non-words (pseudowords, random non-words). The results revealed that models with six processing stages accounted best for the data in all conditions. While most stages were shared, Stage 5 differed between conditions. Together, these results indicate that the differences in word frequency and lexicality effects are driven by a single cognitive processing stage. Based on its latency and topology, we interpret this stage as a Decision process during which participants discriminate between words and nonwords using activated lexical information.

Shabd: A psycholinguistic database for Hindi

We present Shabd, a psycholinguistic database in Hindi. It is based on a corpus of 1.4 billion words from electronic newspapers and news websites. Word frequencies and part of speech information have been derived and are made available in a cleaned list of 34 thousand hand-selected words, and a list of 96 thousand words observed with a frequency of more than 100 times in the corpus. Next to the Shabd database, we also make a list with all 2.3 million word types available and a list with the 2.5 million most frequent word pairs (word bigrams). The quality of the word frequency measure was tested in two lexical decision tasks. We observed that the Shabd word frequencies outperform existing frequencies based on smaller corpora of newspapers but not the Worldlex word frequencies based on an analysis of blogs. We also observed that word frequency accounts for as much variance as contextual diversity (operationalized as the number of documents in which the words were observed). The Shabd database is freely available for research.

Aging affects steaks more than knives: Evidence that the processing of words related to motor skills is relatively spared in aging

Lexical-processing declines are a hallmark of aging. However, the extent of these declines may vary as a function of different factors. Motivated by findings from neurodegenerative diseases and healthy aging, we tested whether 'motor-relatedness' (the degree to which words are associated with particular human body movements) might moderate such declines. We investigated this question by examining data from three experiments. The experiments were carried out in different languages (Dutch, German, English) using different tasks (lexical decision, picture naming), and probed verbs and nouns, in all cases controlling for potentially confounding variables (e.g., frequency, age-of-acquisition, imageability). Whereas 'non-motor words' (e.g., steak) showed age-related performance decreases in all three experiments, 'motor words' (e.g., knife) yielded either smaller decreases (in one experiment) or no decreases (in two experiments). The findings suggest that motor-relatedness can attenuate or even prevent age-related lexical declines, perhaps due to the relative sparing of neural circuitry underlying such words.

The role of valence in word processing: Evidence from lexical decision and emotional Stroop tasks

It is widely accepted that the valence of a word (neutral, positive, or negative) influences lexical processing, yet data from the commonly used lexical decision and emotional Stroop tasks has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the direction of this influence. One critical obstacle to investigating the independent effects of valence is the matching of emotional and neutral stimuli on the lexical, sublexical, and conceptual characteristics known to influence word recognition. The second obstacle is that the cognitive processes which lead to a lexical decision and a colour naming response are unobservable from the response latency measures typically gathered. The present study compiled a set of neutral, positive, and negative words matched triplet-wise on 26 influential characteristics. The novel "mouse tracking" technique was used to analyse the development of responses to these materials in variants of the lexical decision and emotional Stroop task. A conventional key-press emotional Stroop task is also reported. Results revealed a significant processing advantage for positive words over negative and neutral words in the lexical decision task, whereas valence alone did not produce any significant effects in the emotional Stroop task. The discrepancy between the effects of valence across these different tasks is discussed. We also suggest that previous conflicting findings may be confounded by unmatched emotional and neutral stimuli, thus inflating the potential effects of valence.

Age of acquisition ratings for 19,716 simplified Chinese words

This study collected age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 19,716 simplified Chinese words provided by 1765 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Analysis of demographic factors revealed both gender and cohort differences in ratings and thus differences in trajectory of vocabulary development, suggesting the utility of AoA ratings to investigate individual differences and societal changes in levels of academic achievement. Moreover, consistent with past analysis conducted with English words, AoA ratings accounted for an extra portion of variance in lexical processing above and beyond the most prominent predictor, word frequency. Further analysis suggested that AoA ratings might be more predictive of processing low frequency words relative to high frequency words. Cross-language comparison also indicated that future research should explore the unique factors implicated in the processing of Chinese words.

Age of acquisition effects on traditional Chinese character naming and lexical decision

Across languages, age of acquisition (AoA) is a critical psycholinguistic factor in lexical processing, reflecting the influence of learning experience. Early-acquired words tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than late-acquired words. Recently, an integrated view proposed that both the mappings between representations and the construction of semantic representations contribute to AoA effects, thus, predicting larger AoA effects for words with arbitrary mappings between representations as well as for tasks requiring greater semantic processing. We investigated how these predictions generalize to the Chinese language system that differs from alphabetic languages regarding the ease of mappings and semantic involvement in lexical processing. A cross-task investigation of differential psycholinguistic effects was conducted with large character naming and lexical decision datasets to establish the extent to which semantics is involved in the two tasks. We focused on examining the effect sizes of lexical-semantic variables and AoA, and the interaction between AoA and consistency. The results demonstrated that semantics influenced Chinese character naming more than lexical decision, which is in contrast with the findings related to English language, though, critically, AoA effects were more pronounced for character naming than for lexical decision. Additionally, an interaction between AoA and consistency was found in character naming. Our findings provide cross-linguistic evidence supporting the view of multiple origins of AoA effects in the language-processing system.

Do children with overweight respond faster to food-related words?

Overweight in childhood is a risk factor in developing obesity as an adult, thus having severe consequences on the individuals' physical health and psychological well-being. Therefore, studying the cognitive and emotional processes that sustain overweight is essential not only at a theoretical level but also to develop effective interventions. In the present experiment, we examined whether children with overweight respond faster to food-related than non-food-related words in a word recognition task: lexical decision. The participants were 24 children diagnosed with exogenous overweight and 24 children with a healthy weight. The stimulus list included positively valenced food-related words and positively valenced non-food-related words matched in a number of psycholinguistic variables-we also included negatively valenced non-food words. While children with a healthy weight showed similar response times to positively valenced food-related and non-food-related words, children with overweight showed much faster response times to food-related words than to non-food-related words. Furthermore, both children with overweight and children with a healthy weight responded faster to positive than to negative words. These findings suggest a complex interplay of cognitive and emotional factors during word processing that can be used to implement more effective treatments for childhood overweight.

Recognition times for 62 thousand English words: Data from the English Crowdsourcing Project

We present a new dataset of English word recognition times for a total of 62 thousand words, called the English Crowdsourcing Project. The data were collected via an internet vocabulary test in which more than one million people participated. The present dataset is limited to native English speakers. Participants were asked to indicate which words they knew. Their response times were registered, although at no point were the participants asked to respond as quickly as possible. Still, the response times correlate around .75 with the response times of the English Lexicon Project for the shared words. Also, the results of virtual experiments indicate that the new response times are a valid addition to the English Lexicon Project. This not only means that we have useful response times for some 35 thousand extra words, but we now also have data on differences in response latencies as a function of education and age.

Masked identity priming reflects an encoding advantage in developing readers

The masked priming technique is widely used to explore the early moments of letter and word identification. Although this technique is increasingly used in experiments with young readers, the mechanism in play during masked priming with early readers has not yet been fully explored. We investigated the masked priming effects from a modeling perspective; we instantiated competing theories as data models (using Bayes factors) and as a computational model (diffusion model). We carried out a masked priming experiment using identity primes with second- and fourth-grade participants, and we analyzed the data through an evidence accumulation model lens. The priming effect manifests as a shift in the response time distribution, which in evidence accumulation models is accounted for by changes in the encoding process. We describe such changes as savings that have three features of theoretical importance. First, they are numerically very close to the stimulus onset asynchrony between primes and targets. Second, they remain relatively constant from second grade to fourth grade. Third, they seem to operate at the level of abstract orthographic representation because the priming effect occurs in both case-matched and case-mismatched pairs. These findings also have consequences for the practice of data transformation in developmental research; some patterns of data, when transformed, would produce spurious effects.

Asymmetry of the frontal aslant tract is associated with lexical decision

The frontal aslant tract (FAT) is a recently documented white matter tract that connects the inferior and superior frontal gyri with a tendency to be more pronounced in the left hemisphere. This tract has been found to play a role in language functions, particularly verbal fluency. However, it is not entirely clear to what extent FAT asymmetry is related to performance benefits in language-related tasks. In the present study, we aimed to fill this gap by examining the correlations between asymmetric micro- and macro-structural properties of the FAT and performance on verbal fluency and lexical decision tasks. The results showed no correlation between the FAT and verbal fluency; however, lexical decision was correlated with FAT laterality. Specifically, greater left lateralization in both micro- and macro-structural properties was related to faster lexical decision response times. The results were not due merely to motor or decision-making processes, as responses in a simple discrimination control task showed no correlation with laterality. These data are the first to suggest a role for the FAT in mediating processes underlying lexical decision.

Semantic transparency effects in German compounds: A large dataset and multiple-task investigation

In the present study, we provide a comprehensive analysis and a multi-dimensional dataset of semantic transparency measures for 1810 German compound words. Compound words are considered semantically transparent when the contribution of the constituents' meaning to the compound meaning is clear (as in airport), but the degree of semantic transparency varies between compounds (compare strawberry or sandman). Our dataset includes both compositional and relatedness-based semantic transparency measures, also differentiated by constituents. The measures are obtained from a computational and fully implemented semantic model based on distributional semantics. We validate the measures using data from four behavioral experiments: Explicit transparency ratings, two different lexical decision tasks using different nonwords, and an eye-tracking study. We demonstrate that different semantic effects emerge in different behavioral tasks, which can only be captured using a multi-dimensional approach to semantic transparency. We further provide the semantic transparency measures derived from the model for a dataset of 40,475 additional German compounds, as well as for 2061 novel German compounds.

Lexical access versus lexical decision processes for auditory, visual, and audiovisual items: Insights from behavioral and neural measures

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between lexical access processes, and processes that are specifically related to making lexical decisions. In Experiment 1, participants performed a standard lexical decision task in which they had to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible to visual (written), auditory (spoken) and audiovisual (written + spoken) items. In Experiment 2, a different group of participants performed the same task but were required to make responses after a delay. Linear mixed effect models on reaction times and single trial Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) revealed that ERP lexicality effects started earlier in the visual than auditory modality, and that effects were driven by the written input in the audiovisual modality. More negative ERP amplitudes predicted slower reaction times in all modalities in both experiments. However, these predictive amplitudes were mainly observed within the window of the lexicality effect in Experiment 1 (the speeded task), and shifted to post-response-probe time windows in Experiment 2 (the delayed task). The lexicality effects lasted longer in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, and in the delayed task, we additionally observed a "re-instantiation" of the lexicality effect related to the delayed response. Delaying the response in an otherwise identical lexical decision task thus allowed us to separate lexical access processes from processes specific to lexical decision.

Norms of conceptual familiarity for 3,596 French nouns and their contribution in lexical decision

In the last decade, research has shown that word processing is influenced by the lexical and semantic features of words. However, norms for a crucial semantic variable-that is, conceptual familiarity-have not been available for a sizeable French database. We thus developed French Canadian conceptual familiarity norms for 3,596 nouns. This enriches Desrochers and Thompson's (2009) database, in which subjective frequency and imageability values are already available for the same words. We collected online data from 313 Canadian French speakers. The full database of conceptual familiarity ratings is freely available at http://lingualab.ca/fr/projets/normes-de-familiarite-conceptuelle . We then demonstrated the utility of these new conceptual familiarity norms by assessing their contribution to lexical decision times. We conducted a stepwise regression model with conceptual familiarity in the last step. This allowed us to assess the independent contribution of conceptual familiarity beyond the contributions of other well-known psycholinguistic variables, such as frequency, imageability, and age of acquisition. The results showed that conceptual familiarity facilitated lexical decision latencies. In sum, these ratings will help researchers select French stimuli for experiments in which conceptual familiarity must be taken into account.

Feature distinctiveness effects in language acquisition and lexical processing: Insights from megastudies

Semantic features are central to many influential theories of word meaning and semantic memory, but new methods of quantifying the information embedded in feature production norms are needed to advance our understanding of semantic processing and language acquisition. This paper capitalized on databases of semantic feature production norms and age-of-acquisition ratings, and megastudies including the English Lexicon Project and the Calgary Semantic Decision Project, to examine the influence of feature distinctiveness on language acquisition, visual lexical decision, and semantic decision. A feature network of English words was constructed such that edges in the network represented feature distance, or dissimilarity, between words (i.e., Jaccard and Manhattan distances of probability distributions of features elicited for each pair of words), enabling us to quantify the relative feature distinctiveness of individual words relative to other words in the network. Words with greater feature distinctiveness tended to be acquired earlier. Regression analyses of megastudy data revealed that Manhattan feature distinctiveness inhibited performance on the visual lexical decision task, facilitated semantic decision performance for concrete concepts, and inhibited semantic decision performance for abstract concepts. These results demonstrate the importance of considering the structural properties of words embedded in a semantic feature space in order to increase our understanding of semantic processing and language acquisition.

Morphological De-com-pos-it-ion Helps Recognize Low-er Frequency Words in Typically Developing Spanish-Speaking Children

Several studies in Spanish and other languages have shown that, in a lexical decision task, children are more likely to accept pseudowords with a known morphological structure as words as compared to non-morphological pseudowords. Morphology also facilitates visual word recognition of actual words in children with reading difficulties. In the present study, we explored the role of morphology, frequency and reading proficiency (measured by school grade) in visual word recognition. Typically developing readers of Spanish from 2nd, 4th and 6th grades performed a lexical decision task in which the morphological complexity and the frequency of the words were factorially manipulated. Our results showed that morphology benefited the accuracy of visual word recognition for low frequency words only. We conclude that decomposition in morphemes occurs in Spanish only for less frequent words. These results in Spanish support models that posit the decomposition of morphologically complex words in the orthographic lexicon.

MorphoLex-FR: A derivational morphological database for 38,840 French words

Studies on morphological processing in French, as in other languages, have shown disparate results. We argue that a critical and long-overlooked factor that could underlie these diverging results is the methodological differences in the calculation of morphological variables across studies. To address the need for a common morphological database, we present MorphoLex-FR, a sizeable and freely available database with 12 variables for prefixes, roots, and suffixes for the 38,840 words of the French Lexicon Project. MorphoLex-FR constitutes a first step to render future studies addressing morphological processing in French comparable. The procedure we used for morphological segmentation and variable computation is effectively the same as that in MorphoLex, an English morphological database. This will allow for cross-linguistic comparisons of future studies in French and English that will contribute to our understanding of how morphologically complex words are processed. To validate these variables, we explored their influence on lexical decision latencies for morphologically complex nouns in a series of hierarchical regression models. The results indicated that only morphological variables related to the suffix explained lexical decision latencies. The frequency and family size of the suffix exerted facilitatory effects, whereas the percentage of more frequent words in the morphological family of the suffix was inhibitory. Our results are in line with previous studies conducted in French and in English. In conclusion, this database represents a valuable resource for studies on the effect of morphology in visual word processing in French.

Valence makes a stronger contribution than arousal to affective priming

BACKGROUND

Recent data suggest that both word valence and arousal modulate subsequent cognitive processing. However, whether valence or arousal makes a stronger contribution to cognitive processing is less understood.

METHODS

The present study performed three experiments that varied the valence (positive or negative) and arousal (high or low) of prime-target word pairs in a lexical decision-priming task. Affective priming was derived from pure valence (Experiment 1), pure arousal (Experiment 2), or a combination of valence and arousal (Experiment 3).

RESULTS

By comparing three types of priming effects, we found an effect of valence on affective priming was obvious regardless of whether the relationship of the prime-target varied with valence, arousal, or the combination of valence and arousal. In contrast, an effect of arousal on affective priming only appeared in the condition that based on the arousal relationship of the prime-target pair. Moreover, the valence-driven priming effect, arousal-driven priming effect, and emotional-driven priming effect were modulated by valence type but not by arousal level of word stimuli.

CONCLUSION

The present results revealed a pattern of valence and arousal in semantic networks, indicating that the valence information of emotional words tends to be more stable than arousal information within the semantic system, at least in the present lexical decision-priming task.

On the limits of familiarity accounts in lexical decision: The case of repetition effects

Recent modelling accounts of the lexical decision task have suggested that the reading system performs evidence accumulation to carry out some functions. Evidence accumulation models have been very successful in accounting for effects in the lexical decision task, including the dissociation of repetition effects for words and nonwords (facilitative for words but inhibitory for nonwords). The familiarity of a repeated item triggers its recognition, which facilitates 'word' responses but hampers nonword rejection. However, reports of facilitative repetition effects for nonwords with several repetitions in short blocks challenge this hypothesis and favour models based on episodic retrieval. To shed light on the nature of the repetition effects for nonwords in lexical decision, we conducted four experiments to examine the impact of extra-lexical source of information-we induced the use of episodic retrieval traces via instructions and list composition. When the initial block was long, the repetition effect for nonwords was inhibitory, regardless of the instructions and list composition. However, the inhibitory effect was dramatically reduced when the initial block included two presentations of the stimuli and it was even facilitatory when the initial block was short. This composite pattern suggests that evidence accumulation models of lexical decision should take into account all sources of evidence-including episodic retrieval-during the process of lexical decision.

Mapping semantic space: property norms and semantic richness

In semantic property listing tasks, participants list many features for some concepts and fewer for others. This variability in number of features (NoF) has been used in previous research as a measure of a concept's semantic richness, and such studies have shown that in lexical-semantic tasks responses tend to be facilitated for words with high NoF compared to those for words with low NoF, even when many other relevant factors are controlled (Pexman et al. in Psychon Bull Rev 9:542-549, 2002; Mem Cogn 31:842-855, 2003; Psychon Bull Rev 15:161-167, 2008; Goh et al. in Front Psychol, 2016. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00976 ). Furthermore, shared features (i.e., features that are shared by multiple words) appear to facilitate responses in lexical-semantic tasks to a greater degree than distinctive features (Devereux et al. in Cogn Sci 40:325-350, 2016; Grondin et al. in J Mem Lang 60:1-19, 2009). This previous work was limited, however, to relatively small sets of words, typically those extracted from the McRae norms (McRae et al. in Behav Res Methods 37(4):547-559, 2005). New property listing norms provide the opportunity to extract NoF values for many more items (Buchanan et al. in Behav Res Methods 51:1849-1863, 2019). The purpose of the present study was to test whether NoF effects generalize to this larger item set, and to explore how NoF is related to other measures of semantic richness, including subjective ratings of concreteness, imageability, body-object interaction, sensory experience, valence, arousal, and age of acquisition, as well as more objective measures like semantic diversity, number of associates, and lexical centrality. Using the new Buchanan norms, we found significant NoF effects in lexical decision (is it a word or a nonword?) and semantic decision (is it concrete or abstract?) tasks. We also found significant effects of words' number of shared (less distinctive) features in each task. Further, factor analyses of all semantic richness measures showed a distinct factor structure, suggesting that there are clusters of semantic richness dimensions that seem to correspond to more embodied semantic dimensions and more distributional semantic dimensions. Results are interpreted as evidence that semantic representation is multimodal and multidimensional, and provide new insights about the structure of semantic space.

Are you really cursing? Neural processing of taboo words in native and foreign language

The use of socially opprobrious words (taboo words) is a cross-cultural phenomenon occurring between individuals from almost all social extractions. The neurocognitive correlates of using taboo words in the native language (L1) as compared to their use in a second (L2) language are largely unknown. We used fMRI to investigate the processing of taboo and non-taboo stimuli in monolinguals (Experiment 1) and highly proficient bilinguals (Experiment 2) engaged in lexical decision tasks. We report that for L1 socio-pragmatic knowledge is automatically conveyed and taboo words are processed with less effort than non-taboo words. For L2 the processing of taboo words is more effortful and engages additional structures (anterior cingulate cortex, insula) involved in social-norm representation and evaluation. Our results contribute to understand the interface between language and social-norm processing indicating that lexical processing is affected by socio-pragmatic knowledge, but only when the speaker has a contextual use of the language.

Embedded stems as a bootstrapping mechanism for morphological parsing during reading development

The aim of the current research was to test the hypothesis that the activation of embedded words (e.g., the farm in farmhouse) is the starting point for the development of an abstract morphological parsing system in children's reading. To test this hypothesis, we examined the developmental trajectory of compound priming effects in third- and fifth-grade primary school children, high school students, and adults. Both children and adults participated in a masked priming lexical decision study comparing transparent compound (farmhouse-farm), opaque compound (butterfly-butter), and noncompound (sandwich-sand) word priming effects measured relative to an unrelated control. The results showed significant and equal priming effects in the two compound conditions but not in the noncompound priming condition. This robust pattern was clearly and unequivocally observed across all groups of participants. Our data suggest that even the youngest readers have already acquired the ability to rapidly and automatically identify embedded stems and are sensitive to the overall structure of compound words (full decomposition). We conclude that the activation of embedded stems provides a critical starting point in children's use of morphological information when learning to read.

MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition

Using the megastudy approach, we report a new database (MEGALEX) of visual and auditory lexical decision times and accuracy rates for tens of thousands of words. We collected visual lexical decision data for 28,466 French words and the same number of pseudowords, and auditory lexical decision data for 17,876 French words and the same number of pseudowords (synthesized tokens were used for the auditory modality). This constitutes the first large-scale database for auditory lexical decision, and the first database to enable a direct comparison of word recognition in different modalities. Different regression analyses were conducted to illustrate potential ways to exploit this megastudy database. First, we compared the proportions of variance accounted for by five word frequency measures. Second, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the relative importance of the lexical variables influencing performance in the different modalities (visual and auditory). Finally, we compared the similarities and differences between the two modalities. All data are freely available on our website ( https://sedufau.shinyapps.io/megalex/ ) and are searchable at www.lexique.org , inside the Open Lexique search engine.

The role of experience for abstract concepts: Expertise modulates the electrophysiological correlates of mathematical word processing

Embodied theories assign experience a crucial role in shaping conceptual representations. Supporting evidence comes mostly from studies on concrete concepts, where e.g., motor expertise facilitated action concept processing. This study examined experience-dependent effects on abstract concept processing. We asked participants with high and low mathematical expertise to perform a lexical decision task on mathematical and nonmathematical abstract words, while acquiring event-related potentials. Analyses revealed an interaction of expertise and word type on the amplitude of a fronto-central N400 and a centro-parietal late positive component (LPC). For mathematical words, we found a trend for a lower N400 and a significantly higher LPC amplitude in experts compared to nonexperts. No differences between groups were found for nonmathematical words. The results suggest that expertise affects the processing stages of semantic integration and memory retrieval specifically for expertise-related concepts. This study supports the generalization of experience-dependent conceptual processing mechanisms to the abstract domain.

Reading sideways: Effects of egocentric and environmental orientation in a lexical decision task

Many image-level factors affect reading speed and comprehension, including the in-plane orientation of text. As words' angular deviation from upright increases, so do response times. Here we investigated whether these orientation effects in reading are based purely on an egocentric (retinal) reference frame, or whether there is also a contribution of the environmental reference frame. Participants completed a lexical decision task with six-letter, two-syllable words and nonwords presented at a wide range of angles, in increments of 22.5°. A control group of participants (N = 66) completed the task while sitting upright, and an experimental group (N = 43) completed the task while lying sideways on their right side. The function relating the egocentric orientation of strings to response times was symmetric for upright observers, but skewed for observers who lay sideways, with an advantage for responding to environmentally upright text. Our results suggest that sideways readers may use an oblique reference frame (similar to the perceptual upright) for mentally rotating text. We discuss implications for designing optimal text orientations in head mounted displays.

The optimal viewing position effect in printed versus cursive words: Evidence of a reading cost for the cursive font

Two eye-movement experiments were conducted to examine the effects of font type on the recognition of words presented in central vision, using a variable-viewing-position technique. Two main questions were addressed: (1) Is the optimal viewing position (OVP) for word recognition modulated by font type? (2) Is the cursive font more appropriate than the printed font in word recognition in children who exclusively write using a cursive script? In order to disentangle the role of perceptual difficulty associated with the cursive font and the impact of writing habits, we tested French adults (Experiment 1) and second-grade French children, the latter having exclusively learned to write in cursive (Experiment 2). Results revealed that the printed font is more appropriate than the cursive for recognizing words in both adults and children: adults were slightly less accurate in cursive than in printed stimuli recognition and children were slower to identify cursive stimuli than printed stimuli. Eye-movement measures also revealed that the OVP curves were flattened in cursive font in both adults and children. We concluded that the perceptual difficulty of the cursive font degrades word recognition by impacting the OVP stability.

The Dopamine Receptor D2 C957T Polymorphism Modulates Early Components of Event-Related Potentials in Visual Word Recognition Task

BACKGROUND

Visual word recognition is one of the central topics in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Genetic factors are known to contribute to the visual word recognition, but no genes associated with this process have been identified so far. We studied the impact of the DRD2 C957T polymorphism on the efficiency of visual word recognition by measuring its neuronal correlates and behavioral parameters. Early (~200 ms) components of event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded during a lexical decision task. The DRD2 C957T polymorphism is thought to be associated with D2 receptor's availability and binding potential. Earlier studies have demonstrated the influence of this variation on perception and processing of verbal stimuli. The DRD2 C957T is also associated with schizophrenia, with the C allele being the risk allele.

METHODS

Electroencephalogram, genetic, and behavioral data were collected from 96 healthy individuals (53.1% men). ERPs were recorded for words and pseudowords in implicit and explicit tasks. Two regions of interests in the left ventral temporal cortex, whose role in early visual word processing is well established, were selected for analysis.

RESULTS

The results showed the main effect of the DRD2 C957T polymorphism on P200 amplitude. Carriers of the TT genotype had higher P200 amplitudes compared to subjects with schizophrenia risk C allele. Within-group comparisons demonstrated a better ability to adjust attention to orthographic stimuli depending on task demands and lexicality in the TT group.

CONCLUSION

The results of the study suggest that the DRD2 C957T polymorphism modulates early stages of visual word recognition.

The orthographic similarity structure of English words: Insights from network science

Network science has been applied to study the structure of the mental lexicon, the part of long-term memory where all the words a person knows are stored. Here the tools of network science are used to study the organization of orthographic word-forms in the mental lexicon and how that might influence visual word recognition. An orthographic similarity network of the English language was constructed such that each node represented an English word, and undirected, unweighted edges were placed between words that differed by an edit distance of 1, a commonly used operationalization of orthographic similarity in psycholinguistics. The largest connected component of the orthographic language network had a small-world structure and a long-tailed degree distribution. Additional analyses were conducted using behavioral data obtained from a psycholinguistic database to determine if network science measures obtained from the orthographic language network could be used to predict how quickly and accurately people process written words. The present findings show that the structure of the mental lexicon influences lexical access in visual word recognition.

Using Statistical Models of Morphology in the Search for Optimal Units of Representation in the Human Mental Lexicon

Determining optimal units of representing morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon is a central question in psycholinguistics. Here, we utilize advances in computational sciences to study human morphological processing using statistical models of morphology, particularly the unsupervised Morfessor model that works on the principle of optimization. The aim was to see what kind of model structure corresponds best to human word recognition costs for multimorphemic Finnish nouns: a model incorporating units resembling linguistically defined morphemes, a whole-word model, or a model that seeks for an optimal balance between these two extremes. Our results showed that human word recognition was predicted best by a combination of two models: a model that decomposes words at some morpheme boundaries while keeping others unsegmented and a whole-word model. The results support dual-route models that assume that both decomposed and full-form representations are utilized to optimally process complex words within the mental lexicon.

Reading and visual word recognition ability in semantic dementia is not predicted by semantic performance

This paper describes longitudinal testing of two Semantic Dementia (SD) cases. It is common for patients with SD to present with deficits in reading aloud irregular words (i.e. surface dyslexia), and in lexical decision. Theorists from the connectionist tradition (e.g. Woollams et al., 2007) argue that in SD cases with concurrent surface dyslexia, the deterioration of irregular word reading and recognition performance is related to the extent of the deterioration of the semantic system. The Dual Route Cascaded model (DRC; Coltheart et al., 2001) makes no such prediction. We examined this issue using a battery of cognitive tests and two structural scans undertaken at different points in each cases time course. Across both cases, our behavioural testing found little evidence of a key putative link between semantic impairment and the decline of irregular word reading or lexical decision. In addition, our neuroimaging analyses suggested that it may be the emergence of atrophy to key neural regions both inside and outside the anterior temporal lobes that may best capture the emergence of impairments of irregular word reading, and implicated inferior temporal cortex in surface dyslexia.