Sit down and read on: working memory and long-term memory in particle-verb processing.

Particle verbs (e.g., look up) are lexical items for which particle and verb share a single lexical entry. Using event-related brain potentials, we examined working memory and long-term memory involvement in particle-verb processing. Dutch participants read sentences with head verbs that allow zero, two, or more than five particles to occur downstream. Additionally, sentences were presented for which the encountered particle was semantically plausible, semantically implausible, or forming a non-existing particle verb. An anterior negativity was observed at the verbs that potentially allow for a particle downstream relative to verbs that do not, possibly indexing storage of the verb until the dependency with its particle can be closed. Moreover, a graded N400 was found at the particle (smallest amplitude for plausible particles and largest for particles forming non-existing particle verbs), suggesting that lexical access to a shared lexical entry occurred at two separate time points.

Developing a structural model of reading: the role of hearing status in reading development over time.

The purpose of the present study was to develop a structural model of reading based on the Lexical Quality Hypothesis (Perfetti & Hart, 2002). Data from a 4-year longitudinal study of Dutch primary school children with and without hearing loss were used to conduct an exploratory analysis of how lexical components (i.e., decoding skills, lexical decision, and lexical use) relate to one another and to reading comprehension. Our structural model supports a positive role of the quality of the mental lexicon for reading comprehension. Furthermore, it was possible to apply the same conceptual model of reading development to both groups of children when incorporating hearing status as a grouping variable. However, a multigroup comparison model showed that the predictive values of the relations between the different tasks differed for the two groups.

Complex word reading in Dutch deaf children and adults.

Children who are deaf are often delayed in reading comprehension. This delay could be due to problems in morphological processing during word reading. In this study, we investigated whether 6th grade deaf children and adults are delayed in comparison to their hearing peers in reading complex derivational words and compounds compared to monomorphemic words. The results show that deaf children are delayed in reading both derivational words and compounds as compared to hearing children, while both deaf and hearing adults performed equally well on a lexical decision task. However, deaf adults generally showed slower reaction times than hearing adults. For both deaf and hearing children, derivational words were more difficult than compounds, as reflected in hearing children's slower reaction times and in deaf children's lower accuracy scores. This finding likely reflects deaf children's lack of familiarity with the meaning of the bound morphemes attached to the stems in derivational words. Therefore, it might be beneficial to teach deaf children the meaning of bound morphemes and to train them to use morphology in word reading. Moreover, these findings imply that it is important to focus on both monomorphemic and polymorphemic words when assessing word reading ability in deaf children.

Reading vocabulary in children with and without hearing loss: the roles of task and word type.

PURPOSE: To address the problem of low reading comprehension scores among children with hearing impairment, it is necessary to have a better understanding of their reading vocabulary. In this study, the authors investigated whether task and word type differentiate the reading vocabulary knowledge of children with and without severe hearing loss. METHOD: Seventy-two children with hearing loss and 72 children with normal hearing performed a lexical and a use decision task. Both tasks contained the same 180 words divided over 7 clusters, each cluster containing words with a similar pattern of scores on 8 word properties (word class, frequency, morphological family size, length, age of acquisition, mode of acquisition, imageability, and familiarity). RESULTS: Whereas the children with normal hearing scored better on the 2 tasks than the children with hearing loss, the size of the difference varied depending on the type of task and word. CONCLUSIONS: Performance differences between the 2 groups increased as words and tasks became more complex. Despite delays, children with hearing loss showed a similar pattern of vocabulary acquisition as their peers with normal hearing. For the most precise assessment of reading vocabulary possible, a range of tasks and word types should be used.

The similarity of plural endings and linking elements in regional speech variants of Dutch.

The plural suffix -en (noot+en, 'nuts') is pronounced differently by speakers coming from different regions of the Netherlands. In this study, we compared the pronunciation of the plural suffix -en in phrases (noot+en kraken, 'to crack nuts') with linking en in compounds (noot+en+kroker, 'nutcracker'), because some claim that both are similar (Schreuder, Neijt, van der Weide, & Baayen, 1998), whereas others claim that they are not (Verkuyl, 2007). The pronunciations of 109 participants coming from five regions of the Netherlands were therefore compared in a picture naming task. A systematic relation between the pronunciations of plural -en and linking en was detected: Speakers from the Northern and Eastern regions produced [(upside-down e)n] most often for both the linking elements and plural endings, while speakers from the Middle and Western regions produced [upside-down e] most often for both. For speakers from the Southern region, we found no preference to pronounce either [upside-down e] or [upside-down e n] in compounds or phrases. It is concluded that Dutch speakers often do not distinguish plural -en from linking en in their speech production. Possibly, speakers of Dutch consider linking en and plural -en as the same morpheme.

Improving word reading speed: individual differences interact with a training focus on successes or failures.

The effect of two training procedures on the development of reading speed in poor readers is examined. One training concentrates on the words the children read correctly (successes), the other on the words they read incorrectly (failures). Children were either informed or not informed about the training focus. A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 79 poor readers. They repeatedly read regularly spelled Dutch consonant-vowel-consonant words, some children their successes, others their failures. The training used a computerized flashcards format. The exposure duration of the words was varied to maintain an accuracy rate at a constant level. Reading speed improved and transferred to untrained, orthographically more complex words. These transfer effects were characterized by an Aptitude-Treatment Interaction. Poor readers with a low initial reading level improved most in the training focused on successes. For poor readers with a high initial reading level, however, it appeared to be more profitable to practice with their failures. Informing students about the focus of the training positively affected training: The exposure duration needed for children informed about the focus of the training decreased more than for children who were not informed. This study suggests that neither of the two interventions is superior to the other in general. Rather, the improvement of general reading speed in a transparent orthography is closely related to both the children's initial reading level and the type of words they practice with: common and familiar words when training their successes and uncommon and less familiar words with training their failures.

Effects of morphological Family Size for young readers.

Dutch children, from the second and fourth grade of primary school, were each given a visual lexical decision test on 210 Dutch monomorphemic words. After removing words not recognized by a majority of the younger group, (lexical) decisions were analysed by mixed-model regression methods to see whether morphological Family Size influenced decision times over and above several other covariates. The effect of morphological Family Size on decision time was mixed: larger families led to significantly faster decision times for the second graders but not for the fourth graders. Since facilitative effects on decision times had been found for adults, we offer a developmental account to explain the absence of an effect of Family Size on decision times for fourth graders.

Vocabulary development in children with hearing loss: the role of child, family, and educational variables.

In the present study we examined the effect of hearing status on reading vocabulary development. More specifically, we examined the change of lexical competence in children with hearing loss over grade 4-7 and the predictors of this change. Therefore, we used a multi-factor longitudinal design with multiple outcomes, measuring the reading vocabulary knowledge in children with hearing loss from grades 4 and 5, and of children without hearing loss from grade 4, for 3 years with two word tasks: a lexical decision task and a use decision task. With these tasks we measured word form recognition and (in)correct usage recognition, respectively. A GLM repeated measures procedure indicated that scores and growth rates on the two tasks were affected by hearing status. Moreover, with structural equation modeling we observed that the development of lexical competence in children with hearing loss is stable over time, and a child's lexical competence can be explained best by his or her lexical competence assessed on a previous measurement occasion. If you look back, differences in lexical competence among children with hearing loss stay unfortunately the same. Educational placement, use of sign language at home, intelligence, use of hearing devices, and onset of deafness can account for the differences among children with hearing loss.

Depth of reading vocabulary in hearing and hearing-impaired children.

The main point of our study was to examine the vocabulary knowledge of pupils in grades 3-6, and in particular the relative reading vocabulary disadvantage of hearing-impaired pupils. The achievements of 394 pupils with normal hearing and 106 pupils with a hearing impairment were examined on two vocabulary assessment tasks: a lexical decision task and a use decision task. The target words in both tasks represent the vocabulary children should have at the end of primary school. The results showed that most hearing pupils reached this norm, whereas most hearing-impaired pupils did not. In addition, results showed that hearing-impaired pupils not only knew fewer words, but that they also knew them less well. This lack of deeper knowledge remained even when matching hearing and hearing-impaired children on minimal word knowledge. Additionally, comparison of the two tasks demonstrated the efficacy of the lexical decision task as a measure of lexical semantic knowledge.

When bicycle pump is harder to read than bicycle bell: effects of parsing cues in first and second language compound reading.

Reading and understanding morphologically complex words can sometimes be a particular challenge to nonnative speakers. For example, compound words consist of multiple free morphemes, oftentimes without explicit marking of the morpheme boundaries. In a lexical decision task, we investigated compound reading in native and nonnative speakers of Dutch. The compounds differed in that the letter bigram that formed the morpheme boundary could or could not occur within a Dutch morpheme, thus providing an orthotactic cue as to the position of the morpheme boundary. Native and nonnative speakers responded faster to compounds that contained such an orthotactic cue. Additional analyses showed that although native speakers used this cue for long, but not for short compounds, no such word length modulation was observed for nonnative speakers. It is suggested that orthotactic parsing cues are used during compound reading and possibly even more so in nonnative speakers.

Reading polymorphemic Dutch compounds: toward a multiple route model of lexical processing.

This article reports an eye-tracking experiment with 2,500 polymorphemic Dutch compounds presented in isolation for visual lexical decision while readers' eye movements were registered. The authors found evidence that both full forms of compounds (dishwasher) and their constituent morphemes (e.g., dish, washer) and morphological families of constituents (sets of compounds with a shared constituent) played a role in compound processing. They observed simultaneous effects of compound frequency, left constituent frequency, and family size early (i.e., before the whole compound has been scanned) and also observed effects of right constituent frequency and family size that emerged after the compound frequency effect. The temporal order of these and other observed effects goes against assumptions of many models of lexical processing. The authors propose specifications for a new multiple-route model of polymorphemic compound processing that is based on time-locked, parallel, and interactive use of all morphological cues as soon as they become even partly available to the visual uptake system.

Rhythm versus analogy: prosodic form variation in Dutch compounds.

Creating compound nouns is the most productive process of Dutch morphology, with an interesting pattern of form variation. For instance, staat 'nation' simply combines with kunde 'art' (staatkunde 'political science, statesmanship'), but needs a linking element s or en to form staatsschuld 'national debt' and statenbond 'confederation'. Previous research has shown that the use of linking elements is guided by paradigmatic analogy, a factor that in the absence of other factors would lead to paradigm uniformity. However, there is considerable freedom in the use of linking elements, suggesting that other factors are relevant as well. We present studies showing that both stress and length affect their use, and that, in an experimental setting, the linking element en is less favored in lengthened compounds. However, the results observed in this experiment can only be explained satisfactorily in terms of rhythm: the preference for a recurrent pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The general conclusion of this study concerns the distinction between language behavior guided by stored knowledge or by processing factors. Models based on analogy (exemplar-based models) rely on stored knowledge. This study shows that apart from that, rhythm plays its own role. Rhythmic structures facilitate language processing, and a preference for perfect rhythm explains which variant of a compound (with or without the linking element) is chosen. Given the universal nature of analogy and rhythm, the issue of the balance between these two components of linguistic knowledge is relevant for a wide array of languages.

Prosodic cues for morphological complexity: the case of Dutch plural nouns.

It has recently been shown that listeners use systematic differences in vowel length and intonation to resolve ambiguities between onset-matched simple words (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002; Salverda, Dahan, & McQueen, 2003). The present study shows that listeners also use prosodic information in the speech signal to optimize morphological processing. The precise acoustic realization of the stem provides crucial information to the listener about the morphological context in which the stem appears and attenuates the competition between stored inflectional variants. We argue that listeners are able to make use of prosodic information, even though the speech signal is highly variable within and between speakers, by virtue of the relative invariance of the duration of the onset. This provides listeners with a baseline against which the durational cues in a vowel and a coda can be evaluated. Furthermore, our experiments provide evidence for item-specific prosodic effects.

Morphological family size in a morphologically rich language: the case of Finnish compared with Dutch and Hebrew.

Finnish has a very productive morphology in which a stem can give rise to several thousand words. This study presents a visual lexical decision experiment addressing the processing consequences of the huge productivity of Finnish morphology. The authors observed that in Finnish words with larger morphological families elicited shorter response latencies. However, in contrast to Dutch and Hebrew, it is not the complete morphological family of a complex Finnish word that codetermines response latencies but only the subset of words directly derived from the complex word itself. Comparisons with parallel experiments using translation equivalents in Dutch and Hebrew showed substantial cross-language predictivity of family size between Finnish and Dutch but not between Finnish and Hebrew, reflecting the different ways in which the Hebrew and Finnish morphological systems contribute to the semantic organization of concepts in the mental lexicon.

Probability in the grammar of German and Dutch: interfixation in triconstituent compounds.

This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are significantly more likely to appear at the major constituent boundary than expected under chance conditions. A series of experiments provides evidence that speakers of German and Dutch are sensitive to the probabilistic cues to constituent structure provided by the interfixes. Thus, our data provide evidence that probability is part and parcel of grammatical competence.

Processing reduced word forms: the suffix restoration effect.

Listeners cannot recognize highly reduced word forms in isolation, but they can do so when these forms are presented in context (Ernestus, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2002). This suggests that not all possible surface forms of words have equal status in the mental lexicon. The present study shows that the reduced forms are linked to the canonical representations in the mental lexicon, and that these latter representations induce reconstruction processes. Listeners restore suffixes that are partly or completely missing in reduced word forms. A series of phoneme-monitoring experiments reveals the nature of this restoration: the basis for suffix restoration is mainly phonological in nature, but orthography has an influence as well.

The subjects as a simple random effect fallacy: subject variability and morphological family effects in the mental lexicon.

This is a methodological study addressing the appropriateness of standard by-subject and by-item averaging procedures for the analysis of repeated-measures designs. By means of a reanalysis of published data (Schreuder & Baayen, 1997), using random regression models, we present a proof of existence of systematic variability between participants that is ignored in the standard psycholinguistic analytical procedures. By applying linear mixed effects modeling (Pinheiro & Bates, 2000), we call attention to the potential lack of power of the by-subject and by-item analyses, which in this case study fail to reveal the coexistence of a facilitatory family size effect and an inhibitory family frequency effect in visual and auditory lexical processing.

The processing and representation of Dutch and English compounds: peripheral morphological and central orthographic effects.

In this study, we use the association between various measures of the morphological family and decision latencies to reveal the way in which the components of Dutch and English compounds are processed. The results show that for constituents of concatenated compounds in both languages, a position-related token count of the morphological family plays a role, whereas English open compounds show an effect of a type count, similar to the effect of family size for simplex words. When Dutch compounds are written with an artificial space, they reveal no effect of type count, which shows that the differential effect for the English open compounds is not superficial. The final experiment provides converging evidence for the lexical consequences of the space in English compounds. Decision latencies for English simplex words are better predicted from counts of the morphological family that include concatenated and hyphenated but not open family members.

Linking elements in Dutch noun-noun compounds: constituent families as analogical predictors for response latencies.

This study addresses the choice of linking elements in novel Dutch noun-noun compounds. Previous off-line experiments (Krott, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2001) revealed that this choice can be predicted analogically on the basis of the distribution of linking elements in the left and right constituent families, i.e., the set of existing compounds that share the left (or right) constituent with the target compound. The present study replicates the observed graded analogical effects under time pressure, using an on-line decision task. Furthermore, the analogical support of the left constituent family predicts response latencies. We present an implemented interactive activation network model that accounts for the experimental data.