Mind the suffix: Pseudoword processing in children and adults.

Previous evidence has shown that pseudowords made up of real morphemes take more time to process and generate more errors than pseudowords without morphemes in a lexical decision task. The explanation for these results is controversial because two possible arguments may be posited; the first is related to the morphological composition of the stimuli, and the second is related to the larger semantic interpretability of pseudowords with morphemes in comparison with pseudowords without morphemes (a semantic-based explanation). To disentangle this issue, we conducted an experiment with 92 children and 42 adults. For this purpose, a lexical decision task was implemented, controlling for semantic interpretability while manipulating the morphological status of pseudowords. The results show that the morphological composition of pseudowords generates larger latencies and more errors than pseudowords without morphemes, thereby corroborating that morphemes are activated during pseudoword processing even in the case of young readers.

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.

Dyslexics Exhibit an Orthographic, Not a Phonological Deficit in Lexical Decision.

Dyslexia is theorized to be caused by phonological deficits, visuo-attentional deficits, or some combination of the two. The present study contrasted phonological and visuo-attentional theories of dyslexia using a lexical decision task administered to adult participants with and without dyslexia. Homophone and pseudo-homophone stimuli were included to explore whether the two groups differed in their reliance on phonological encoding. Transposed-letter stimuli, including both TL neighbors and TL non-words, measured potential orthographic impairment predicted by visuo-attentional deficit theories. The findings revealed no significant difference in response time or accuracy between the groups for the homophone and pseudo-homophone stimuli. However, dyslexics were significantly slower and less accurate in their responses to the TL stimuli than controls. Thus, dyslexics presented deficits consistent with visuo-attentional theories, but not with the phonological deficit theory.

Lateralized displays reveal the perceptual locus of the syllable transposition effect in Korean.

Studies of letter transposition effects in alphabetic scripts provide compelling evidence that letter position is encoded flexibly during reading, potentially during an early, perceptual stage of visual word recognition. Recent studies additionally suggest similar flexibility in the spatial encoding of syllabic information in the Korean Hangul script. With the present research, we conducted two experiments to investigate the locus of this syllabic transposition effect. In Experiment 1, lexical decisions for foveal stimulus presentations were less accurate and slower for four-syllable nonwords created by transposing two syllables in a base word as compared to control nonwords, replicating prior evidence for a transposed syllable effect in Korean word recognition. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli were presented to the right and left visual hemifields (i.e., RVF and LVF), which project both unilaterally and contralaterally to each participant's left and right cerebral hemisphere (i.e., LH and RH) respectively, using lateralized stimulus displays. Lexical decisions revealed a syllable transposition effect in the accuracy and latency of lexical decisions for both RVF and LVF presentations. However, response times for correct responses were longer in the LVF, and therefore the RH, as compared to the RVF/LH. As the LVF/RH appears to be selectively sensitive to the visual-perceptual attributes of words, the findings suggest that this syllable transposition effect partly finds its locus within a perceptual stage of processing. We discuss these findings in relation to current models of the spatial encoding of orthographic information during visual word recognition and accounts of visual word recognition in Korean.

Estimating the proportions and latencies of reaction time outliers: A pooling method and case study of lexical decision tasks.

A methodological problem in most reaction time (RT) studies is that some measured RTs may be outliers-that is, they may be very fast or very slow for reasons unconnected to the task-related processing of interest. Numerous ad hoc methods have been suggested to discriminate between such outliers and the valid RTs of interest, but it is extremely difficult to determine how well these methods work in practice because virtually nothing is known about the actual characteristics of outliers in real RT datasets. This article proposes a new method of pooling cumulative distribution function values for examining empirical RT distributions to assess both the proportions of outliers and their latencies relative to those of the valid RTs. As the method is developed, its strengths and weaknesses are examined using simulations based on previously suggested ad hoc models for RT outliers with particular assumed proportions and distributions of valid RTs and outliers. The method is then applied to several large RT datasets from lexical decision tasks, and the results provide the first empirically based description of outlier RTs. For these datasets, fewer than 1% of the RTs seem to be outliers, and the median outlier latency appears to be approximately 4-6 standard deviations of RT above the mean of the valid RT distribution.

Examining the Impact of Reading Fluency on Lexical Decision Results in French 6th Graders.

PURPOSE: How does lexical decision behavior vary in students with the same grade level (all students were in their first year of middle-school), but different levels of reading fluency? Here, we tested a prediction of the dual-route model: as fluency increases, variations in the results may reflect a decreasing reliance on decoding and an increasing reliance on the lexical route. METHOD: 1,501 French 6th graders passed a one-minute speeded reading-aloud task evaluating fluency, and a ten-minute computerized lexical decision task evaluating the impact of lexicality, length, word frequency and pseudoword type. RESULTS: As predicted, the word length effect varied dramatically with reading fluency, with the least fluent students showing a length effect even for frequent words. The frequency effect also varied, but solely in proportion to overall reading speed, suggesting that frequency affects the decision stage similarly in all readers, while length disproportionately impacts poor readers. Response times and errors were also affected by pseudoword type (e.g., letter substitutions or transpositions), but these effects showed minimal variation with fluency. Overall, lexical decision variables were excellent predictors of reading fluency (r = 0.62). CONCLUSION: Our results highlight the variability in middle-school reading ability and describe how a simple lexical decision task can be used to assess students' mental lexicon (vocabulary) and the automatization of reading skills.

The Effects of Problematic Internet Use and Emotional Connotation on Internet Slang Processing: Evidence from a Lexical Decision Task.

Young people use slang for identifying themselves with a particular social group, gaining social recognition and respect from that group, and expressing their emotional state. One feature of Internet slang is its active use by youth in online communication, which, under certain conditions, may cause problematic Internet use (PIU). We conducted two studies in young Russian speakers (n1 = 115, n2 = 106). In study 1, participants were asked to rate a set of slang and common words using Self-Assessment Manikin. The study revealed that the most reliable predictor of higher emotional ratings was word familiarity. There were no significant effects of slang vs. common words or word frequency. In study 2, we used a dual lexical decision task to reveal the effects of word characteristics and propensity for PIU on reaction time (RT) for Internet slang words in pairs with semantically related vs. unrelated common words. Study 2 did not reveal any significant semantic priming effect. Word frequency was a significant predictor of lexical decision facilitation. Common, but not slang, word valence and dominance significantly affected RT in the opposite direction. Individuals with higher cognitive preoccupation with the Internet responded significantly faster, while those more likely to use online communication for mood regulation responded significantly slower to the stimuli. Apparently, on explicit and implicit levels, in-depth knowledge of Internet slang can be one the PIU markers. The results are discussed in line with Davis' approach to determining the general pathological Internet use.

Visuo-Attentional and Phonological Deficits Explored in French Students with Dyslexia: Eye Movements Recorded during a Phonological Lexical Decision Task.

Whether dyslexia is caused by phonological or attentional dysfunction remains a widely debated issue. To enrich this debate, we compared the eye movements of 32 French university students with (14 students) and without (18 students) dyslexia while performing a delayed phonological lexical decision task on 300 visually presented stimuli. The processing stimuli involved either a lexical (i.e., words) or a non-lexical route relying on a grapheme-phoneme correspondence (pseudohomophones and pseudowords), while other stimuli involved only a visual search (consonant and symbol sequences). We recorded the number of fixations, the duration of the first fixation and the amplitude of saccades made on the stimuli. Compared to the controls, the participants with dyslexia made more fixations while reading regardless of the type of stimulus (lexical and non-lexical). Crucially, the participants with dyslexia exhibited longer first fixations in particular while reading phonologically challenging stimuli such as pseudohomophones and pseudowords compared to stimuli involving a simple visual search (consonants, symbols). Taken together, these results suggest that both visual and phonological impairments may be implicated in dyslexia, supporting the hypothesis that dyslexia is a multifactorial deficit.

Malay Lexicon Project 3: The impact of orthographic-semantic consistency on lexical decision latencies.

Theories of word processing propose that readers are sensitive to statistical co-occurrences between spelling and meaning. Orthographic-semantic consistency (OSC) measures provide a continuous estimate of the statistical regularities between spelling and meaning. Here we examined Malay, an Austronesian language that is agglutinative. In Malay, stems are often repeated in other words that share a related meaning (e.g., sunyi/quiet; ke-sunyi-an/silence; makan/eat; makan-an/foods). The first goal was to expand an existing large Malay database by computing OSC estimates for 2,287 monomorphemic words. The second goal was to explore the impact of root family size and OSC on lexical decision latencies for monomorphemic words. Decision latencies were collected for 1,280 Malay words of various morphological structures. Of these, data from 1,000 monomorphemic words were analysed in a series of generalised additive mixed models (GAMMs). Root family size and OSC were significant predictors of decision latencies, particularly for lower frequency words. We found a facilitative effect of root family size and OSC. Furthermore, we observed an interaction between root family size and OSC in that an effect of OSC was only apparent in words with larger root families. This interaction has not yet been explored in English but has the potential to be a new benchmark effect to test distributional models of word processing.

Bigger is really better: Resolution of conflicting behavioural evidence for semantic size bias in a lexical decision task.

Previous literature has indicated conflicting results regarding a response time bias favouring words indicating large real-world objects (RWO) over words indicating small RWO during a lexical decision task. This study aimed to replicate an original experiment and, expanding on it, disentangle possible alternatives for why this effect is sometimes observed and sometimes not. The same methods as the original study were followed, and the results were inconsistent with all previously published findings. Although no significant difference was observed for response time, the findings indicated a significant difference in accuracy and inverse efficiency scores such that "large" words were recognised significantly more accurately than "small" words. After examining several linguistic dimensions that may also contribute to response time, statistical models accounting for these dimensions yielded a significant and increased effect size for the response time size rating of words in our sample from the United States. Our findings indicate that there is a cognitive bias favouring words representing large RWO over small ones but suggest several additional linguistic factors need to be controlled for it to be detected consistently in response time.

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.

UniPseudo: A universal pseudoword generator.

Pseudowords are letter strings that look like words but are not words. They are used in psycholinguistic research, particularly in tasks such as lexical decision. In this context, it is essential that the pseudowords respect the orthographic statistics of the target language. Pseudowords that violate them would be too easy to reject in a lexical decision and would not enforce word recognition on real words. We propose a new pseudoword generator, UniPseudo, using an algorithm based on Markov chains of orthographic n-grams. It generates pseudowords from a customizable database, which allows one to control the characteristics of the items. It can produce pseudowords in any language, in orthographic or phonological form. It is possible to generate pseudowords with specific characteristics, such as frequency of letters, bigrams, trigrams, or quadrigrams, number of syllables, frequency of biphones, and number of morphemes. Thus, from a list of words composed of verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs, UniPseudo can create pseudowords resembling verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs in any language using an alphabetic or syllabic system.

Representational level matters for tone-word recognition: Evidence from form priming.

In a form priming experiment with a lexical decision task, we investigated whether the representational structure of lexical tone in lexical memory impacts spoken-word recognition in Mandarin. Target monosyllabic words were preceded by five types of primes: (1) the same real words (/lun4/-/lun4/), (2) real words with only tone contrasts (/lun2/-/lun4/), (3) unrelated real words (/pie3/-/lun4/), (4) pseudowords with only tone contrasts (*/lun3/-/lun4/), and (5) unrelated pseudowords (*/tai3/-/lun4/). We found a facilitation effect in target words with pseudoword primes that share the segmental syllable but contrast in tones (*/lun3/-/lun4/). Moreover, no evident form priming effect was observed in target words primed by real words with only tone contrasts (/lun2/-/lun4/). These results suggest that the recognition of a tone word is influenced by the representational level of tone accessed by the prime word. The distinctive priming patterns between real-word and pseudoword primes are best explained by the connectionist models of tone-word recognition, which assume a hierarchical representation of lexical tone.

Examining Letter Detector Tolerance through Offset Letter Halves: Evidence from Lexical Decision.

Neurobiological models of reading assume that the specialized detectors at the letter level (e.g., the arrays of detectors for the letter 'n') possess a certain degree of tolerance (e.g., Local Combination Detectors model, Dehaene et al. 2005). In this study, we designed two lexical decision experiments that examined the limits of tolerance of letter detectors by introducing a novel manipulation involving shifting letter halves (e.g., in Experiment 1; in Experiment 2) relative to intact items. This manipulation alters the transition between upper and lower parts of the letters, adding junctions that do not exist in the intact letter forms. We included high- and low-frequency words in the stimulus list to investigate whether letter distortion affects processing beyond the letter level, reasoning that interactive effects would signal top-down lexical feedback. In Experiment 1, which employed a subtle letter shift, we observed a minimal cost of letter distortion that did not interact with word frequency. Experiment 2, employing a larger letter shift, revealed an overall greater reading cost that affected differentially high- and low-frequency words. Overall, these findings offer insights into the limits of resilience in letter detectors to distortion during word recognition and introduce a novel manipulation of letter distortion.

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.

Hypnotic suggestion modulates visual recognition of negative words depending on word arousal.

This study examined whether and how emotional hypnotic suggestions modulate the visual recognition of negative words. We investigated the influence of hypnotic suggestions aimed at modifying emotional reactivity on the arousal effect in negative words. High and low suggestible individuals performed a go/no-go lexical decision task in three intra-individual conditions: with a suggestion to increase emotional reactivity, with a suggestion to decrease emotional reactivity and without hypnotic suggestion. Results showed that hypnotic suggestions modulated the arousal facilitation effect differently depending on the level of suggestibility of the participants. In high suggestible individuals, response times for low-arousal negative words varied oppositely according to the suggestion administered, while no modulations were retrieved for high-arousal ones. In contrast, no suggestion effects were found for low suggestible participants. Altogether, these findings suggest a higher influence of hypnotic suggestions on emotional words that require longer processing times in high suggestible individuals.

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.

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.

Phonological Well-Formedness Constraints in Mandarin Phonotactics: Evidence From Lexical Decision.

This article investigates the role of phonological well-formedness constraints in Mandarin speakers' phonotactic grammar and how they affect online speech processing. Mandarin non-words can be categorized into systematic gaps and accidental gaps, depending on whether they violate principled phonotactic constraints based on the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP). Non-word acceptability judgment experiments have shown that systematic gaps received lower wordlikeness ratings than accidental gaps. Using a lexical decision task, this study found that systematic gaps were rejected significantly faster than accidental gaps, even after lexical statistics were taken into account. These findings thus provide converging evidence for the essential status of the OCP-based phonotactic constraints in Mandarin speakers' phonological knowledge.