Contrasting the primings between English and Chinese: To advance Hoey's theory of lexical priming from the perspective of culture psychology.

The present study demonstrated that Hoey's promising and serviceable theory could serve as one that can describe and explain similarities and differences exhibited between English and Chinese. Three fundamental concepts as defined in the theory (collocation, colligation, and semantic association) were considered. The combinatory profile showed that: (1) different word choices were primed to constitute to a shared semantic association (2) no unique word combination containing the nodes was found, but high or low frequency use of particular clusters and collocates appearing at both sides to the node occurred; (3) it is claimed that the interpretation and explanation of priming similarities and differences between English and Chinese need to be extended to culture psychology.

We both say tomato: Intact lexical alignment in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

In people with schizophrenia and related disorders, impairments in communication and social functioning can negatively impact social interactions and quality of life. In the present study, we investigated the cognitive basis of a specific aspect of linguistic communication-lexical alignment-in people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. We probed lexical alignment as participants played a collaborative picture-naming game with the experimenter, in which the two players alternated between naming a dual-name picture (e.g., rabbit/bunny) and listening to their partner name a picture. We found evidence of lexical alignment in all three groups, with no differences between the patient groups and the controls. We argue that these typical patterns of lexical alignment in patients were supported by preserved-and in some cases increased-bottom-up mechanisms, which balanced out impairments in top-down perspective-taking.

Effect of lexical accessibility on syntactic production in aphasia: An eyetracking study.

PURPOSE: Healthy speakers use both word-level and structure-level information to ease sentence production processes. Structural priming facilitates message-structure mapping in aphasia. However, it remains unclear if and how word-level information affects off-line and on-line sentence production in persons with aphasia (PWA). This eyetracking-while-speaking study examined the effect of lexical priming on production of syntactic (active/passive) structures in PWA. METHOD: Eleven PWA and twenty healthy older adults (HOA) described transitive actions (woman pulling horse) following lexical priming, wherein the relative ease of lexical retrieval for the Agent or Theme was manipulated via an auditory probe (what is happening with the woman/horse ?). It was examined whether or not PWA produce the sentence structure that allows earlier production of the primed word (e.g., passives when Theme was primed). Participants' eye fixation times to each character (Agent, Theme) were also monitored to examine if PWA show priming-induced preferential looks to one character from the earliest stage of production, consistent with word-driven planning. RESULTS: HOA showed increased production of passives over actives in the Theme vs. Agent prime condition. In eye fixation data, HOA showed priming-induced Theme advantage from the earliest time window (picture onset-400 milliseconds). PWA also showed a significant priming effect in off-line sentence production, with this priming effect being greater for the individuals whose syntactic processing is better preserved. In eye fixation data, however, PWA showed preferential fixations to the primed character at a later stage of sentence planning (400-800 milliseconds), following equal fixation time to Agent and Theme during the earliest time window. CONCLUSION: HOA showed word-driven production in both off-line and real-time (eye fixations) production. Lexical accessibility effectively drove off-line syntactic production in PWA, especially for those whose syntactic capacity remains relatively preserved. However, PWA showed advanced processing of both characters in earliest eye fixation data, suggesting that successful word-driven off-line syntactic production was associated with atypical real-time sentence planning in aphasia.

Priming semántico directo y mediado ortofonológicamente en pacientes con enfermedad de Parkinson: un estudio de tiempos de reacción / Direct and orthophonologically mediated semantic priming in patients with Parkinson's disease: evidence from reaction times

El presente estudio aborda el impacto de la enfermedad de Parkinson en el procesamiento de información semántica durante una tarea de reconocimiento visual de palabras. Para ello, se comparó el rendimiento de un grupo de pacientes con Parkinson con el rendimiento de sujetos sin daño neurológico en dos experimentos. Se evaluaron los efectos de tiempo de presentación de un prime semántico directo (Experimento 1) y un prime semántico mediado orto-fonológicamente (Experimento 2). Además, se evaluó la influencia de la frecuencia léxica tanto del prime como la palabra target, sobre el acceso léxico. Los participantes estaban divididos en tres grupos (grupo clínico, grupo de control etario, y grupo de adultos jóvenes). Los tres grupos completaron una tarea de decisión léxica de tiempo de reacción en la modalidad go-no-go. Los participantes debían responder presionando una tecla del computador si el estímulo presentado en la pantalla era una palabra. En el caso contrario cuando era una pseudo palabra, los participantes no debían presionar ninguna tecla. Los resultados en base al número de respuestas correctas y los tiempos de reacción muestran dificultades de procesamiento semántico en el grupo clínico. Sin embargo, este grupo mostró ser sensible a la frecuencia de las palabras y los tiempos de presentación de estas. En su conjunto, los resultados son coherentes con la literatura existente, y contribuyen a comprender de mejor manera el déficit lingüístico presente en la enfermedad de Parkinson.

The present study addresses the incidence of Parkinson's disease in the processing of semantic information during visual word recognition tasks. In order to do so, the performance of a group of patients with Parkinson's was compared with the performance of subjects without neurological impairment in two experiments. We evaluate the effects of presentation time of a semantic prime (Experiment 1) and anortho-phonologically mediated semantic prime (Experiment 2), and the impact of the lexical frequency of both the prime and the target words. Participants divided into three groups (a clinical group, an age control group and a group of young adults), completed a reaction time lexical decision task in the go-no-go modality. They had to respond by pressing a computer key if the stimulus presented on the screen was a word. Otherwise, the participants should not press any key. The results, based on response accuracy and reaction times, show a semantic deficit in the clinical group, while this group was, nevertheless, sensitive to the frequency of the words and their presentation time. As a whole, the results are consistent with the existing literature, and contribute to a better understanding of the linguistic deficit present in Parkinson's disease.

Learning to spell in a language with transparent orthography: Distributional properties of orthography and whole-word lexical processing.

We examined how whole-word lexical information and knowledge of distributional properties of orthography interact in children's spelling. High- versus low-frequency words, which included inconsistently spelled segments occurring more or less frequently in the orthography, were used in two experiments: (a) word spelling; (b) lexical priming of pseudoword spelling. Participants were 1st-, 2nd-, and 4th-grade Italian children. Word spelling showed sensitivity to the distributional properties of orthography in all children: accuracy in spelling uncommon transcription segments emerged progressively as a function of word frequency and schooling. Lexical priming effects emerged as a function of age. When related primes contained an uncommon segment, 2nd- and 4th-graders preferred uncommon segments than common ones in spelling target pseudowords, thus inverting the response trend found in the control condition. A smaller but significant effect was present in 1st- graders, who, unlike 2nd- and 4th-graders, still preferred common segments, only slightly increasing the use of uncommon ones. A larger priming effect emerged for high-frequency primes than low-frequency ones. Results indicate that children learning to spell in a transparent orthography are sensitive to the distributional properties of the orthography. However, whole-word lexical representations are also used, with larger effects in more skilled pupils.

The Analysis of Metaphor: To What Extent Can the Theory of Lexical Priming Help Our Understanding of Metaphor Usage and Comprehension?

This paper addresses the issues with current systems of categorisation and measurement of linguistic metaphoricity, which have coloured most research into the area to-date. The paper discusses the role of metaphor as a form of creative language and a deviation from more linguistic norms and conventionalities. Two current theories are discussed as providing alternatives to metaphor identification approaches. These are Hanks' (Int J Lexicogr 17:3, 2004) Theory of Norms and Exploitations and Hoey's (Lexical priming and the properties of text, 2003) Theory of Lexical Priming. It is proposed that the theory of lexical priming can be adopted to provide an explanation of linguistic norms and exploitations involved in metaphoric language. Finally, the paper provides a brief corpus analysis of the verb to kindle found in a corpus of Nineteenth Century writings. The analysis will focus upon evidence of linguistic and secondary meaning primings within concordance lines.

Metaphor priming in sentence production: concrete pictures affect abstract language production.

People speak metaphorically about abstract concepts-for instance, a person can be "full of love" or "have a lot of love to give." Over the past decade, research has begun to focus on how metaphors are processed during language comprehension. Much of this work suggests that understanding a metaphorical expression involves activating brain and body systems involved in perception and motor control. However, no research to date has asked whether the same is true while speakers produce language. We address this gap using a sentence production task. Its results demonstrate that visually activating a concrete source domain can trigger the use of metaphorical language drawn from that same concrete domain, even in sentences that are thematically unrelated to the primes, a metaphorical priming effect. This effect suggests that conceptual metaphors play a part in language production. It also shows that activation in the perceptual system that is not part of an intended message can nevertheless influence sentence formulation.

Priming sentence planning.

Sentence production requires mapping preverbal messages onto linguistic structures. Because sentences are normally built incrementally, the information encoded in a sentence-initial increment is critical for explaining how the mapping process starts and for predicting its timecourse. Two experiments tested whether and when speakers prioritize encoding of different types of information at the outset of formulation by comparing production of descriptions of transitive events (e.g., A dog is chasing the mailman) that differed on two dimensions: the ease of naming individual characters and the ease of apprehending the event gist (i.e., encoding the relational structure of the event). To additionally manipulate ease of encoding, speakers described the target events after receiving lexical primes (facilitating naming; Experiment 1) or structural primes (facilitating generation of a linguistic structure; Experiment 2). Both properties of the pictured events and both types of primes influenced the form of target descriptions and the timecourse of formulation: character-specific variables increased the probability of speakers encoding one character with priority at the outset of formulation, while the ease of encoding event gist and of generating a syntactic structure increased the likelihood of early encoding of information about both characters. The results show that formulation is flexible and highlight some of the conditions under which speakers might employ different planning strategies.

Predicting language: MEG evidence for lexical preactivation.

It is widely assumed that prediction plays a substantial role in language processing. However, despite numerous studies demonstrating that contextual information facilitates both syntactic and lexical-semantic processing, there exists no direct evidence pertaining to the neural correlates of the prediction process itself. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), this study found that brain activity was modulated by whether or not a specific noun could be predicted, given a picture prime. Specifically, before the noun was presented, predictive contexts triggered enhanced activation in left mid-temporal cortex (implicated in lexical access), ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (previously associated with top-down processing), and visual cortex (hypothesized to index the preactivation of predicted form features), successively. This finding suggests that predictive language processing recruits a top-down network where predicted words are activated at different levels of representation, from more 'abstract' lexical-semantic representations in temporal cortex, all the way down to visual word form features. The same brain regions that exhibited enhanced activation for predictive contexts before the onset of the noun showed effects of congruence during the target word. To our knowledge, this study is one of the first to directly investigate the anticipatory stage of predictive language processing.