The Mental Lexicon - Volume 10, Issue 1, 2015

The automatic evaluation literature and the survivability memory enhancement effect (Nairne et al., 2007) suggest that stimuli might be automatically categorized along an approach/withdraw dimension. Duckworth et al. (2002) showed that such effects hold even for novel stimuli. The current study is a more rigorous test of the idea that such effects reflect a general organizing principle of cognitive-perceptual processing. Participants performed auditory (Experiment 1) or visual (Experiment 2) lexical decision. The pseudowords had been previously rated by different participants on subjective Danger and Usefulness. RTs for the pseudowords showed the same Danger × Usefulness interaction observed several times for real words: increasing Danger speeded RTs for words lower on Usefulness but slowed RTs for words higher on Usefulness. Danger and Usefulness classifications are an integral part of routine stimulus processing from the very first exposure. Results are discussed in terms of a general organizing principle of human cognition.

Many studies have reported that first language (L1) translation primes speed responses to second language (L2) targets, whereas L2 translation primes generally do not speed up responses to L1 targets in lexical decision. According to the Sense Model (Finkbeiner, Forster, Nicol & Nakamura, 2004) this asymmetry is due to the proportion of senses activated by the prime. Because L2 primes activate only a subset of the L1 translations senses, priming is not observed. In this study we test the predictions of the Sense Model by using Japanese-English cognates, which allow us to manipulate the number of senses that words have in each language. Contrary to the predictions of the Sense Model, our results replicated the typical asymmetrical priming effects, suggesting that it is not the total activation of senses that drives the priming effect. Rather the results are more in line with theories that postulate slower, and thus ineffective, activation of semantics by L2 primes.

The role of morphological and syntactic information in non-native second language (L2) comprehension is controversial. Some have argued that late bilinguals rapidly integrate grammatical cues with other information sources during reading or listening in the same way as native speakers. Others claim that structural cues are underused in L2 processing. We examined different kinds of modifiers inside compounds (e.g. singulars vs. plurals, *rat eater vs. rats eater) with respect to this controversy, which are subject to both structural and non-structural constraints. Two offline and two online (eye-movement) experiments were performed examining the role of these constraints in spoken language comprehension of English and German, testing 77 advanced L2 learners. We also compared the L2 groups to corresponding groups of native speakers. Our results suggest that despite native-like sensitivity to the compounding constraints, late bilinguals rely more on non-structural constraints and are less able to revise their initial interpretations than L1 comprehenders.

Across languages, stop-sonorant onsets are preferred to fricative-sonorant ones (e.g., pna ≻ fna), suggesting that stop-initial onsets are better formed. Here, we ask whether this preference is active in the linguistic competence of English speakers. To address this question, we compare stop- and fricative-nasal onsets (e.g., pnik vs. fnik) to matched obstruent-obstruent controls (e.g., ptik vs. fsik, respectively). Past research has shown that (a) stop-stop onsets (e.g., ptik) are dispreferred to stop-nasal onsets (e.g., pnik); and (b) dispreferred onsets tend to be misidentified (e.g., ptik → pәtik). We thus reasoned that, if fricative-nasal onsets (e.g., fnik) are worse formed relative to stop-nasal ones (e.g., pnik), then fnik-type onsets should be more vulnerable to misidentification, hence, their advantage over obstruent-obstruent controls (e.g., fsik) should be attenuated. Consequently, when compared to the obstruent-obstruent baseline (e.g., ptik, fsik), misidentification should be less prevalent in stop-nasal onsets (e.g., pnik) compared to fricative-nasal ones (e.g., fnik). The results of three experiments are consistent with this prediction. Our findings suggest that English speakers possess linguistic preferences that mirror the distribution of onset clusters across languages.

The current studies investigated the processing and storage of lexical metaphors and metonyms by combining two existing methodologies from ambiguity research: counting the number of senses (as in e.g., Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002) and determining the relationship between those senses (as in e.g., Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007). We have called these two types of ambiguity ‘numerical polysemy’ and ‘relational polysemy’. Studies employing a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization task (Experiment 2) compared processing of metaphorical and non-metaphorical words while controlling for number of senses. The effects of relational polysemy were investigated in more detail with a further lexical decision study (Experiment 3). Results showed a metaphor advantage and metonymy disadvantage which conflict with earlier findings of reverse patterns (e.g., Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007). The fact that both conventional lexical metaphors and metonyms can incur either processing advantages or disadvantages strongly suggests they are not inherently stored differently in the mental lexicon.

This short paper discusses shortcomings of the capture-recapture (CR) method of estimating vocabulary size (Meara & Olmos Alcoy, 2010; Williams, Segalowitz & Leclair, 2014). When sampling from a population generated by a power-law process (e.g., a Zipf distribution), the probability that any given member is selected is dependent on its rank, such that higher frequency rank (i.e., 1st, 2nd, 3rd) members are much more likely to be selected than lower rank (i.e., 100th, 1000th) members. Because of this, sampling is much more likely to select from the same limited group of words. The CR measure, however, assumes a uniform distribution, and so drastically underestimates the size of the vocabulary when applied to power-law data. Work with simulated data shows ways that the degree of underestimation may be lessened. Applying these methods to real data shows effects parallel to those in the simulations.