The Mental Lexicon - Volume 14, Issue 3, 2019

In this study we analyze a large database of lexical decision times for English content words made by speakers of English as an additional language residing in the United States. Our first goal was to test whether the use of statistical measures better able to model variation associated with participants and items would replicate findings of a previous analysis of this data (Berger, Crossley, & Skalicky, 2019). Our second goal was to determine whether variables related to experiences using and learning English would interact with linguistic features of the target words. Results from our statistical analysis suggest affirmative answers to both of these questions. First, our results included significant effects for linguistic features related to contextual diversity and contextual distinctiveness, providing a replication of findings from the original study in that words appearing in more textual and lexical contexts were responded to quicker. Second, a measure of length of English learning and a measure of daily English use interacted with a measure of orthographic similarity. Our study provides further evidence regarding how a large, crowdsourced database can be used to obtain a better understanding of second language lexical recognition behavior and provides suggestions for further research.

Previous research suggests that while free morpheme identification during visual word recognition is position-independent, suffixes are activated only when they occur after the stem. Surprisingly, prefix position coding has not yet been assessed. This point is important given that some experimental studies demonstrated clear processing differences between prefixes and suffixes. In this study we examined whether Spanish suffixes and prefixes are recognized independently of their position by adapting the Crepaldi, Rastle, and Davis’s (2010) experimental paradigm. We observed that morphologically structured nonwords in which the affix occurs in its typical position (e.g., curiosura, disgrave) are rejected more slowly and less accurately than their matched orthographic controls (e.g., curiosula, dusgrave). Crucially, such morpheme interference effect is completely absent when the morphemes are inverted (i.e., uracurios and gravedis are rejected as easily as ulacurios and gravedus). Our data provide strong support to the hypothesis that all affix processing is sensitive to position.

Multiple theories predict that word learning is intimately linked to episodic memory, at least in the early phases of learning. However, it is unclear to what degree this link reflects more domain-specific (i.e., those dedicated to language or the lexicon) or more domain-general episodic memory processes that operate outside of language. One way to address this possibility is by using a behavioral individual differences design. This study examined whether behavioral individual differences in episodic memory abilities predicted adult word learning abilities. If behavioral performance in a nonlinguistic episodic memory task is predictive of behavioral performance in word learning, then it is likely that they share a common underlying nonlinguistic, memory-based mechanism. The results revealed that individual differences in episodic memory abilities predicted word learning abilities shortly after learning but not two days later. These behavioral results are consistent with prior neuropsychological observations (e.g., in amnesia: Kensinger, Ullman, & Corkin, 2001) as well as with theories positing a shift in reliance in lexical development from episodic memory to a distributed neocortical memory system after a period of sleep (e.g., Davis & Gaskell, 2009).

This paper introduces a freely available and easy to use Java application for the collection and recording of Cloze probability ratings. Clozapp presents participants with text fragments of the researchers’ choice and collects guesses regarding upcoming words. It can also collect basic demographic information about participants. Available modes of data collection include elicitation of responses to a limited number of omitted words in a text or to all words in a text. Clozeapp can be customized to present instructions and experimental stimuli in any given language and to collect multiple types of demographic data. This paper presents the application by detailing the states and actions available, as well as descriptions of how to customize the app to fit different experimental needs including possible input and output details. The application manual is provided. As a proof of concept, we used Clozapp to conduct a replication study of two existing collections of Cloze probability norms. The Clozapp norms showed strong reliable correlations (r > 0.7) with both existing data sets, suggesting a high convergence between modes of data collection. The application provides an efficient and customizable way of collecting predictability norms for language research.

The Q-Sort methodology has been used to study participants’ subjective views on various topics (Brown, 1996). The task has historically been completed by manually sorting cards into categories that force responses into a normal distribution (Brown, 1996). Data collection using this method is time consuming and manual data entry is prone to human error. We describe here QMethod Software – a computerized web-based application that allows participants to sort and record their responses online. This online application eliminates the need for researchers to attend the study sessions and to manually enter data. QMethod Software described here is currently being used in both applied and cognitive psychology studies, including a clinical study that evaluates participants’ perception of behaviours seen as most characteristic or most uncharacteristic of psychological aggression or coercive control in situations of intimate partner violence. In a health psychology study, it is being used to examine people’s perceptions of food allergy, and in a psycholinguistics lab it was used to evaluate the affective valence, abstractness, and semantic richness ratings of words. We will show here that the data obtained from one of these psycholinguistic studies (abstractness/concreteness) correlates highly with existing measures (Brysbaert, Warriner & Kuperman, 2014) thus demonstrating that the Q-sort methodology and this particular implementation, the QMethod Software app, reproduces more typical evaluations/assessments in the psycholinguistics literature.