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- Volume 16, Issue 1, 2021
The Mental Lexicon - Volume 16, Issue 1, 2021
Volume 16, Issue 1, 2021
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The impact of embodied simulation in vocabulary learning
Author(s): Rémy Versace, Nicolas Bailloud, Annie Magnan and Jean Ecallepp.: 2–22 (21)More LessAbstractThe aim of the present study was to demonstrate the multisensory nature of vocabulary knowledge by using learning designed to encourage the simulation of sensorimotor experiences.
Forty participants were instructed to learn pseudowords together with arbitrary definitions, either by mentally experiencing (sensorimotor simulation) the definitions, or by mentally repeating them. A test phase consisting of three tasks was then administered: in a recognition task, participants had to recognize learned pseudowords among distractors. In a categorization task, they had to categorize pseudowords as representing either living or non-living items. Finally, in a sentence completion task, participants had to decide whether pseudowords were congruent with context sentences. As expected, the sensorimotor simulation condition induced better performances only in the categorization task and the sentence completion task. The results converge with data from the literature in demonstrating that knowledge emergence implies sensorimotor simulation and showing that vocabulary learning can benefit from encoding that encourages the simulation of sensorimotor experiences.
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Relative entropy effects on the processing of spoken Romanian verbs
Author(s): Filip Nenadić, Petar Milin and Benjamin V. Tuckerpp.: 23–48 (26)More LessAbstractA multitude of studies show the relevance of both inflectional paradigms (word form frequency distributions, i.e., inflectional entropy) and inflectional classes (whole class frequency distributions) for visual lexical processing. Their interplay has also been proven significant, measured as the difference between paradigm and class frequency distributions (relative entropy). Relative entropy effects have now been recorded in nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositional phrases. However, all of these studies used visual stimuli – either written words or picture-naming tasks. The goal of our study is to test whether the effects of relative entropy can also be captured in the auditory modality. Forty young native speakers of Romanian (60% female) living in Serbia as part of the Romanian ethnic minority participated in an auditory lexical decision task. Stimuli were 168 Romanian verbs from two inflectional classes. Verbs were presented in four forms: present and imperfect 1st person singular, present 3rd person plural, and imperfect 2nd person plural. The results show that relative entropy influences both response accuracy and response latency. We discuss alternative operationalizations of relative entropy and how they can help us test hypotheses about the structure of the mental lexicon.
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Contributions of declarative memory and prior knowledge to incidental L2 vocabulary learning
Author(s): Josiah Murphy, Ryan T. Miller and Phillip Hamrickpp.: 49–68 (20)More LessAbstractThe bulk of second language (L2) vocabulary learning happens incidentally through reading (Rott, 2007; Webb, 2008), but individual differences, such as prior knowledge, modulate the efficacy of such incidental learning. One individual difference that is strongly predicted to play a role in L2 vocabulary is declarative memory ability; however, links between these two abilities have not been explored (Hamrick, Lum, & Ullman, 2018). This study considered declarative memory in conjunction with varying degrees of prior knowledge, since declarative memory may serve a compensatory function (Ullman & Pullman, 2015). L2 Spanish learners completed measures of prior Spanish vocabulary knowledge, declarative memory ability, and incidental L2 vocabulary learning. The results suggest that better declarative memory predicts better immediate learning in general and better vocabulary retention two days later, but only for those with more prior knowledge, consistent with the Matthew Effect previously reported in the literature (Stanovich, 1986).
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Priming Maltese plurals
Author(s): Jessica Nieder, Ruben van de Vijver and Holger Mittererpp.: 69–97 (29)More LessAbstractWe investigate the storage and processing of sound and broken plural forms in the Maltese lexicon by means of a cross-modal priming study. The results show no significant differences in reaction time between sound and broken plurals, but indicate a different priming effect for sound than for broken plurals. We argue that the different priming effect is a result of the phonological overlap between sound singulars and their corresponding plurals forms, while broken singulars and their plurals do not share the same phonological structure. Our results support a single-mechanism model of morphological processing in which both frequency of pattern and morphophonological similarity interact.
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Romance N Prep N constructions in visual word recognition
Author(s): Inga Hennecke and Harald Baayenpp.: 98–132 (35)More LessAbstractN Prep N constructions such as Sp. bicicleta de montaña ‘mountain bike’ are very productive and frequent in Romance languages. They commonly have been classified as syntagmatic compounds that show no orthographic union and exhibit an internal structure that resembles free syntactic structures, such as Sp. libro para niños ‘book for children’. There is no consensus on how to best distinguish lexical from syntactic N Prep N constructions. The present paper presents an explorative eye-tracking study on N Prep N constructions, varying both lexical type (lexical vs. syntactic) and preposition across three languages, French, Spanish and Portuguese. The task of the eye-tracking study was a reading aloud paradigm of the constructions in sentence context. Constructions were fixated on less when more frequent, independent of lexical status. There was also modest evidence that a higher construction frequency afforded shorter total fixation durations, but only for lower deciles of the response distribution. The (construction-initial) head noun also received fewer fixations as construction frequency increased, and also when the head noun was more frequent. The second fixation durations on the head noun also revealed an effect of lexical status, with syntactic constructions receiving shorter fixations at the 5th and 7th deciles. The probability of a fixation on the preposition decreased with preposition frequency, but first fixations on the preposition increased with preposition frequency. The prepositions of Portuguese, the language with the richest inventory of prepositions, received more fixations than the prepositions of French and Spanish. The observed pattern of results is consistent with models of lexical processing in which reading is guided by knowledge of both higher-level constructions and knowledge of key constituents such as the head noun and the preposition.
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Testing the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail via auditory lexical decision
Author(s): Arne Lohmann and Benjamin V. Tuckerpp.: 133–164 (32)More LessAbstractThis article reports the results of an auditory lexical decision task, testing the processing of phonetic detail of English noun/verb conversion pairs. The article builds on recent findings showing that the frequent occurrence in certain prosodic environments may lead to the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail as part of the lexical representation. To investigate this question with noun/verb conversion pairs, ambicategorical stimuli were used that exhibit systematic occurrence differences with regard to prosodic environment, as indicated by either a strong verb-bias, e.g., talk (N/V) or a strong noun-bias, e.g., voice (N/V). The auditory lexical decision task tests whether acoustic properties reflecting either the typical or the atypical prosodic environment impact the processing of recordings of the stimuli. In doing so assumptions about the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail are tested that distinguish competing model architectures. The results are most straightforwardly accounted for within an abstractionist architecture, in which the acoustic signal is mapped onto a representation that is based on the canonical pronunciation of the word.
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Phonetic reduction and paradigm uniformity effects in spontaneous speech
Author(s): Marie Engemann and Ingo Plagpp.: 165–198 (34)More LessAbstractRecent work on the acoustic properties of complex words has found that morphological information may influence the phonetic properties of words, e.g. acoustic duration. Paradigm uniformity has been proposed as one mechanism that may cause such effects. In a recent experimental study Seyfarth et al. (2017) found that the stems of English inflected words (e.g. frees) have a longer duration than the same string of segments in a homophonous mono-morphemic word (e.g. freeze), due to the co-activation of the longer articulatory gesture of the bare stem (e.g. free). However, not all effects predicted by paradigm uniformity were found in that study, and the role of frequency-related phonetic reduction remained inconclusive. The present paper tries to replicate the effect using conversational speech data from a different variety of English (i.e. New Zealand English), using the QuakeBox Corpus (Walsh et al. 2013). In the presence of word-form frequency as a predictor, stems of plurals were not found to be significantly longer than the corresponding strings of comparable non-complex words. The analysis revealed, however, a frequency-induced gradient paradigm uniformity effect: plural stems become shorter with increasing frequency of the bare stem.
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