The Mental Lexicon - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2022

Previous evidence has implicated personal relevance as a predictive factor in lexical access. Westbury (2014) showed that personally relevant words were rated as having a higher subjective familiarity than words that were not personally relevant, suggesting that personally relevant words are processed more fluently than less personally relevant words. Here we extend this work by defining a measure of personal relevance that does not rely on human judgments but is rather derived from first-order co-occurrence of words with the first-person singular personal pronoun, I. We show that words estimated as most personally relevant are recognized more quickly, named faster, judged as more familiar, and used by infants earlier than words that are less personally relevant. Self-relevance is also a strong predictor of several measures that are usually measured only by human judgments or their computational estimates, such as subjective familiarity, age of acquisition, imageability, concreteness, and body-object interaction. We have made all self-relevance estimates (as well as the raw data and code from our experiments) available at https://osf.io/gdb6h/.

In an experiment, Spanish speakers assigned gender to nouns. Some nouns had biological referents. Others had a mismatch between their gender and their final phones (e.g. problema). Nouns with biological referents and nouns with matching gender and phonology were responded to faster suggesting that gender does not depend solely on a noun’s gender. Gender was also assigned to dual-gendered nouns, which are feminine nouns that take the masculine article el (e.g. agua). Most participants assigned them masculine gender.

Dual-gendered nouns are often preceded by masculine modifiers which is due to analogy to el. The idea is explored that the gender of el, along with all modifiers a noun has been experienced with, explains gender assignment. Computational simulations were carried out to test this using exemplar, naive Bayes, and decision tree algorithms. They made accurate predictions without referencing the noun’s gender. In dual-gendered nouns, a shift towards preposed masculine modifiers was observed. A simulation predicted the gender of bare dual-gendered nouns which mirrored the masculine gender the experimental participants provided. These results suggest a usage-based model in which a noun’s gender is determined by the modifiers it has been experienced with.

In recent years, evidence has emerged that readers may have access to the meaning of complex words even in the early stages of processing, suggesting that phenomena previously attributed to morphological decomposition may actually emerge from an interplay between formal and semantic effects. The present study adds to this line of work by deploying a forward masked priming experiment with both L1 (Experiment 1) and L2 (Experiment 2) speakers of English. Following recent research trends, we view morphological processing as a gradient process emerging over time. In order to model this, we used a large within-item stimulus design combined with advanced statistical methods such as generalised mixed models (GAMM) and quantile regression (QGAM). L1 GAMM analyses only showed priming for true morpho-semantic relations (the identity ‘bull’, inflected ‘bulls’ and derived conditions ‘bullish’), with no priming observed in the case of other relations (the pseudo-complex ‘bully’ or the stem-embedded ‘bullet’ conditions). Furthermore, with respect to the time-course of effects, we found significant differences between conditions were present from very early on as revealed by the QGAM analyses. In contrast, L2 speakers showed significant facilitation across all five conditions compared to the baseline condition, including the stem-embedded condition, suggesting early L2 processing is only dependant on the form.

The N400 event-related brain potential (ERP) can be used to evaluate language comprehension, and may be a particularly powerful tool for the assessment of individuals who are behaviourally unresponsive. This study presents a set of semantic violation sentences developed in Canadian French and characterizes their ability to elicit an N400 effect in healthy adults. A novel set of 100 French sentences were created and normed through two surveys that assessed sentence cloze probability (n = 98) and semantic plausibility (n = 99). The best 80 sentences (40 congruent; 40 incongruent) were selected for the final stimulus set and tested for their ability to elicit N400 effects in 33 French-speaking individuals. The final stimulus set successfully generated an N400 effect in the grand-average across all individuals, and in the grand-average within age groups (young, middle-age, and older adults). On a single-subject level, the final stimulus set elicited N400 effects in 76% of the participants. The feasibility of using this stimulus set to assess semantic processing in behaviourally unresponsive individuals was demonstrated in a case example of a French individual in a disorder of consciousness. These sentences enable the inclusion of Canadian French speakers in this simple assessment of language comprehension abilities.

Previous research has shown that second language (L2) learners of Mandarin learn new words more easily if the new word is homophonous with a word they already know (Liu and Wiener, 2020). That research involved word learning in which speech was produced by a single-talker with a specific pitch range. The present study examines whether the observed tonal homophone advantage is dependent on familiarity with the talker. Adult learners of Mandarin Chinese as an L2 were taught 20 new tonal words for three consecutive days. To manipulate phonological familiarity, 10 words had homophones already known to the learners and 10 words did not. To manipulate talker familiarity, participants were trained on a single talker but tested on 16 new talkers or trained and tested on 16 (multi)-talkers. Daily testing involved a 4-alternative-force-choice task. Both groups showed increased accuracy and faster response times on Day 2 compared to Day 1, but this learning was independent of homophone status or talker group. No other effects were found. These results suggest that the tonal homophone advantage in L2 word learning observed by Liu and Wiener (2020) may have been partially driven by an exceptionally high level of talker familiarity, since that study used a single speaker both for training and testing.