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- Volume 2, Issue, 2007
The Mental Lexicon - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2007
Volume 2, Issue 2, 2007
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The dislike of regular plurals in compounds: Phonological familiarity or morphological constraint?
Author(s): Iris Berent and Steven Pinkerpp.: 129–181 (53)More LessEnglish speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the phonological properties of regular plurals. Five experiments test this proposal. Experiment 1 demonstrated that novel regular plurals (e.g., loonks-eater) are disliked in compounds compared to irregular plurals with illicit (hence less frequent) phonological patterns (e.g., leevk-eater, plural of loovk). Experiments 2–3 found that people show no dispreference for compounds containing nouns that merely sound like regular plurals (e.g., hose-installer vs. pipe-installer). Experiments 4–5 showed a robust effect of morphological regularity when phonological familiarity was controlled: Compounds containing regular plural nonwords (e.g., gleeks-hunter, plural of gleek) were disfavored relative to irregular, phonologically-identical, plurals (e.g., breex-container, plural of broox). The dispreference for regular plurals inside compounds thus hinges on the morphological distinction between irregular and regular forms and it is irreducible to phonological familiarity.
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Cross-modal repetition priming with homophones provides clues about representation in the word recognition system
Author(s): Penny M. Pexman, Stephen J. Lupker and Yasushi Hinopp.: 183–214 (32)More LessIn three experiments, we assessed the impact of auditory homophone primes (/swi:t/) on lexical decisions to visually presented low-frequency (suite) and high-frequency (sweet) homophone spellings. In Experiment 1 we investigated the time course of these cross-modal repetition priming effects. Results suggested that low-frequency homophone spellings do not reach the same activation level as nonhomophones, even at long SOAs. There were no differences in priming between high-frequency homophones and nonhomophones. In Experiments 2 and 3 we attempted to eliminate the impact of strategies with lower proportions of repetition primes. Results showed smaller priming effects for both low- and high-frequency homophones than for nonhomophones, suggesting that neither homophone spelling is fully activated. Implications for local and distributed models of word recognition are discussed.
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Change in lexical retrieval skills in adulthood
Author(s): Mira Goral, Avron Spiro III, Martin L. Albert, Loraine K. Obler and Lisa Tabor Connorpp.: 215–238 (24)More LessWe conducted multivariate random-effect analyses on longitudinal data from 238 adults, ranging in age from 30 to 94, who were tested on five lexical tests over a period of 20 years to examine (a) the relations between lemma and lexeme retrieval as manifested in different tests of lexical retrieval and (b) changes in lexical processing during older adulthood. This study documents differing profiles of age-related decline in lexical retrieval determined by task demand, gender, education, and underlying cognitive skills. The tasks that required retrieval of unique lexical items (Boston Naming Test and Action Naming Test) yielded significant age-related decline that became more rapid in older age, distinguishing them from tasks that allowed for the retrieval of various lexical items. Findings support a cascaded progression of lemma and lexeme retrieval during word production.
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The availability of noun properties during the interpretation of novel noun phrases
Author(s): Christina L. Gagné and Thomas L. Spaldingpp.: 239–258 (20)More LessThe current experiments examine whether recent exposure to a modifier-noun phrase (e.g., unripe peaches) affects the representation of the head noun (e.g, peach). Experiment 1 demonstrates that a property true of the head noun (e.g, sweet) takes longer to verify when preceded by a phrase for which this property is not true (e.g., unripe peaches) than by a phrase for which the property remains true (e.g., orchard peaches). Experiment 2 replicates this finding and, in addition, demonstrates that properties that remain true of both prime phrases (e.g., fuzzy) are equally available during the processing of the head noun. These findings suggest that interpreting a modifier-noun phrase affects the head noun’s representation such that properties that are incompatible with the entire phrase temporarily become less available during subsequent processing of the head noun than do properties that remain compatible with the phrase.
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Naming compounds in Alzheimer’s disease
Author(s): Valentina Chiarelli, Alina Menichelli and Carlo Semenzapp.: 259–269 (11)More LessThe peculiar pattern of linguistic and cognitive deficits in early Alzheimer’s disease (DAT), whereby memory limitations and failure in semantics prevail over deficits in syntax, makes an interesting contrast with linguistic deficits in classic aphasia categories. The present study compared errors in picture naming of different types of Italian compounds, both in aphasia and in DAT. As in previous studies, in aphasia the knowledge of the compound status seems to be retained vis-à-vis the inability to retrieve the phonological form. This effect is much less evident in DAT. The target compound structure in errors is also preserved in aphasia, while DAT participants seem to compensate for their retrieval failure by overwhelmingly using the most productive structures. Unlike in aphasia, in DAT the retrieval of the second component is more difficult than the retrieval of the first component, probably as an effect of processing overload.
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LINGUA: The Language-Independent Neighbourhood Generator of the University of Alberta
Author(s): Chris Westbury, Geoff Hollis and Cyrus Shaoulpp.: 271–284 (14)More LessLINGUA (Language-Independent Neighbourhood Generator of the University of Alberta) is a free, platform-independent (Java) program consisting of a set of tools that have been developed for three purposes: to turn corpora into frequency dictionaries; to calculate orthographic neighbourhood and N-gram counts; and to generate plausible nonwords in an algorithmic way. As its name suggests, it has been specifically developed to be language-independent, and is able to handle input corpora in a wide range of text encodings. In this article we describe the LINGUA tools and how to use them. Since LINGUA requires a large corpus, we also include a tutorial describing in detail how to develop a corpus in a specific language by harvesting text from the World Wide Web. LINGUA is freely available from: http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/
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