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- Volume 4, Issue, 2009
The Mental Lexicon - Volume 4, Issue 3, 2009
Volume 4, Issue 3, 2009
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When MOOD rhymes with ROAD: Dynamics of phonological coding in bilingual visual word perception
Author(s): Martin van Leerdam, Anna M.T. Bosman and Annette M.B. de Grootpp.: 303–335 (33)More LessThree experiments investigated whether perception of a spelling-to-sound inconsistent word such as MOOD involves coding of inappropriate phonology caused by knowledge of enemy neighbors (e.g., BLOOD) in non-native speakers. In a new bimodal matching task, Dutch-English bilinguals judged the correspondence between a printed English word and a speech segment that was or was not the printed word’s rime. Evidence for coding of inappropriate phonology was obtained with trials in which the speech segment was derived from an English enemy neighbor. In such trials, error rates increased significantly relative to control trials. This effect was also found when speech segments were derived from Dutch enemy neighbors, which suggests inappropriate coding of cross-language phonology. These findings are consistent with a strong phonological theory of word perception (Frost, 1998), in which phonological coding is essentially a language non-selective process.
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Derivational morphology approached with event-related potentials
Author(s): Jens Bölte, Bernadette M. Jansma, Anna Zilverstand and Pienie Zwitserloodpp.: 336–353 (18)More LessWe investigated the processing of derived adjectives in German using event-related potentials (ERPs). ERPs were registered to existing adjectives (freundlich, ‘friendly’), to morphologically complex pseudowords that were synonymous to an existing adjective and thus interpretable (*freundhaft), and to complex pseudowords that were structurally and semantically anomalous (*freundbar). Stimuli were embedded in sentence contexts, displayed word by word. An ERP effect with a left-frontal maximum was observed around 450–500 ms after stimulus onset. In this window, both pseudoword types differed from existing adjectives. We interpret this data pattern as a LAN, reflecting structural problems due to morphological parsing, a process that is distinct from semantic processing.
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Lexical access of mass and count nouns: How word recognition reaction times correlate with lexical and morpho-syntactic processing
Author(s): Sara Mondini, Eva Kehayia, Brendan Gillon, Giorgio Arcara and Gonia Jaremapp.: 354–379 (26)More LessTwo psycholinguistic experiments were carried out in Italian to test the role played by the feature that distinguishes mass nouns from count nouns, as well as by the feature that distinguishes singular nouns from plural nouns. The first experiment, a simple lexical decision task, revealed a sensitivity of the lexical access system to the processing of the features Mass and Plural as shown by longer reaction times. In particular, nouns in the plural yielded longer reaction times than in the singular except when the plural form was irregular. Furthermore, the feature Mass also affected processing, yielding longer reaction times. In the second experiment, a sentence priming task, both the Plural and the Mass effects did not surface when a grammatical sentence fragment was the prime. These data show a direct correlation between the linguistic ‘complexity’ of plural/mass nouns and processing time. They also suggest that this complexity does not affect normal fluent spoken language where words are embedded in a semantic and syntactic context.
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Good and bad opposites: Using textual and experimental techniques to measure antonym canonicity
Author(s): Carita Paradis, Caroline Willners and Steven Jonespp.: 380–429 (50)More LessThe goal of this paper is to combine corpus methodology with experimental methods to gain insights into the nature of antonymy as a lexico-semantic relation and the degree of antonymic canonicity of word pairs in language and in memory. Two approaches to antonymy in language are contrasted, the lexical categorical model and the cognitive prototype model. The results of the investigation support the latter model and show that different pairings have different levels of lexico-semantic affinity. At this general level of categorization, empirical methods converge; however, since they measure slightly different aspect of lexico-semantic opposability and affinity, and since the techniques of investigation are different in nature, we obtain slightly conflicting results at the more specific levels. We conclude that some antonym pairs can be diagnosed as “canonical” on the strength of three indicators: textual co-occurrence, individual judgement about “goodness” of opposition, and elicitation evidence.
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Head position and the mental representation of nominal compounds: A constituent priming study in Italian
Author(s): Marco Marelli, Davide Crepaldi and Claudio Luzzattipp.: 430–454 (25)More LessThere is a significant body of psycholinguistic evidence that supports the hypothesis of an access to constituent representation during the mental processing of compound words. However it is not clear whether the internal hierarchy of the constituents (i.e., headedness) plays a role in their mental lexical processing and it is not possible to disentangle the effect of headedness from that of constituent position in languages that admit only head-final compounds, like English or Dutch. The present study addresses this issue in two constituent priming experiments (SOA 300ms) with a lexical decision task. Italian endocentric (head-initial and head-final) and exocentric nominal compounds were employed as stimuli and the position of the primed constituent was manipulated. A first-level priming effect was found, confirming the automatic access to constituent representation. Moreover, in head-final compounds data reveal a larger priming effect for the head than for the modifying constituent. These results suggest that different kinds of compounds have a different representation at mental level: while head-final compounds are represented with an internal head-modifier hierarchy, head-initial and exocentric compounds have a lexicalised, internally flat representation.
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