The Mental Lexicon - Volume 5, Issue 1, 2010

High neighborhood density reduces the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition. The two studies reported here investigated whether Clustering Coefficient (CC) — a graph theoretic variable measuring the degree to which a word’s neighbors are neighbors of one another, has similar effects on spoken word recognition. In Experiment 1, we found that high CC words were identified less accurately when spectrally degraded than low CC words. In Experiment 2, using a word repetition procedure, we observed longer response latencies for high CC words compared to low CC words. Taken together, the results of both studies indicate that higher CC leads to slower and less accurate spoken word recognition. The results are discussed in terms of activation-plus-competition models of spoken word recognition.

Four picture naming experiments addressing the production of regular and irregular pasttense forms in Dutch are reported. Effects of inflectional entropy as well as effects of the frequency of the past-tense inflected form across regulars and irregulars support models with a redundant lexicon while challenging the dual mechanism model (Pinker, 1997). The evidence supports the hypothesis of Stemberger (2004) and the general approach of Word and Paradigm morphology (Blevins, 2003) according to which inflected forms are not derived from the present-tense stem, but accessed independently.

A version of the change-detection paradigm was used to examine Good-Enough Representation (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002). Participants read sentence pairs where a subject noun (e.g., flower) could change to a Superordinate (e.g., plant), Subordinate (e.g., rose), or an Unrelated (e.g., prince) noun. The task was completed cross-linguistically for bilinguals, where the first sentence appeared in English (L1) and the second in French (L2). Linguistic focus was also manipulated. Change detection was extremely high in all conditions in the monolingual sample. In the bilingual sample, focused changes were detected more often, as were changes to unrelated words. Proficiency was related to change detection for monolinguals and bilinguals. The relationships between these and other participant and stimulus variables are also explored.

The meaning of a modifier is influenced by the noun it modifies (Murphy, 1988). To determine how alternative senses of ambiguous adjectives are represented, we examined the processing of noun phrases. Ambiguous adjectives were paired with nouns such that the interpretation of the phrases used the dominant or subdominant sense (e.g., green conference). Participants verified interpretations (Experiments 1 and 2) or made sense-nonsense judgments (Experiments 3 and 4) to target phrases that were preceded by primes that were related to a single sense of the ambiguous modifier. Responses to targets were facilitated by consistent primes, and either unaffected (in the verification task) or facilitated (in the sense-nonsense task) by inconsistent primes. Furthermore, responses were influenced by the strength of both senses. Results support ambiguous word representation as a shared core-meaning with sense specialization.

The paper explores how linguistic indices related to lexical networks and psycholinguistic models of lexical knowledge can be used to predict produced and not produced words in second language (L2) speakers. Two hypotheses are tested in this study. The first addresses how lexical properties thought to be important in word knowledge interrelate with word production. The second addresses which lexical properties are most predictive of word production. To test these hypotheses, a set of 45 frequent nouns and verbs produced by L2 learners were collected. A comparison word list of 45 frequent nouns and verbs produced by native speakers, but not found in the L2 data set were also collected. Polysemy and hypernymy values from the WordNet database along with word meaningfulness, concreteness, familiarity, and imagability values from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database and frequency values from SUBTLEXus were collected for each word. ANOVA analyses of variance and discriminant function analyses were conducted for each data set to examine which lexical indices discriminated between produced and not produced words and how these indices interrelated. The results of the noun analysis indicate that produced nouns are more frequent, more meaningful, and more familiar than not produced nouns. Results from the verb analysis show that produced verbs are more frequent, more meaningful, less specific, and more familiar than not produced verbs. These findings provide evidence for the importance of word properties in lexical production.