The Mental Lexicon - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2014

A potential embodied influence in the semantic effects of Danger and Usefulness is investigated using Body-Object Interaction (BOI). Lexical decision times are influenced by ratings of Danger and Usefulness. In a frequently-found interaction, thought to be produced by activated approach-withdraw motor responses, increasing Danger ratings produce faster responses for items with lower Usefulness ratings while producing slower responses for items with higher Usefulness ratings. BOI is used to test the embodied explanation of this interaction. The same 102 words were presented in two lexical decision experiments. In both auditory and visual lexical decision, the effects of Danger and Usefulness were found to be diminished for items with higher BOI ratings. BOI moderates Danger and Usefulness effects in both auditory and visual lexical decision, in a way that suggests BOI is either the stronger or the temporally earlier effect.

This study provides validity evidence for the Capture-Recapture (CR) method, borrowed from ecology, as a measure of second language (L2) productive vocabulary size (PVS). Two separate “captures” of productive vocabulary were taken using written word association tasks (WAT). At Time 1, 47 bilinguals provided at least 4 associates to each of 30 high-frequency stimulus words in English, their first language (L1), and in French, their L2. A few days later (Time 2), this procedure was repeated with a different set of stimulus words in each language. Since the WAT was used, both Lex30 and CR PVS scores were calculated in each language. Participants also completed an animacy judgment task assessing the speed and efficiency of lexical access. Results indicated that, in both languages, CR and Lex30 scores were significantly positively correlated (evidence of convergent validity). CR scores were also significantly larger in the L1, and correlated significantly with the speed of lexical access in the L2 (evidence of construct validity). These results point to the validity of the technique for estimating relative L2 PVS. However, CR scores are not a direct indication of absolute vocabulary size. A discussion of the method’s underlying assumptions and their implications for interpretation are provided.

Recent research has indicated that understanding compound words involves an attempt at semantic composition of the constituent words, and that this meaning construction process involves an attempt to identify a relation linking the constituents. Research with novel compounds, where a meaning construction process is necessary, has shown that relational interpretations compete to be selected during comprehension, and that increased competition leads to increased processing difficulty. The current project investigates relational competition during the processing of transparent and opaque English compounds. The results show that the diversity of possible relational interpretations affects the ease with which participants can make a lexical decision for a compound. This is true even for opaque compounds, where the identification of the meaning of the compound cannot, by definition, be the result of the meaning construction process. This suggests that initiation of the meaning construction process is obligatory during compound processing.

The role which the diversity of a word’s contexts plays in lexical access is currently the object of research. Vector-space models such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) are useful to examine this role. Having an objective, discrete model of lexical representation allows us to objectify parameters in order to define contextual focalization in a more measurable way. In the first part of our study, we investigate whether certain empirical data on ambiguity can be modeled by means of an exclusively symbolic single representation model such as LSA and an excitatory-inhibitory mechanism such as the Construction-­Integration framework. Our observations support the idea that some ambiguity effects could be explained by the contextual distribution using such a model. In the second part, we put abstract and concrete words to the test. Our LSA model (exclusively symbolic) and the excitatory-inhibitory mechanism can also explain the penalty paid by abstract words as they activate other words through semantic similarity and the advantage of concrete words in naming and semantic judgments, though it does not account for the advantage of concrete words in lexical decision tasks. The results of this second part are then discussed within the framework of the embodied/symbolic view of the language process.

Models of language learning and processing differ in their level of emphasis on the storage of individual meaningful units versus combinations of meaningful units. While there is evidence for the storage of larger stretches of speech, a separate issue is how much such stored forms contribute to processing, as compared to morphologically simpler forms. We examine the acquisition of one aspect of the phonology of Valley Zapotec: complementarity of segmental length based on subsegmental features: vowels before fortis consonants are short (VCː), and vowels before lenis consonants are long (VːC). This complementarity is found for fortis consonants in morphologically simple forms with final stress (simple nouns, verbs with full subject noun), but not in morphologically complex forms with a final unstressed syllable (diminutive nouns, verbs with pronominal subject clitic). During one period of development, Zapotec-learning children overgeneralize the complementarity from morphologically simple to morphologically complex forms (with u-shaped learning likely). The child’s processing of complex forms in language production is based more on simple forms than on the complex forms themselves. We identify five possible explanations of these results. Insofar as combinations of morphemes are stored at this young age, they are relatively ineffective at influencing processing during language production.

Performance on word processing tasks is known to be influenced by the frequency with which words occur in a language. Large and robust effects of word frequency occur across languages and the processes thought to be sensitive to word frequency are considered fundamentally important characteristics of the mental lexicon. To our knowledge, word frequency data is non-existent for Urdu. This important language has characteristics that make it appealing to psycholinguists. Unfortunately, most of the Urdu published electronically is in the form of image files rather than text and therefore, has been largely inaccessible by programs designed to generate word counts. Consequently, unlike other important orthographies (e.g., English) orthographic word frequencies in Urdu are not readily available. We describe here a database that addresses this methodological gap. We have constructed a word frequency database for written Urdu and describe that development. We also describe data from simple tests of the effects of Urdu word frequency to demonstrate that our measure results in effects considered to be the hallmark of frequency effects. The frequency counts from this database will help psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists conduct and control future studies on the mental lexicon using Urdu. This database can be downloaded from http://web2.uwindsor.ca/psychology/urdufrequency/