Three experiments were conducted to investigate how syntactic-category and semantic information is processed in visual word recognition. The stimuli were two-character Chinese words in which semantic and syntactic-category ambiguities were factorially manipulated. A lexical decision task was employed in Experiment 1, whereas a semantic relatedness…

We present an MEG study of homonym recognition in reading, identifying effects of a semantic measure of homonym ambiguity. This measure sheds light on two competing theories of lexical access: the "early access" theory, which entails that lexical access occurs at early (pre 200 ms) stages of processing; and the "late access" theory, which…

This study examined how noun and verb processing in bilingual visual word recognition are affected by within and between-language overlap. We investigated how word class ambiguous noun and verb cognates are processed by bilinguals, to see if co-activation of overlapping word forms between languages benefits from additional overlap within a…

The word-superiority effect (WSE) describes the superior recognition of word constituents in a word, as opposed to a non-word, context. In this study, the WSE was used as a diagnostic tool to examine the modulatory effect of word semantic transparency on the degree to which Chinese bimorphemic compound words are lexically represented as unitised…

This experiment examined event-related responses to targets preceded by semantically transparent morphologically related primes (e.g., farmer-farm), semantically opaque primes with an apparent morphological relation (corner-corn), and orthographically, but not morphologically, related primes (scandal-scan) using the masked priming technique…

Recent theories of morphological processing have been dominated by the notion that morphologically complex words are decomposed into their constituents on the basis of their semantic properties. In this article we argue that the weight of evidence now suggests that the recognition of morphologically complex words begins with a rapid morphemic…

The ambiguity disadvantage (slower processing of ambiguous words relative to unambiguous words) has been taken as evidence for a distributed semantic representational system like that embodied in parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. In the present study, we investigated whether semantic ambiguity slows meaning activation, as PDP models…

The role of morphological, semantic, and form-based factors in the early stages of visual word recognition was investigated across different SOAs in a masked priming paradigm, focusing on English derivational morphology. In a first set of experiments, stimulus pairs co-varying in morphological decomposability and in semantic and orthographic…

Previous studies haves shown that under masked priming conditions, CORNER primes CORN as strongly as TEACHER primes TEACH and more strongly than BROTHEL primes BROTH. This result has been taken as evidence of a purely structural level of representation at which words are decomposed into morphological constituents in a manner that is independent of…

Many models of word recognition predict that neighbours of target words will be activated during word processing. Cascaded models can make the additional prediction that semantic features of those neighbours get activated before the target has been uniquely identified. In two semantic decision tasks neighbours that were congruent (i.e., from the…

Describes two variants of the form-priming paradigm (direct and mediated form priming) and summarizes the results obtained with each. With both variants, participants are presented with a target, to which a response is required, preceded by a prime. (28 references) (Author/CK)

Used a semantic and morpho-syntactic priming paradigm to examine at which processing stage the advantage of blind adults may arise. Concludes that the faster speech comprehension skills of blind adults may originate from a more efficient perceptual analysis rather than from a more extended use of semantic or morpho-syntactic context information.…

Reports two sets of lexical priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions. Results showed that morphological structure plays a significant role in early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic…

Introduces this issue of the journal, summarizing current issues in spoken word recognition. Argues a full understanding of the process of lexical access during speech comprehension will depend on resolving several issues: what is the form of the representations used for lexical access; how is phonological information coded in the mental lexicon;…

Describes the cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, including its underlying rationale and the different tasks with which it is combined. Introduces the type of stimuli used and the dependent and independent variables typically manipulated; discusses the paradigm's main advantages and drawbacks; and considers its most important areas of…