A lexical decision task was used with a masked priming procedure to investigate whether and to what extent neighborhood distribution influences the effect of prime duration in masked orthographic priming. French word targets had two higher frequency neighbors that were either distributed over two letter positions (e.g., "LOBE/robe-loge")…

In spontaneous speech, speakers sometimes replace a word they have just produced or started producing by another word. The present study reports that in these replacement repairs, low-frequency replaced words are more likely to be interrupted prior to completion than high-frequency words, providing support to the hypothesis that the production of…

Presents a new dimension of lexical variation--contextual distinctiveness. CD is a corpus-derived summary measure of the frequency distribution of the contexts in which a word occurs, and it is naturally compatible with contextual theories of semantic representation and meaning. An experiment shows that CD is a better predictor of lexical decision…

This study investigated how lexical access in naming tasks (picture naming, naming to open-ended sentences, and naming to category exemplars) might be influenced by different lexical factors during adolescence and adulthood. Participants included 1075 individuals, ranging in age from 12 to 83 years. Lexical factors examined included word frequency…

Reports on research that (1) suggests that phonetically ambiguous pairs (ice cream/I scream) have been used inaccurately to illustrate contextual effects in word segmentation, (2) supports unitary rather than exhaustive processing, and (3) supports the use of the concepts of word frequency and listener expectations instead of top-down, multiple…

Demonstrates that the contextual probability of lexical items in a continuous sample of spontaneous speech, as measured by the predictability of words in context, is related to word frequency. (Author/RL)