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…

In this paper we investigate whether homophones have "shared" (e.g., Dell, 1990; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999) or "independent" (e.g., Caramazza, Costa, Miozzo, & Bi, 2001) phonological representations. We carried out a homophone reading aloud task with low frequency irregular homophones and matched low frequency…

Two experiments are reported which investigated morphological processing in English using bilexemic compound words. Long and short compound words were presented in neutral sentences and eye movements were recorded while participants read the sentences to investigate the time course of compound word recognition. In Experiment 1, the frequency of…

In three experiments, we explore the effects of phonological properties such as neighbourhood density and frequency on speech production in Spanish. Specifically, we assess the reliability of the recent observation made by Vitevitch and Stamer (2006), according to which the neighbourhood effect in Spanish has a reverse polarity to that observed in…

In this study, we investigate the processing of morphologically complex words in Danish using auditory lexical decision. We document a second critical point in auditory comprehension in addition to the Uniqueness Point (UP), namely the point at which competing morphological continuation forms of the base cease to be compatible with the input,…

Two picture naming experiments show that compound word production in Mandarin Chinese and in English is determined by the compound's whole-word frequency, and not by its constituent morpheme frequency. Four control experiments rule out that these results are caused by recognition or articulatory processes. These results are consistent with models…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…

Assessed encoding of suffixed words (both derivations and inflections) by monitoring eye movements during reading English sentences in which target words were embedded. Whole-word frequency and root frequency were independently manipulated, where pairs of words differing on one variable and matched on the other were inserted into the same sentence…

Elicited acceptability ratings from native-English-speaking adults for regular and irregular past tense forms and their stems, in sentence contexts, analyzing them for frequency and phonological neighborhood effects. Results indicate that irregular past tenses are retrieved from associative memory, whereas regular past tenses are produced by a…

Four visual lexical decision experiments using the masked priming paradigm tested for effects of prime word frequency and cumulative root frequency with primes varying in degree of morphological and orthographic overlap with free root targets in French. (Author/VWL)

Three experiments used the differential frequency effect as a diagnostic tool to investigate the mental representation of disyllabic compound words in Mandarin Chinese. The results indicated that, when both word frequency and morpheme frequency were held constant, high-frequency first syllables slowed responses to real words. (41 references) (MDM)

Emphasizes that auditory lexical decision has wide applicability and that the paradigm is currently used to study basic processes in word recognition, the nature of the mental lexicon, effects of word frequency, neighbor effects and various other phenomena of isolated word perception. Article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of this task. (54…

Current models of spoken-word recognition describe access to lexical representations in terms of activation and decay. This research investigated an important aspect of activation: the impact of processing time. The results showed a separable impact of time and signal on the activational state of lexical elements. (34 references) (Author/CK)