1,596 research outputs found
Processing Differences Across Regular and Irregular Inflections Revealed Through ERPs
No full textCopyright © 2015 American Psychological AssociationResearch strongly suggests that printed words are recognized in terms of their constituent morphemes, but researchers have tended to consider the recognition of derivations and inflections in separate theoretical debates. Recently, Crepaldi et al. (2010) proposed a theory that claims to account for the recognition of both derivations and inflections. We investigated brain potentials in the context of masked priming to test 2 key predictions of this theory: (a) that regular inflections should prime their stems to a greater degree than irregular inflections should prime their stems and (b) that priming for regular inflections should arise earlier in the recognition process than priming for irregular inflections. Significant masked priming effects were observed for both regular and irregular inflections, though these effects were greater for regular inflections. ERP data further suggested that masked priming effects for regular and irregular inflections had different time courses. Priming for regular but not irregular inflections emerged in a time window reflecting processing up to 250 ms post target onset, and although priming for regular and irregular inflections was observed in a time window reflecting processing 400 to 600 ms post target onset, these effects arose earlier and were of greater magnitude for the regular inflections. These findings support a form-then-meaning characterization of the visual word processing system such as that proposed by Crepaldi et al. (2010) and raise challenges for alternative approaches. (PsycINFO Database RecordESRCItalian Ministry of Educatio
Morphemes as letter chunks: Linguistic information enhances the learning of visual regularities
No full textWe have previously shown that readers use co-occurrence statistics to learn about the presence and position of affix-like chunks in strings of pseudo-letters (Lelonkiewicz, Ktori & Crepaldi, 2020). These findings were taken as evidence that visual statistical learning might be implicated in morphological processing during visual word recognition. The present study seeks to specify this claim by (a) establishing the visual, language-agnostic nature of the underlying learning mechanism and (b) examining it in the presence of higher-order linguistic information. In Experiments 1a and 1b, readers were familiarized with strings of abstract shapes that involved affix-like chunks of frequently co-occurring shapes. We found that readers were sensitive to the presence and position of chunks. Further experiments revealed that presence and position effects were stronger when readers were exposed to letter strings which allowed access to orthographic and phonological representations (Experiments 2a and 2b), and were enhanced by access to semantics (Experiment 3). Our study demonstrates that the learning of visual regularities supports chunk identification both in purely visual and language-like materials, and that the availability of linguistic information enhances this learning
Seeing Stems Everywhere and Being Blind to Affixes
No full textRecent evidence has shown that suffixes influence nonword processing only when they follow an existing stem (e.g., in 'shootment', but not in 'mentshoot'), suggesting that their mental representation is position-locked (Crepaldi, Rastle & Davis, 2010). These results raise questions about the nature of morpheme position coding, an issue that has typically been neglected in morphological research; although it is clear that morphemes must be coded for position during word identification (otherwise we could not distinguish between words like 'overhang' and 'hangover'), even the most recent theoretical attempts (e.g., Crepaldi, Rastle, Coltheart & Nickels, 2010; Taft, 2006) have not addressed this issue. In the present experiments we asked whether prefix and stem identification is also sensitive to positional constraints (as suffix identification is).
In Experiment 1 we showed that the rejection time of pseudo-prefixed nonwords (e.g., predrink) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., pledrink), which was not the case when the prefix followed the stem (e.g., drinkpre took as long as drinkple to be rejected). This result suggests that prefix identification is position-specific.
In Experiment 2 we showed that the rejection time of reversed compounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin), indicating that 'honey' and 'moon' were identified within 'moonhoney', and the representations of these morphemes then activated (at least partially) the word 'honeymoon'. This result suggests that stems are coded is a position-independent fashion.
This latter conclusion was strengthened by the results of Experiment 3, in which the masked presentation of reversed compounds (e.g., moonhoney) facilitated the identification of compound words (honeymoon). In contrast monomorphemic control pairs did not produce a similar pattern (i.e., rickmave did not prime maverick), indicating that the effect for ‘moonhoney’ pairs was not due simply to orthographic similarity
Morphological processing as we know it: An analytical review of morphological effects in visual word identification
No full textThe last 40 years have witnessed a growing interest in the mechanisms underlying the visual identification of complex words. A large amount of experimental data has been amassed, but although a growing number of studies are proposing explicit theoretical models for their data, no comprehensive theory has gained substantial agreement among scholars in the field. We believe that this is due, at least in part, to the presence of several controversial pieces of evidence in the literature and, consequently, to the lack of a well-defined set of experimental facts that any theory should be able to explain. With this review, we aim to delineate the state of the art in the research on the visual identification of complex words. By reviewing major empirical evidences in a number of different paradigms such as lexical decision, word naming, and masked and unmasked priming, we were able to identify a series of effects that we judge as reliable or that were consistently replicated in different experiments, along with some more controversial data, which we have tried to resolve and explain. We concentrated on behavioral and electrophysiological studies on inflected, derived and compound words, so as to span over all types of complex words. The outcome of this work is an analytical summary of well-established facts on the most relevant morphological issues, such as regularity, morpheme position coding, family size, semantic transparency, morpheme frequency, suffix allomorphy and productivity, morphological entropy, and morpho-orthographic parsing. In discussing this set of benchmark effects, we have drawn some methodological considerations on why contrasting evidence might have emerged, and have tried to delineate a target list for the construction of a new all-inclusive model of the visual identification of morphologically complex words
Seeing stems everywhere: Position-independent identification of stem morphemes
No full textThere is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like overhang and hangover, and to recognize that preheat is a word, whereas heatpre is not. Recent data have shown that suffixes are identified as morphemes only when they occur at the ends of letter strings (Crepaldi, Rastle, & Davis, 2010), which supports the general proposal that the word identification system is sensitive to morpheme positional constraints. This proposal leads to the prediction that the identification of free stems should occur in a position‑independent fashion, given that free stems can occur anywhere within complex words (e.g., overdress and dresser). In Experiment 1, we show that the rejection time of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin), suggesting that honey and moon are identified within moonhoney, and that these morpheme representations activate the representation for the word honeymoon. In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the masked presentation of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) facilitates the identification of compound words (honeymoon). In contrast, monomorphemic control pairs do not produce a similar pattern (i.e., rickmave did not prime maverick), indicating that the effect for moonhoney pairs is genuinely morphological in nature. These results demonstrate that stem representations differ from affix representations in terms of their positional constraints, providing a challenge to all existing theories of morphological processing
The role of morphology in novel word learning: a registered report
No full textThe majority of the new words that we learn every day as adults are morphologically complex; yet, we do not know much about the role of morphology in novel word learning. In this study, we tackle this issue by comparing the learning of: (i) suffixed novel words (e.g. flibness); (ii) novel words that end in non-morphological, but frequent letter chunks (e.g. fliban); and (iii) novel words with non-morphological, low-frequency endings (e.g. flibov). Words are learned incidentally through sentence reading, while the participants’ eye movements are monitored. We show that morphology has a facilitatory role compared with the other two types of novel words, both during learning and in a post-learning recognition memory task. We also showed that participants attributed meaning to word parts (if flibness is a state of happiness, then flib must mean happy), but this process was not specifically triggered by the presence of a suffix (flib must also mean happy in fliban and flibov), thus suggesting that the brain tends to assume similar meanings for similar words and word parts
Masked Morphological Priming and Sensitivity to the Statistical Structure of form-to-Meaning mapping in L2
No full textIn one’s native language, visual word identification is based on early morphological analysis and is sensitive to the statistical structure of the mapping between form and meaning (Orthography–to–Semantic Consistency, OSC). How these mechanisms apply to a second language is much less clear. We recruited L1 Italian-L2 English speakers for a masked priming task where the relationship between prime and target was morphologically transparent, e.g., employer–EMPLOY, morphologically opaque, e.g., corner-CORN, or merely orthographic, e.g., brothel–BROTH. Critically, participants underwent thorough testing of their lexical, morphological, phonological, spelling, and semantic proficiency in their second language. By exploring a wide spectrum of L2 proficiency, we showed that this factor critically qualifies L2 priming. Genuine morphological facilitation only arises as proficiency grows, while orthographic priming shrinks as L2 competence increases. OSC was also found to modulate priming and interact with proficiency, providing an alternative way of describing the transparency continuum in derivational morphology. Overall, these data illustrate the trajectory towards a fully consolidated L2 lexicon and show that masked priming and sensitivity to OSC are key trackers of this process
How to become twice more precise in detecting neuropsychological impairments
No full textIntroduction
Although it was a giant leap forward when it was introduced, the classic approach to the norming of neuropsychological tests (Capitani, 1987) has two main limitations: (i) it doesn’t consider possible interactions between covariates (e.g., age and education); (ii) working on by–subject percentages of correct responses, it cannot consider item covariates (e.g., frequency, length, imageability) that are known to affect performance substantially. Here we show how to overcome these limitations, and how this improves our diagnosis.
Methods
As a test case, we used the action–naming task devised by Crepaldi et al. (2006). 290 healthy Italian speakers (148 F and 142 M) made up our norming sample. They ranged 18 to 98 years in age (M=54.1) and 3 to 23 years in education (M=12.3).
The test was standardized: (i) following the classic Capitani approach, based on regressing by–subject mean accuracy on gender, age and education; (ii) adding interactions between gender, age and education to the classic approach; (iii) using raw correct/incorrect scores thanks to mixed–effect models, thus being able to take under control also item variables (e.g., frequency, imageability) and any additional item– or subject–specific random variability (mixed–effects norming; Jaeger, 2008).
Results
We first contrasted the three approaches in terms of their amount of explained variance in the computation of expected scores, that is, their ability to “wash out” unwanted effects from expected scores. The classic Capitani norming explained 34.7% of the total variance; interaction norming went up to 43.7%; and mixed–effects norming ensured 73% of explained variance.
A comparison between expected scores according to Capitani and mixed–effects norming in 2,600 combinations of age (20–85) and education values (3-22) revealed an overall correlation of .81. Differences were generally bigger with young age and low education, and with old age and high education; and typically showed higher expected scores by mixed–effects than Capitani norming (see Figure 1).
Equivalent Scores (ES) were then computed for a simulated sample of around 80,000 patients ranging in age (20–85 years), education (3–22 years), gender (M–F) and raw scores (20–50 correct responses). They disagree 28% of the times according to the two approaches. The difference (in either direction) is 1.28 in mean, and ranges from 1 to 4. Mixed–effects ES is lower than Capitani ES in 61% of the cases. Among the 45070 simulated patients that would be classified as impaired at naming verbs (ES=0) according to Capitani norming, 5% would not be classified as such (ES>0) according to mixed–effects norming. These figures are closely replicated in a sample of 69 unselected aphasic patients.
Discussion
The data indicate that using a better statistical model to calculate expected scores is highly beneficial in terms of amount of explained variance, that is, we can gauge the true effects of subject (e.g., age) and item variables (e.g., frequency) much more precisely, thus enjoying higher–quality corrected scores. Critically, this reflects substantially into how (simulated and actual) patients are classified
Editorial: The variable mind? How apparently inconsistent effects might inform model building
No full textCognitive theory development as we know it: Specificity, explanatory power and the brain
No full textA commentary o
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