Metrical segmentation and lexical inhibition in spoken word recognition.

Two cross-modal priming experiments investigated whether speech segmentation is based on the occurrence of strong syllables (A. Cutler & D. Norris, 1988) or lexical competition (J. L. McClelland & J. L. Elman, 1986). Auditorily presented words with no, few, or many competitors served as prime for a visual target. Facilitatory effects were larger for primes with no or few competitors than for primes with many competitors. This difference disappeared when the interstimulus interval between the prime and target was shortened. The differential priming effects are interpreted as evidence for inhibition between competing lexical candidates. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When cues collide: Use of stress and statistical cues to word boundaries by 7- to 9-month-old infants.

Prior research suggests that stress cues are particularly important for English-hearing infants' detection of word boundaries. It is unclear, though, how infants learn to attend to stress as a cue to word segmentation. This series of experiments was designed to explore infants' attention to conflicting cues at different ages. Experiment 1 replicated previous findings: When stress and statistical cues indicated different word boundaries, 9-month-old infants used syllable stress as a cue to segmentation while ignoring statistical cues. However, in Experiment 2, 7-month-old infants attended more to statistical cues than to stress cues. These results raise the possibility that infants use their statistical learning abilities to locate words in speech and use those words to discover the regular pattern of stress cues in English. Infants at different ages may deploy different segmentation strategies as a function of their current linguistic experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic constraints in the retrieval of homophone orthography.

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had a different part of speech (was syntactically ambiguous). Each homophone was preceded by an unrelated word or a prime; primes were orthographically related to the competitor and shared or differed from the competitor’s part of speech. For syntactically unambiguous homophones, more errors occurred overall, and priming increased errors independent of the prime’s part of speech. For syntactically ambiguous homophones, priming occurred only following primes that shared part of speech with the competitor. These results demonstrate that written homophone errors can occur during lemma retrieval or during orthographic encoding, with the particular stage depending on the syntactic ambiguity of the homophone to be produced. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Associative priming in word fragment completion: a dissociation between explicit and implicit retrieval processes

Three experiments investigated associative priming in word fragment completion. In associative priming, the study word that acts as a prime is semantically related in some way to the response word that the subject must produce or respond to at test. For example, a prime might be semantically related to the solution to its paired word fragment (e.g. study "VANILLA", solve fragment "-H-C--A-E" at test, solution is "CHOCOLATE"). Associative priming therefore differs from both repetition and conceptual priming, in which the studied primes are themselves the words that must be produced or responded to at test. In Experiment 1, associative primes were found to influence word fragment completion performance on an explicit test, but not on an implicit test. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the effects of associative primes on explicitly instructed fragment completion cannot be attributed to the specific information about cue-prime relationships that is included in the explicit instructions. Experiment 3 demonstrated that a manipulation of modality, a variable known to disrupt implicit retrieval processes, disrupts repetition priming on an explicit test, but not associative priming. The results of these three experiments suggest that whereas repetition primes are retrieved from memory by both explicit and implicit retrieval processes, associative primes are retrieved by only explicit processes. These data suggest that implicit retrieval processes are cue-dependent processes which automatically retrieve memory information that provides a good match to retrieval cues. Explicit retrieval processes are cue-independent, functioning as an intentional retrieval set to access particular categories or types of memory information.     

Neurophysiological evidence for underspecified lexical representations: Asymmetries with word initial variations.

How does the mental lexicon cope with phonetic variants in recognition of spoken words? Using a lexical decision task with and without fragment priming, the authors compared the processing of German words and pseudowords that differed only in the place of articulation of the initial consonant (place). Across both experiments, event-related brain potentials indicated that pseudowords with initial noncoronal place (e.g., *Brachen) activate words with initial coronal place (e.g., Drachen [dragon]). In contrast, coronal pseudowords (e.g., *Drenze) do not as effectively activate noncoronal words (e.g., Grenze [border]). Thus, certain word onset variations do not hamper the speech recognition system. The authors interpret this asymmetry as a consequence of underspecified coronal place of articulation in the mental lexicon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modulating the masked congruence priming effect with the hands and the mouth.

The authors report a series of experiments in which they use the masked congruence priming paradigm to investigate the processing of masked primes in the manual and verbal response modalities. In the manual response modality, they found that masked incongruent primes produced interference relative to both congruent and neutral primes. This finding, which replicates the standard finding in the masked congruence priming literature, is presumed to reflect the conflict that arises between two incompatible responses and, thus, to index the extent of processing of the masked prime. Somewhat surprisingly, when participants were asked to respond verbally in the same task, masked incongruent primes no longer produced interference, but masked congruent primes produced facilitation. These findings are surprising because they suggest that the processing of nonconsciously perceived primes extends to the response level in the manual, but not verbal, response modality. The authors propose that the modulation of the masked congruence priming effect by response modality is due to verbal, but not manual, responses being mediated by the lexical-phonological production system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual distance and competition in lexical access

Two experiments use rhyme priming techniques to explore the decision space for lexical access. The 1st experiment, using intramodal (auditory-auditory) priming, covaried the phonological distance of a spoken rhyme prime (e.g., pomato) from its source word (e.g., tomato) with the presence or absence of close lexical competitors. The results showed strong effects of phonological distance and no significant effects of competitor environment. The 2nd experiment, using ambiguous rhyme primes in a cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming task, showed that phonetically ambiguous primes could fully match their source words, but only in the appropriate lexical environment. The results support a view of lexical access in which the listener's perceptual experience is based on strict requirements for a bottom-up match with the speech input, and in which competitor environment does not directly modulate the on-line goodness-of-fit computation.     

Contextual facilitation of lexical processing in Alzheimer's disease: intralexical priming or sentence-level priming?

Studies of semantic priming (facilitation of lexical processing by a prior semantic context) suggest that semantic-memory structure remains intact in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recently, however, it has been claimed that the priming produced by single-word primes reflects merely the facilitation of preexisting lexical associations (intralexical priming) and thus reveals nothing about semantic memory in AD. Other studies showing normal priming in AD have used sentences as primes. However, intralexical priming originating from individual words within the sentence might also account for this type of contextual priming. This possibility was examined by reanalyzing previous sentence-priming results using data only from those trials where there was little likelihood of intralexical priming. This did not change the previous pattern of priming facilitation, suggesting that the normal sentence priming found in AD patients derives from the message conveyed by the sentence as a whole, rather than from simple intralexical associations.     

What can we learn from the morphology of Hebrew? A masked-priming investigation of morphological representation.

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 23(5) of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (see record 2008-09898-001). On page 854, two Hebrew words are missing from Appendix F. The corrected Appendix appears with the erratum.] All Hebrew words are composed of 2 interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a phonological word pattern. The lexical representations of these morphemic units were examined using masked priming. When primes and targets shared an identical word pattern, neither lexical decision nor naming of targets was facilitated. In contrast, root primes facilitated both lexical decisions and naming of target words that were derived from these roots. This priming effect proved to be independent of meaning similarity because no priming effects were found when primes and targets were semantically but not morphologically related. These results suggest that Hebrew roots are lexical units whereas word patterns are not. A working model of lexical organization in Hebrew is offered on the basis of these results. (A correction concerning this article appears in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1997, Vol 23(5), 1189–1191. On page 854 of the current issue, two Hebrew words are missing from Appendix F. The corrected Appendix appears in this correction.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relative position priming effect depends on whether letters are vowels or consonants.

The relative position priming effect is a type of subset priming in which target word recognition is facilitated as a consequence of priming the word with some of its letters, maintaining their relative position (e.g., csn as a prime for casino). Five experiments were conducted to test whether vowel-only and consonant-only subset primes contribute equally to this effect. Experiment 1 revealed that this subset priming effect emerged when primes were composed exclusively of consonants, compared with vowel-only primes (csn-casino vs. aia-animal). Experiment 2 tested the impact of letter frequency in this asymmetry. Subset priming effects were obtained for both high- and low-frequency consonants but not for vowels, which rules out a letter frequency explanation. Experiment 3 tested the role of phonology and its contribution to the priming effects observed, by decreasing the prime duration. The results showed virtually the same effects as in the previous experiments. Finally, Experiments 4 and 5 explored the influence of repeated letters in the primes on the magnitude of the priming effects obtained for consonant and vowel subset primes (iuo-dibujo and aea-madera vs. mgn-imagen and rtr-frutero). Again, the results confirmed the priming asymmetry. We propose that a functional distinction between consonants and vowels, mainly based on the lexical constraints imposed by each of these types of letters, might provide an explanation for the whole set of results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

The prime lexicality effect: form-priming as a function of prime awareness, lexical status, and discrimination difficulty

G. W. Humphreys, D. Besner, and P. T. Quinlan (1988) found that form-primes (e.g., contrast-CONTRACT) were effective only with masked primes. C. Veres (1986) obtained the same effect for word primes but found that nonword primes (e.g., controct) were effective regardless of masking. In a lexical-decision task, the present study failed to find any priming with word primes but only when the nonword distractors were very close to a particular word (e.g., UNIVORSE). With more distant nonword distractors (e.g., ANIVORSE), priming with word primes was restored in the masked condition. In terms of an entry-opening model of priming, this effect was interpreted as a blocking of priming by a postaccess checking operation. Alternatively, in an interactive activation model, this effect could be modeled either by decreasing the strength of lexical competition or by changing the decision criterion from local to global activation.     

On the generality of the perceptual closure effect

Perceptual closure is a process whereby an incomplete stimulus is perceived to be complete. J. G. Snodgrass and K. Feenan (1990) argued that perceptual closure during a study episode is an important factor in producing large priming effects in picture fragment identification. They found that a moderately fragmented study picture produced more priming than either a very fragmented or an intact study picture and argued that this inverted U-shaped function is a signature of the perceptual closure effect. The experiments in this study, extend these results to word fragment identification by showing that (a) the most effective prime, for both unspeeded and speeded word fragment identification is a moderately fragmented study word; (b) the sharpness of the U-shaped gradient is the same whether the perceptual feedback during study is a word (in a font different from that of the fragmented study word) or a picture; and (c) although a fragmented study picture primes subsequent word fragment identification, it does not produce the inverted U-shaped function, thereby showing that perceptual closure reflects perceptual rather than conceptual priming.     

Masked priming with orthographic neighbors: A test of the lexical competition assumption.

In models of visual word identification that incorporate inhibitory competition among activated lexical units, a word's higher frequency neighbors will be the word's strongest competitors. Preactivation of these neighbors by a prime is predicted to delay the word's identification. Using the masked priming paradigm (K. I. Forster & C. Davis, 1984, J. Segui and J. Grainger (1990) reported that, consistent with this prediction, a higher frequency neighbor prime delayed the responses to a lower frequency target, whereas a lower frequency neighbor prime did not delay the responses to a higher frequency target. In the present experiments, using English stimuli, it was found that this pattern held only when the primes and targets had few neighbors; when the primes and targets had many neighbors, lower frequency primes delayed responses to higher frequency targets essentially as much as higher frequency primes delayed responses to lower frequency targets. Several possible explanations for these findings are discussed along with their theoretical implications. Considered together, the results are most consistent with activation-based accounts of the masked priming effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Single word production in English: The role of subsyllabic units during phonological encoding.

Five experiments investigated the role of sublexical units in English single word production L. Ferrand, J. Segui, and G. W. Humphreys (1997) reported a priming effect that was most effective when primes and targets shared the first syllable. Experiments 1A and 1B failed to replicate this effect but Experiment 1B showed that subsyllabic units play a role in speech production. This role was further explored using a picture naming task in Experiment 2. Naming latencies were shortest when the segmental overlap between prime and target (picture name) was largest, regardless of the syllable structure of the target. Experiments 3 and 4 replicated this segmental overlap effect with different sets of words as targets. Experiment 5 showed that the magnitude of the overlap effect increased with longer prime exposure duration. The implications of these results for theories of phonological encoding in speech production are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Summation of activation: Evidence from multiple primes that converge and diverge within semantic memory.

Six experiments addressed the combinatorial influence of multiple related primes in naming, lexical decision, and relatedness judgment performance. Primes either converged on a single semantic representation (e.g., LION-STRIPES-TIGER) or diverged onto distinct semantic representations (e.g., KIDNEY-PIANO-ORGAN). The facilitatory influence of 2 related primes was well predicted by the sum of the influences from the single-related-prime conditions (1) for both convergent and divergent primes, (2) in lexical-decision and naming, (3) across varying prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies, and (4) under target-degradation conditions that increased the priming effects. The relatedness-judgment task yielded an additive pattern of priming for convergent prime conditions; however, an underadditive pattern of priming was found for divergent prime conditions. Discussion focuses on the role of attentional systems that modulate the type of information used to perform a given task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Masked Repetition and Phonological Priming Within and Across Modalities.

Lexical decision latencies to word targets presented either visually or auditorily were faster when directly preceded by a briefly presented (53-ms) pattern-masked visual prime that was the same word as the target (repetition primes), compared with different word primes. Primes that were pseudohomophones of target words did not significantly influence target processing compared with unrelated primes (Experiments 1-2) but did produce robust priming effects with slightly longer prime exposures (67 ms) in Experiment 3. Like repetition priming, these pseudohomophone priming effects did not interact with target modality. Experiments 4 and 5 replicated this general pattern of effects while introducing a different measure of prime visibility and an orthographic priming condition. Results are interpreted within the framework of a bimodal interactive activation model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of backward priming on word recognition in single-word and sentence contexts.

Backward priming was investigated under conditions similar to those used in lexical ambiguity research. Ss received prime-target word pairs that were associated either unidirectionally (BABY-STORK) or bidirectionally (BABY-CRY). In Exp 1, targets were presented 500 ms following the onset of visual primes, and Ss made naming or lexical decision responses to the targets. Forward priming was obtained in all conditions, while backward priming occurred only with lexical decision. In Exp 2, primes were presented auditorily, either in isolation or in a sentence. Targets followed the offset of the primes either immediately or after 200 ms. Backward priming occurred with both response tasks, but only when the prime was an isolated word. Backward priming decreased over time with the naming task, but not with lexical decision. These results suggest that the locus of the backward priming effect is different for the 2 response tasks. Results support a context-independent view of lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verbs and nouns are organized and accessed differently in the mental lexicon: evidence from Hebrew

A masked priming paradigm was used to examine the role of the root and verbal-pattern morphemes in lexical access within the verbal system of Hebrew. Previous research within the nominal system had showed facilitatory effects from masked primes that shared the same root as the target word, but not when the primes shared the word pattern (R. Frost, K. I. Forster, & A. Deutsch, 1997). In contrast to these findings, facilitatory effects were obtained for both roots and word patterns in the verbal system. In addition, verbal pattern facilitation was obtained even when the primes were pseudoverbs consisting of illegal combinations of roots and verbal patterns. Significant priming was also found when the primes and the targets contained the same root. The results are discussed with reference to the factors that may determine the lexical status of morphological units in lexical organization. A model of morphological processing of Hebrew words is proposed.     

Effects of syntactic expectations on speech segmentation.

Although the effect of acoustic cues on speech segmentation has been extensively investigated, the role of higher order information (e.g., syntax) has received less attention. Here, the authors examined whether syntactic expectations based on subject-verb agreement have an effect on segmentation and whether they do so despite conflicting acoustic cues. Although participants detected target words faster in phrases containing adequate acoustic cues ("spins" in take spins and "pins" in takes pins), this acoustic effect was suppressed when the phrases were appended to a plural context (those women take spins/*takes pins [with the asterisk indicating a syntactically unacceptable parse]). The syntactically congruent target ("spins") was detected faster regardless of the acoustics. However, a singular context (that woman *take spins/takes pins) had no effect on segmentation, and the results resembled those of the neutral phrases. Subsequent experiments showed that the discrepancy was due to the relative time course of syntactic expectations and acoustics cues. Taken together, the data suggest that syntactic knowledge can facilitate segmentation but that its effect is substantially attenuated if conflicting acoustic cues are encountered before full realization of the syntactic constraint. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Unconscious priming of association judgments.

Participants judged whether pairs of target words were associated or not-associated in meaning (association judgment task). Target pairs were preceded by a brief (200 ms) related or unrelated (prime) word presented to the nondominant eye. Each participant performed 2 blocks of association judgment task trials: 1 with primes that were legible, and 1 with primes that were masked by a pattern simultaneously presented to the dominant eye. Across 2 experiments, significantly larger masked priming effects were observed for participants who could not detect priming words (low-d′ participants) than for participants who could partially see priming words (high-d′ participants). This result suggests that undetectable masked primes can activate word meaning and that conscious attempts to process masked primes may inhibit unconscious activation. Additionally, evidence is presented that supports claims that spreading activation is the crucial mechanism responsible for unconscious priming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)