Daniel Zagar

Illusory conjunctions in French: The nature of sublexical units in visual word recognition

The respective influence of orthographic redundancy (Seidenberg, 1987) and syllable boundaries (Rapp, 1992) on reading units in French was tested in three experiments, using the illusory conjunction paradigm (Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986). Bigram boundaries were defined according to bigram frequencies. The data showed that the syllable effect was attenuated or cancelled when syllable boundaries did not coincide with bigram boundaries. Reading units were defined by syllable and orthographic information. The implications of such findings for the dual route theory and the PDP model are discussed.

Neighbourhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming in the lexical decision task

Lexical decision tasks (LDTs) were used with a masked priming procedure to test whether neighbourhood distribution interacts with orthographic priming. Word targets had either ‘single’ neighbours when their two higher frequency orthographic neighbours were spread over letter positions (e.g., neighbours of LOBE: robe-loge) or ‘twin’ neighbours when they were concentrated on a single letter position (e.g., neighbours of FARD: lard-tard). All word targets were preceded by their highest frequency orthographic neighbour or by a control prime. An inhibitory priming effect was found for words with single neighbours, but not for words with twin neighbours, in both a yes/no LDT (Experiment 1a) and a go/no-go LDT (Experiment 1b). This interaction was replicated in a go/no-go LDT when the position of the letter yielding the neighbour prime was controlled (Experiment 2). Simulations run on the word materials revealed that the interactive activation model captures the inhibitory priming effect in the single-neighbour condition but fails to capture the loss of priming in the twin-neighbour condition.

A linguistic dissociation in Williams syndrome: Good at gender agreement but poor at lexical retrieval

Williams syndrome (WS) is a rareneuro-developmental disorder characterised byspared language in the face of serious deficitsin nonlinguistic cognitive abilities. Weconducted a study on ten WS individuals inwhich gender agreement and gender assignmentwere assessed by means of two tasks: gendercategorisation and gender concord. Subjectsperformed gender categorisation to real nounswhose gender was regular or exceptional giventheir ending, and to invented nouns which werecomposed of nonword or word stems and realword-endings. The same material was used in thegender concord task in which subjects had tomatch the items with the appropriate form ofthe article and the adjective carrying genderagreement. In the gender categorisation of realwords, WS were lower than controls but bothgroups demonstrated a similar sensitivity togender-ending regularities. In the gendercategorisation of nonwords, the results showeda clear dissociation. The WS subjects producedmore ending-consistent responses than thecontrols. Contrary to the controls, WS reliedheavily on the gender clue provided by theending even when the gender of the word evokedby the stem of the invented word was opposed tothat evoked by the ending. Participants with WSwere not influenced by the specific word evokedby the stem of the invented word. In the secondtask (concord task), the WS subjects performed well although lower than thecontrols. We concluded that the WS people werenot impaired in gender agreement which relieson syntactic rules and/or on the extraction ofregularities but experienced difficulties inretrieving lexical instances.

Can we see syllables in monosyllabic words? A study with illusory conjunctions

Mathey, Zagar, Doignon, and Seigneuric (2006) reported an inhibitory effect of syllabic neighbourhood in monosyllabic French words suggesting that syllable units mediate the access to lexical representations of monosyllabic stimuli. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the perception of syllable units in monosyllabic stimuli. The illusory conjunction paradigm was used to examine perceptual groupings of letters. Experiment 1 showed that potential syllables in monosyllabic French words (e.g., BI in BICHE) affected the pattern of illusory conjunctions. Experiment 2 indicated that the perceptual parsing in monosyllabic items was due to syllable information and orthographic redundancy. The implications of the data are discussed for visual word recognition processes in an interactive activation model incorporating syllable units and connected adjacent letters (IAS; Mathey et al., 2006).

Evidence for a Preserved Sensitivity to Orthographic Redundancy and an Impaired Access to Phonological Syllables in French Developmental Dyslexics.

To evaluate the orthographic and phonological processing skills of developmental dyslexics, we (a) examined their abilities to exploit properties of orthographic redundancy and (b) tested whether their phonological deficit extends to spelling-to-sound connections for large-grain size units such as syllables. To assess the processing skills in dyslexics, we utilized the illusory conjunction paradigm to investigate the nature of reading units in French dyslexic and control children matched in reading age. In control children, reading units were defined by both orthographic redundancy and phonological syllable information. In dyslexics, however, reading units were defined only by orthographic redundancy. Therefore, despite their impairment in reading acquisition, developmental dyslexics have the ability to encode and exploit letter frequency co-occurrences. In contrast, their access to phonological syllables from letters was impaired, suggesting that their phonological deficit extends to large grain-size phonological units.

When WORDS with Higher-frequency Neighbours Become Words with No Higher-frequency Neighbour (Or How to Undress the Neighbourhood Frequency Effect)

Abstract “SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS” (The ploughman, with his plough, manages the work) The influence of lexical similarity on word recognition has been discussed not only because of its theoretical impact but also because it is difficult to replicate. Among the multiplicity of the causes of this inconsistency one reason can be that different words were used in comparing words with higher-frequency neighbours (HFN) and words without HFN. In this experiment we chose French words for which the neighbourhood changes when they are written in UPPER case or in lower case. For example ‘DEFI’ has one HFN (‘DEMI’) but when it is displayed in lower case ‘defi’ has no HFN because ‘demi’ has no accent on the ‘e’. Reaction times in a lexical decision task for these words were compared with a control condition in which there was no change in the neighbourhood when the word typography was changed (‘NEON — neon’). The data showed a significant HFN effect: reaction times were longer on ‘DEFI’ than on ‘defi’ while no difference was observed between ‘NEON’ and ‘neon’. Moreover the simulations ran with the IA model (McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981) showed the same pattern of results. These data confirm the reality of an inhibitory mechanism during visual word recognition.