Françoise Cordier

Evidence for several components of word familiarity

Familiarity with a word can be divided into two main components: familiarity with the form of the word (due to both its lexicality and its specific form) and familiarity with its meaning. In this study, ratings of familiarity were compared for words whose meaning was unknown to participants (UM words), for words of known meaning (KM words), and for unknown words (U words). Linguistic and experiential frequencies were equivalent. Rated familiarity was lower for UM than KM words and even lower for U words. Next, we built pseudowords from these stimuli by changing one letter and submitted them to two familiarity rating tasks that differed in the nature of the additional stimuli: either only nonwords or nonwords plus words. It was assumed that familiarity ratings would be lower for pseudowords built from UM words than for pseudowords built from KM words. The data were consistent with this assumption, and ratings depended on the initial categories of stimuli. These results support the view that usual word familiarity has two components, familiarity with form and familiarity with meaning, and a double source, processing of word form and processing of word meaning. The full set of these materials and norms may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Psycholinguistique vs psychologie cognitive du langage : une simple variante terminologique ?

Resume La psycholinguistique a vu le jour au debut des anneesxa050 aux Etats-Unis et se distinguait clairement a l’origine de la psychologie du langage par le poids de la perspective communicationnelle puis de l’hypothese de pertinence psychologique des regles de transformation de la grammaire generative. Cependant progressivement ces orientations se sont estompees et la psycholinguistique a peu a peu investi toutes les branches de la psychologie du langage, de sorte qu’on peut actuellement considerer que ce ne sont plus que deux variantes terminologiques. L’etude de cette variation est menee a partir des index thematiques de quatre manuels intitules soit «xa0psycholinguistiquexa0» soit «xa0psychologie du langagexa0».