G. Lukatela

Representation of inflected nouns in the internal lexicon.

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the Serbo-Croatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independent-entries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun’s frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.

Phonological Access of the Lexicon: Evidence From Associative Priming With Pseudohomophones

Pseudohomophones were used in a primed naming task. In Experiments 1 and 2, target pseudowords that sounded like real words (e.g., CHARE) were preceded either by context words that related associatively to the word with which the target was homophonic (TABLE-CHARE) or by context words that were not associatively related (NOVEL-CHARE). Control pairs were TABLE-THARE and NOVEL-THARE (Experiment 1) and TABLE-CHARK and NOVEL-CHARK (Experiment 2). In relation to NOVEL, TABLE benefited the naming of CHARE but not the naming of THARE or CHARK. TAYBLE-CHAIR pairs were used in Experiment 3. If the prime TAYBLE activated/table/,then/chair/would be activated associatively and the target CHAIR would be named faster than if TARBLE was the prime. Experiment 4 extended the design of Experiment 3 to include TABLE-CHAIR pairs and a comparison of a short (280 ms) and a long (500 ms) delay between context and target onsets. The priming due to associated pseudohomophones was unaffected by onset asynchrony and equal in magnitude to that due to associated words. Results suggest that lexical representations are coded and accessed phonologically.

Lexical decision in a phonologically shallow orthography

The Serbo-Croatian language is written in two alphabets, Roman and Cyrillic. Both orthographies transcribe the sounds of the language in a regular and straightforward fashion and may, therefore, be referred to as phonologically shallow in contrast to English orthography, which is phonologically deep. Most of the alphabet characters are unique to one alphabet or the other. There are, however, a number of shared characters, some of which receive the same reading and some of which receive a different reading, in the two alphabets. It is possible, therefore, to construct a variety of types of letter strings. Some of these can be read in only one way and can be either a word or nonsense. Other letter strings can be pronounced one way if read as Roman and in a distinctively different way if read as Cyrillic and can be words in both alphabets—but different words; or they can be nonsense in both alphabets or nonsense in one alphabet and a word in the other. In a lexical decision task conducted with bialphabetical readers, it was shown that words that can be read in two different ways are accepted more slowly and with greater error than words that can be read only one way. It was concluded that for the phonologically shallow writing systems of Serbo-Croatian, lexical decision proceeds with reference to the phonology.

Phonemic similarity effects and prelexical phonology

Ten experiments were conducted on visually presented Serbo-Croatian words and pseudowords, comprising phonemically similar and dissimilar context-target sequences. There were five main results. First, phonemic similarity effects in both lexical decision and naming are independent of graphemic similarity. Second, phonemic similarity need not facilitate lexical decision; the direction of its effect depends on lexicality, target frequency, and type of similarity (specifically, the position of the phoneme that distinguishes context and target). Third, phonemic similarity expedites the naming of words and pseudowords, and to the same degree. Fourth, phonemic similarity is negated in naming, but not in lexical decision, when the visually presented context and target are stressed differently. Fifth, the phonemic similarity effect occurs even when the context is a masked pseudoword. These results are discussed in terms of a model in which word-processing units are activated routinely by phoneme-processing units, and in which compositionally similar word units, when activated, inhibit one another in proportion to each’s familiarity. In this model, the phonemic similarity effect in naming is based on the states of phoneme units, whereas the phonemic similarity effect in lexical decision is based on the states of word units. Overall, the results comport with an account in which phonology is computed prelexically and automatically.

Grammatical priming of inflected nouns.

In normal linguistic usage, the inflected nouns of Sorbo-Croatian are usually preceded by prepositions that help to specify which particular grammatical case is intended and to stress the noun’s function in the sentence. In a lexical decision task, it was demonstrated that lexical decision times to nouns in a grammatical case that demands a preposition were faster when the preposition was appropriate to the case than when it was either inappropriate to the case or a nonsense syllable. This result lends support to the intuition that priming can occur among sentential components.

Automatic and pre-lexical computation of phonology in visual word identification

Abstract Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the hypothesis that identification of a visually presented word involves phonological information that is activated pre-lexically and automatically. A backward masking paradigm was used in which a word target was followed by a pseudoword mask, followed in turn by a non-linguistic pattern mask. The stimulus materials were Serbo-Croatian. The pseudoword mask could share all but one phoneme in common with the target, or none; moreover, it could be printed in the same alphabet as the target (e.g. both stimuli printed in Cyrillic), or in the other alphabet (e.g. target in Cyrillic, mask in Roman). Word targets were always lower case, and pseudoword masks were always upper case. It was assumed that where a mask shares phonological information with the target it can compensate for the interruption in processing by continuing the activation of the phoneme units activated by the target. Such an effect would be pre-lexical because the phoneme units activated by th...

Can theories of word recognition remain stubbornly nonphonological

Publisher Summary This chapter reveals that the stubborn rejection of phonology in the prevailing theories of reading cannot be sustained within a consistent theory of language processing that accommodates all of the facts, not just those that are convenient. The bulk of research on word identification using English language materials has been taken to implicate the dominance of a visual access route with, perhaps, an optional but not preferred phonological route. Data on word identification using Serbo-Croatian language materials point unequivocally to a nonoptional phonological access route. The basic mechanism of written language processing is assumed to be the same for all languages. Different data patterns among languages, therefore, are to be taken as evidence of the ways in which that mechanism can be fine-tuned by the structure of a particular language. Some differences and similarities among Serbo-Croatian, English, and Hebrew are used to elucidate possible features of a written language processing mechanism that would allow such patterns to arise. Given the nature of the data that have been obtained with Serbo-Croatian, such a mechanism must allow for automatic prelexical phonology. The chapter discusses the assumption that all writing systems are phonological, they provide a system for transcribing phonologically any possible word of the language. The variety of orthographies does this in more or less straightforward ways, resulting in their being phonologically shallow or deep.

Lexical representation of regular and irregular inflected nouns

Abstract An experiment is reported in which native speakers/readers of Serbo-Croat made rapid lexical decisions to inflected nouns in three cases: nominative singular, dative/locative singular (these two cases are spelled the same way), and instrumental singular. Both regularly and irregularly declined nouns were used. The regularly declined nouns were divided evenly between the masculine and feminine gender. For regular masculine nouns the nominative singular is linguistically full and free. For regular feminine nouns the nominative singular is linguistically empty and bound. The irregularly declined nouns were all feminine. They were irregular in either the dative/locative singular form or in the instrumental singular form. Predictions were made from the ‘satellite entries” view (Lukatela et al., Memory and Cognition 8, 41-23. 1980) of how the inflected forms of a Serbo-Croatian noun are organized in the internal lexicon. According to this view each form is said to be represented in a unitary fashion (s...

Rapid naming is affected by association but not by syntax.

Three experiments are reported that focused on the grammatical and associative relationship between a single-word context and a to-be-named target in the Serbo-Croatian language. Unlike in studies using the English language, word class need not be violated in order to obtain grammatical incongruency: all word pairs, therefore, can be semantically plausible. Experiment 1 contrasted naming with lexical decision using associative and grammatical priming, a replication of Seidenberg, Waters, Sanders, and Langer’s (1984) study. With associative priming, both lexical decision and naming were facilitated significantly, but with grammatical priming, only lexical decision was affected significantly. Heeding observations of West and Stanovich (1986), in Experiment 2 we used stimuli known to produce a robust grammatical congruency effect on lexical decision (130 msec) and a procedure designed to slow naming latencies. Again, no grammatical congruency effect for naming was obtained. Finally, because Experiment 1, which used a row of Xs as the neutral context, showed an associative priming effect on naming pseudowords, Experiment 3 used a neutral context that was linguistic. An associative priming effect was found for words but not for pseudowords. Results were discussed in terms of pre- and postlexical loci of contextual effects.

Bi-Alphabetical Lexical Decision.

The Serbo-Croatian language is written in two alphabets, Roman and Cyrillic. The majority of the total number of alphabet characters are unique to one or the other alphabet. There are, however, a number of shared characters, some of which receive the same reading in the two alphabets, and some of which receive a different reading in the two alphabets. Letter-strings were constructed, all of which could be given a phonological interpretation in Roman, but only some of which could be given a phonological interpretation in Cyrillic; some of these letter-strings had a lexical entry in Roman, some had a lexical entry in Cyrillic, some had a lexical entry - the same or different - in both alphabets, and some had no lexical entry in either alphabet. In three experiments, subjects reading in the Roman alphabet mode decided as rapidly as possible whether a given letter-string was a word. Taken together, the experiments suggest that in the lexical decision task, Serbo-Croatian letter-strings (where their structure permits) receive simultaneously two phonologic interpretations. Whether or not this phonologic bivalence impedes lexical decision in the assigned alphabet mode depends on whether or not the letter-string has a lexical entry in at least one of the alphabets.