Jens Bölte

The Word Frequency Effect A Review of Recent Developments and Implications for the Choice of Frequency Estimates in German

We review recent evidence indicating that researchers in experimental psychology may have used suboptimal estimates of word frequency. Word frequency measures should be based on a corpus of at least 20 million words that contains language participants in psychology experiments are likely to have been exposed to. In addition, the quality of word frequency measures should be ascertained by correlating them with behavioral word processing data. When we apply these criteria to the word frequency measures available for the German language, we find that the commonly used Celex frequencies are the least powerful to predict lexical decision times. Better results are obtained with the Leipzig frequencies, the dlexDB frequencies, and the Google Books 2000-2009 frequencies. However, as in other languages the best performance is observed with subtitle-based word frequencies. The SUBTLEX-DE word frequencies collected for the present ms are made available in easy-to-use files and are free for educational purposes.

How Writing System and Age Influence Spatial Representations of Actions A Developmental, Cross-Linguistic Study

Recently, researchers reported a bias for placing agents predominantly on the left side of pictures. Both hemispheric specialization and cultural preferences have been hypothesized to be the origin of this bias. To evaluate these hypotheses, we conducted a study with participants exposed to different reading and writing systems: Germans, who use a left-to-right system, and Israelis, who use a right-to-left system. In addition, we manipulated the degree of exposure to the writing systems by testing preschoolers and adults. Participants heard agent-first or recipient-first sentences and were asked to draw the content of the sentences or to arrange transparencies of protagonists and objects such that their arrangement depicted the sentences. Although preschool-age children in both countries showed no directional bias, adults manifested a bias that was consistent with the writing system of their language. These results support the cultural hypothesis regarding the origin of spatial-representational biases.

Variation and assimilation in German: Consequences for lexical access and representation

The consequences of surface variation in speech on lexical access have recently received considerable attention. The lexical system is intolerant to mismatch between input and lexical representation, but an exception is phonologically regular variation. One example is assimilation of consonants that adopt the place of articulation of adjacent consonants in fast speech. Data are presented from crossmodal form priming experiments in German on regressive and progressive assimilation at word boundaries. The results show that some, but not all forms of lawful variation are tolerated by the lexical system. The consequences of these findings for psycholinguistic and linguistic models, some of which incorporate explanations for regular variation, are discussed.

Effects of personal familiarity on early neuromagnetic correlates of face perception

This study investigated effects of familiarity and orientation on face processing by means of magnetoencephalography. Participants were presented with photographs of personally familiar, famous and unfamiliar faces in both upright and inverted orientation. They had to decide whether faces were familiar by means of manual yes/no responses. Independent of orientation, we observed a clear modulation of the M170 by familiarity, with personally familiar faces evoking larger amplitudes than unknown faces. The M170 was also sensitive to orientation, with larger amplitudes for inverted than upright faces. Moreover, the M170 exhibited larger amplitudes over the right than over the left hemisphere, but this asymmetry was present for upright faces only. The present data suggest that at least for personally familiar faces, neural correlates of identification start no later than ∼ 170 ms, and underline a special role of the right hemisphere for faces in their typical upright orientation.

Morphological effects on speech production: Evidence from picture naming

The influence of morphologically complex and simple words on the production of morphologically complex and simple picture names was investigated in five picture-word interference studies. Two variants of picture-word interference were employed to separate morphological from semantic and phonological effects. In the first variant, distractor words were presented concurrently with the pictures, which had to be named. Semantic distractors produced the expected interference. Morphological and phonological distractors both resulted in facilitation, but the size of the effect was much larger for morphological distractors. In a second variant, distractors and pictures were separated by a lag of 7–10 intervening trials. Picture naming was again facilitated by morphological distractors, but no effects were found for phonological and semantic distractors. Distractors from different morphological classes were investigated in the last experiment, again with lags between distractors and pictures. Although these distractors shared a free morpheme with the picture name, they differed from the picture at the conceptual and lemma level. Equal amounts of facilitation were obtained for all distractor types, suggesting that effects originate at a level of shared morphemes.

Prosopagnosia without apparent cause: overview and diagnosis of six cases.

We compared six cases of congenital prosopagnosia to unimpaired participants using standardized test batteries, tailor-made experimental paradigms, and clinical questionnaires. Every prosopagnosic participant displayed deficits in recognizing famous faces and retaining novel faces over short periods of time. Other aspects of face perception such as judgment of emotional expression, speech reading and memory for faces and names were impaired to a lesser degree or only in single cases. No evidence was found for general visual deficits or social dysfunctions. Two of our six cases are first order relatives, and a further three report first-order relatives suffering from prosopagnosic symptoms. The results are in line with the idea of a genetic component to congenital prosopagnosia.

The impact of semantic transparency of morphologically complex words on picture naming

We examined the contribution of semantic similarity to morphological priming effects, using the immediate (Exp. 1 and 3) and the delayed variant (Exp. 2) of picture-word interference. Distractor words were either compounds morphologically related to the picture name, but differing with respect to their semantic transparency (hummingbird, jailbird (Exp. 1); butterfly, butter dish (Exp. 3)), or form-related non-compound words (e.g., trombone). All three experiments revealed strong facilitation of picture naming due to morphologically related distractors. Form-related distractors facilitated picture naming in the immediate variant only, and to a lesser degree than compounds. Interestingly, the size of the morphemic effect was almost identical for semantically transparent and opaque complex words, which suggests that they share morphemic representations. These results suggest that morphological complexity in speech production is coded at the level of form representations, independent of semantic transparency.

Pre-attentive detection of syntactic and semantic errors.

This magnetoencephalographic study tested whether magnetic fields evoked by syntactic and semantic errors differ in their time course and magnitude from fields evoked by phonemic differences. An oddball design, using German sentences with embedded critical words was applied: The error condition (with the standard word RASEN, lawn, in 70% of the trials, and the syntactic and semantic errors ROSEN, roses and RIESEN, giant as deviants) wasx compared with a neutral, correct phonemic condition. Mismatch responses were significantly larger for syntactic and semantic errors as compared to mere phonemic deviations. The semantic error elicited higher mismatch responses than the syntactic error. This error-sensitive component is interpreted as a very early detector for semantic and syntactic errors.

Interference and facilitation in overt speech production investigated with event-related potentials

We report an event-related potential study investigating the neural basis of interference and facilitation in the picture-word interference paradigm with immediate overt naming. We used the high temporal resolution of the electrophysiological response to dissociate general and specific interference processes, by comparing unrelated word distractors to nonlinguistic (a row of Xs), surface feature denoting, and category member distractors. Our results first indicate that the increased naming latencies for linguistic relative to nonlinguistic distractors are because of general conflict-monitoring processes, associated with early event-related potential effects (120–220 ms) and increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. Next, distractors specifying a surface feature of the picture seem to facilitate its identification within the same time window, which involves widespread networks. Finally, nonlinguistic and surface feature distractors also reduced the N400 amplitude, relative to unrelated word distractors. Taken together our results support the view that several distinct processes give rise to the reaction time results often observed in picture naming.

Is Phonological Information Mapped onto Semantic Information in a One-to-One Manner?☆

Spoken word recognition models have to explain the influence of mismatching information on lexical activation. The effect of mismatching information is usually addressed with cross-modal semantic priming experiments using priming effects as a measure of the degree of lexical activation. Pseudowords phonologically related to a semantic associate of the target, e.g., *domato-PAPRIKA, serve as primes. Mismatch effects at the word form level are supposed to percolate unaltered to the semantic level. We show that cross-modal semantic priming might underestimate activation at the word form level. Targets (e.g., PAPRIKA) were preceded by either phonologically related pseudoword primes (e.g., *baprika) or semantically related pseudoword primes (e.g., *domato). Different priming and RT patterns were obtained for the two priming relations.