Manuel Perea

BuscaPalabras: A program for deriving orthographic and phonological neighborhood statistics and other psycholinguistic indices in Spanish

This article describes a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in Spanish, including word frequency, syllable frequency, bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, concreteness, familiarity, imageability, valence, arousal, and age-of-acquisition measures. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words. The program computes measures of orthographic similarity online, with respect to either a default vocabulary of 31,491 Spanish words or a vocabulary specified by the user. In addition to providing standard orthographic and phonological neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, such as transposed-letter similarity and embedded-word similarity. It is available, free of charge, from the following Web site: www.maccs.mq.edu.au/~colin/B-Pal.

Effects of orthographic neighborhood in visual word recognition : Cross-task comparisons

Effects of orthographic neighborhood in visual word recognition in Spanish were examined in 5 paradigms: progressive demasking, standard lexical decision, lexical decision with blocking of neighborhood density, naming, and semantic categorization. The results showed inhibitory effects of neighborhood frequency in the progressive-demasking task, in both lexical-decision tasks, as well as for low-density words in the naming task, and for high-density words in the semantic-categorization task. Higher levels of neighborhood density produced an inhibitory trend in the progressive-demasking task, facilitation in lexical decision (significant only when neighborhood density was blocked), and a robust facilitation effect in naming (only for words with higher frequency neighbors). A global analysis across tasks and one simulation study helped outline some of the underlying task-specific and task-independent mechanisms.

The Overlap Model: A Model of Letter Position Coding

Recent research has shown that letter identity and letter position are not integral perceptual dimensions (e.g., jugde primes judge in word-recognition experiments). Most comprehensive computational models of visual word recognition (e.g., the interactive activation model, J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981, and its successors) assume that the position of each letter within a word is perfectly encoded. Thus, these models are unable to explain the presence of effects of letter transposition (trial-trail), letter migration (beard-bread), repeated letters (moose-mouse), or subset/superset effects (faulty-faculty). The authors extend R. Ratcliffs (1981) theory of order relations for encoding of letter positions and show that the model can successfully deal with these effects. The basic assumption is that letters in the visual stimulus have distributions over positions so that the representation of one letter will extend into adjacent letter positions. To test the model, the authors conducted a series of forced-choice perceptual identification experiments. The overlap model produced very good fits to the empirical data, and even a simplified 2-parameter model was capable of producing fits for 104 observed data points with a correlation coefficient of .91.

Effects of syllable frequency and syllable neighborhood frequency in visual word recognition.

Three experiments were carried out to analyze the role of syllable frequency in lexical decision and naming. The results show inhibitory effects of syllable frequency in the lexical decision task for both high- and low-frequency words. In contrast, the effect of syllable frequency is facilitatory in the naming task. A post hoc analysis revealed the important role played by the number of higher frequency syllabic neighbors (words that share a syllable with the target) in the lexical decision task and the role of the frequency of the first syllable in the naming task. Experiment 3 manipulated the neighborhood syllable frequency directly by comparing words with few higher frequency syllabic neighbors and words with many higher frequency syllabic neighbors in the lexical decision task; an inhibitory neighborhood syllable frequency effect was found. The results are interpreted in terms of current models of visual word recognition and word naming.

Associative and semantic priming effects occur at very short stimulus-onset asynchronies in lexical decision and naming

Prior research has found significant associative/semantic priming effects at very short stimulus-onset asynchronies (SOAs) in experimental tasks such as lexical decision, but not in naming tasks (however, see Lukatela and Turvey, 1994). In this paper, the time course of associative priming effects was analyzed a several very short SOAs (33, 50, and 67 ms), using the masked priming paradigm (Forster and Davis, 1984), both in lexical decision (Experiment 1) and naming (Experiment 2). The results show small--but significant--associative priming effects in both tasks. Additionally, using the masked priming procedure at the 67 ms SOA. Experiments 3 and 4, shows facilitatory priming effects for both associatively and semantically (unassociated) related pairs in lexical decision and naming tasks. That is, automatic priming can be semantic. Taken together our data appear to support interactive models of word recognition in which semantic activation may influence the early stages of word processing.

Does jugde activate COURT? Transposed-letter similarity effects in masked associative priming

Transposed-letter (TL) nonwords (e.g.,jugde) can be easily misperceived as words, a fact that is somewhat inconsistent with the letter-position-coding schemes employed by most current models of visual word recognition. To examine this issue further, we conducted four masked semantic/associative priming experiments, using a lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the related primes could be words, TL-internal nonwords, or replacement-letter (RL) nonwords (e.g.,judge, jugde, orjudpe, respectively; the target would be COURT). Relative to an unrelated condition, masked TL-internal primes produced a significant semantic/associative priming effect, an effect that was only slightly smaller than the priming effect for word primes. No effect, however, was observed for RL-nonword primes. In Experiment 2, the TL-nonword primes were created by switching the two final letters of the primes (e.g.,judeg). The results again showed a semantic/associative priming effect for word primes, but not for TL-final nonword primes or for RL-nonword primes. Experiment 3 replicated the associative/semantic priming effect for TL-internal nonword primes, with, again, no effect for TL-final nonword primes. Finally, Experiment 4 again failed to yield a priming effect for TL-final nonword primes. The implications of these results for the choice of a letter-position-coding scheme in visual word recognition models are discussed.

A Model of the Go/No-Go Task

In this article, the first explicit, theory-based comparison of 2-choice and go/no-go variants of 3 experimental tasks is presented. Prior research has questioned whether the underlying core-information processing is different for the 2 variants of a task or whether they differ mostly in response demands. The authors examined 4 different diffusion models for the go/no-go variant of each task along with a standard diffusion model for the 2-choice variant (R. Ratcliff, 1978). The 2-choice and the go/no-go models were fit to data from 4 lexical decision experiments, 1 numerosity discrimination experiment, and 1 recognition memory experiment, each with 2-choice and go/no-go variants. The models that assumed an implicit decision criterion for no-go responses produced better fits than models that did not. The best model was one in which only response criteria and the nondecisional components of processing changed between the 2 variants, supporting the view that the core information on which decisions are based is not different between them.

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, biphones, and bisyllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal/.

Transposed-letter effects in reading: evidence from eye movements and parafoveal preview.

Three eye movement experiments were conducted to examine the role of letter identity and letter position during reading. Before fixating on a target word within each sentence, readers were provided with a parafoveal preview that differed in the amount of useful letter identity and letter position information it provided. In Experiments 1 and 2, previews fell into 1 of 5 conditions: (a) identical to the target word, (b) a transposition of 2 internal letters, (c) a substitution of 2 internal letters, (d) a transposition of the 2 final letters, or (e) a substitution of the 2 final letters. In Experiment 3, the authors used a further set of conditions to explore the importance of external letter positions. The findings extend previous work and demonstrate that transposed-letter effects exist in silent reading. These experiments also indicate that letter identity information can be extracted from the parafovea outside of absolute letter position from the first 5 letters of the word to the right of fixation. Finally, the results support the notion that exterior letters play important roles in visual word recognition.

The what, when, where, and how of visual word recognition

A long-standing debate in reading research is whether printed words are perceived in a feedforward manner on the basis of orthographic information, with other representations such as semantics and phonology activated subsequently, or whether the system is fully interactive and feedback from these representations shapes early visual word recognition. We review recent evidence from behavioral, functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and biologically plausible connectionist modeling approaches, focusing on how each approach provides insight into the temporal flow of information in the lexical system. We conclude that, consistent with interactive accounts, higher-order linguistic representations modulate early orthographic processing. We also discuss how biologically plausible interactive frameworks and coordinated empirical and computational work can advance theories of visual word recognition and other domains (e.g., object recognition).