Maria Augustinova

The French Lexicon Project: Lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and 38,840 pseudowords

The French Lexicon Project involved the collection of lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and the same number of nonwords. It was directly inspired by the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) and produced very comparable frequency and word length effects. The present article describes the methods used to collect the data, reports analyses on the word frequency and the word length effects, and describes the Excel files that make the data freely available for research purposes. The word and pseudoword data from this article may be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Age-of-acquisition and subjective frequency estimates for all generally known monosyllabic French words and their relation with other psycholinguistic variables

Ratings for age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency were collected for the 1,493 monosyllabic French words that were most known to French students. AoA ratings were collected by asking participants to estimate in years the age at which they learned each word. Subjective frequency ratings were collected on a 7-point scale, ranging from never encountered to encountered several times daily. The results were analyzed to address the relationship between AoA and subjective frequency ratings with other psycholinguistic variables (objective frequency, imageability, number of letters, and number of orthographic neighbors). The results showed high reliability ratings with other databases. Supplementary materials for this study may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Suggestion does not de-automatize word reading: Evidence from the semantically based Stroop task

Recent studies have shown that the suggestion for participants to construe words as meaningless symbols reduces, or even eliminates, standard Stroop interference in highly suggestible individuals (Raz, Fan, & Posner, 2005; Raz, Kirsch, Pollard, & Nitkin-Kaner, 2006). In these studies, the researchers consequently concluded that this suggestion de-automatizes word reading. The aim of the present study was to closely examine this claim. To this end, highly suggestible individuals completed both standard and semantically based Stroop tasks, either with or without a suggestion to construe the words as meaningless symbols (manipulated in both a between-participants [Exp. 1] and a within-participants [Exp. 2] design). By showing that suggestion substantially reduced standard Stroop interference, these two experiments replicated Raz et al.’s (2006) results. However, in both experiments we also found significant semantically based Stroop effects of similar magnitudes in all suggestion conditions. Taken together, these results indicate that the suggestion to construe words as meaningless symbols does not eliminate, or even reduce, semantic activation (assessed by the semantically based Stroop effect) in highly suggestible individuals, and that such an intervention most likely reduces nonsemantic task-relevant response competition related to the standard Stroop task. In sum, contrary to Raz et al.’s claim, suggestion does not de-automatize or prevent reading (as shown by a significant amount of semantic processing), but rather seems to influence response competition. These results also add to the growing body of evidence showing that semantic activation in the Stroop task is indeed automatic.

Comparing word processing times in naming, lexical decision, and progressive demasking: evidence from Chronolex

We report performance measures for lexical decision (LD), word naming (NMG), and progressive demasking (PDM) for a large sample of monosyllabic monomorphemic French words (N = 1,482). We compare the tasks and also examine the impact of word length, word frequency, initial phoneme, orthographic and phonological distance to neighbors, age-of-acquisition, and subjective frequency. Our results show that objective word frequency is by far the most important variable to predict reaction times in LD. For word naming, it is the first phoneme. PDM was more influenced by a semantic variable (word imageability) than LD, but was also affected to a much greater extent by perceptual variables (word length, first phoneme/letters). This may reduce its usefulness as a psycholinguistic word recognition task.

Automaticity of Word Reading Evidence From the Semantic Stroop Paradigm

Various lines of research have independently reported that different interventions reduce or even eliminate Stroop interference. Because such findings have been interpreted as evidence that word reading can be prevented and/or controlled, these lines of research challenge the widespread automatic view of word reading. This article provides methodological and empirical arguments explaining why such conclusions might not be warranted and summarizes direct empirical evidence showing that interventions used in past studies have not yet been found to prevent or impose any control over word reading in the Stroop task. The main conclusion of this article is that the processes involved in word reading might (still) be considered automatic.

Single-letter coloring and spatial cuing do not eliminate or reduce a semantic contribution to the Stroop effect.

The automaticity of semantic activation in the Stroop task is still the subject of considerable debate (Augustinova & Ferrand, 2007; Manwell, Roberts, & Besner, 2004). The present experiments were designed to assess whether coloring and cuing a single letter (vs. all letters) in the Stroop task reliably eliminates semantically based Stroop interference or whether the elimination observed by Manwell et al. was due to insufficient statistical power. Experiment 1 was an exact replication of the experiment conducted by Manwell and colleagues and involved a large population. Experiment 2 replicated and extended Experiment 1 by controlling for initial fixation. In line with previous findings obtained by Augustinova and Ferrand, both experiments indicated that coloring and cuing a single letter failed to eliminate or even reduce the semantically based Stroop effect. Thus, these results add to the growing body of evidence suggesting that semantic activation in the Stroop task is automatic.

Influence de la présentation bicolore des mots sur l’effet Stroop

Manwell, Roberts, and Besner (2004) recently reported the absence of a semantically based Stroop effect (i.e., slower color naming latencies for color-associated words than for color-neutral words) when a single letter was spatially precued and appeared in a different color from the rest of the word displayed as compared to condition where all letters in the display were precued and appeared in a homogeneous color. In contrast to the latter results, two experiments in the present work showed a semantically based Stroop effect in both singleletter coloring when participants were instructed to focus their attention on the first letter of the display only and to name its color. This single letter was colored differently from the rest of the word displayed in Experiment 1a, and was the only letter colored while the rest of the word displayed in grey in Experiment 1b. These different results are interpreted in a new general framework suggesting that semantic information is always automatically activated but not systematically used in visual word recognition.

Differential effects of viewing positions on standard versus semantic Stroop interference

From their finding that the substantial magnitude of the Stroop interference that occurs when a participant’s initial fixation is directed at the optimal viewing position is eliminated when the initial fixation is directed at the end of a word, Perret and Ducrot (2010) concluded that initial fixation at the latter position likely prevents reading. In the present study, we further examined this interpretation. To this end, the two conflict dimensions (semantic vs. response) that were confounded in the original work were separated within a semantically based Stroop paradigm (Neely & Kahan, 2001) that was administered with vocal (instead of manual) responses. In line with past findings showing greater interference in the vocal task, the reported results indicated that standard Stroop interference was reduced, but not eliminated, thus making the initial interpretation in terms of reading suppression unlikely. This conclusion is further strengthened by the presence of isolated semantic interference, the magnitude of which remained significant and was unaffected by viewing position. In sum, these results show that initial fixation of the end of a word simply reduces (nonsemantic) response competition.

Quand « amour » amorce « soleil » (ou pourquoi l’amorcage affectif n’est pas un (simple) cas d’amorçage semantique ?)

L’article presente une analyse theorique des effets d’amorcage affectif. Cette analyse suggere qu’une explication en termes de propagation d’activation dans un reseau semantique se heurte a deux types de problemes: 1) des incoherences au niveau theorique; 2) des difficultes a rendre compte d’un certain nombre de donnees, meme lorsque que ces donnees sont obtenues avec la tâche de prononciation. Plusieurs explications alternatives sont proposees. Celles-ci reposent sur l’hypothese de l’existence d’un systeme affectif independant du systeme semantique, et/ ou sur l’operation de processus autres que la propagation d’activation, tels que la competition de reponses motrices ou la selection de la reponse (attention selective). Il est finalement avance que ces explications alternatives, bien que distinctes, ne sont pas incompatibles et peuvent etre integrees pour rendre compte des effets d’amorcage affectif d’une maniere plus complete.

Not as bad as it seems: When the presence of a threatening humanoid robot improves human performance

“Bad” humanoid robots paying attention to human performance energized attentional control—as does human presence. “Bad” humanoid robots just paying attention to human performance may energize attentional control—as does human presence.