Michael J. Cortese

Handbook of Psycholinguistics

K. Haberlandt, Methods in Reading Research. F. Ferreira and M. Anes, Why Study Spoken Language? K. Rayner and S.C. Sereno, Eye Movements in Reading Psycholinguistic Studies. M. Kutas and C.K. Van Petten, Psycholinguistics Electrified: Event-Related Brain Potential Investigations. R.E. Remez, A Guide to Research on the Perception of Speech. K.R. Kluender, Speech Perception as a Tractable Problem in Cognitive Science. D.W. Massaro, Psychological Aspects of Speech Perception: Implications for Research and Theory. S.E. Lively, D.B. Pisoni, and S.D. Goldinger, Spoken Word Recognition: Research and Theory. D.A. Balota, Visual Word Recognition: The Journey from Features to Meaning. G.B. Simpson, Context and the Processing of Ambiguous Words. D.C. Mitchell, Sentence Parsing. R.W. Gibbs, Jr., Figurative Thought and Figurative Language. C. Cacciari and S. Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language. M. Singer, Discourse Inference Processes. A.C. Graesser, C.L. McMahen, and B.K. Johnson, Question Asking and Answering. P. van den Broek, Comprehension and Memory of Narrative Texts: Inferences and Coherence. C.R. Fletcher, Levels of Representation in Memory for Discourse. A.M. Glenberg, P. Kruley, and W.E. Langston, Analogical Processes in Comprehension: Simulation of a Mental Model. B.K. Britton, Understanding Expository Text: Building Mental Structures to Induce Insights. S.C. Garrod and A.J. Sanford, Resolving Sentences in a Discourse Context: How Discourse Representation Affects Language Understanding. A.J. Sanford and S.C. Garrod, Selective Processing in Text Understanding. W. Kintsch, The Psychology of Discourse Processing. P. Bloom, Recent Controversies in the Study of Language Acquisition. L. Gerken, Child Phonology: Past Research, Present Questions, Future Directions. J. Oakhill, Individual Differences in Childrens Text Comprehension. C.A. Perfetti, Psycholinguistics and Reading Ability. R.K. Olson, Language Deficits in Specific Reading Disability. K. Kilborn, Learning a Language Late: Second Language Acquisition in Adults. K. Bock and W. Levelt, Language Production: Grammatical Encoding. H.H. Clark, Discourse in Production. D. Caplan, Language and the Brain. E. Zurif and D. Swinney, The Neuropsychology of Language. P.A. Carpenter, A. Miyake, and M.A Just, Working Memory Constraints in Comprehension: Evidence from Individual Differences, Aphasia, and Aging. A. Garnham, Future Directions. Index.

The English Lexicon Project.

The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.

Visual Word Recognition of Single-Syllable Words

Speeded visual word naming and lexical decision performance are reported for 2428 words for young adults and healthy older adults. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables (e.g., measures of consistency, frequency, familiarity, neighborhood size, and length), and semantic variables (e.g. imageahility and semantic connectivity). The influence of most variables was highly task dependent, with the results shedding light on recent empirical controversies in the available word recognition literature. Semantic-level variables accounted for unique variance in both speeded naming and lexical decision performance, level with the latter task producing the largest semantic-level effects. Discussion focuses on the utility of large-scale regression studies in providing a complementary approach to the standard factorial designs to investigate visual word recognition.

VERIDICAL AND FALSE MEMORIES IN HEALTHY OLDER ADULTS AND IN DEMENTIA OF THE ALZHEIMER'S TYPE

Five groups of participants (young, healthy old, healthy old-old, very mild Dementia of the Alzheimers Type, Mild Dementia of the Alzheimers Type) studied and were tested on six 12-item lists of words selected from the DRM (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) materials. These lists of words strongly converged semantically on a nonpresented critical word. The results indicated that both veridical recall and recognition performance decreased both as a function of age of the participants and as a function of dementia severity. However, the recall and recognition of the highly related nonpresented items actually increased as a function of age, and only slightly decreased as a function of DAT. When false memory was considered as a proportion of veridical memory, there was a clear increase as a function of both age of the participants and as a function of disease severity. The results are discussed in terms of (a) age and DAT-related changes in attention and memory performance, and (b) the underlying mec...

Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words

Imageability ratings made on a 1–7 scale and reaction times for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 31 participants. Analyses comparing these ratings to 1,153 common words from Toglia and Battig (1978) indicate that these ratings are valid. Reliability was assessed (α = .95). The information obtained in this study adds to that of other normative studies and is useful to researchers interested in manipulating or controlling imageability in word recognition and memory studies. These norms can be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Age of acquisition predicts naming and lexical-decision performance above and beyond 22 other predictor variables: An analysis of 2,342 words

Age of acquisition (AoA) ratings were obtained and were used in hierarchical regression analyses to predict naming and lexical-decision performance for 2,342 words (from Balota, Cortese, Sergent-Marshall, Spieler, & Yap, 2004). In the analyses, AoA was included in addition to the set of predictors used by Balota et al. (2004). AoA significantly predicted latency performance on both tasks above and beyond the standard predictor set. However, AoA was more strongly related to lexical-decision performance than to naming performance. Finally, the previously reported effect of imageability on naming latencies by Balota et al. was not significant with AoA included as a factor. These results are consistent with the idea either that AoA has a semantic/lexical locus or that AoA effects emerge primarily in situations in which the input–output mapping is arbitrary.

Visual Word Recognition: The Journey from Features to Meaning (A Travel Update)

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a discussion on the word recognition literature. Word recognition research is central to notions regarding different levels/codes of analysis in language processing, attention, and memory. The lexical unit is ideally suited for such work because words can be analyzed at many different levels—for example, features, letters, graphemes, phonemes, morphemes, and semantics. Word recognition research is also central in the development of theories of automatic and attentional processes. Part of the reason for this emphasis is the natural relation between the development of reading skills and the development of automaticity. One can see the extra impetus from education circles regarding the development of word recognition skills. Moreover, the notion that the aspect of word recognition has been automatized and is no longer under the conscious control of the reader has historically provided some of the major fuel for arguments regarding self-encapsulated linguistic processing modules. The issue of how attentional control signals might modulate processes involved in word recognition has received renewed interest recently, and hence, notions of automaticity and modularity have been reevaluated.

Predicting semantic priming at the item level

The current study explores a set of variables that have the potential to predict semantic priming effects for 300 prime–target associates at the item level. Young and older adults performed either lexical decision (LDT) or naming tasks. A multiple regression procedure was used to predict priming based upon prime characteristics, target characteristics, and prime–target semantic similarity. Results indicate that semantic priming (a) can be reliably predicted at an item level; (b) is equivalent in magnitude across standardized measures of priming in LDTs and naming tasks; (c) is greater following quickly recognized primes; (d) is greater in LDTs for targets that produce slow lexical decision latencies; (e) is greater for pairs high in forward associative strength across tasks and across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs); (f) is greater for pairs high in backward associative strength in both tasks, but only at a long SOA; and (g) does not vary as a function of estimates from latent semantic analysis (LSA). Based upon these results, it is suggested that researchers take extreme caution in comparing priming effects across different item sets. Moreover, the current findings lend support to spreading activation and feature overlap theories of priming, but do not support priming based upon contextual similarity as captured by LSA.

Age of acquisition ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words.

Age of acquisition (AoA) ratings made on a 1-7 scale for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 32 participants across four blocks of 750 trials (two blocks of 750 trials were completed in each of 2 days). These results, as well as those of the regression analyses and reliability and validity measures that were originally reported in Cortese and Khanna (2007), are summarized here. Here, we also report high interblock correlations across items, indicating that participants were consistent in their ratings across blocks. The norms for the 3,000 words are important for researchers interested in word processing and may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society’s Norms, Stimuli, and Data archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Regularity effects in word naming: What are they?

In a word-naming experiment, word-body consistency was crossed with grapheme-to-phoneme regularity to test predictions of current models of word recognition. In the latency and error data, a clear effect of consistency was observed, with the influence of regularity somewhat weaker. In addition, simulation data from three contemporary models of word recognition were obtained for the stimuli used in the experiment in order to compare the models’ latencies with those of humans. The simulations showed that the human latency data are most consistent with the parallel-distributed-processing model of Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, and Patterson (1996), less so with the dual-process model (Zorzi, Houghton, & Butterworth, 1998), and least so with the dual-route-cascaded model (Coltheart & Rastle, 1994).