Ronald Peereman

A new set of 299 pictures for psycholinguistic studies: French norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, age of acquisition, and naming latencies

Pictures are often used as stimuli in studies of perception, language, and memory. Since performances on different sets of pictures are generally contrasted, stimulus selection requires the use of standardized material to match pictures across different variables. Unfortunately, the number of standardized pictures available for empirical research is rather limited. The aim of the present study is to provide French normative data for a new set of 299 black-and-white drawings. Alario and Ferrand (1999) were closely followed in that the pictures were standardized on six variables: name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Objective frequency measures are also provided for the most common names associated with the pictures. Comparative analyses between our results and the norms obtained in other, similar studies are reported. Finally, naming latencies corresponding to the set of pictures were also collected from French native speakers, and correlational/multiple-regression analyses were performed on naming latencies. This new set of standardized pictures is available on the Internet (http://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/bases/pictures/) and should be of great use to researchers when they select pictorial stimuli.

Manulex-infra: Distributional characteristics of grapheme-phoneme mappings, and infralexical and lexical units in child-directed written material

It is well known that the statistical characteristics of a language, such as word frequency or the consistency of the relationships between orthography and phonology, influence literacy acquisition. Accordingly, linguistic databases play a central role by compiling quantitative and objective estimates about the principal variables that affect reading and writing acquisition. We describe a new set of Web-accessible databases of French orthography whose main characteristic is that they are based on frequency analyses of words occurring in reading books used in the elementary school grades. Quantitative estimates were made for several infralexical variables (syllable, grapheme-to-phoneme mappings, bigrams) and lexical variables (lexical neighborhood, homophony and homography). These analyses should permit quantitative descriptions of the written language in beginning readers, the manipulation and control of variables based on objective data in empirical studies, and the development of instructional methods in keeping with the distributional characteristics of the orthography.

Learning Nonadjacent Dependencies: No Need for Algebraic-Like Computations

Is it possible to learn the relation between 2 nonadjacent events? M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002) claimed this to be possible, but only in conditions suggesting the involvement of algebraic-like computations. The present article reports simulation studies and experimental data showing that the observations on which Pena et al. grounded their reasoning were flawed by deep methodological inadequacies. When the invalid data are set aside, the available evidence fits exactly with the predictions of a theory relying on ubiquitous associative mechanisms. Because nonadjacent dependencies are frequent in natural language, this reappraisal has far-reaching implications for the current debate on the need for rule-based computations in human adaptation to complex structures.

The exploitation of distributional information in syllable processing

There is now growing evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical regularities embedded into linguistic utterances, but the exact nature of the distributional information to which human performance is sensitive is an issue that has been surprisingly neglected as yet. In order to address this issue, we first propose an overview of some basic measures of association, going from the simple co-occurrence frequency to the normative measure of contingency, rw: We then report an experiment collecting judgments of word-likeness as a function of the relationship between the phonemes composing the rimes (VC). The contingency between Vs and Cs, as assessed by rw; was the best predictor of children and adult judgments. Surprisingly, the forward transitional probability ðPðC=VÞ; which is the main measure considered by language researchers, was a poor predictor of performance, whereas the backward transitional probability ðPðV=CÞ) made a sizeable contribution. We then analyze the ability of computational models to account for these results, successively considering a connectionist model based on the automatic computation of statistical regularities (SRN) [Cogn. Sci. 14 (1990) 179] and a model in which the sensitivity to statistical regularities emerges as a by-product of the attentional processing of the incoming information (Parser) [J. Memory Language 39 (1998) 246]. Somewhat ironically, Parser, which implements no specific mechanisms for statistical computations, proves to be a better predictor of performance than the SRN. The generality of these results, and their implications for the issue of automaticity, are discussed. q 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

LEXOP: a lexical database providing orthography-phonology statistics for French monosyllabic words.

During the last 20 years, psycholinguistic research has identified many variables that influence reading and spelling processes. We describe a new computerized lexical database, LEXOP, which provides quantitative descriptors about the relations between orthography and phonology for French monosyllabic words. Three main classes of variables are considered: consistency of print-to-sound and sound-to-print associations, frequency of orthography-phonology correspondences, and word neighborhood characteristics.

Inhibitory priming effects in auditory word recognition: when the target's competitors conflict with the prime word

Several studies indicate that the number of similar sounding words that are activated during recognition is a powerful predictor of performance on auditory targets. Words with few competitors are processed more quickly and accurately than words with many competitors. In the present study, we examined the contribution of the competitor set size in determining the magnitude of the inhibitory priming effect. The data show that the priming effect is stronger when word targets have few competitors. This result supports the view of direct competition between lexical candidates.

Where is the syllable priming effect in visual word recognition

Recent studies using the masked priming paradigm have reported facilitating effects of syllable primes in French and English word naming (Ferrand, Segui, & Grainger, 1996; Ferrand, Segui, & Humphreys, 1997). However, other studies have not been able to replicate these effects in Dutch and English (Schiller, 1998, 1999, 2000). In Experiment 1, using the same stimuli and procedure as Ferrand et al. (1996), we did not replicate the syllable priming effect in French. In Experiments 2a and 2b, when prime duration was increased (from 30 to 45 and 60 ms), we did not obtain a syllable priming effect. In Experiment 3, with 60 participants and exactly the same procedure as Ferrand et al. (1996), we again failed to replicate the syllable priming effect. We conclude that the syllable priming effect is not a reliable effect and should be considered cautiously in the elaboration of models of word reading.

For a Psycholinguistic Model of Handwriting Production: Testing the Syllable-Bigram Controversy.

This study examined the theoretical controversy on the impact of syllables and bigrams in handwriting production. French children and adults wrote words on a digitizer so that we could collect data on the local, online processing of handwriting production. The words differed in the position of the lowest frequency bigram. In one condition, it coincided with the words syllable boundary. In the other condition, it was located before the syllable boundary. The results yielded higher movement durations at the position where the low-frequency bigram coincided with the syllable boundary compared to where the low-frequency bigram appeared before the syllable boundary. Syllable-oriented strategies failed with the presence of a very low-frequency bigram within the initial syllable. Further analysis showed that children in grades 3 and 4 privileged syllable-oriented programming strategies. The production times of children in grade 4 were also affected by syllable frequency and, to a lesser extent, bigram frequency. The adults writing durations were modulated by bigram frequency. Therefore, both bigrams and syllables regulate handwriting production although the influence of bigrams was stronger in adults than children. In the light of these results, we propose a psycholinguistic model of handwriting production.

Orthographic influences in spoken word recognition: The consistency effect in semantic and gender categorization tasks

According to current models, spoken word recognition is driven by the phonological properties of the speech signal. However, several studies have suggested that orthographic information also influences recognition in adult listeners. In particular, it has been repeatedly shown that, in the lexical decision task, words that include rimes with inconsistent spellings (e.g., /-ip/ spelled -eap or -eep) are disadvantaged, as compared with words with consistent rime spelling. In the present study, we explored whether the orthographic consistency effect extends to tasks requiring people to process words beyond simple lexical access. Two different tasks were used: semantic and gender categorization. Both tasks produced reliable consistency effects. The data are discussed as suggesting that orthographic codes are activated during word recognition, or that the organization of phonological representations of words is affected by orthography during literacy acquisition.

Lexical competition in phonological priming: Assessing the role of phonological match and mismatch lengths between primes and targets

In five experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B replicate and extend Slowiaczek and Hamburger’s (1992) observation that inhibitory effects occur when the prime and the target share the first three phonemes (e.g., /briz/-/brik/) but not when they share the first two phonemes (e.g., /brεz/-/brik/). This observation suggests that lexical competition depends on the length of the phonological match between the prime and the target. However, Experiment 2 revealed that an overlap of two phonemes is sufficient to cause an inhibitory effect provided that the primes mismatched the targets only on the last phoneme (e.g., /bRiZl/-/brikt/). Conversely, with a three-phoneme overlap, no inhibition was observed in Experiment 3 when the primes mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes (e.g., /bagεt/-/baga3/). In Experiment 4, an inhibitory effect was again observed when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme but not when they mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes when the time between the offset of overlapping segments in the primes and the onset of overlapping segments in the targets was controlled for. The data thus indicate that what essentially determines prime-target competition effects in word-form priming is the number of mismatching phonemes.