output lexicon

A series of three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of Adjective+Noun phrases in Dutch. Bilinguals (Dutch native speakers) were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an Adjective+Noun phrase in Dutch which included the translation of the noun. In two experiments, we blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender.We found that participants performed the task slower when the target nouns were of the same semantic category than when they were from different categories; and faster when they were of the same grammatical gender than when they were of different gender. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed in order to both replicate the previous experiments and to test for interactions between the two effects. The results of the first two experiments were replicated, and crucially no interaction was found. These findings are compatible with models of lexical retrieval in production in which, first lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information are separable; second the flow of activation between the two is feedforward.

Do readers encode the sequencing of consonant (C) and vowel (V) phonemes (skeletal structure) in printed words? The authors used the Stroop task to examine readers ’ sensitivity to skeletal structure. In Experiment 1, CVC nonwords (e.g., pof) facilitated the naming of colors with congruent frames (e.g., red, a CVC word) but not with incongruent ones (e.g., green). In Experiment 2, the color black (a CCVC frame) was named faster with a congruent CCVC frame (e.g., grof) compared to either CCVCC (e.g., groft) or CVC (e.g., gof) incongruent controls. Finally, in Experiment 3, the color pink (a CVCC frame) was named faster with a CVCC frame (e.g., goft) compared to either CCVCC or CVC incongruent controls. In most cases, congruent frames shared no segments with the color name. These findings demonstrate that readers automatically assemble the skeletal structure of printed words. There is considerable evidence that the computation of adequate representations for printed words hinges on linguistic competence (e.g., Perfetti, 1985, 1992). The existence of intact linguistic knowledge has been shown to facilitate the acquisition of grapheme to phoneme correspondences (e.g., Harm & Seidenberg, 1999), whereas deficits in linguistic competence are linked to reading disability (e.g., Molfese, 2000; Paulesu et al., 2001; Ramus et al., 2003). Reading research has further demonstrated that the representation of printed words encodes various aspects of their linguistic structure, including syllable structure (e.g., Treiman,

this paper is to help clarifying the underlying mechanisms of one of these tasks, the implicit priming task, first developed by Meyer (1990, 1991)

In various priming paradigms, segmental overlap (i.e. phonological or orthographical overlap) between the target and prime word has been demonstrated to facilitate picture naming. But features extending over several segments are rarely controlled for in stimulus selection. Some attention has been paid to such suprasegmental features, but inconsistent findings have been obtained. The presented studies took up this issue and the combination of word stress and vowel quality was investigated in a picture-word task. In the pictureword interference task, pictures are named while attempting to ignore simultaneously presented distractors words. A series of three experiments presented Dutch target and distractor words of three possible suprasegmental patterns while controlling for a manifold of variables. Distractor words inhibited picture naming for picture targets of a fully related suprasegmental pattern. A fourth experiment obtained a facilitatory main effect of segmental overlap, whereas the suprasegmental effect dissipated when suprasegmental features are manipulated in the presence of segmental overlap. This observation clarifies results of Experiment 3 in which segmental overlap was an artefact of the manipulation of suprasegmental overlap. Inhibitory form priming has been observed in other picture naming paradigms and variants of the picture-word task. An account was extrapolated from these instances, as an attempt to cover both facilitatory, inhibitory, and null effects of suprasegmental overlap.

This study reports on the results of five discontinuous typing paradigm experiments in which subjects (native English speakers in experiment 1 and native German speakers in experiments 2 to 5) had to type words presented to them in various modes. In experiment 1 the words were presented in visual form. In experiment 2 words were presented orally and the results are compared with typing following visual word presentation. Experiment 3 compares typing following visual word and picture presentation. In experiment 4 subjects were required to type pseudo-words, whilst in the final experiment the typing responses, following oral and visual word presentation, were delayed by an extended preparatory period. In all experiments we found that the increase of inter-keystroke intervals (IKIs) was highly significant at positions that where either exclusively syllable (S) boundaries or combined syllable and morpheme (SM) boundaries. SM type IKIs are significantly larger than S type IKIs and are influenced by word frequencies, indicating lexical dependencies. SM type IKIs were found to be significantly longer for oral than for visual word presentation. This is taken as an indication that additional processes (phonological-graphemic mediation) are involved in the accessing of graphemic word forms when words are presented aurally. The fact that pseudo-words are also written with increased IKIs at syllable borders indicates that at least one major component of the S-type IKIs is produced by bypassing the lexicon, probably at sublexical levels. The fact that augmented SM and S type IKIs are also found in the delayed typing task indicates that input into the motor system is constituted by sub-word units instead by fully specified words. As SM and S type IKIs reflect influences of different ...