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Monolingual English speakers and Chinese-English bilinguals were compared on their lexical decision performance in a masked priming experiment where the prime and target ended in the same embedded word. All primes were nonwords where the letters in addition to the embedded word did not form a morpheme (e.g., the "sab" of "sabagree" or the "ple of "plerough"). The targets were of two types. In one condition they were prefixed words (as in "sabagree-DISAGREE") and in the other they were nonprefixed words (as in "plerough-THOROUGH"). With an unrelated prime as the baseline, the native speakers showed priming for the prefixed words but not the nonprefixed words, whereas the nonnative speakers showed priming for both types of word. It was concluded from these results that nonnative speakers focus more on the individual letters of a complex word than do native speakers when reading, and the specific processing mechanisms that might underlie this are discussed.

The present study examined whether Chinese-English bilinguals showed morphological sensitivity toward prefixed words. In the experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects in a Transparent condition ("disagree-AGREE") and an Opaque condition ("mischief-CHIEF"), but not in a Form condition ("stranger-ANGER"). In contrast, bilinguals showed equivalent priming effects across the three conditions. Indeed, the difference between the magnitude of priming in the Form condition relative to that in the other two conditions was statistically smaller for the bilinguals than for the monolinguals. These findings suggest Chinese-English bilinguals are less sensitive to the morphological status of prefixes, compared with monolinguals

Participants judged whether a letter-string created a word when a single letter was added to the end indicated by a hyphen. Unique final fragments were easier to reconstruct when corresponding to the body of a word, having no onset (e.g. laugh from –augh) than when the second consonant of a two-letter onset was also included (e.g. blind from –lind). Conversely, unique initial fragments were easier to reconstruct when including the first consonant of a two-letter coda (e.g. drink from drin–) than when corresponding to an “antibody”, having no coda (e.g. claim from clai–). Such results cannot be explained by any account of orthographic processing based purely on the identity and position of the component letters while ignoring their function as an onset, coda, or vowel. Instead, the results are compatible with a model such as the proposed Subsyllabic Processing (SSP) account where subsyllabic structures are hierarchically represented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, we report two eye movement experiments investigating how Chinese readers process incremental words during reading. These are words where some of the component characters constitute another word (an embedded word). In two experiments, eye movements were monitored while the participants read sentences with incremental words whose first two characters (Experiment 1) or last two characters (Experiment 2) constituted a word (referred to respectively as "head-embedded" and "tail embedded"). Reading times on these words were longer when the frequencies of the embedded words were lower. However, this was only seen on first fixation duration for head-embedded words. These results suggest that embedded words are activated when Chinese readers process incremental words, and that this activation is earlier for a head-embedded word than for a tail-embedded word. These results support a hierarchical model which assumes that the representation for whole word is activated via the representation of its constituent morphemes.

This study examined the sensitivity of Chinese-English bilinguals to derivational word structure in English. In the first experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects for prime-target pairs related both transparently (e.g., "hunter-HUNT") and opaquely (e.g., "corner-CORN") but not for those related purely in terms of form (e.g., "freeze-FREE"), whereas bilinguals showed priming in all three conditions. Furthermore, stronger form priming was found for bilinguals who were less experienced in English. A second experiment showed that bilingual participants found it harder to identify items as nonwords when the words possessed a suffix (e.g., "animalful") than when they did not (e.g., "animalfil"), and this was true in terms of accuracy even for bilinguals with less exposure to English. Overall, these findings suggest that Chinese-English bilinguals, regardless of proficiency, have some sensitivity to morphological structure and that greater proficiency leads to priming effects that tend to pattern more like those of monolinguals.

Some inconsistency is observed in the results from studies of reading development regarding the role of the syllable in visual word recognition, perhaps due to a disparity between the tasks used. We adopted a word-spotting paradigm, with Spanish children of second grade (mean age: 7 years) and sixth grade (mean age: 11 years). The children were asked to detect one-syllable words that could be found at the beginning of pseudo-words, with the boundary between the word and the remaining letters being manipulated. The end of the embedded word could either match the syllabic boundary (e.g. the word "FIN" in the pseudo-word "FINLO," where the syllable boundary is between "N" and "L") or not (e.g. "FINUS," where the syllable boundary is located between "I" and "N"). The results showed that children of both grades were faster in the syllabic than the non-syllabic condition, and that the magnitude of this effect was the same regardless of reading ability. The results suggest an early universality in the use of syllables in Spanish, regardless of reading level.

A word-spotting task is used in Spanish to test the way in which polysyllabic letter-strings are parsed in this language. Monosyllabic words (e.g., "bar") embedded at the beginning of a pseudoword were immediately followed by either a coda-forming consonant (e.g., "barto") or a vowel (e.g., "baros"). In the former case, the embedded word corresponds to the first spoken syllable, whereas it cuts across the syllable boundary in the latter case. Unlike a previous study in English using the same methodology (Taft & Álvarez, 2014), the embedded word was found to be easier to detect when followed by a consonant than a vowel, at least for low-frequency words. It was concluded that phonological recoding is more important in the parsing of Spanish words than English words, where maximization of the coda dominates instead.

A visual lexical decision task was used to examine the interaction between base frequency (i.e., the cumulative frequencies of morphologically related forms) and semantic transparency for a list of derived words. Linear mixed effects models revealed that high base frequency facilitates the recognition of the complex word (i.e., a "base frequency effect"), but the magnitude of this declines with semantic transparency. These results suggest that the extent to which the constituents of a complex word contribute to its recognition is dictated by semantic transparency. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of localist-connectionist models of morphological processing.

Korean has visually salient syllable units that are often mapped onto either prefixes or suffixes in derived words. In addition, prefixed and suffixed words may be processed differently given a left-to-right parsing procedure and the need to resolve morphemic ambiguity in prefixes in Korean. To test this hypothesis, four experiments using the masked priming lexical decision paradigm were conducted. Results showed that suffixed primes facilitated responses to their stem targets regardless of the lexicality or interpretability of the primes. In contrast, prefixed primes had a significant effect only when they were real words, and not when they were either interpretable or noninterpretable prefixed pseudowords. These results suggest that there may be two different processing mechanisms for derived words in Korean. One is prelexical morphological decomposition for suffixed words, and the other is the supralexical analysis for prefixed words where decomposition occurs only after the whole word has been accessed.

The present study examined within – and cross-language priming patterns among German-English-French trilinguals in order to explore the lexico-semantic representation of L3 in relation to L1 and L2. The trilinguals participated in three lexical decision tasks within the masked translation priming paradigm. The results showed significant within-language repetition priming effects in all three languages, significant translation priming effects for L2-L1, L1-L3, and L2-L3, but no significant priming for L1-L2, L3-L1 or L3-L2. Our findings demonstrate that translation priming asymmetry persists in trilinguals and that the weakest L3 is integrated into both L1 and L2 conceptually (i.e. three languages have a commonly shared conceptual representation). In addition, our results showed a language dominance shift over lexical development between L1 and L2. We argue for a modified Sense Model as the best fit to explain the cognitive architecture of the trilingual lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The way in which letters are assigned their position when recognizing a visually presented word was examined in three experiments using nonwords created by transposing the two medial consonants of a bisyllabic baseword (e.g., "nakpin," "semron"). The difficulty in responding to such "TL" nonwords in a lexical decision task was shown to be lower when the medial consonants of the baseword formed a complex coda (e.g., the "rm" of "sermon") than when they comprised a separate coda and onset (e.g., the "p" and "k" of "napkin"). The same result was shown in false positive responses to nonwords when their visibility was degraded through masking. In addition, these TL effects were just as strong for nonwords like "nakpin" as they were for nonwords whose medial consonants formed a complex coda like "warlus," but whose baseword was syllabified between those consonants (e.g., the "l" and "r" of "walrus"). Such findings are a challenge for most current models of letter position assignment. Instead, they can be explained by an account where bisyllabic words are stored in lexical memory with a structure that maximizes the coda of the first syllable and where medial consonants are tried out in all viable subsyllabic slots. (Contains 6 figures.)

Japanese kanji reading can be divided into two types: "On"-readings, derived from the original Chinese pronunciation and "Kun"-readings, originating from the Japanese pronunciation. Kanji that are normally given an "On"-reading around 50% of the time were presented in a context of other kanji that had either a highly dominant "On"-reading or a highly dominant "Kun"-reading. The reading that was given in this experiment was very much biased toward the type of phonological environment in which it was embedded. So native Japanese speakers easily shifted between "On" and "Kun" readings, depending on phonological context, suggesting that separate "On" and "Kun" sub-lexica exist within the phonological lexicon.

For bilinguals born in an English-speaking country or who arrive at a young age, English (L2) often becomes their dominant language by adulthood. This study examines whether such adult bilinguals show equivalent performance to monolingual English native speakers on three English auditory processing tasks: phonemic awareness, spelling-to-dictation and auditory comprehension. The study contrasts three bilingual language groups differing in their L1: morphosyllabic/logographic L1 (Cantonese), morphosyllabic/alphabetic (Vietnamese) L1 and non-morphosyllabic/alphabetic L1 (Other). Particularly on the tasks that involved nonwords, the morphosyllabic bilingual groups performed most poorly, suggesting an effect of L1 phonological structure on English processing despite L1 having become subordinate to L2. The results indicate that even when a bilingual is born, raised and educated in their L2 environment, native equivalence in L2 is not assured.

It is demonstrated that the meaning given to an ambiguous word (e.g., "stick") can be biased by the masked presentation of a polymorphemic word derived from that meaning (e.g., "sticky"). No bias in interpretation is observed when the masked prime is a word that is semantically related to the target with no morphological relationship (e.g., "glue"), though such a semantically based bias is revealed when the prime is unmasked. Because the masked priming results cannot be explained in terms of facilitation of processing at either the form level or the semantic level, it is concluded that an intermediate level provides the locus of the effect, referred to here as the "lemma" level. Thus, any model of lexical processing needs to incorporate such an intermediate level to capture the relationship between stem morphemes and their derived forms. (Contains 1 footnote and 4 figures.)

When two consonants within an English word were transposed to create a nonword, difficulty in lexical decision responses to that nonword was revealed, most strongly when the coda of the first syllable was exchanged with the onset of the second (e.g., "nakpin" derived from "napkin"), but also when onsets were exchanged between syllables (e.g., "kapnin") as well as codas (e.g., "nankip"). The latter findings are incompatible with current models of letter processing. Moreover, such transposed letter (TL) effects were shown to be considerably reduced in Hangul, the alphabetic script used in Korean. Because Hangul physically demarcates the onset and coda positions for every consonant, it is argued that it is ambiguity in assignment of a consonant to an onset or coda slot that leads to the TL effect in a linear script such as English. Such a conclusion implies that models of letter processing should incorporate the involvement of subsyllabic structure, something that is currently lacking. (Contains 2 figures and 3 tables.)

There is increasing evidence that orthographic information has an impact on spoken word processing. However, much of this evidence comes from tasks that are subject to strategic effects. In the three experiments reported here, we examined activation of orthographic information during spoken word processing within a paradigm that is unlikely to involve strategic factors, namely auditory priming where the relationship between prime and target was masked from awareness. Specifically, we examined whether auditory primes that were homographic with their spoken targets (e.g., the pseudohomograph /dri:d/, which can be spelled the same as the target word "dread") produced greater facilitation than primes that were equally phonologically related to their targets but could not be spelled the same as them (e.g., /sri:d/ followed by the spoken word "shred"). Two auditory lexical decision experiments produced clear pseudohomograph priming even though the participants were unaware of the orthographic relationship between the primes and targets. A task that required participants to merely repeat the spoken target revealed an effect of orthography on error rates, but not on latencies. It was concluded that, in literate adults, orthography is important in speech recognition just as phonology is important in reading.

It is typically assumed that when orthography is translated silently into phonology (i.e., when reading silently), the phonological representation is equivalent to the spoken form or, at least, the surface phonemic form. The research presented here demonstrates that the phonological representation is likely to be more abstract than this, and is orthographically influenced. For example, the claim is made that the word "corn" has an underlying /r/ in its phonological representation, even in non-rhotic dialects. The evidence comes from difficulties observed in judgements about the homophony with a target word of a pseudohomophone whose phonology does not match the putative abstract representation of that word. For example, it is hard to say that the pseudohomophone "cawn" is homophonic with "corn." The conclusion that orthography can shape phonological representation is antithetical to both computational models of the conversion of print to sound and linguistic accounts of phonology.

Using a priming procedure, 4 experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of a short preexposure of a prime that was a radical or contained radicals identical to the target. Significant facilitation was found when the target contained the prime as a radical, although only for low-frequency targets which did not arise merely as a result of graphical similarity. Facilitation also occurred when the prime and target shared a radical in the same position but not when in different positions. When the prime and target had exactly the same radicals but in different positions, however, the priming effect was inhibitory. This set of results suggests that simple characters (radicals) and complex characters are represented at a different level.

At what level of orthographic representation is phonology linked in the lexicon? Is it at the whole word level, the syllable level, letter level, etc.? This question can be addressed by comparing the two scripts used in Korean, logographic "hanja" and alphabetic/syllabic "hangul," on a task where judgments must be made about the phonology of a visually presented word. Three experiments are reported that used a "homophone decision task" and manipulated the sublexical relationship between orthography and phonology in "hanja" and "hangul," as well as the lexical status of the stimuli. For both "hanja" and "hangul" word targets, subjects showed a high error rate in correctly judging that there was another word identically pronounced with it when sublexical information was non-supportive of whole-word homophony. It is concluded that the process of making a homophone decision reflects the relationship between orthography and phonology as mediated through sublexical units activated from orthography to phonology and vice versa (called "Orthography-Phonology-Orthography Rebound" or "OPO Rebound"). The results are explained and discussed within a multilevel interactive activation model with orthographic units linked to phonological units at each level.

The word virus is not normally considered polymorphemic, yet it is clearly both semantically and orthographically related to the word viral. Thus, the subunit vir takes on the role of a bound morpheme. In contrast, the words future and futile also share a subunit (fut), but are semantically unrelated. The reported experiment demonstrates facilitation in a masked priming experiment for the semantically related pairs that share an initial orthographic subunit (e.g., virus-viral), but not for the semantically unrelated pairs (e.g., future-futile). Whether the subunit was pronounced the same way in the prime and target was shown to be irrelevant. Furthermore, semantic relatedness was insufficient to produce priming when orthography was not shared. It was concluded that, while the units of processing within the orthographic system may be the same for the two types of item, their representation at a higher level may depend on the correlation between form with meaning. For example, virus and viral might share a higher level representation and thus facilitate each other, whereas future and futile might be represented separately at that higher level and even compete with each other.

Examines the proposal that orthographic processing in reading polysyllabic words takes place via an analysis of the word into an orthographic/morphological structure called the basic orthographic syllabic structure (BOSS). Three experiments are reported demonstrating that whether the BOSS division is faster than the syllable division depends crucially on the reading ability of the participants. (Author/VWL)

If recognition of a polymorphemic word always takes place via its decomposition into stem and affix, then the higher the frequency of its stem (i.e., base frequency) the easier the lexical decision response should be when frequency of the word itself(i.e., surface frequency) is controlled. Past experiments have demonstrated such a base frequency effect, but not under all circumstances. Thus, a dual pathway notion has become dominant as an account of morphological processing whereby both decomposition and whole-word access is possible. Two experiments are reported here that demonstrate how an obligatory decomposition account can handle the absence of base frequency effects. In particular, it is shown that the later stage of recombining the stem and affix is harder for high base frequency words than for lower base frequency words when matched on surface frequency, and that this can counterbalance the advantage of easier access to the higher frequency stem. When the combination stage is crucial for discriminating the word items from the nonword items, a reverse base frequency effect emerges, revealing the disadvantage at this stage for high base frequency words. Such an effect is hard for the dual-pathway account to explain, but follows naturally from the idea of obligatory decomposition.

Three experiments are reported here to address the question of whether submorphemic information is involved in the recognition of Chinese characters. A character decision task was used in which frequency characteristics of the radicals within a character and radical status of the components within a noncharacter were manipulated. The frequency of the right-hand radical affected responses to 2-radical characters, whereas the radical status of both left and right components affected noncharacter responses. Furthermore, the impact of radical frequency was shown to be sensitive to radical position. For 3-radical characters, it appeared that the frequency of a compound radical (composed of 2 subradicals) had no effect on responses, whereas the frequency of the subradicals did. It is concluded that all simple radicals are independently activated in the process of character recognition. Compound radicals are not activated in this way despite their common occurrence. The results are considered within a multilevel interactive-activation framework incorporating position sensitivity.

The present study investigates how morphological information is processed and represented in the bilingual lexicon. We employed a masked cross-language morphological priming paradigm to examine morphological decomposition and semantic transparency in bilingual lexical processing. A robust and reliable morphological priming effect was observed for both transparent compounds and opaque compounds, though there was a strong trend for more facilitation in the former than the latter. To account for these results, we propose a lemma-based bilingual model specifying the activation/competition between lemmas during cross-language activation at the morphological level. Our novel findings advance the understanding of interplay between morphology and bilingualism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facilitatory priming effects due to similarity of orthographic form are obtained for high-N target words provided that they have low-frequency bodies and the body is shared between the prime and target (e.g., perd-HERD). Conversely, it is shown that low-N target words show priming regardless of the frequency of the body, provided that the prime and target do not share the same body (e.g., drice-DRIVE). If the body is shared, then priming occurs only for targets with low-frequency bodies. These results suggest that neighborhood density should be defined in terms of both individual letter units and subsyllabic units and that both types of density jointly determine priming.

The body of a monosyllabic word (i.e., its vowel plus terminal consonants) has been shown to be an important unit in lexical processing (e.g., the EAD of HEAD). This article attempts to define what the body of a polysyllabic word might be, suggesting that it is the body of the first orthographically defined syllable of the word (the body of its basic orthographic syllabic structure [BOSS], or BOB, e.g., the EAD of MEADOW). Three experiments, testing 60, 96, and 45 university students, respectively, demonstrated that the pronunciation of a nonword is influenced by the pronunciation of the BOB of a preceding word, but not by the pronunciation of its vowel alone or its first phonologically defined syllable. The results of the 3 studies are interpreted as supporting the idea that the BOB is an important unit of lexical processing.

Native English speakers do not show masked priming effects in lexical decision when a prime word is related to its target purely on the basis of orthographic form (e.g., pillow-PILL, protest-PROTECT). There is strong evidence, however, that non-native English speakers do show such form priming. This paper explores the possible cognitive mechanisms behind this difference between native and non-native speakers. Taft and Li (2020) found that only non-native speakers (with Chinese as their first language) showed priming when the nonword prime ended in the same embedded word as the word target (e.g., plerough-THOROUGH), but a newly reported experiment goes on to show priming for native speakers as well when the shared letter-combination is not itself a word (e.g., celtoise-TORTOISE). This contrast in results leads to the interpretation that native speakers have a specific mechanism for activating embedded words that is important when recognizing polymorphemic words through their stems. It is suggested that non-native speakers, or at least those with Chinese as their first language, do not engage or are slow in engaging such a mechanism. The form priming that they demonstrate arises from facilitated processing of the repeated letters rather than the pre-activation of a lexical representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of experiments examines lexical decision and naming times to single words which, when used in a sentence, are functionally constrained. Closed class words which cannot meaningfully stand along (e.g., THAN, ELSE) took longer to respond to than open class words in a lexical decision task but not a naming task (with naming onset times adjusted for voice onset variations); whereas closed class words which can stand alone (e.g., NOW, THOSE) did not differ from open class words. It was further shown that open class words which cannot stand alone (e.g., RELY, DISPOSE) were associated with longer lexical decision times than those which can (e.g., RAIL, PERSIST), but not with longer naming times. Thus the effect of functional constraint was not restricted to closed class words and seemed to occur at a post-access decision stage of processing rather than influencing lexical access itself. Finally, it was demonstrated that not all functional constraints delay lexical decision times, since obligatorily transitive verbs (e.g., BORROW, UNDERGO) did not differ from unconstrained words. An explanation is given in terms of how meaningfulness might have an influence on lexical decision responses.

Recent evidence points to the important role of embedded word activations in visual word recognition. The present study asked how the reading system prioritises word identification when not just one, but two different words are embedded within the same position. This question was addressed by using a masked primed lexical decision task (Experiment 1) with target words embedded in nonword primes (tea or team in teamaction). Results revealed priming independently of the length, position, or morphological status of the embedded word. However, when primes were used as targets within a word naming task (Experiment 2), participants were more likely to name the longer than the shorter embedded word, independent of morphological status. Our results suggest that the reading system gives priority to longer embedded words, which we discuss in the context of recent theories of visual word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a visual lexical decision task, recognition is shown in two experiments to be harder for possessional adjectives that look like they are inflected verbs (e.g., talented) than for genuine inflected verbs (e.g., consulted), especially when the nonword distractors have real-word stems (e.g., infanted). Such a result implies that inflected words do not have a form-based whole word representation, but are recognized when functional information associated with their stem and affix is recombined after decomposition. A third experiment goes on to demonstrate that the addition of the verb suffix -ing to the noun stem of such pseudo-verb-stem words (i.e., talenting) leads to more erroneous classifications as a real word than when the stem is another type of noun (e.g., infanting). Moreover, a negative correlation is observed between the accuracy of recognition of the pseudo-verb-stem words and the classification as a nonword of the -ing version of their stems. On the basis of these experiments, a model is proposed in which a pseudo-verb-stem word is recognized through a lexical representation of its stem that corresponds to a bound ornative verb and which is different to the representation used to recognize its free-standing noun version. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of exposure to non-English heritage languages versus exposure to foreign-accented English during early childhood on language performances later in life were investigated. Three groups of young adult participants who differed in their early home language environment were examined on a series of linguistic tasks. Results showed that people who were mostly exposed to accented English in the early home environment are more native-like in various aspects of English language performance than those who were mostly exposed to their non-English heritage language, including vocabulary, pronunciation, and processing of certain types of speech stimuli. Early and extended exposure to accented speech, however, does not appear to enhance the ability to perceive foreign accents in general, and may in fact produce a disadvantage when listening to unfamiliar accents. These findings provide some initial insight into the consequences of migrant parents choosing to speak one language over the other with their children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]