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Dual coding theories of knowledge suggest that meaning is represented in the brain by a double code, which comprises language-derived representations in the Anterior Temporal Lobe and sensory-derived representations in perceptual and motor regions. This approach predicts that concrete semantic features should activate both codes, whereas abstract features rely exclusively on the linguistic code. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we adopted a temporally resolved multiple regression approach to identify the contribution of abstract and concrete semantic predictors to the underlying brain signal. Results evidenced early involvement of anterior-temporal and inferior-frontal brain areas in both abstract and concrete semantic information encoding. At later stages, occipito-temporal regions showed greater responses to concrete compared to abstract features. The present findings shed new light on the temporal dynamics of abstract and concrete semantic representations in the brain and suggest that the concreteness of words processed first with a transmodal/linguistic code, housed in frontotemporal brain systems, and only after with an imagistic/sensorimotor code in perceptual and motor regions.

A key issue in language processing is how we recognize and understand words in sentences. Research on sentence reading indicates that the time we need to read a word depends on how (un)expected it is. Research on single word recognition shows that each word also has its own recognition dynamics based on the relation between its orthographic form and its meaning. It is not clear, however, how these sentence-level and word-level dynamics interact. In the present study, we examine the joint impact of these sources of information during sentence reading. We analyze existing eye-tracking and self-paced reading data (Frank et al., 2013, Behavior Research Methods, 45[4], 1182–1190) to investigate the interplay of sentence-level prediction (operationalized as Surprisal) and word Orthography-Semantics Consistency in activating word meaning in sentence processing. Results indicate that both Surprisal and Orthography-Semantics Consistency exert an influence on several reading measures. The shape of the observed interaction differs, but the results give compelling indication for a general trade-off between expectations based on sentence context and cues to meaning from word orthography.

Skilled readers are typically most accurate at identifying words when fixating them slightly left of the central character, the so-called optimal viewing position. There are two main explanations for this effect, which are not mutually exclusive. The first claims that the optimal viewing position lies left-of-center due to the particular constraints of the human perceptual system. The second explains the effect in terms of the beginnings of words generally being more informative about word identity. The complexities of natural languages make it difficult to tease apart the relative contribution of each explanation. We explore this issue through the lens of a Bayesian cognitive model and two experiments using artificial lexicons in which we can carefully control how information is distributed across wordforms. Our results replicate previous findings and further suggest that readers may use implicit knowledge about information distribution to minimize uncertainty when targeting words.

Skilled readers are typically most accurate at identifying words when fixating them slightly left of the central character, the so-called optimal viewing position. There are two main explanations for this effect, which are not mutually exclusive. The first claims that the optimal viewing position lies left-of-center due to the particular constraints of the human perceptual system. The second explains the effect in terms of the beginnings of words generally being more informative about word identity. The complexities of natural languages make it difficult to tease apart the relative contribution of each explanation. We explore this issue through the lens of a Bayesian cognitive model and two experiments using artificial lexicons in which we can carefully control how information is distributed across wordforms. Our results replicate previous findings and further suggest that readers may use implicit knowledge about information distribution to minimize uncertainty when targeting words.

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child’s spontaneous use of labels during a visually presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory.

Online First Publication, September 9, 2021, words are typically more difficult to identify than concrete words in lexical-decision, word-naming, and recall tasks. This behavioral advantage, known as the concreteness effect, is often considered as evidence for embodied semantics, which emphasizes the role of sensorimotor experience in the comprehension of word meaning. In this view, online sensorimotor simulations triggered by concrete words, but not by abstract words, facilitate access to word meaning and speed up word identification. To test whether perceptual simulation is the driving force underlying the concreteness effect, we compared data from early-blind and sighted individuals performing an auditory lexical-decision task. Subjects were presented with property words referring to abstract (e.g., “logic”), concrete multimodal (e.g., “spherical”), and concrete unimodal visual concepts (e.g., “blue”). According to the embodied account, the processing advantage for concrete unimodal visual words should disappear in the early blind because they cannot rely on visual experience and simulation during semantics processing (i.e., purely visual words should be abstract for early-blind people). On the contrary, we found that both sighted and blind individuals are faster when processing multimodal and unimodal visual words compared with abstract words. This result suggests that the concreteness effect does not depend on perceptual simulations but might be driven by modality-independent properties of word meaning.

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child’s spontaneous use of labels during a visually presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory.

Our brain constructs reality through narrative and argumentative thought. Some hypotheses argue that these two modes of cognitive functioning are irreducible, reflecting distinct mental operations underlain by separate neural bases; Others ascribe both to a unitary neural system dedicated to long-timescale information. We addressed this question by employing inter-subject measures to investigate the stimulus-induced neural responses when participants were listening to narrative and argumentative texts during fMRI. We found that following both kinds of texts enhanced functional couplings within the frontoparietal control system. However, while a narrative specifically implicated the default mode system, an argument specifically induced synchronization between the intraparietal sulcus in the frontoparietal control system and multiple perisylvian areas in the language system. Our findings reconcile the two hypotheses by revealing commonalities and differences between the narrative and the argumentative brain networks, showing how diverse mental activities arise from the segregation and integration of the existing brain systems.

Inflectional values, such as singular and plural, sustain agreement relations between constituents in sentences, allowing sentence parsing and prediction in online processing. Ideally, these processes would be facilitated by a consistent and transparent correspondence between the inflectional values and their form: for example, the value of plural should always be expressed by the same ending, and that ending should only express plural. Experimental research reports higher processing costs in the presence of a non-transparent relation between forms and values. While this effect was found in several languages, and typological research shows that consistency is far from common in morphological paradigms, it is still somewhat difficult to precisely quantify the transparency degree of the inflected forms. Furthermore, to date, no accounts have quantified the transparency in inflection with regard to the declensional classes and the extent to which it is expressed across different parts of speech, depending on whether these act as controllers of the agreement (e.g., nouns) or as targets (e.g., adjectives). We present a case study on Italian, a language that marks gender and number features in nouns and adjectives. This work provides measures of the distribution of forms in the noun and adjective inflection in Italian, and quantifies the degree of form-value transparency with respect to inflectional endings and declensional classes. In order to obtain these measures, we built Flex It, a dedicated large-scale database of inflectional morphology of Italian, and made it available, in order to sustain further theoretical and empirical research.

Published: 24 October 2019, How perceptual information is encoded into language and conceptual knowledge is a debated topic in cognitive (neuro)science. We present modality norms for 643 Italian adjectives, which referred to one of the five perceptual modalities or were abstract. Overall, words were rated as mostly connected to the visual modality and least connected to the olfactory and gustatory modality. We found that words associated to visual and auditory experience were more unimodal compared to words associated to other sensory modalities. A principal components analysis highlighted a strong coupling between gustatory and olfactory information in word meaning, and the tendency of words referring to tactile experience to also include information from the visual dimension. Abstract words were found to encode only marginal perceptual information, mostly from visual and auditory experience. The modality norms were augmented with corpus–based (e.g., Zipf Frequency, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20) and ratings–based psycholinguistic variables (Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Contextual Availability). Split-half correlations performed for each experimental variable and comparisons with similar databases confirmed that our norms are highly reliable. This database thus provides a new important tool for investigating the interplay between language, perception and cognition.

Published: 24 October 2019, How perceptual information is encoded into language and conceptual knowledge is a debated topic in cognitive (neuro)science. We present modality norms for 643 Italian adjectives, which referred to one of the five perceptual modalities or were abstract. Overall, words were rated as mostly connected to the visual modality and least connected to the olfactory and gustatory modality. We found that words associated to visual and auditory experience were more unimodal compared to words associated to other sensory modalities. A principal components analysis highlighted a strong coupling between gustatory and olfactory information in word meaning, and the tendency of words referring to tactile experience to also include information from the visual dimension. Abstract words were found to encode only marginal perceptual information, mostly from visual and auditory experience. The modality norms were augmented with corpus–based (e.g., Zipf Frequency, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20) and ratings–based psycholinguistic variables (Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Contextual Availability). Split-half correlations performed for each experimental variable and comparisons with similar databases confirmed that our norms are highly reliable. This database thus provides a new important tool for investigating the interplay between language, perception and cognition.

Published: 24 October 2019, How perceptual information is encoded into language and conceptual knowledge is a debated topic in cognitive (neuro)science. We present modality norms for 643 Italian adjectives, which referred to one of the five perceptual modalities or were abstract. Overall, words were rated as mostly connected to the visual modality and least connected to the olfactory and gustatory modality. We found that words associated to visual and auditory experience were more unimodal compared to words associated to other sensory modalities. A principal components analysis highlighted a strong coupling between gustatory and olfactory information in word meaning, and the tendency of words referring to tactile experience to also include information from the visual dimension. Abstract words were found to encode only marginal perceptual information, mostly from visual and auditory experience. The modality norms were augmented with corpus–based (e.g., Zipf Frequency, Orthographic Levenshtein Distance 20) and ratings–based psycholinguistic variables (Age of Acquisition, Familiarity, Contextual Availability). Split-half correlations performed for each experimental variable and comparisons with similar databases confirmed that our norms are highly reliable. This database thus provides a new important tool for investigating the interplay between language, perception and cognition.

Research in multi-agent cooperation has shown that artificial agents are able to learn to play a simple referential game while developing a shared lexicon. This lexicon is not easy to analyze, as it does not show many properties of a natural language. In a simple referential game with two neural network-based agents, we analyze the object-symbol mapping trying to understand what kind of strategy was used to develop the emergent language. We see that, when the environment is uniformly distributed, the agents rely on a random subset of features to describe the objects. When we modify the objects making one feature non-uniformly distributed,the agents realize it is less informative and start to ignore it, and, surprisingly, they make a better use of the remaining features. This interesting result suggests that more natural, less uniformly distributed environments might aid in spurring the emergence of better-behaved languages., Comment: 3rd NeurIPS Workshop on Emergent Communication

Article first published online: January 1, 2018, Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic.

Article first published online: January 1, 2018, Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic.

Article first published online: January 1, 2018, Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic.

Across many cultures people conceptualize time as extending along a horizontal Mental Time Line (MTL). This spatial mapping of time has been shown to depend on experience with written text, and may also depend on other graphic conventions such as graphs and calendars. All of this information is typically acquired visually, suggesting that visual experience may play an important role in the development of the MTL. Do blind people develop a MTL? If so, how does it compare with the MTL in sighted? In this study we tested early blind, late blind and sighted participants in a space–time congruity task. Participants had to classify temporal words by pressing a right and a left key, either with crossed or uncrossed hands. We found that the MTL develops in the absence of vision, and that it is based on the same external frame of reference in sighted and blind people. Reading braille may provide the same experiential link between space and time in the manual modality as reading printed text provides in the visual modality. These results showing a similar MTL in sighted and blind participants contrast with previous results showing that the Mental Number Line (MNL) depends on different spatial coordinates in the sighted and the blind, and suggest that spatial representations of time and number may have different experiential bases.

Space and time in the sighted and blind

A largely overlooked side effect in most studies of morphological priming is a consistent main effect of semantic transparency across priming conditions. That is, participants are faster at recognizing stems from transparent sets (e.g., farm) in comparison to stems from opaque sets (e.g., fruit), regardless of the preceding primes. This suggests that semantic transparency may also be consistently associated with some property of the stem word. We propose that this property might be traced back to the consistency, throughout the lexicon, between the orthographic form of a word and its meaning, here named Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC), and that an imbalance in OSC scores might explain the “stem transparency” effect. We exploited distributional semantic models to quantitatively characterize OSC, and tested its effect on visual word identification relying on large-scale data taken from the British Lexicon Project (BLP). Results indicated that (a) the “stem transparency” effect is solid and reliable, insofar as it holds in BLP lexical decision times (Experiment 1); (b) an imbalance in terms of OSC can account for it (Experiment 2); and (c) more generally, OSC explains variance in a large item sample from the BLP, proving to be an effective predictor in visual word access (Experiment 3).

Research strongly suggests that printed words are recognized in terms of their constituent morphemes, but researchers have tended to consider the recognition of derivations and inflections in separate theoretical debates. Recently, Crepaldi et al. (2010) proposed a theory that claims to account for the recognition of both derivations and inflections. We investigated brain potentials in the context of masked priming to test 2 key predictions of this theory: (a) that regular inflections should prime their stems to a greater degree than irregular inflections should prime their stems and (b) that priming for regular inflections should arise earlier in the recognition process than priming for irregular inflections. Significant masked priming effects were observed for both regular and irregular inflections, though these effects were greater for regular inflections. ERP data further suggested that masked priming effects for regular and irregular inflections had different time courses. Priming for regular but not irregular inflections emerged in a time window reflecting processing up to 250 ms post target onset, and although priming for regular and irregular inflections was observed in a time window reflecting processing 400 to 600 ms post target onset, these effects arose earlier and were of greater magnitude for the regular inflections. These findings support a form-then-meaning characterization of the visual word processing system such as that proposed by Crepaldi et al. (2010) and raise challenges for alternative approaches.

In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation. We analyzed whether the effect of stem frequency changes according to whether the (very same) word is read as a genuine derivation (transparent context) versus as a pseudoderived word (opaque context). Analysis of the first fixation durations revealed a stem-word frequency effect in both opaque and transparent contexts, thus showing that stems were accessed whether or not they contributed to word meaning, that is, word decomposition is indeed blind to semantics. However, while the stem-word frequency effect was facilitatory in the transparent context, it was inhibitory in the opaque context, thus showing an early involvement of semantic representations. This pattern of data is revealed by words with short suffixes. These results indicate that derived and pseudoderived words are segmented into their constituent morphemes also in natural reading; however, this blind-to-semantics process activates morpheme representations that are semantically connoted.

A largely overlooked side effect in most studies of morphological priming is a consistent main effect of semantic transparency across priming conditions. That is, participants are faster at recognizing stems from transparent sets (e.g., farm) in comparison to stems from opaque sets (e.g., fruit), regardless of the preceding primes. This suggests that semantic transparency may also be consistently associated with some property of the stem word. We propose that this property might be traced back to the consistency, throughout the lexicon, between the orthographic form of a word and its meaning, here named Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC), and that an imbalance in OSC scores might explain the “stem transparency” effect. We exploited distributional semantic models to quantitatively characterize OSC, and tested its effect on visual word identification relying on large-scale data taken from the British Lexicon Project (BLP). Results indicated that (a) the “stem transparency” effect is solid and reliable, insofar as it holds in BLP lexical decision times (Experiment 1); (b) an imbalance in terms of OSC can account for it (Experiment 2); and (c) more generally, OSC explains variance in a large item sample from the BLP, proving to be an effective predictor in visual word access (Experiment 3).

In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation. We analyzed whether the effect of stem frequency changes according to whether the (very same) word is read as a genuine derivation (transparent context) versus as a pseudoderived word (opaque context). Analysis of the first fixation durations revealed a stem-word frequency effect in both opaque and transparent contexts, thus showing that stems were accessed whether or not they contributed to word meaning, that is, word decomposition is indeed blind to semantics. However, while the stem-word frequency effect was facilitatory in the transparent context, it was inhibitory in the opaque context, thus showing an early involvement of semantic representations. This pattern of data is revealed by words with short suffixes. These results indicate that derived and pseudoderived words are segmented into their constituent morphemes also in natural reading; however, this blind-to-semantics process activates morpheme representations that are semantically connoted.

Research strongly suggests that printed words are recognized in terms of their constituent morphemes, but researchers have tended to consider the recognition of derivations and inflections in separate theoretical debates. Recently, Crepaldi et al. (2010) proposed a theory that claims to account for the recognition of both derivations and inflections. We investigated brain potentials in the context of masked priming to test 2 key predictions of this theory: (a) that regular inflections should prime their stems to a greater degree than irregular inflections should prime their stems and (b) that priming for regular inflections should arise earlier in the recognition process than priming for irregular inflections. Significant masked priming effects were observed for both regular and irregular inflections, though these effects were greater for regular inflections. ERP data further suggested that masked priming effects for regular and irregular inflections had different time courses. Priming for regular but not irregular inflections emerged in a time window reflecting processing up to 250 ms post target onset, and although priming for regular and irregular inflections was observed in a time window reflecting processing 400 to 600 ms post target onset, these effects arose earlier and were of greater magnitude for the regular inflections. These findings support a form-then-meaning characterization of the visual word processing system such as that proposed by Crepaldi et al. (2010) and raise challenges for alternative approaches.

Across many cultures people conceptualize time as extending along a horizontal Mental Time Line (MTL). This spatial mapping of time has been shown to depend on experience with written text, and may also depend on other graphic conventions such as graphs and calendars. All of this information is typically acquired visually, suggesting that visual experience may play an important role in the development of the MTL. Do blind people develop a MTL? If so, how does it compare with the MTL in sighted? In this study we tested early blind, late blind and sighted participants in a space-time congruity task. Participants had to classify temporal words by pressing a right and a left key, either with crossed or uncrossed hands. We found that the MTL develops in the absence of vision, and that it is based on the same external frame of reference in sighted and blind people. Reading braille may provide the same experiential link between space and time in the manual modality as reading printed text provides in the visual modality. These results showing a similar MTL in sighted and blind participants contrast with previous results showing that the Mental Number Line (MNL) depends on different spatial coordinates in the sighted and the blind, and suggest that spatial representations of time and number may have different experiential bases.

No time in my hands. Different spatial coordinates support temporal and numerical concepts in blind individuals.

Despite grammatical class being a fundamental organizing principle of the human mental lexicon, recent morphological models of visual word identification remain silent as to whether and how it is represented in the lexical system. The present study addresses this issue by investigating cross class morphological priming (i.e., the effect obtained when nouns prime verbs sharing the same root, or vice versa) to clarify whether morphological stems subserving the formation of both nouns and verbs (e.g., depart-) have a unique, grammatical class independent representation. Experiment 1 and 2 suggest this to be the case, as they show that morphological priming crosses grammatical class boundaries in overt paradigm conditions. Experiment 3 show that, in masked priming conditions, cross-class facilitation emerges both for genuine derivations and pseudo-related pairs with a homographic stem (e.g., port-e, doors, and port-are, to carry), which is taken to suggest that grammatical-class free stem representations are located at a pre lexical level of morphological processing

Despite grammatical class being a fundamental organizing principle of the human mental lexicon, recent morphological models of visual word identification remain silent as to whether and how it is represented in the lexical system. The present study addresses this issue by investigating cross class morphological priming (i.e., the effect obtained when nouns prime verbs sharing the same root, or vice versa) to clarify whether morphological stems subserving the formation of both nouns and verbs (e.g., depart-) have a unique, grammatical class independent representation. Experiment 1 and 2 suggest this to be the case, as they show that morphological priming crosses grammatical class boundaries in overt paradigm conditions. Experiment 3 show that, in masked priming conditions, cross-class facilitation emerges both for genuine derivations and pseudo-related pairs with a homographic stem (e.g., port-e, doors, and port-are, to carry), which is taken to suggest that grammatical-class free stem representations are located at a pre lexical level of morphological processing

There is general agreement that, early in processing, morphological segmentation proceeds irrespectively of semantic transparency, so that DEALER is broken down into DEAL- and -ER just as CORNER is broken down into CORN- and -ER. It is much less clear, however, when this mechanism emerges in developing readers, with previous studies showing: (i) morpho-orthographic decomposition since 3rd grade (Quémart et al., 2011); (ii) no morpho-orthographic decomposition up to 5th grade (Beyersmann et al., 2012); (iii) morpho-orthographic decomposition maturing between 4th and 7th grade (Schiff et al., 2012). 128 typically-developing, Italian 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders participated in a masked priming, lexical decision task. 120 prime-target pairs were selected, 40 for each of the following conditions: a) transparent (farinoso-FARINA, mealy-MEAL); b) opaque (violenza-VIOLA, violence-VIOLET); c) orthographic (costume-COSTO, costume-COST). Each pair was contrasted with an unrelated baseline (timoroso-FARINA, fearful-MEAL). In a mixed-effects model carried out on RTs, CONDITION was found to interact with RELATEDNESS: morphological priming only emerged in the transparent condition (related: M = 1300 ms, SD = 444.4; unrelated: M = 1379, SD = 442.3), whereas no sign of facilitation was found in either the opaque (related: M = 1391, SD = 446.0; unrelated: 1379, SD = 412.1) or the orthographic condition (related: M = 1370, SD = 430.9; unrelated: M = 1399, SD = 431.4). Data are consistent with the hypothesis that in the course of reading acquisition form-meaning mapping is crucial to detect morphemic units. Accordingly, there is no evidence for morpho-orthographic parsing in primary school, not even in a language, i.e., Italian, characterised by a quasi-perfect one-to-one orthography-to-phonology mapping.

INTRODUZIONE Il ruolo della morfologia nell'acquisizione della lettura è stato verificato in diverse lingue (cfr. Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2011), ma è in corso un ampio dibattito sul livello di elaborazione in cui verrebbero identificati i morfemi. Secondo alcuni autori (Rastle & Davis, 2008), si tratterebbe di un processo automatico, messo in atto in base alla rilevazione di specifiche sequenze di grafemi, che avverrebbe nelle prime fasi di elaborazione dello stimolo; secondo altri, invece, il riconoscimento dei costituenti morfemici avverrebbe attraverso l'attivazione di rappresentazioni lessicali, organizzate sulla base non solo di caratteristiche formali, ma anche semantiche (Feldman et al., 2009). Per verificare il ruolo della struttura ortografica e delle componenti semantico-lessicali nel processo di lettura in età scolare, Quémart, Casalis & Colé (2011)hanno proposto a bambini di 8 e di 12 anni un compito di decisione lessicale con prime mascherato, trovando conferma, in Francese, del ruolo fondamentale delle componenti ortografiche; al contrario, Beyersmann, Castles & Coltheart (2012), in Inglese, con lo stesso paradigma, hanno trovato chiari effetti riconducibili a componenti semantico-lessicali. Di fronte alla eterogeneità dei risultati emersi in letteratura, sembra interessante il contributo che lo studio di una lingua ad ortografia trasparente, come l'Italiano, può fornire, per meglio discriminare il ruolo della struttura ortografica da quello dell'informazione lessicale e semantica, nell'utilizzo dei costituenti morfemici durante l'acquisizione della lettura. METODO Partecipanti. 128 bambini frequentanti le classi III, IV e V della scuola primaria (51% maschi; età media = 112 mesi). Stimoli. Sono state selezionate 120 coppie di parole prime-target, 40 per ciascuna delle seguenti condizioni: a) relazione morfologica (es., farinoso-FARINA); b)pseudoderivazione (es., violenza-VIOLA); c) somiglianza ortografica (es., costume- COSTO). Ciascun target poteva ess

A substantial body of literature indicates that, at least at some level of processing, complex words are broken down into their morphemes solely on the basis of their orthographic form (e.g., Rastle, Davis and New, 2004). Recent evidence has shown that this process might not be obligatory, as indicated by the fact that morpho-orthographic effects were not found in a cross-case same-different task, i.e., when lexical access is not necessarily required (Dunabeitia, Kinoshita, Carreiras and Norris, 2011). In this study we employed a task that requires to understand a series of words, and thus implies lexical access. Masked primes were shown very briefly right before the appearance of the target word; prime-target pairs entertained either a morpho-semantic (dealer-DEAL), a morpho-orthographic (corner-CORN), or a purely orthographic relationship (brothel-BROTH). Eye fixation times clearly indicate facilitation for transparent pairs, but not for opaque pairs (nor for orthographic pairs, which were used as a baseline). These results indicate that the access to a morpho-orthographic level of representation is not always necessary for lexical identification, which challenges models of visual word identification that cannot account for task-induced effects

There is general agreement that, early in processing, morphological segmentation proceeds irrespectively of semantic transparency, so that DEALER is broken down into DEAL- and -ER just as CORNER is broken down into CORN- and -ER. It is much less clear, however, when this mechanism emerges in developing readers, with previous studies showing: (i) morpho-orthographic decomposition since 3rd grade (Quémart et al., 2011); (ii) no morpho-orthographic decomposition up to 5th grade (Beyersmann et al., 2012); (iii) morpho-orthographic decomposition maturing between 4th and 7th grade (Schiff et al., 2012). 128 typically-developing, Italian 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders participated in a masked priming, lexical decision task. 120 prime-target pairs were selected, 40 for each of the following conditions: a) transparent (farinoso-FARINA, mealy-MEAL); b) opaque (violenza-VIOLA, violence-VIOLET); c) orthographic (costume-COSTO, costume-COST). Each pair was contrasted with an unrelated baseline (timoroso-FARINA, fearful-MEAL). In a mixed-effects model carried out on RTs, CONDITION was found to interact with RELATEDNESS: morphological priming only emerged in the transparent condition (related: M = 1300 ms, SD = 444.4; unrelated: M = 1379, SD = 442.3), whereas no sign of facilitation was found in either the opaque (related: M = 1391, SD = 446.0; unrelated: 1379, SD = 412.1) or the orthographic condition (related: M = 1370, SD = 430.9; unrelated: M = 1399, SD = 431.4). Data are consistent with the hypothesis that in the course of reading acquisition form-meaning mapping is crucial to detect morphemic units. Accordingly, there is no evidence for morpho-orthographic parsing in primary school, not even in a language, i.e., Italian, characterised by a quasi-perfect one-to-one orthography-to-phonology mapping.

INTRODUZIONE Il ruolo della morfologia nell'acquisizione della lettura è stato verificato in diverse lingue (cfr. Verhoeven & Perfetti, 2011), ma è in corso un ampio dibattito sul livello di elaborazione in cui verrebbero identificati i morfemi. Secondo alcuni autori (Rastle & Davis, 2008), si tratterebbe di un processo automatico, messo in atto in base alla rilevazione di specifiche sequenze di grafemi, che avverrebbe nelle prime fasi di elaborazione dello stimolo; secondo altri, invece, il riconoscimento dei costituenti morfemici avverrebbe attraverso l'attivazione di rappresentazioni lessicali, organizzate sulla base non solo di caratteristiche formali, ma anche semantiche (Feldman et al., 2009). Per verificare il ruolo della struttura ortografica e delle componenti semantico-lessicali nel processo di lettura in età scolare, Quémart, Casalis & Colé (2011)hanno proposto a bambini di 8 e di 12 anni un compito di decisione lessicale con prime mascherato, trovando conferma, in Francese, del ruolo fondamentale delle componenti ortografiche; al contrario, Beyersmann, Castles & Coltheart (2012), in Inglese, con lo stesso paradigma, hanno trovato chiari effetti riconducibili a componenti semantico-lessicali. Di fronte alla eterogeneità dei risultati emersi in letteratura, sembra interessante il contributo che lo studio di una lingua ad ortografia trasparente, come l'Italiano, può fornire, per meglio discriminare il ruolo della struttura ortografica da quello dell'informazione lessicale e semantica, nell'utilizzo dei costituenti morfemici durante l'acquisizione della lettura. METODO Partecipanti. 128 bambini frequentanti le classi III, IV e V della scuola primaria (51% maschi; età media = 112 mesi). Stimoli. Sono state selezionate 120 coppie di parole prime-target, 40 per ciascuna delle seguenti condizioni: a) relazione morfologica (es., farinoso-FARINA); b)pseudoderivazione (es., violenza-VIOLA); c) somiglianza ortografica (es., costume- COSTO). Ciascun target po

A substantial body of literature indicates that, at least at some level of processing, complex words are broken down into their morphemes solely on the basis of their orthographic form (e.g., Rastle, Davis and New, 2004). Recent evidence has shown that this process might not be obligatory, as indicated by the fact that morpho-orthographic effects were not found in a cross-case same-different task, i.e., when lexical access is not necessarily required (Dunabeitia, Kinoshita, Carreiras and Norris, 2011). In this study we employed a task that requires to understand a series of words, and thus implies lexical access. Masked primes were shown very briefly right before the appearance of the target word; prime-target pairs entertained either a morpho-semantic (dealer-DEAL), a morpho-orthographic (corner-CORN), or a purely orthographic relationship (brothel-BROTH). Eye fixation times clearly indicate facilitation for transparent pairs, but not for opaque pairs (nor for orthographic pairs, which were used as a baseline). These results indicate that the access to a morpho-orthographic level of representation is not always necessary for lexical identification, which challenges models of visual word identification that cannot account for task-induced effects

Although it is widely accepted that nouns and verbs are functionally independent linguistic entities, it is less clear whether their processing recruits different brain areas. This issue is particularly relevant for those theories of lexical semantics (and, more in general, of cognition) that suggest the embodiment of abstract concepts, i.e., based strongly on perceptual and motoric representations. This paper presents a formal meta analysis of the neuroimaging evidence on noun and verb processing in order to address this dichotomy more effectively at the anatomical level. We used a hierarchical clustering algorithm that grouped fMRI/PET activation peaks solely on the basis of spatial proximity. Cluster specificity for grammatical class was then tested on the basis of the noun verb distribution of the activation peaks included in each cluster. 32 clusters were identified: three were associated with nouns across different tasks (in the right inferior temporal gyrus, the left angular gyrus, and the left inferior parietal gyrus); one with verbs across different tasks (in the posterior part of the right middle temporal gyrus); and three showed verb specificity in some tasks and noun specificity in others (in the left and right inferior frontal gyrus and the left insula). These results do not support the popular tenets that verb processing is predominantly based in the left frontal cortex and noun processing relies specifically on temporal regions; nor do they support the idea that verb lexical semantic representations are heavily based on embodied motoric information. Our findings suggest instead that the cerebral circuits deputed to noun and verb processing lie in close spatial proximity in a wide network including frontal, parietal, and temporal regions. The data also indicate a predominant – but not exclusive – left lateralization of the network.

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like overhang and hangover, and to recognize that preheat is a word, whereas heatpre is not. Recent data have shown that suffixes are identified as morphemes only when they occur at the ends of letter strings (Crepaldi, Rastle, & Davis, 2010), which supports the general proposal that the word identification system is sensitive to morpheme positional constraints. This proposal leads to the prediction that the identification of free stems should occur in a position‐independent fashion, given that free stems can occur anywhere within complex words (e.g., overdress and dresser). In Experiment 1, we show that the rejection time of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., moonbasin), suggesting that honey and moon are identified within moonhoney, and that these morpheme representations activate the representation for the word honeymoon. In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the masked presentation of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., moonhoney) facilitates the identification of compound words (honeymoon). In contrast, monomorphemic control pairs do not produce a similar pattern (i.e., rickmave did not prime maverick), indicating that the effect for moonhoney pairs is genuinely morphological in nature. These results demonstrate that stem representations differ from affix representations in terms of their positional constraints, providing a challenge to all existing theories of morphological processing

Lexical‑semantic variables (such as word frequency, imageability and age of acquisition) have been studied extensively in neuropsychology to address the structure of the word production system. The evidence available on this issue is still rather controversial, mainly because of the very complex interrelations between lexical‑semantic variables. Moreover, it is not clear whether the results obtained in Indo‑European languages also hold in languages with a completely different structure and script, such as Chinese. The objective of the present study is to investigate this specific issue by studying the effect of word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, visual complexity of the stimuli to be named, grammatical class and morphological structure in word and picture naming in Chinese. The effect of these variables on naming and reading accuracy of healthy and brain‑damaged individuals is evaluated using mixed‑effect models, a statistical technique that allows to model both fixed and random effects; this feature substantially enhances the statistical power of the technique, so that several variables – and their complex interrelations – can be handled effectively in a unique analysis. We found that grammatical class interacts consistently across tasks with morphological structure: all participants, both healthy and brain‑damaged, found simple nouns significantly easier to read and name than complex nouns, whereas simple and complex verbs were of comparable difficulty. We also found that imageability was a strong predictor in picture naming, but not in word naming, whereas the contrary held true for age of acquisition. These results are taken to indicate the existence of a morphological level of processing in the Chinese word production system, and that reading aloud may occur along a non‑semantic route (either lexical or sub‑lexical) in this language.