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The present paper was an attempt to study the effect of the Persian lexicon on the students’ English NP production in speech production levels. The data were collected from the senior high school students' English speech. The research method is descriptive-analytic. At first 210 errors were classified into 6 groups and then they were analyzed according to principles and hypotheses offered in speech production stages. Persian grammatical features in the students’ utterances show that Persian lexemes have been selected in speech production stages because grammatical processing is the direct consequence of lexical selection. It was found that the activation coming from the conceptual level has been spread to the phonological segments of Persian lexemes according to phonological activation models. So Persian lexicon has been active in forming the surface structure of the students’ utterances. English lexemes associated with corresponding Persian ones in surface structure have been selected from the English lexicon before utterance articulation. The study results are in line with the word association model which assumes L2 words are associated with L1 words and through L1 mediation can L2 words gain access to concepts at early L2 learning.

While reading is among the most important and well-researched topics of developmental psychology, sublexical regularities and how these regularities relate to reading skills have attracted less interest so far. This study tested general orthographic knowledge (GOK) using an indirect reaction time (RT)-based task, in which participants had to detect letters appearing within frequent and infrequent letter clusters. The aim of the method was to minimise the roles of phonological activation and metalinguistic decision. Three different age-groups of German-speaking individuals were tested: first graders (N = 60), third graders (N = 68), and adults (N = 44). Orthographic regularity affected RTs in all three groups, with significantly lower RTs for frequent than for infrequent clusters. The indirect measure of GOK did not show an association with reading measures in first graders and adults, but in the case of third graders it explained variance over and above age and phonological skills. This study provides evidence for phonology-independent GOK, at least in third graders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past 30 years of reading research has confirmed the importance of bottom-up processing. Rather than a psycholinguistic guessing game (Goodman, 1967), reading is dependent on rapid, accurate recognition of written forms. In fluent first language (L1) readers, this is seen in the automatic activation of a word's phonological form, impacting lexical processing (Perfetti & Bell, 1991; Rayner, Sereno, Lesch & Pollatsek, 1995). Although the influence of phonological form is well established, less clear is the extent to which readers are sensitive to the possible pronunciations of a word (Lesch & Pollatsek, 1998), derived from the varying consistency of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) (e.g., although 'great' has only one pronunciation, [ɡɹeɪt], the grapheme within it has multiple possible pronunciations: [i] in [plit] 'pleat', [ɛ] in [bɹɛθ] 'breath'; Parkin, 1982). Further, little is known about non-native readers' sensitivity to such characteristics. Non-native readers process text differently from L1 readers (Koda & Zehler, 2008; McBride-Chang, Bialystok, Chong & Li, 2004), with implications for understanding L2 reading comprehension (Rayner, Chace, Slattery & Ashby, 2006). The goal of this study was thus to determine whether native and non-native readers are sensitive to the consistency of a word's component GPCs during lexical processing and to compare this sensitivity among readers from different L1s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used an error disruption paradigm to investigate how deaf readers from Hong Kong, who had varying levels of reading fluency, use orthographic, phonological, and mouth-shape-based (i.e., "visemic") codes during Chinese sentence reading while also examining the role of contextual information in facilitating lexical retrieval and integration. Participants had their eye movements recorded as they silently read Chinese sentences containing orthographic, homophonic, homovisemic, or unrelated errors. Sentences varied in terms of how much contextual information was available leading up to the target word. Fixation time analyses revealed that in early fixation measures, deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations. However, in contexts where targets were highly predictable, fixation times on homophonic errors decreased relative to those on unrelated errors, suggesting that higher levels of contextual predictability facilitated early phonological activation. In the measure of total reading time, results indicated that deaf readers activated word meanings primarily through orthographic representations, but they also appeared to activate word meanings through visemic representations in late error recovery processes. Examining the influence of reading fluency level on error recovery processes, we found that, in comparison to deaf readers with lower reading fluency levels, those with higher reading fluency levels could more quickly resolve homophonic and orthographic errors in the measures of gaze duration and total reading time, respectively. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical implications of these findings as they relate to the lexical quality hypothesis and the dual-route cascaded model of reading by deaf adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to investigate the effects of contextual predictability on orthographic and phonological activation during Chinese sentence reading by Cantonese-speaking readers using the error disruption paradigm. Participants' eye fixations and pupil sizes were recorded while they silently read Chinese sentences containing homophonic, orthographic, and unrelated errors. Sentences had varying amounts of contextual information leading up to target words such that some targets were more predictable than others. Results of the fixation time analysis indicated that orthographic effects were significant in first fixation and gaze duration, while phonological effects emerged later in total reading time. However, interactions between predictability and the homophonic condition were found in gaze duration. These results suggest that, while Cantonese readers activate word meanings primarily through orthography in early processing, early phonological activation can occur when facilitated by semantics in high-constraint sentence contexts. Analysis of pupillary response measurements revealed that participants' pupil sizes became larger when they read words containing orthographic errors, suggesting that orthographic error recovery processes significantly increase cognitive load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Evidence for automatic phonological activation during L2 visual word recognition in young L2 learners. • Evidence for both within- L2 and cross-language phonological activation n favor of language non-selectivity. • Pseudohomophone interference effects in young L2 learners of varying L2 exposure. Abstract This study aimed to investigate phonological activation during silent word reading in French adolescents learning English as a second language (L2) at secondary school. Grade 6 and Grade 8 adolescents performed lexical decision tasks in English, where we compared processing of nonwords that were homophonic to real L2 words (i.e., pseudohomophones [PsHs]; e.g., grean) with that of orthographic control pseudowords (OCs; e.g., greun). In Experiment 1, PsHs were constructed so that they sounded like L2 words when using cross-language (L1) grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) only (e.g., grine), whereas PsHs were constructed with within-language (L2) GPCs (e.g., grean) in Experiment 2. Results showed a PsH interference effect as reflected by higher error rates and/or longer rejection times for PsHs compared with OCs whether using within-language or cross-language GPCs and at both grade levels. Evidence of this PsH interference effect was also observed in Experiment 3, which used PsHs that sounded like real L1 words when using L2 GPCs (e.g., droal for the French word drôle [ funny in English]). We suggest that young L2 learners automatically activate both L1 and L2 GPCs during L2 silent reading in favor of strong cross-language interactions at the orthography-to-phonology interface. The results are discussed in relation to bilingual and developmental models on visual word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Recently, Meyer, Belke, Telling and Humphreys (2007) reported that competitor objects with homophonous names (e.g., boy) interfere with identifying a target object (e.g., buoy) in a visual search task, suggesting that an object name's phonology becomes automatically activated even in situations in which participants do not have the intention to speak. The present study explored the generality of this finding by testing a different phonological relation (rhyming object names, e.g., cat–hat) and by varying details of the experimental procedure. Experiment 1 followed the procedure by Meyer et al. Participants were familiarized with target and competitor objects and their names at the beginning of the experiment and the picture of the target object was presented prior to the search display on each trial. In Experiment 2, the picture of the target object presented prior to the search display was replaced by its name. In Experiment 3, participants were not familiarized with target and competitor objects and their names at the beginning of the experiment. A small interference effect from phonologically related competitors was obtained in Experiments 1 and 2 but not in Experiment 3, suggesting that the way the relevant objects are introduced to participants affects the chances of observing an effect from phonologically related competitors. Implications for the information flow in the conceptual–lexical system are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The current study examined the contribution of semantic knowledge to the process of reading aloud unfamiliar words among thirty non-typical readers from third grade. The performances of reading aloud were tested by using three lists of pseudowords: semantic, phonological, and un-trained. For each pseudoword in the list of semantic condition, an invented meaning was matched, and the participants orally trained to learn such invented meaning. For the list of the phonological condition, the participants were orally taught the pronunciation of the pseudowords only, while the third list of pseudowords was not trained at all. After the training phase, the subjects were examined by reading aloud the pseudowords which were presented randomly. For all lists of the pseudowords, there was no orthographic exposure before the reading trial. The findings showed that the higher levels of accuracy were significantly recorded for the semantic condition as compared to the other conditions, without a significant difference in the reading rate between all the conditions. The current findings were discussed in the context of the contribution of semantic activation to reading aloud of written words.

This study examines the effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding by high-intermediate level Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners. The results of the study suggest that the CFL learners tested have a well-developed semantic pathway to recognition; however, their phonological pathway is not yet a reliable means of character identification. Semantic radicals that correctly pertain to character meaning facilitated reaction time in semantic categorization tasks, while radicals that had no immediately interpretable relation to character meaning had a strong inhibitory effect. The relative accuracy of phonetic radicals (for predicting the whole-character's pronunciation) did not measurably improve homonym recognition. In a lexical decision task (Experiment 3), the subjects were significantly slower in identifying pseudo-characters when the phonological component was blurred, indicating that, despite having unreliable phonological pathways to character recognition, the subjects were still using phonological radical analysis as their default recognition strategy; however, the author argues that the radical is likely being used for orthographic disambiguation more than for phonological properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding were examined. Our results suggest that semantic and phonetic radicals are each available for access when a corresponding task emphasizes one or the other kind of radical. But in a more neutral lexical recognition task, the semantic radical is more informative. Semantic radicals that correctly pertain to character meaning facilitated reaction time in semantic categorization tasks (Experiment #1), while radicals that had no immediately interpretable relation to character meaning had a strong inhibitory effect. Likewise, phonetic radicals that accurately indicated a character’s pronunciation facilitated a homonym recognition task (Experiment #2), whereas phonetic radicals that differed significantly in pronunciation from their character inhibited homonym recognition. In a lexical decision task (Experiment #3) where each character had either a blurred semantic radical or a blurred phonetic radical, the characters with a blurred semantic radical elicited a significantly higher error rate and a trend for longer response times. These results are interpreted to indicate that while educated native Chinese speakers have full use of both semantic and phonetic paths to character decoding, there is a slight predisposition to semantic decoding strategies over phonetic ones indicating that the semantic path is the default means of character recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: With the event-related potential (ERP) technique, we examined the time course of phonological and semantic activation in Chinese word recognition. Participants did a semantic judgment task and a homophone judgment task over the same set of word pairs. Each pair was of either high or low word frequency and the two words were either unrelated or related semantically or phonologically, i.e., being homophones. For high-frequency words, both the semantically related pairs in the homophone task and the homophonic pairs in the semantic task elicited ERP responses different from the unrelated control pairs in the N400 component but not any component earlier, suggesting a similar time course for semantic and phonological activation. For low-frequency words, the semantically related pairs in the homophone task were associated with a similar modulation of N400. However, compared to the unrelated controls, the homophonic pairs in the semantic task elicited a larger P200, a component implicated in phonological processing in the literature, and thus demonstrated a phonological activation earlier than semantic activation. The results showed that word frequency affects the time course of semantic and phonological activation suggesting that phonology is not invariably activated before semantics in Chinese word recognition. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Recent research has shown that phonological neighborhood density facilitates naming latencies. In an attempt to extend this work, the authors evaluated the effect of phonological neighborhood distribution by comparing responding to words that consisted of 3 phonemes but differed in the number of phoneme positions that could be changed to form a neighbor (i.e., 2 vs. 3 positions). The results revealed that words in which all 3 positions could be changed to form a neighbor were named more rapidly than were words in which only 2 positions could be changed. The results show that this effect occurs due to a difference between the 2 groups of words in terms of their least supported phoneme (i.e., the phoneme position within a word with which the fewest neighbors overlap). The authors show that differences in terms of the number of neighbors for the least supported phoneme can also explain past research that indicates an effect of phonological neighborhood density on naming. The authors explain the results of this research using the dual-route cascaded model of reading aloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study with three experiments examined the notion inherent in the Interactive Constituency Model of Perfetti and colleagues [Perfetti, C.A., Liu, Y. & Tan, L.H. (2002) In H.S.R. Kao, C.K. Leong & D.-G. Gao (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience studies of the Chinese language (pp. 35–60). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; Perfetti, C.A. & Tan, L.H. (1999) In J. Wang, A.W. Inhoff & H.-C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese script: A cognitive analysis (pp. 115–134). Mahwah, New Hersey: Lawrence Erlbaum] that in reading 2-character Chinese words phonology is activated at the character level rather than at the word level. Specifically, the effect of phonological inconsistency (multiple pronunciations) of constituent characters on the visual recognition of 2-character Chinese words found by Tan and Perfetti (Experiment 2) [(1999) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 382–393] was further tested in 2 lexical decision experiments (1 and 2a) with sample sizes of 42 and 47 native Cantonese-speaking Chinese university students. Using the same stimulus materials with some needed slight variations, the two experiments found the target items with the constituent inconsistent characters were processed faster than the control two-character words with consistent characters and this inconsistency effect of heterophonic homographs would still be compatible with character-level phonology. The words with the consistent constituent character on the left (inconsistency on the right constituent) were processed faster than those with the consistent constituent character on the right (inconsistency on the left constituent). In Experiment 2b the control or consistent words were named faster than the corresponding inconsistent words and there was no left–right positional difference for the inconsistency. Taken together, the two lexical decision experiments and the naming experiment uphold the generality of character-level consistency effect of heterophonic homographs, even though there are some slight variations from the original study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In these experiments, cross-script masked repetition priming and word frequency effects were examined for Japanese words and nonwords as a function of script familiarity and the nature of the task (lexical decision or naming). In the lexical decision task, masked repetition priming effects were observed only for word targets and those effects were larger for targets presented in an orthographically unfamiliar script than for targets presented in an orthographically familiar script. In contrast, in the naming task, masked repetition priming effects were observed for both word and nonword targets and, for word targets, the repetition priming effects were similar regardless of the orthographic familiarity of the targets. In addition, large word frequency effects were observed when the targets were presented in a familiar script, but the effects were diminished or eliminated when the targets were presented in an unfamiliar script in both tasks. Implications of these results are discussed in terms of the possible loci of the priming effects in the two tasks. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This experiment explored the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings when homophonic and nonhomophonic errors were embedded in meaningful texts. The resulting data supported the position that phonological codes are activated very early in eye fixation and are compatible with the verification model of Van Orden (1987). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7–23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green. There were five types of relationships between a character and its display color: semantically congruent, phonologically congruent, semantically incongruent, phonologically incongruent and neutral. In addition to the classical Stroop effects, interference and facilitation effects from the homophones of color characters were also observed. The younger children and those with lower reading ability exhibited stronger Stroop effects. These findings suggest that phonological codes are activated automatically in Chinese character recognition. Furthermore, there is more phonological activation in the semantic retrieval of children in lower grades and those with lower reading ability. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]