A mega recognition memory study of 2897 disyllabic words

Abstract

Following the studies by Cortese, Khanna, and Hacker (2010) on recognition memory for monosyllabic words, recognition memory estimates (e.g., hits, false alarms, hits minus false alarms) for 3000 disyllabic words were obtained from 120 subjects and 2897 of these words were analysed via multiple regression. Participants studied 30 lists of 50 words and were tested on 30 lists of 100 words. Of the subjects, 60 received a constant study time of 2000 ms per item and 60 studied items at their own pace. Specific predictor variables included log word frequency, word length, imageability, age of acquisition, orthographic similarity, and phonological similarity. The results were similar to those of Cortese et al. (2010). Specifically, in the analysis of hits minus false alarms, the entire set of predictor variables accounted for 34.9% of the variance. All predictor variables except phonological similarity were related to performance, with imageability, length, orthographic similarity and frequency all being strong predictors. These results are mostly compatible with the predictions made by single- and dual-process theories. However, across items hit rates were not correlated with false alarms. Given that most variables produced the standard mirror pattern, this latter outcome poses a major challenge for recognition memory theories.

It’s all in the delivery: Effects of context valence, arousal, and concreteness on visual word processing

“…Cortese, Khanna, and Hacker (2010); Cortese, McCarty, and Schock (2014) conducted mega-studies of recognition memory for monosyllabic and disyllabic words. In this paradigm, participants are presented sequentially with a list of 50 words, which they are instructed to memorize.…”

“…Dependent measures in this paradigm include the rate at which a word from the original list was correctly identified (hits), rate at which a word not on the original list was thought to have been on it (false alarms), and measures including both (sensitivity, or D’ and hits minus false alarms). We merged all words from both Cortese et al (2010, 2014) for which we had matching data from Brysbaert et al (2014) and Warriner et al (2013) and our contextual semantic scores. This yielded a total of 4,789 words.…”

“…The recognition memory models included three additional control variables of relevance to that task: orthographic similarity, phonological similarity, phonological-orthographic rime neighbourhood size. For information on these variables and their relevance to recognition memory, see Cortese et al (2010, 2014). In the age of acquisition study, word frequency, length, contextual diversity, and word prevalence were included as control variables.…”

Age of acquisition (AoA) effect in monolingual Russian and bilingual Russian (L1)-English (L2) speakers in a free recall task

“…The aim of these studies was to test recognition memory for monosyllabic (Cortese et al, 2010) and disyllabic (Cortese et al, 2015) words in 120 subjects. Participants studied 30 lists of 50 words and were tested on 30 lists of 100 words.…”

Participants shift response deadlines based on list difficulty during reading-aloud megastudies

“…Furthermore, the ELP has motivated lexicon projects in other languages, including British English (Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012), Chinese (Sze, Rickard Liow, & Yap, 2014), French (Ferrand et al, 2010), and more. In addition, the technique has been extended to auditory lexical decision (Ernestus & Cutler, 2015), semantic priming (Hutchison et al, 2013), and recognition memory (Cortese, McCarty, & Schock, 2015), to name just a few of these areas.…”