Comments on Clark's “The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy”

Wike, Edward L.; Church, James D.

doi:10.1016/0022-5371(76)90023-2

Cited by 178 publications

(114 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Although analyses using stimulus items as a random factor have been traditionally performed in psycholinguistic research, such analyses are actually not appropriate in cases, such as the present set of studies, in which stimulus items were not selected randomly, but were selected to control several criteria (Cohen, 1976;Hino & Lupker, 2000;Keppel, 1976;Raaijmakers, Schrijnemakers, & Gremmen, 1999; J. E. K. Smith, 1976;Wike & Church, 1976). Therefore, items analyses were not conducted in any of the experiments reported here.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

2003

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A tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) elicitation task and a picture-naming task were used to examine the role of neighborhood frequency as well as word frequency and neighborhood density in speech production. As predicted for the younger adults in Experiment 1, more TOT states were elicited for words with low word frequency and with sparse neighborhoods. Contrary to predictions, neighborhood frequency did not significantly influence retrieval of the target word. For the older adults in Experiment 2, however, more TOT states were elicited for words with low neighborhood frequency. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, pictures with high neighborhood frequency were named more quickly and accurately than pictures with low neighborhood frequency. These results show that the number of neighbors and the frequency of those neighbors influence lexical retrieval in speech production. The facilitative nature of these factors is more parsimoniously accounted for by an interactive model rather than by a strictly feedforward model of speech production.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 98%

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

2003

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“…Although there is some debate about whether or not to treat stimulus items as a random factor in statistical analyses (Cohen, 1976;Hino & Lupker, 2000;Keppel, 1976;Raaijmakers, 2003;Raaijmakers, Schrijnemakers, & Gremmen, 1999;Smith, 1976;Wike & Church, 1976), it is the current practice in psycholinguistic research to conduct both types of analyses. For consistency with this convention, both types of analyses will be reported; however, the discussion and interpretation of the results will be based only on the analyses in which participants were treated as a random factor.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because every task used in laboratory settings has advantages and disadvantages, replication across a variety of tasks increases our confidence that the observed effect was not due to the assumptions of a particular task employed in a particular experiment. Furthermore, Wike and Church (1976) recommended replication as a means of generalizing results without resorting to statistical techniques that might be inappropriate, such as analyses that treat stimulus items as a random factor.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The spread of the phonological neighborhood influences spoken word recognition

Vitevitch

2007

Memory & Cognition

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166In research on spoken language processing, neighborhood density refers to the number of words that sound similar to a given word: Words with many neighbors, or similar words, are said to have dense neighborhoods, whereas words with few neighbors are said to have sparse neighborhoods. Several studies in English have demonstrated that neighborhood density influences various aspects of spoken language processing, including lexical acquisition (e.g., Storkel, 2002Storkel, , 2004, speech production (e.g., Vitevitch, 1997Vitevitch, , 2002bVitevitch & Sommers, 2003), and spoken word recognition (Luce & Pisoni, 1998; see also Vitevitch & Rodríguez, 2005, for a discussion of the influence of neighborhood density on spoken word recognition in Spanish).In several laboratory-based spoken word recognition tasks, Luce and Pisoni (1998) demonstrated that English words with sparse neighborhoods are responded to more quickly and accurately than those with dense neighborhoods, suggesting that multiple word forms are activated and compete with each other during spoken word recognition. Words with large numbers of phonological neighbors (i.e., dense neighborhoods) are subject to greater competition and therefore recognized more slowly and less accurately than words with few phonological neighbors (i.e., sparse neighborhoods).Vitevitch (2002c) observed a similar processing disadvantage for words with dense neighborhoods in an analysis of a corpus containing speech perception errors, known as "slips of the ear," that were collected via naturalistic observation. An example of a slip of the ear is erroneously hearing the correctly produced question "What's wrong with her bike?" as "What's wrong with her back?" (Bond, 1999). In analyzing the misperceived words in Bond's corpus, Vitevitch (2002c) found that slips of the ear tended to occur in words with dense phonological neighborhoods, further suggesting that multiple word forms are activated and compete during spoken word recognition.The previously discussed studies clearly demonstrate that the number of phonologically related word forms that are activated influences spoken word recognition: Words with few neighbors are recognized more quickly and more accurately than words with many neighbors in English. Now, consider two words with the same number of phonological neighbors. Does some other factor, such as the distribution of the neighbors in the lexical neighborhood, influence the speed and accuracy of spoken word recognition? By way of illustration, consider the words mop (/ /) and mob (/ /). When a single phoneme substitutes any of the phonemes in the word mop, phonological neighbors are formed (e.g., hop, map, mock). However, similar substitutions in the word mob produce phonological neighbors at only two of the three phoneme positions (e.g., rob, m*b, mock); no real word in English is formed when the phoneme in the medial position of the word mob is substituted. Note that each word has the same total number of phonological neighbors, but that the number of phoneme positions i...

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“…The risk with treating items as random effects is that if the items were not sampled randomly from a population, as other researchers have argued is true for many types of language experiments, treating them as random will result in less statistical power, thereby creating a greater risk of false negative results (Wike and Church, 1976;Cohen, 1976;Keppel, 1976;Smith, 1976;Wickens and Keppel, 1983;Raaijmakers et al, 1999;Raaijmakers, 2003). Although we believe that the current experiments do not require items to be treated as random effects (because the different lexicalizations were not randomly sampled, but rather were instead carefully created to be representative of the conditions of interest, and because the items were lexically matched across conditions), we nonetheless constructed linear mixed effects models treating both participants and items as crossed random effects for the ME and LS experiments, and simulated p-values using the languageR package (Baayen, 2007;Baayen et al, 2008).…”

Section: Mixed Effects Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001–2010

Sprouse

Schütze

Almeida

2013

Lingua

189

147

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[171 words]The goal of the present study is to provide a direct comparison of the results of informal judgment collection methods with the results of formal judgment collection methods, as a first step in understanding the relative merits of each family of methods. Although previous studies have compared small samples of informal and formal results, this article presents the first largescale comparison based on a random sample of phenomena from a leading theoretical journal (Linguistic Inquiry). We tested 298 data points from the approximately 1743 English data points that were published in Linguistic Inquiry between 2001 and 2010. We tested this sample with 936 naïve participants using three formal judgment tasks (magnitude estimation, 7-point Likert scale, and two-alternative forced-choice) and report five statistical analyses. The results suggest a convergence rate of 95% between informal and formal methods, with a margin of error of 5.3-5.6%. We discuss the implications of this convergence rate for the ongoing conversation about judgment collection methods, and lay out a set of questions for future research into syntactic methodology.

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Comments on Clark's “The language-as-fixed-effect fallacy”

Cited by 178 publications

References 6 publications

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

The facilitative influence of phonological similarity and neighborhood frequency in speech production in younger and older adults

The spread of the phonological neighborhood influences spoken word recognition

A comparison of informal and formal acceptability judgments using a random sample from Linguistic Inquiry 2001–2010

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