Semantic transparency and masked morphological priming: An ERP investigation

Morris, Jeffrey B.; Frank, Tiffany; Grainger, Jonathan; Holcomb, Phillip J.

doi:10.1037/e527352012-815

Cited by 21 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…As can be seen in the depiction of the full waveforms in Fig. 4, the N250 component occurred between a trough at around 200 ms and a spike at around 400 ms, which is consistent with the N250 properties specified in prior work (Hoshino, Midgley, Holcomb, & Grainger, 2010;Morris, Frank, Grainger, & Holcomb, 2007;Timmer & Schiller, 2012). The main effect of lexical tone was highly significant, with less negative values for neutral-than for full-tone targets, b = 0.34μV, SE = 0.11, t = 3.00.…”

Section: N250supporting

confidence: 67%

Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings

Luo

Yan

et al. 2015

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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In two experiments, we examined the contribution of articulation-specific features to visual word recognition during the reading of Chinese. In spoken Standard Chinese, a syllable with a full tone can be tone-neutralized through sound weakening and pitch contour change, and there are two types of two-character compound words with respect to their articulation variation. One type requires articulation of a full tone for each constituent character, and the other requires a full-and a neutral-tone articulation for the first and second characters, respectively. Words of these two types with identical first characters were selected and embedded in sentences. Native speakers of Standard Chinese were recruited to read the sentences. In Experiment 1, the individual words of a sentence were presented serially at a fixed pace while eventrelated potentials were recorded. This resulted in less-negative N100 and anterior N250 amplitudes and in more-negative N400 amplitudes when targets contained a neutral tone. Complete sentences were visible in Experiment 2, and eye movements were recorded while participants read. Analyses of oculomotor activity revealed shorter viewing durations and fewer refixations on-and fewer regressive saccades totarget words when their second syllable was articulated with a neutral rather than a full tone. Together, the results indicate that readers represent articulation-specific word properties, that these representations are routinely activated early during the silent reading of Chinese sentences, and that the representations are also used during later stages of word processing.

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Section: N250supporting

confidence: 67%

Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings

Luo

Yan

et al. 2015

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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“…lock and port were subsequently removed because they appeared in different sets in different studies: port was used as a target for the transparent prime portable in Morris et al (2007) and as a target for the opaque prime porter in Marslen-Wilson et al (2008), whereas the pair locker-lock was classified as opaque in Morris et al (2007) and as transparent in Marslen-Wilson et al (2008). Eight items were further removed because they were not included in the BLP.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Items were extracted from a concatenation of the set used by Rastle, Davis, Marslen-Wilson, and Tyler (2000), Devlin, Jamison, Matthews, and Gonnerman (2004), Rastle et al (2004), Morris, Frank, Grainger, and Holcomb (2007), Marslen-Wilson, Bozic, and Randall (2008), and Andrews and Lo (2013), leading to a set including 335 stem words. lock and port were subsequently removed because they appeared in different sets in different studies: port was used as a target for the transparent prime portable in Morris et al (2007) and as a target for the opaque prime porter in Marslen-Wilson et al (2008), whereas the pair locker-lock was classified as opaque in Morris et al (2007) and as transparent in Marslen-Wilson et al (2008).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semantic Transparency in Free Stems: The Effect of Orthography-Semantics Consistency on Word Recognition

Marelli

Amenta

Crepaldi

2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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A largely overlooked side result 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 be also 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 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 BLP, proving to be an effective predictor in visual word access (Experiment 3).Keywords: Orthography-Semantics Consistency, distributional semantic models, megastudies, visual word identification Orthography-Semantics Consistency 3Semantic transparency in free stems: the effect of Orthography-Semantics Consistency in word recognition.Recent research on morphological processing has focused on the role played by semantic transparency in the recognition of derived words. Indeed, the meaning of a derived form can be more or less associated to the meanings of its constituent morphemes: words like nameless, farmer, bakery can be easily understood given the meaning of their roots (transparent words), whereas in words like courteous, fruitful, cryptic root meanings are not fully maintained (opaque words). How early semantic transparency comes to the stage during visual word processing has been the theoretical issue at the center of a long-standing debate (for a review, see . Priming was the main methodological tool adopted in addressing this question, with the assumption that, if the recognition of a root (e.g., farm) is made quicker by the previous presentation of a related derived form (e.g., farmer ) in comparison to a control prime (e.g., speaker ), this would mean that the root is accessed when processing the derived form. Typically, transparent and opaque derived primes are compared for their effectiveness in facilitating the identification of their (pseudo-)roots. In order to rule out any strategic effect related to prime awareness, the prime is often presented very shortly and preceded by an orthographic mask, making it virtually invisible at an explicit level (masked priming; Forster & Davis, 1984). Under these conditions, priming effect is regularly observed for both transparent and opaque prime-targe...

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“…The set of morphologically related words for English, with a relation with the stem of semantic transparency or opacity (n= 1,252), was selected from the CELEX database (Baayen, Piepenbrock, & van Rijn, 1993;Lavric, Rastle, & Clapp, 2011;Marlsen-Wilson, Bozic, & Randall, 2008;Morris, Frank, Grainger, & Holcomb, 2007;Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004) and the Concise Oxford Dictionary (Fowler & Fowler, 1982); the words for Spanish were selected from the Dictionary of the Spanish Real Academy (Real Academia Española, 2001).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Age of acquisition and imageability norms for base and morphologically complex words in English and in Spanish

et al. 2015

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The extent to which processing words involves breaking them down into smaller units or morphemes or is the result of an interactive activation of other units, such as meanings, letters, and sounds (e.g., dis-agree-ment vs. disagreement), is currently under debate. Disentangling morphology from phonology and semantics is often a methodological challenge, because orthogonal manipulations are difficult to achieve (e.g., semantically unrelated words are often phonologically related: casual-casualty and, vice versa, sign-signal). The present norms provide a morphological classification of 3,263 suffixed derived words from two widely spoken languages: English (2,204 words) and Spanish (1,059 words). Morphologically complex words were sorted into four categories according to the nature of their relationship with the base word: phonologically transparent (friend-friendly), phonologically opaque (child-children), semantically transparent (habit-habitual), and semantically opaque (event-eventual). In addition, ratings were gathered for age of acquisition, imageability, and semantic distance (i.e., the extent to which the meaning of the complex derived form could be drawn from the meaning of its base constituents). The norms were completed by adding values for word frequency; word length in number of phonemes, letters, and syllables; lexical similarity, as measured by the number of neighbors; and morphological family size. A series of comparative analyses from the collated ratings for the base and derived words were also carried out. The results are discussed in relation to recent findings.Keywords Age of acquisition . Morphology . Phonology . Semantics . English . SpanishThe phonological, orthographic, morphological, and semantic characteristics of words are central elements in word processing research. This is because finding out how the mind interacts with the structures of language (i.e., its sounds, its letters, its morphemes, and the meaning of its words) has proved to be a successful method of understanding the cognitive basis of language production and comprehension (Brysbaert, Van Wijnendaele, & De Deyne, 2000;Cattell, 1886;Davies, Barbón, & Cuetos, 2013;Duñabeitia, Laka, Perea, & Carreiras, 2009;Frederiksen & Kroll, 1976;Izura, Hernández-Muñoz, & Ellis, 2005;Lavidor & Ellis, 2002;Levelt, 1989;Macizo & Bajo, 2006;Marslen-Wilson, Tyler, Waksler, & Older, 1994;Pérez, 2007).Morphology, in particular, refers to the compositional structure that meaning has within the words in a language. Thus, words are often composed of smaller meaningful units called morphemes (e.g., home-work, penni-less, review-ed). Morphemes can both stand alone as monomorphemic words (e.g., truth) and be bonded to other morphemes as part of polymorphemic words (e.g., -ful in truthful). Morphologically complex words consist of a core morpheme, called root, base, or stem, and one or several add-on morphemes called affixes. In languages such as English and Spanish, affixes can be placed either at the beginning of the word (e.g., fore-in for...

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Semantic transparency and masked morphological priming: An ERP investigation

Cited by 21 publications

References 21 publications

Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings

Syllabic tone articulation influences the identification and use of words during Chinese sentence reading: Evidence from ERP and eye movement recordings

Semantic Transparency in Free Stems: The Effect of Orthography-Semantics Consistency on Word Recognition

Age of acquisition and imageability norms for base and morphologically complex words in English and in Spanish

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