The bigram trough hypothesis and the syllable number effect in lexical decision

Muncer, Steven; Knight, David C.

doi:10.1080/17470218.2012.697176

Cited by 15 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 28 publications

(56 reference statements)

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“…Words with more morphemes were also named and identified more accurately than words with fewer morphemes. This research also supported previous findings that the relative frequency of bigrams in different word positions could not explain the effect of morphemes, which supported their previous findings with the syllable effect (Knight & Muncer, ; Muncer & Knight, ).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

“…The zero‐order correlation between number of morphemes and decision time was positive but when word length was taken into account the relationship was reversed. The number of syllables had an inhibitory effect on lexical decision, as has been demonstrated on many occasions (Muncer & Knight, ). Muncer, Knight & Adams () have replicated this effect in a study of a larger sample of 3,358 five‐letter words.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

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Lexical decision and the number of morphemes and affixes

Muncer

Knight

Adams

2013

Scandinavian J Psychology

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There has been a considerable amount of research looking at the effects of both syllable number and syllable frequency on lexical decision and word naming times. Recently, there has also been an increased interest in morphological variables, but there have been no large scale studies that have examined the role of the number of morphemes in lexical decision for nonwords. This is partly because of the difficulty of identifying morphemes in nonwords. We present a program that identifies the presence of affixes and, therefore, can be used to count the number of morpheme-like elements in a nonword. We then used the program to measure the importance of affixes/morphemes in predicting lexical decision in nonwords. The results suggested that morphemes have an important role in lexical decision for both words and nonwords.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 91%

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

Lexical decision and the number of morphemes and affixes

Muncer

Knight

Adams

2013

Scandinavian J Psychology

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“…Our data also indicate that nonwords with more syllables were rejected more slowly, a finding which fits well with the idea that the syllable is one of the sublexical codes mediating lexical access (see Yap & Balota, 2009, for more discussion). It is worth noting that syllabic length effects, although reliable in a very large dataset, are relatively subtle, explaining why findings in the literature (e.g., Muncer& Knight, 2012) have been mixed.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…That said, work by Yap and Balota (2009) indicate that a word’s syllabic length (see also Ferrand& New, 2003) is positively correlated with both speeded pronunciation and lexical decision latencies, after influential covariates such as letter length, phoneme length, word frequency, neighborhood size, and phonological consistency are controlled for (see also Butler & Hains, 1979; Muncer& Knight, 2012; New, Ferrand, Pallier, & Brysbaert, 2006). Interestingly, although syllabic length is a robust predictor of word lexical decisions, the impact of this variable on nonword lexical decisions is less clear.…”

Section: Effects Of Psycholinguistic Variables On Nonword Lexical Decmentioning

confidence: 99%

Responding to nonwords in the lexical decision task: Insights from the English Lexicon Project.

Yap¹,

Sibley²,

Balota³

et al. 2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word-frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, since a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide valuable insights into early lexical processes. In the present study, item-level and participant-level analyses were conducted on the trial-level lexical decision data for almost 37,000 nonwords in the English Lexicon Project in order to identify the influence of different psycholinguistic variables on nonword lexical decision performance, and to explore individual differences in how participants respond to nonwords. Item-level regression analyses reveal that nonword response time was positively correlated with number of letters, number of orthographic neighbors, number of affixes, and baseword number of syllables, and negatively correlated with Levenshtein orthographic distance and baseword frequency. Participant-level analyses also point to within- and between-session stability in nonword responses across distinct sets of items, and intriguingly reveal that higher vocabulary knowledge is associated with less sensitivity to some dimensions (e.g., number of letters) but more sensitivity to others (e.g., baseword frequency). The present findings provide well-specified and interesting new constraints for informing models of word recognition and lexical decision.

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“…Finally, length of a word in number of letters or syllables has been reported to affect word processing (e.g., Balota et al, 2004;Ferrand & New, 2003;Muncer & Knight, 2012).…”

Section: Pattern Effect In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

What can megastudies tell us about the orthographic structure of English words?

Chetail

Balota

Treiman

2015

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

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Although the majority of research in visual word recognition has targeted single-syllable words, most words are polysyllabic. These words engender special challenges, one of which concerns their analysis into smaller units. According to a recent hypothesis, the organization of letters into groups of successive consonants (C) and vowels (V) constrains the orthographic structure of printed words. So far, evidence has been reported only in French with factorial studies of relatively small sets of items. In the present study, we performed regression analyses on corpora of megastudies (English and British Lexicon Project databases) to examine the influence of the CV pattern in English. We compared hiatus words, which present a mismatch between the number of syllables and the number of groups of adjacent vowel letters (e.g., client), to other words, controlling for standard lexical variables. In speeded pronunciation, hiatus words were processed more slowly than control words, and the effect was stronger in low-frequency words. In the lexical decision task, the interference effect of hiatus in low-frequency words was balanced by a facilitatory effect in high-frequency words. Taken together, the results support the hypothesis that the configuration of consonant and vowel letters influences the processing of polysyllabic words in English.

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The bigram trough hypothesis and the syllable number effect in lexical decision

Cited by 15 publications

References 28 publications

Lexical decision and the number of morphemes and affixes

Lexical decision and the number of morphemes and affixes

Responding to nonwords in the lexical decision task: Insights from the English Lexicon Project.

What can megastudies tell us about the orthographic structure of English words?

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