The role of orthography in the semantic activation of neighbors.

Abstract

There is now considerable evidence that a letter string can activate semantic information appropriate to its orthographic neighbors (e.g., Forster & Hector's, 2002, TURPLE effect). This phenomenon is the focus of the present research. Using Japanese words, we examined whether semantic activation of neighbors is driven directly by orthographic similarity alone or whether there is also a role for phonological similarity. In Experiment 1, using a relatedness judgment task in which a Kanji word-Katakana word pair was presented on each trial, an inhibitory effect was observed when the initial Kanji word was related to an orthographic and phonological neighbor of the Katakana word target but not when the initial Kanji word was related to a phonological but not orthographic neighbor of the Katakana word target. This result suggests that phonology plays little, if any, role in the activation of neighbors' semantics when reading familiar words. In Experiment 2, the targets were transcribed into Hiragana, a script they are typically not written in, requiring readers to engage in phonological coding. In that experiment, inhibitory effects were observed in both conditions. This result indicates that phonologically mediated semantic activation of neighbors will emerge when phonological processing is necessary in order to understand a written word (e.g., when that word is transcribed into an unfamiliar script).

Beyond Phonics: The Case for Teaching Children the Logic of the English Spelling System

“…Similarly, PDP models of word naming (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) are typically developed within the "triangle model" framework that includes mappings from orthography to meaning (separate from mappings linking orthography to phonology). These models are all consistent with the strong evidence that orthographic word knowledge can be accessed independently of first computing grapheme-phoneme correspondences, and that orthographic word knowledge can directly access semantic knowledge (Bowers, Davis, & Hanley, 2005;Hino, Lupker, & Taylor, 2012;Taft, & van Graan, 1998), even in children (Nation & Cocksey, 2009). This raises the question of how to best learn orthographic word forms (in addition to grapheme-phoneme correspondences).…”

Acquisition process of typing skill using hierarchical materials in the Japanese language

“…This syllabic structure has a constant duration of pronunciation as units of processing, which are called mora or morae (e.g., Hino, Kusunose, Lupker, & Jared, 2013; Hino, Lupker, & Taylor, 2012; Kinoshita, 1998; Tamaoka & Makioka, 2004; Perea, Nakatani, & van Leeuwen, 2011; Sakuma, Sasanuma, Tatsumi, & Masaki, 1998; Verdonschot et al, 2011; Witzel, Qiao, & Foster, 2011). …”

Age of acquisition and imageability: a cross‐task comparison

“…As an example, a variable such as orthographic neighbourhood size (Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, ) would clearly be an orthographic level variable. However, because of the interactivity of the language system, an orthographic variable such as orthographic neighbourhood may exert part of its effect by influencing processing within the phonological and/or semantic systems (Hino, Lupker, & Taylor, ). Although the language system is interactive and processing within one system (e.g., phonology) will affect processing within the other two systems (e.g., orthography and semantics), it is still useful to classify variables as orthographic, phonological or semantic.…”