MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition

Orthography-phonology consistency in English: Theory- and data-driven measures and their impact on auditory vs. visual word recognition

Research on orthographic consistency in English words has selectively identified different sub-syllabic units in isolation (grapheme, onset, vowel, coda, rime), yet there is no comprehensive assessment of how these measures affect word identification when taken together. To study which aspects of consistency are more psychologically relevant, we investigated their independent and composite effects on human reading behavior using large-scale databases. Study 1 found effects on adults' naming responses of both feedforward consistency (orthography to phonology) and feedback consistency (phonology to orthography). Study 2 found feedback but no feedforward consistency effects on visual and auditory lexical decision tasks, with the best predictor being a composite measure of consistency across grapheme, rime, OVC, and word-initial letter-phoneme. In Study 3, we explicitly modeled the reading process with forward and backward flow in a bidirectionally connected neural network. The model captured latent dimensions of quasi-regular mapping that explain additional variance in human reading and spelling behavior, compared to the established measures. Together, the results suggest interactive activation between phonological and orthographic word representations. They also validate the role of computational analyses of language to better understand how print maps to sound, and what properties of natural language affect reading complexity.

LaDEP: A large database of English pseudo-compounds

The Large Database of English Pseudo-compounds (LaDEP) contains nearly 7500 English words which mimic, but do not truly possess, a compound morphemic structure. These pseudo-compounds can be parsed into two free morpheme constituents (e.g., car-pet), but neither constituent functions as a morpheme within the overall word structure. The items were manually coded as pseudo-compounds, further coded for features related to their morphological structure (e.g., presence of multiple affixes, as in ruler-ship), and summarized using common psycholinguistic variables (e.g., length, frequency). This paper also presents an example analysis comparing the lexical decision response times between compound words, pseudo-compound words, and monomorphemic words. Pseudo-compounds and monomorphemic words did not differ in response time, and both groups had slower response times than compound words. This analysis replicates the facilitatory effect of compound constituents during lexical processing, and demonstrates the need to emphasize the pseudo-constituent structure of pseudo-compounds to parse their effects. Further applications of LaDEP include both psycholinguistic studies investigating the nature of human word processing or production and educational or clinical settings evaluating the impact of linguistic features on language learning and impairments. Overall, the items within LaDEP provide a varied and representative sample of the population of English pseudo-compounds which may be used to facilitate further research related to morphological decomposition, lexical access, meaning construction, orthographical influences, and much more.

UniPseudo: A universal pseudoword generator

Pseudowords are letter strings that look like words but are not words. They are used in psycholinguistic research, particularly in tasks such as lexical decision. In this context, it is essential that the pseudowords respect the orthographic statistics of the target language. Pseudowords that violate them would be too easy to reject in a lexical decision and would not enforce word recognition on real words. We propose a new pseudoword generator, UniPseudo, using an algorithm based on Markov chains of orthographic n-grams. It generates pseudowords from a customizable database, which allows one to control the characteristics of the items. It can produce pseudowords in any language, in orthographic or phonological form. It is possible to generate pseudowords with specific characteristics, such as frequency of letters, bigrams, trigrams, or quadrigrams, number of syllables, frequency of biphones, and number of morphemes. Thus, from a list of words composed of verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs, UniPseudo can create pseudowords resembling verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs in any language using an alphabetic or syllabic system.

Multi-LEX: A database of multi-word frequencies for French and English

Written word frequency is a key variable used in many psycholinguistic studies and is central in explaining visual word recognition. Indeed, methodological advances on single-word frequency estimates have helped to uncover novel language-related cognitive processes, fostering new ideas and studies. In an attempt to support and promote research on a related emerging topic, visual multi-word recognition, we extracted from the exhaustive Google Ngram datasets a selection of millions of multi-word sequences and computed their associated frequency estimate. Such sequences are presented with part-of-speech information for each individual word. An online behavioral investigation making use of the French 4-gram lexicon in a grammatical decision task was carried out. The results show an item-level frequency effect of word sequences. Moreover, the proposed datasets were found useful during the stimulus selection phase, allowing more precise control of the multi-word characteristics.

The Chinese Lexicon Project II: A megastudy of speeded naming performance for 25,000+ traditional Chinese two-character words

Using a megastudy approach, (Tse et al., 2017 Behavior Research Methods, 49, 1503-1519) established a large-scale repository of lexical variables and lexical decision responses for more than 25,000 traditional Chinese two-character words. In the current study, we expand their database by collecting norms for speeded naming reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates, and compiling more lexical variables (e.g., phonological consistency and semantic neighborhood size). Following Tse et al.'s procedure, about 33 college-aged native Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong read aloud each word. We conducted item-level regression analyses to test the relative predictive power of orthographic variables (e.g., stroke count), phonological variables (e.g., phonological consistency), and semantic variables (e.g., semantic transparency) in naming performance. We also compared the effects of lexical variables on naming performance and Tse et al.'s lexical decision performance to examine the extent to which effects are task-specific or task-general. Freely accessible to the research community, this resource provides a valuable addition to other influential mega-databases, such as the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2004 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283-316), and furthers our understanding of Chinese word recognition processes.

Word-association norms for 1,100 French words with varying levels of concreteness

The organisation of concepts in the mental lexicon is a widely studied research topic in experimental psychology. For instance, several studies have shown that whereas concrete concepts are organised according to semantic similarity, abstract concepts are organised according to verbal association. However, these results are not systematically replicated, mainly due to a lack of normative database especially in French. To that end, we introduce a French word-association database for 1,100 cues with varying levels of concreteness from abstract to concrete concepts. Analyses from the word-association task revealed stronger association strength for concrete concepts compared with abstract concepts. Additional results showed that cues tend to elicit responses of a similar level of concreteness. The database will be useful for investigators interested in French verbal associations for abstract and concrete concepts. The data (available on OSF https://osf.io/dhuqs/) introduce responses organised according to association strength and provides cue concreteness.

Behavioral and brain responses to verbal stimuli reveal transient periods of cognitive integration of the external world during sleep

Sleep has long been considered as a state of behavioral disconnection from the environment, without reactivity to external stimuli. Here we questioned this 'sleep disconnection' dogma by directly investigating behavioral responsiveness in 49 napping participants (27 with narcolepsy and 22 healthy volunteers) engaged in a lexical decision task. Participants were instructed to frown or smile depending on the stimulus type. We found accurate behavioral responses, visible via contractions of the corrugator or zygomatic muscles, in most sleep stages in both groups (except slow-wave sleep in healthy volunteers). Across sleep stages, responses occurred more frequently when stimuli were presented during high cognitive states than during low cognitive states, as indexed by prestimulus electroencephalography. Our findings suggest that transient windows of reactivity to external stimuli exist during bona fide sleep, even in healthy individuals. Such windows of reactivity could pave the way for real-time communication with sleepers to probe sleep-related mental and cognitive processes.

Hypnotic suggestion modulates visual recognition of negative words depending on word arousal

This study examined whether and how emotional hypnotic suggestions modulate the visual recognition of negative words. We investigated the influence of hypnotic suggestions aimed at modifying emotional reactivity on the arousal effect in negative words. High and low suggestible individuals performed a go/no-go lexical decision task in three intra-individual conditions: with a suggestion to increase emotional reactivity, with a suggestion to decrease emotional reactivity and without hypnotic suggestion. Results showed that hypnotic suggestions modulated the arousal facilitation effect differently depending on the level of suggestibility of the participants. In high suggestible individuals, response times for low-arousal negative words varied oppositely according to the suggestion administered, while no modulations were retrieved for high-arousal ones. In contrast, no suggestion effects were found for low suggestible participants. Altogether, these findings suggest a higher influence of hypnotic suggestions on emotional words that require longer processing times in high suggestible individuals.

Intelligent Modeling for In-Home Reading and Spelling Programs

Technology-based in-home reading and spelling programs have the potential to compensate for the lack of sufficient instructions provided at schools. However, the recent COVID-19 pandemic showed the immaturity of the existing remote teaching solutions. Consequently, many students did not receive the necessary instructions. This paper presents a model for developing intelligent reading and spelling programs. The proposed approach is based on an optimization model that includes artificial neural networks and linear regression to maximize the educational value of the pedagogical content. This model is personalized, tailored to the learning ability level of each user. Regression models were developed for estimating the lexical difficulty in the literacy tasks of auditory and visual lexical decision, word naming, and spelling. For building these regression models, 55 variables were extracted from French lexical databases that were used with the data from lexical mega-studies. Forward stepwise analysis was conducted to identify the top 10 most important variables for each lexical task. The results showed that the accuracy of the models (based on root mean square error) reached 88.13% for auditory lexical decision, 89.79% for visual lexical decision, 80.53% for spelling, and 83.86% for word naming. The analysis of the results showed that word frequency was a key predictor for all the tasks. For spelling, the number of irregular phoneme-graphemes was an important predictor. The auditory word recognition depended heavily on the number of phonemes and homophones, while visual word recognition depended on the number of homographs and syllables. Finally, the word length and the consistency of initial grapheme-phonemes were important for predicting the word-naming reaction times.

EXPRESS: When words collide: Bayesian meta-analyses of distractor and target properties in the picture-word interference paradigm

In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while ignoring a written or spoken distractor word. Naming times to the pictures are slowed down by the presence of the distractor word. The present study investigates in detail the impact of distractor and target word properties on picture naming times, building on the seminal study by Miozzo and Caramazza (2003) "When more is less: A counterintuitive effect of distractor frequency in the picture-word interference paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General." We report the results of several Bayesian meta-analyses, based on 26 datasets. These analyses provide estimates of effect sizes and their precision for several variables and their interactions. They show the reliability of the distractor frequency effect on picture naming latencies (latencies decrease as the frequency of the distractor increases) and demonstrate for the first time the impact of distractor length, with longer naming latencies for trials with longer distractors. Moreover, distractor frequency interacts with target word frequency to predict picture naming latencies. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Can we use the internet to study speech production? Yes we can! Evidence contrasting online versus laboratory naming latencies and errors

The closure of cognitive psychology labs around the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic has prevented in-person testing. This has caused a particular challenge for speech production researchers, as before the pandemic there were no studies demonstrating that reliable overt speech production data could be collected via the internet. Here, we present evidence that both accurate and reliable overt articulation data can be collected from internet-based speech production experiments. We tested 100 participants in a picture naming paradigm, where we manipulated the word and phonotactic frequency of the picture names. We compared our results to a lab-based study conducted on different participants which used the same materials and design. We found a significant word frequency effect but no phonotactic frequency effect, fully replicating the lab-based results. Effect sizes were similar between experiments, but with significantly longer latencies in the internet-collected data. We found no evidence that internet upload or download speed affected either naming latencies or errors. In addition, we carried out a permutation-style analysis which recommends a minimum sample size of 40 participants for online production paradigms. In sum, our study demonstrates that internet-based testing of speech production is a feasible and promising endeavour, with less challenges than many researchers (anecdotally) assumed.

Do both WRAP and TRAP inhibit the recognition of the French word DRAP? Impact of orthographic markedness on cross-language orthographic priming

We investigated lexical and sub-lexical orthographic coding in bilingual visual word recognition by examining interactions between orthographic neighbourhood and markedness. In three experiments, French/English bilinguals performed a masked lexical decision task in French (L1) in which orthographically related prime words could be either marked or unmarked English (L2) words, compared to unrelated primes (e.g., wrap, trap, gift-DRAP, meaning sheet). The results yielded an overall inhibition priming effect, which was unexpectedly more robust in the marked condition than in the unmarked one. This result highlights the need to integrate both lexical competition and orthographic markedness in bilingual models such as BIA/+ and determine how the latter may modulate lexical processing in bilinguals.

Shabd: A psycholinguistic database for Hindi

We present Shabd, a psycholinguistic database in Hindi. It is based on a corpus of 1.4 billion words from electronic newspapers and news websites. Word frequencies and part of speech information have been derived and are made available in a cleaned list of 34 thousand hand-selected words, and a list of 96 thousand words observed with a frequency of more than 100 times in the corpus. Next to the Shabd database, we also make a list with all 2.3 million word types available and a list with the 2.5 million most frequent word pairs (word bigrams). The quality of the word frequency measure was tested in two lexical decision tasks. We observed that the Shabd word frequencies outperform existing frequencies based on smaller corpora of newspapers but not the Worldlex word frequencies based on an analysis of blogs. We also observed that word frequency accounts for as much variance as contextual diversity (operationalized as the number of documents in which the words were observed). The Shabd database is freely available for research.

Psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words

Compounds are morphologically complex words made of different linguistic parts. They are very prevalent in a number of languages such as French. Different psycholinguistic characteristics of compounds have been used in certain studies to investigate the mechanisms involved in compound processing (see Table 7). We provide psycholinguistic norms for a set of 506 French compound words. The words were normed on seven characteristics: lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, sensory experience, conceptual familiarity, imageability, age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency. Reliability measures were computed for the collected norms. Descriptive statistical analyses, and correlational and multiple regression analyses were performed. We also report some comparisons made between our normative data and certain norms obtained in other similar studies. The entire set of norms, which will be very useful to researchers investigating the processing of compounds, is available as Supplemental Material.

The role of valence in word processing: Evidence from lexical decision and emotional Stroop tasks

It is widely accepted that the valence of a word (neutral, positive, or negative) influences lexical processing, yet data from the commonly used lexical decision and emotional Stroop tasks has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the direction of this influence. One critical obstacle to investigating the independent effects of valence is the matching of emotional and neutral stimuli on the lexical, sublexical, and conceptual characteristics known to influence word recognition. The second obstacle is that the cognitive processes which lead to a lexical decision and a colour naming response are unobservable from the response latency measures typically gathered. The present study compiled a set of neutral, positive, and negative words matched triplet-wise on 26 influential characteristics. The novel "mouse tracking" technique was used to analyse the development of responses to these materials in variants of the lexical decision and emotional Stroop task. A conventional key-press emotional Stroop task is also reported. Results revealed a significant processing advantage for positive words over negative and neutral words in the lexical decision task, whereas valence alone did not produce any significant effects in the emotional Stroop task. The discrepancy between the effects of valence across these different tasks is discussed. We also suggest that previous conflicting findings may be confounded by unmatched emotional and neutral stimuli, thus inflating the potential effects of valence.

Age-related evaluations of imageability and subjective frequency for 1286 neutral and emotional French words: ratings by young, middle-aged, and older adults

This study aimed at providing imageability and subjective frequency ratings collected from four adult age groups ranging from 18 to 85 years old (18-25; 26-39; 40-59; and 60 and over) for 1286 neutral and emotional French words available in the EMA database (Gobin et al., 2017). Overall, the older adults rated words as more (subjectively) frequent and more imageable than the younger adults. Furthermore, we examined the relationships between subjective frequency and imageability, as well as those with emotional variables (i.e., valence, arousal) already available for these words, for each age group. For all age groups, more subjective frequent words were more imageable. Emotional words were more imageable and more frequent. Arousal scores were lower for low- and high-imageability words, and higher for more subjective frequent words. The strength of these links between subjective frequency, imageability, and emotional ratings was found to decrease as a function of age. Finally, by using the lexical decision reaction times and accuracy rates of young adults from Megalex (Ferrand et al., 2018), imageability and subjective frequency across age were found to provide an additional contribution to visual word recognition performance as compared to objective lexical variables (i.e., number of letters, syllables, objective frequency, orthographic neighborhood). More importantly, subjective frequency and imageability ratings from the youngest group predicted reaction times and accuracy better than ratings from the oldest group. By providing new age-adapted word characteristics, this norm should be of great use to researchers in the field of cognitive aging who use word materials.

The Auditory English Lexicon Project: A multi-talker, multi-region psycholinguistic database of 10,170 spoken words and nonwords

The Auditory English Lexicon Project (AELP) is a multi-talker, multi-region psycholinguistic database of 10,170 spoken words and 10,170 spoken nonwords. Six tokens of each stimulus were recorded as 44.1-kHz, 16-bit, mono WAV files by native speakers of American, British, and Singapore English, with one from each gender. Intelligibility norms, as determined by average identification scores and confidence ratings from between 15 and 20 responses per token, were obtained from 561 participants. Auditory lexical decision accuracies and latencies, with between 25 and 36 responses per token, were obtained from 438 participants. The database also includes a variety of lexico-semantic variables and structural indices for the words and nonwords, as well as participants' individual difference measures such as age, gender, language background, and proficiency. Taken together, there are a total of 122,040 sound files and over 4 million behavioral data points in the AELP. We describe some of the characteristics of this database. This resource is freely available from a website ( https://inetapps.nus.edu.sg/aelp/ ) hosted by the Department of Psychology at the National University of Singapore.

N170 reflects orthographic uniqueness point effects in English among native Japanese and Korean readers

Orthographic uniqueness point (OUP) refers to the letter position of a word at which it is distinguishable from other lexical items in the language. Previous findings of OUP effects have been mixed and mainly demonstrated in native readers of alphabetic languages. The current study investigated whether OUP effects could be shown among non-native readers in a visual repetition detection task. The experiment tested three OUP conditions (early, mid, late) in native English readers and proficient non-native English readers whose native scripts were Japanese or Korean. Results revealed main effects of OUP on N170 amplitude, where early OUP words elicited more negative N170 and late OUP words elicited marginally less negative N170 than mean activation for both native and non-native readers. There was no indication that non-linearity or non-alphabetic nature of one's native script influenced OUP effects. Results were consistent with a parallel letter processing account in single word reading.

Recognition times for 62 thousand English words: Data from the English Crowdsourcing Project

We present a new dataset of English word recognition times for a total of 62 thousand words, called the English Crowdsourcing Project. The data were collected via an internet vocabulary test in which more than one million people participated. The present dataset is limited to native English speakers. Participants were asked to indicate which words they knew. Their response times were registered, although at no point were the participants asked to respond as quickly as possible. Still, the response times correlate around .75 with the response times of the English Lexicon Project for the shared words. Also, the results of virtual experiments indicate that the new response times are a valid addition to the English Lexicon Project. This not only means that we have useful response times for some 35 thousand extra words, but we now also have data on differences in response latencies as a function of education and age.

Semantic similarity and associated abstractness norms for 630 French word pairs

The representation of abstract concepts remains a challenge, justifying the need for further experimental investigation. To that end, we introduce a normative database for 630 semantically similar French word pairs and associated levels of abstractness for 1260 isolated words based on data from 900 subjects. The semantic similarity and abstractness norms were obtained in two studies using 7-point scales. The database is organised according to word-pair semantic similarity, abstractness, and associated lexical variables such as word length (in number of letters), word frequency, and other lexical variables to allow for matching of experimental material. The associated variables were obtained by cross-referencing our database with other known psycholinguistic databases including Lexique (New et al., 2004), the French Lexicon Project (Ferrand et al., 2010), Wordlex (Gimenes & New, 2016), and MEGALEX (Ferrand et al., 2018). We introduced sufficient diversity to allow researchers to select pairs with varying levels of semantic similarity and abstractness. In addition, it is possible to use these data as continuous or discrete variables. The full data are available in the supplementary materials as well as on OSF ( https://osf.io/qsd4v/ ).

On the time it takes to judge grammaticality

The presentation duration of five-word sequences was varied and participants were asked to judge their grammaticality. The five-word sequences were presented for a variable duration randomly selected between 50 and 500 ms with 50-ms steps and were immediately followed by a masking stimulus. Half of the sequences were correct sentences which were randomly intermixed with ungrammatical sequences formed of the same words in scrambled order. We measured the proportion of correct responses for each presentation duration in the grammatical and ungrammatical conditions, and calculated sensitivity and bias from these measures. Both the sensitivity measure ( d′) and the probability correct responses to grammatical and ungrammatical sequences increased as the stimulus duration increased, with a d′ of 2 and an average percent correct close to 87% for the grammatical sequences already attained at 300 ms. The rate of increase in performance diminished beyond 300 ms. Grammatical decision times were faster and more accurate for the grammatically correct sequences, thus indicating that participants were not responding by detecting illegal word combinations in the ungrammatical sequences. On the basis of these findings, we provide an upper estimate of 300 ms as the time it takes to access reliable syntactic information from five-word sequences in French, and we discuss the implications of this constraint for models of reading.

Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas

We present word prevalence data for 61,858 English words. Word prevalence refers to the number of people who know the word. The measure was obtained on the basis of an online crowdsourcing study involving over 220,000 people. Word prevalence data are useful for gauging the difficulty of words and, as such, for matching stimulus materials in experimental conditions or selecting stimulus materials for vocabulary tests. Word prevalence also predicts word processing times, over and above the effects of word frequency, word length, similarity to other words, and age of acquisition, in line with previous findings in the Dutch language.

Comparing length and frequency effects in children across modalities

Although it is well established that beginning readers rely heavily on phonological decoding, the overlap of the phonological pathways used in visual and auditory word recognition is not clear. Especially in transparent languages, phonological reading could use the same pathways as spoken word processing. In the present study, we report a direct comparison of lexical decision performance in the visual and auditory modality in beginning readers of a transparent language. Using lexical decision, we examine how marker effects of length and frequency differ in the two modalities and how these differences are modulated by reading ability. The results show that both frequency and length effects are stronger in the visual modality, and the differences in length effects between modalities are more pronounced for poorer readers than for better readers. This suggests that visual word recognition in beginning readers of a transparent language initially is based on phonological decoding and subsequent matching in the phonological lexicon, especially for poor readers. However, some orthographic processing seems to be involved already. We claim that the relative contribution of the phonological and orthographic route in beginning readers can be measured by the differences in marker effects between auditory and visual lexical decision.

An electrophysiological megastudy of spoken word recognition

This study used electrophysiological recordings to a large sample of spoken words to track the time-course of word frequency, phonological neighbourhood density, concreteness and stimulus duration effects in two experiments. Fifty subjects were presented more than a thousand spoken words during either a go/no go lexical decision task (Experiment 1) or a go/no go semantic categorisation task (Experiment 2) while EEG was collected. Linear mixed effects modelling was used to analyze the data. Effects of word frequency were found on the N400 and also as early as 100 ms in Experiment 1 but not Experiment 2. Phonological neighbourhood density produced an early effect around 250 ms and the typical N400 effect. Concreteness elicited effects in later epochs on the N400. Stimulus duration affected all epochs and its influence reflected changes in the timing of the ERP components. Overall the results support cascaded interactive models of spoken word recognition.