Electrophysiological evidence of lexical processing impacted by foreign language reading anxiety

Extensive studies have been conducted on the impact of foreign language reading anxiety on reading, primarily focusing on pedagogy and behavior but lacking electrophysiological evidence. The current study aimed to investigate the influence of foreign language reading anxiety on reading and its underlying mechanisms. The results revealed a negative correlation between foreign language reading anxiety and foreign language reading performance, irrespective of the native language. Adults with low levels of foreign language reading anxiety (LFLRA) demonstrated a significant difference in early lexical component N170 amplitude between foreign and native languages. However, this effect was not observed in adults with high levels of foreign language reading anxiety (HFLRA). In terms of N170 latency, HFLRA showed a longer N170 for the foreign language compared to the native language. Furthermore, the N170 effects were predominantly localized over the left occipitotemporal electrodes. Regarding N400 latency, a significant difference was found in LFLRA individuals between foreign and native language processing, while HFLRA individuals did not exhibit this difference. These findings suggest that HFLRA individuals experience inefficient lexical processing (such as orthography or semantics) during reading in foreign language.

Processing difficulty while reading words with neighbors is not due to increased foveal load: Evidence from eye movements

Words with high orthographic relatedness are termed "word neighbors" (angle/angel; birch/birth). Activation-based models of word recognition assume that lateral inhibition occurs between words and their activated neighbors. However, studies of eye movements during reading have not found inhibitory effects in early measures assumed to reflect lexical access (e.g., gaze duration). Instead, inhibition in eye-movement studies has been found in later measures of processing (e.g., total time, regressions in). We conducted an eye-movement boundary change study (Rayner, Cognitive Psychology, 7(1), 65-81, 1975) that manipulated the parafoveal preview of the word following the neighbor word (word N+1). In this way, we explored whether the late inhibitory effects seen with transposed letter words and words with higher-frequency neighbors result from reduced parafoveal preview due to increased foveal load and/or interference during late stages of lexical processing (the L2 stage within the E-Z Reader framework). For word N+1, while there were clear preview effects, there was not an effect of the neighborhood status of word N, nor a significant interaction. This suggests that the late inhibitory effects of earlier eye-movement studies are driven by misidentification of neighbor words rather than being due to increased foveal load.

Unseen but influential associates: Properties of words' associates influence lexical and semantic processing

In many models of lexical and semantic processing, it is assumed that single word processing is a function of the characteristics of the words presented and the distributional properties of the words' networks. Recent research suggests that semantic characteristics of a target word's associates may in fact influence target-word responses in lexical-semantic tasks. The present study extends that previous research to examine whether lexical and semantic properties of target-word associates are recruited during lexical and semantic decision tasks, and whether the type of associate information recruited varies as a function of task and concreteness of the target word. We found that lexical-semantic properties of words' first associates are related to accuracy of responses to words in lexical decision, and that semantic properties of words' first associates are related to both response time and accuracy in semantic decision. Further, these effects differ depending on the target word's concreteness. These findings provide new insight about the way words' associates contribute to semantic representation and processing, even though the associates are not actually presented, moving beyond previous assumptions about lexical-semantic processing of single words.

Überachiever or Developerin: Eye movements during the processing of translingual hybrid noun-formations

This eye tracking experiment tests how the brain recognizes and processes hybrid German-English word-formations and how this process compares to monolingual items. Thirty bilingual German-English adults from the Oxford area (23 females; mean age = 28.0, SD = 9.3) who were familiar with the meaning and underlying structure of the individual components had no comprehension difficulties. After fitting linear mixed effects models (95 % CI), the results showed an effect of word length and previous exposure to hybrid forms on processing times, indicated by longer fixation times and increased regressions, particularly in later stages of lexical processing. This indicates that bilingual readers have no trouble recognizing hybrid words, but may have difficulty with semantic and syntactic integration due to lack of exposure.

The phonological congruency modulated long-term form priming of Chinese characters

Elucidating the interaction between lexical processing and word learning is essential for a complete understanding of the underlying mechanisms of each of them. Long-term priming for words reflects an interplay between lexical processing and word learning. Although robust long-term priming effects have been found between two occurrences of the same word and between semantically similar words, it remains unclear whether long-term priming between orthographically similar words (i.e., long-term form priming) is a reliable effect. Following the theoretical analysis based on the connectionist framework, we articulated the possibility that long-term form priming might be modulated by the phonological congruency between the prime and target words, and that if this modulator was under control, reliable effects of long-term form priming would emerge. However, this hypothesis has not been adequately tested empirically. The present study tested this hypothesis by using Chinese phonograms and the phonetic radicals embedded in them as the prime and target items. In three experiments that varied in the types of stimuli and testing tasks, we consistently found that when the prime and target had the same phonology, naming the prime facilitated later processing of the target, while when they had different phonologies, the priming effect was inhibitory. These observations were consistent with the connectionist account of long-term priming for words. Our findings help confirm the reliability, generalizability, and robustness of long-term form priming and elucidate its underlying mechanisms, and suggesting promising future directions on the interactions between lexical processing and word learning.

The N400 is Elicited by Meaning Changes but not Synonym Substitutions: Evidence From Persian Phrasal Verbs

We tested two accounts of the cognitive process underlying the N400 event-related potential component: one that it reflects meaning-based processing and one that it reflects the processing of specific words. The experimental design utilized separable Persian phrasal verbs, which form a strongly probabilistic, long-distance dependency, ideal for the study of probabilistic processing. In sentences strongly constraining for a particular continuation, we show evidence that between two low-probability words, only the word that changed the expected meaning of the sentence increased N400 amplitude, while a synonym of the most probable target word did not. The findings support an account of the N400 in which its underlying process is driven by the processing of meaning rather than of specific words.

Peekbank: An open, large-scale repository for developmental eye-tracking data of children's word recognition

The ability to rapidly recognize words and link them to referents is central to children's early language development. This ability, often called word recognition in the developmental literature, is typically studied in the looking-while-listening paradigm, which measures infants' fixation on a target object (vs. a distractor) after hearing a target label. We present a large-scale, open database of infant and toddler eye-tracking data from looking-while-listening tasks. The goal of this effort is to address theoretical and methodological challenges in measuring vocabulary development. We first present how we created the database, its features and structure, and associated tools for processing and accessing infant eye-tracking datasets. Using these tools, we then work through two illustrative examples to show how researchers can use Peekbank to interrogate theoretical and methodological questions about children's developing word recognition ability.

Relative Contributions of Social, Contextual, and Lexical Factors in Speech Processing

This exploratory study examined the simultaneous interactions and relative contributions of bottom-up social information (regional dialect, speaking style), top-down contextual information (semantic predictability), and the internal dynamics of the lexicon (neighborhood density, lexical frequency) to lexical access and word recognition. Cross-modal matching and intelligibility in noise tasks were conducted with a community sample of adults at a local science museum. Each task featured one condition in which keywords were presented in isolation and one condition in which they were presented within a multiword phrase. Lexical processing was slower and more accurate when keywords were presented in their phrasal context, and was both faster and more accurate for auditory stimuli produced in the local Midland dialect. In both tasks, interactions were observed among stimulus dialect, speaking style, semantic predictability, phonological neighborhood density, and lexical frequency. These interactions revealed that bottom-up social information and top-down contextual information contribute more to speech processing than the internal dynamics of the lexicon. Moreover, the relatively stronger bottom-up social effects were observed in both the isolated word and multiword phrase conditions, suggesting that social variation is central to speech processing, even in non-interactive laboratory tasks. At the same time, the specific interactions observed differed between the two experiments, reflecting task-specific demands related to processing time constraints and signal degradation.

Visual event-related potentials reveal the early whole-word lexical processing of Chinese two-character words

Morphologically complex words are common across different languages, especially in Chinese, because more than 90% of common modern Chinese words are complex words. Many behavioral studies have suggested the whole-word processing of Chinese complex words, but the neural correlates of whole-word processing remain unclear. Previous electrophysiological studies revealed automatic and early (∼250 ms) access to the orthographic forms of monomorphic words in the ventral occipitotemporal area. In this study, we investigated whether there is also automatic and early orthographic recognition of Chinese complex words (as whole units) by recording event-related potentials (ERPs). A total of 150 two-character words and 150 two-character pseudowords composed of the same 300 characters (morphemes) were pseudorandomly presented to proficient Chinese readers. Participants were required to determine the color of each stimulus in the color decision task and to determine whether each stimulus was a word in the lexical decision task. The two constituent characters of each stimulus were horizontally arranged in Experiment 1 and vertically arranged in Experiment 2. The results revealed a significant early ERP difference between words and pseudowords approximately 250-300 ms after stimulus onset in the parieto-occipital scalp region. The early ERP difference was more prominent in the color decision task than in the lexical decision task, more prominent in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, and more prominent in the left parieto-occipital scalp region than in the right. Source analysis results showed that the early ERP difference originated from the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These results reflected early and automatic access to whole-word orthographic representations of Chinese complex words in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex.

Do individual differences in lexical reliance reflect states or traits?

Research suggests that individuals differ in the degree to which they rely on lexical information to support speech perception. However, the locus of these differences is not yet known; nor is it known whether these individual differences reflect a context-dependent "state" or a stable listener "trait." Here we test the hypothesis that individual differences in lexical reliance are a stable trait that is linked to individuals' relative weighting of lexical and acoustic-phonetic information for speech perception. At each of two sessions, listeners (n = 73) completed a Ganong task, a phonemic restoration task, and a locally time-reversed speech task - three tasks that have been used to demonstrate a lexical influence on speech perception. Robust lexical effects on speech perception were observed for each task in the aggregate. Individual differences in lexical reliance were stable across sessions; however, relationships among the three tasks in each session were weak. For the Ganong and locally time-reversed speech tasks, increased reliance on lexical information was associated with weaker reliance on acoustic-phonetic information. Collectively, these results (1) provide some evidence to suggest that individual differences in lexical reliance for a given task are a stable reflection of the relative weighting of acoustic-phonetic and lexical cues for speech perception in that task, and (2) highlight the need for a better understanding of the psychometric characteristics of tasks used in the psycholinguistic domain to build theories that can accommodate individual differences in mapping speech to meaning.

Social context effects on emotional language: The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional evaluation of words

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered our routines, our conversations, the specific social contexts in which we hear or use certain words, and potentially, the representation of the words related to the disease and its consequences. Here we investigated whether the effects of the pandemic have changed the representation of the affective features of COVID-19-related words. To this aim, we collected new ratings of valence (from unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (from calm to activated) dimensions for COVID-19-related words (e.g., hospital) and COVID-19-unrelated words (e.g., whale). Subsequently, we compared these scores with those from databases that reported ratings for the same pool of words before the pandemic. Our results showed significant changes in arousal for COVID-19-related words but not unrelated words, thus revealing that the pandemic social context modified their affective representation. These findings support the flexibility of emotional representations and the malleability and dynamicity of the mental lexicon as a function of contextual factors.

Eye tracking based assessment of lexical processing and early lexical development in very preterm children

BACKGROUND

Associations between lexical processing and lexical development during the second year of life have been little studied in preterm children.

AIMS

To evaluate associations between lexical processing at 18 months and lexical development between 12 and 18 months in very preterm children.

STUDY DESIGN

Correlational study.

SUBJECTS

25 Finnish-speaking children born <32 gestational weeks.

OUTCOME MEASURES

Lexical processing (reaction time RT; correct looking time CLT) was measured with an eye tracking technology-based task at 18 months' corrected age. Lexical development was measured longitudinally at 12-, 15- and 18-months' corrected age using the following screening instruments: the short form version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories and the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scale: Infant-Toddler Checklist.

RESULTS

The longer the RT of the child, the weaker expressive skills the child had at 12 and 15 months (correlations coefficient values -0.45 to -0.51). The more the child looked at the target image compared to the distractor (CLT), the stronger expressive skills the child had at 18 months (r = 0.45-0.52). A linear regression model with RT and gender as independent variables explained 33 % of the variance in lexical skills at 18 months. A model with CLT explained 40 % of expressive skills at 18 months.

CONCLUSIONS

Lexical processing at 18 months was associated with expressive lexical development in very preterm children. The results suggest eye tracking technology based methods may have utility in the assessment of early lexical growth in preterm children, although further research is needed to assess psychometric properties and predictive value of the method.

Visual event-related potentials reveal the early lexical processing of Chinese characters

Logographic scripts such as Chinese differ markedly from alphabetic scripts. The time-course of the lexical processing of alphabetic words was widely studied by recording event-related potentials (ERPs), and the results indicated that alphabetic words are rapidly and automatically processed. This study investigated whether there is also rapid and automatic lexical processing of Chinese characters by recording ERPs. High-frequency (HF) characters and orthographically similar low-frequency (LF) characters were pseudo-randomly presented to proficient Chinese readers. The color of half of the characters was blue and the color of the other half was black. In the color decision task, participants were asked to determine the color of each character. In the lexical recognition task, participants were asked to report whether s/he knew each character (the LF characters in this study were very rare characters which were usually not recognized by proficient Chinese readers). In both tasks, the N170 elicited by HF characters peaked earlier than the N170 elicited by LF characters in the right parieto-occipital area (PO8), and the ERPs to HF characters diverged from the ERPs to LF characters around 210-222 ms after the stimulus onset. These results reflected the rapid and automatic lexical processing of Chinese characters. Source analysis results suggested that the left and the right occipitotemporal cortices and the right visual cortex were the neural origins of the early lexical processing of Chinese characters, and the peak activation was in the right visual cortex.

Simultaneously recorded subthalamic and cortical LFPs reveal different lexicality effects during reading aloud

Many language functions are traditionally assigned to cortical brain areas, leaving the contributions of subcortical structures to language processing largely unspecified. The present study examines a potential role of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in lexical processing, specifically, reading aloud of words (e.g., 'fate') and pseudowords (e.g., 'fape'). We recorded local field potentials simultaneously from the STN and the cortex (precentral, postcentral, and superior temporal gyri) of 13 people with Parkinson's disease undergoing awake deep brain stimulation and compared STN's lexicality-related neural activity with that of the cortex. Both STN and cortical activity demonstrated significant task-related modulations, but the lexicality effects were different in the two brain structures. In the STN, an increase in gamma band activity (31-70 Hz) was present in pseudoword trials compared to word trials during subjects' spoken response. In the cortex, a greater decrease in beta band activity (12-30 Hz) was observed for pseudowords in the precentral gyrus. Additionally, 11 individual cortical sites showed lexicality effects with varying temporal and topographic characteristics in the alpha and beta frequency bands. These findings suggest that the STN and the sampled cortical regions are involved differently in the processing of lexical distinctions.

Morpheme Transposition of Two-Character Chinese Words in Vertical Visual Fields

The present study explored the morpheme transposition process of two-character Chinese words in the upper and lower visual fields by adopting a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation paradigm. The results showed that the identification accuracy of canonical words was better in the lower visual field, whereas the accuracy of transposed words was almost identical in the upper and lower visual fields. Furthermore, there was no significant difference between canonical and transposed words at 0°, 2°, 4°, and 6° eccentricities in the upper visual field. However, the accuracy of canonical words was markedly higher than that of transposed words at 2°, 4°, and 6° eccentricities in the lower visual field. Finally, the character order errors mainly occurred at 0°eccentricity with a duration of 100 ms in vertical visual fields. These findings, taken together, indicated that the character transposition affected the lexical process of two-character Chinese words in the lower visual field but not in the upper visual field, and the character order of words was more likely to be reversed at 0° eccentricity and the initial stage of visual word processing in vertical reading.

Predictability eliminates neighborhood effects during Chinese sentence reading

Previous research has demonstrated effects of both orthographic neighborhood size and neighbor frequency in word recognition in Chinese. A large neighborhood-where neighborhood size is defined by the number of words that differ from a target word by a single character-appears to facilitate word recognition, while the presence of a higher-frequency neighbor has an inhibitory effect. The present study investigated modulation of these effects by a word's predictability in context. In two eye-movement experiments, the predictability of a target word in each sentence was manipulated. Target words differed in their neighborhood size (Experiment 1) and in whether they had a higher-frequency neighbor (Experiment 2). The study replicated the previously observed effects of neighborhood size and neighbor frequency when the target word was unpredictable, but in both experiments neighborhood effects were absent when the target was predictable. These results suggest that when a word is preactivated by context, the activation of its neighbors may be diminished to such an extent that these neighbors do not effectively compete for selection.

Aging affects steaks more than knives: Evidence that the processing of words related to motor skills is relatively spared in aging

Lexical-processing declines are a hallmark of aging. However, the extent of these declines may vary as a function of different factors. Motivated by findings from neurodegenerative diseases and healthy aging, we tested whether 'motor-relatedness' (the degree to which words are associated with particular human body movements) might moderate such declines. We investigated this question by examining data from three experiments. The experiments were carried out in different languages (Dutch, German, English) using different tasks (lexical decision, picture naming), and probed verbs and nouns, in all cases controlling for potentially confounding variables (e.g., frequency, age-of-acquisition, imageability). Whereas 'non-motor words' (e.g., steak) showed age-related performance decreases in all three experiments, 'motor words' (e.g., knife) yielded either smaller decreases (in one experiment) or no decreases (in two experiments). The findings suggest that motor-relatedness can attenuate or even prevent age-related lexical declines, perhaps due to the relative sparing of neural circuitry underlying such words.

Objective ages of acquisition for 3300+ simplified Chinese characters

We report the construction of two age-of-acquisition (AoA) norms for 3300+ characters in simplified Chinese, which make up about 99% of the texts used in daily life. We determined a character's AoA according to the time in which the character is formally learned in two sets of leading textbooks of Chinese in compulsory education, published respectively on the basis of the 2001 and 2011 national curriculum. Apart from having a significantly larger coverage of characters than previous norms, the current norms also outperformed them in explaining accuracy and reaction times in four large-scale databases for character decision, character naming, or character handwriting, even after controlling for the effects of frequency, number of meanings, and number of strokes. The explanatory advantage of the current norms suggests that, compared to earlier norms, the current norms capture more up-to-date character AoAs; these findings also highlight the diachronic nature of some lexical variables such as AoA and frequency. The developed objective AoA norms can be used for subsequent research on Chinese character recognition or production.

Cumulative semantic cost without successful naming

Accessing semantic information has negative consequences for successive recovering attempts of similar information. For instance, in the course of picture-naming tasks, the time required to name an object is determined by the total number of items from the same category that have already been named; naming latencies increase proportionally to the total number of semantically related words named previously. This phenomenon is called cumulative semantic cost (or interference). Two picture-naming experiments with children (4–11 years old, 229 participants) investigate whether having successfully named the previous within-category items is a necessary condition for the cumulative semantic cost to appear. We anticipated that younger children would have a larger rate of nonresponses compared with older children, reflecting the fact that younger children have not yet consolidated many lexical representations. Our results confirmed this prediction. Critically, we also observed that cumulative semantic cost was independent of having successfully retrieved previous within-category lexical items. Furthermore, picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a nonresponse showed the same amount of cost as those picture trials for which the previous within-category item elicited a correct naming event. Our findings indicate that it is the attempt to retrieve a lexical unit, and not the successful retrieval of a specific lexical unit, that causes semantic cost in picture naming. This cost can be explained by a mechanism of weakening the semantic-to-lexical mappings of semantic coordinate words. The findings are also discussed in the context of retrieval-induced forgetting effects in memory recall research.

Re-Examining the Effect of Top-Down Linguistic Information on Speaker-Voice Discrimination

The current study replicated and extended the results from a study conducted by Narayan, Mak, and Bialystok (2017) that found effects of top-down linguistic information on a speaker discrimination task by examining four conditions: rhymes (day-bay), compounds (day-dream), reverse compounds (dream-day), and unrelated words (day-bee). The original study found that participants were more likely to judge two words to be spoken by the same speaker if the words cohered lexically (created lexical compounds such as day-dream) or were phonologically related (rhymes, such as day-bay), but their study contained two limitations: (a) Same- and different-speaker trials were analyzed separately, which obscures effects of response bias, and (b) cross-gender pairs were used in the different-speaker trials, potentially inflating performance. The current study addresses these limitations by including only within-gender trials and by examining sensitivity and bias using signal detection theory. Our results not only provide support of the original study but also provide clear evidence that listeners are biased to judge two words as being produced by the same person when they share either phonological information (rhymes) or lexical-semantic coherence (compounds). Thus, the current study provides an important modified replication of previous research.

Sense identification data: A dataset for lexical semantics

Sense Identification is a newly proposed task; in considering a pair of terms to assess their conceptual similarity, human raters are postulated to preliminarily select a sense pair. Senses involved in this pair are those actually subject to similarity rating. The sense identification task is searching for the sense selected during the similarity rating. The sense individuation task is important to investigate strategies and sense inventories underlying human lexical access and, moreover, it is a relevant complement to the semantic similarity task. Individuating which senses are involved in the similarity rating is also crucial in order to fully assess those ratings: if we have no idea of which two senses were retrieved, on which base can we assess the score expressing their semantic proximity? The Sense Identification Dataset (SID) dataset has been built to provide a common experimental ground to systems and approaches dealing with the sense identification task. It is the first dataset specifically designed for experimenting on the mentioned task. The SID dataset was created by manually annotating with sense identifiers the term pairs from an existing dataset, the SemEval-2017 Task 2 English dataset. The original dataset was originally conceived for experimenting on the semantic similarity task, and it contains a score expressing the human similarity rating for each term pair. For each such term pair we added a pair of annotated senses: in particular, senses were annotated such that they are compatible (explicative of) with the existing similarity ratings. The SID dataset contains BabelNet sense identifiers. This sense inventory is a broadly adopted 'naming convention' for word senses, and such identifiers can be easily mapped onto further resources such as WordNet and WikiData, thereby enabling further processing tasks and usages in the Natural Language Processing pipeline.

Lexical processing in sign language: A visual mismatch negativity study

Event-related potential studies of spoken and written language show the automatic access of auditory and visual words, as indexed by mismatch negativity (MMN) or visual MMN (vMMN). The present study examined whether the same automatic lexical processing occurs in a visual-gestural language, i.e., Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL). Using a classic visual oddball paradigm, deaf signers and hearing non-signers were presented with a sequence of static images representing HKSL lexical signs and non-signs. When compared with hearing non-signers, deaf signers exhibited an enhanced vMMN elicited by the lexical signs at around 230 ms, and a larger P1-N170 complex evoked by both lexical sign and non-sign standards at the parieto-occipital area in the early time window between 65 ms and 170 ms. These findings indicate that deaf signers implicitly process the lexical sign and that neural response differences between deaf signers and hearing non-signers occur at the early stage of sign processing.

Learning about things that never happened: A critique and refinement of the Rescorla-Wagner update rule when many outcomes are possible

A vector-based model of discriminative learning is presented. It is demonstrated to learn association strengths identical to the Rescorla-Wagner model under certain parameter settings (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972, Classical Conditioning II: Current Research and Theory, 2, 64-99). For other parameter settings, it approximates the association strengths learned by the Rescorla-Wagner model. I argue that the Rescorla-Wagner model has conceptual details that exclude it as an algorithmically plausible model of learning. The vector learning model, however, does not suffer from the same conceptual issues. Finally, we demonstrate that the vector learning model provides insight into how animals might learn the semantics of stimuli rather than just their associations. Results for simulations of language processing experiments are reported.

Lexical access versus lexical decision processes for auditory, visual, and audiovisual items: Insights from behavioral and neural measures

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between lexical access processes, and processes that are specifically related to making lexical decisions. In Experiment 1, participants performed a standard lexical decision task in which they had to respond as quickly and as accurately as possible to visual (written), auditory (spoken) and audiovisual (written + spoken) items. In Experiment 2, a different group of participants performed the same task but were required to make responses after a delay. Linear mixed effect models on reaction times and single trial Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) revealed that ERP lexicality effects started earlier in the visual than auditory modality, and that effects were driven by the written input in the audiovisual modality. More negative ERP amplitudes predicted slower reaction times in all modalities in both experiments. However, these predictive amplitudes were mainly observed within the window of the lexicality effect in Experiment 1 (the speeded task), and shifted to post-response-probe time windows in Experiment 2 (the delayed task). The lexicality effects lasted longer in Experiment 1 than in Experiment 2, and in the delayed task, we additionally observed a "re-instantiation" of the lexicality effect related to the delayed response. Delaying the response in an otherwise identical lexical decision task thus allowed us to separate lexical access processes from processes specific to lexical decision.

Task-specific signatures in the expert brain: Differential correlates of translation and reading in professional interpreters

Insights on the neurocognitive particularities of expert individuals have benefited from language studies on professional simultaneous interpreters (PSIs). Accruing research indicates that behavioral advantages in this population are restricted to those skills that are directly taxed during professional practice (e.g., translation as opposed to reading), but little is known about the neural signatures of such selective effects. To illuminate the issue, we recruited 17 PSIs and 15 non-interpreter bilinguals and compared behavioral and electrophysiological markers of word reading and translation from and into their native and non-native languages (L1 and L2, respectively). PSIs exhibited greater delta-theta (1-8 ​Hz) power across all tasks over varying topographies, but these were accompanied by faster performance only in the case of translation conditions. Moreover, neural differences in PSIs were most marked for L2-L1 translation (the dominant interpreting direction in their market), which exhibited maximally widespread modulations that selectively correlated with behavioral outcomes. Taken together, our results suggest that interpreting experience involves distinct neural signatures across reading and translation mechanisms, but that these are systematically related with processing efficiency only in domains that face elevated demands during everyday practice (i.e., L2-L1 translation). These findings can inform models of simultaneous interpreting, in particular, and expert cognitive processing, in general.

Individual Differences in Reading Speed are Linked to Variability in the Processing of Lexical and Contextual Information: Evidence from Single-trial Event-related Brain Potentials

In the current paper, we examined the effects of lexical (e.g. word frequency, orthographic neighborhood density) and contextual (e.g. word predictability in the form of cloze probability) features on single-trial event-related brain potentials in a self-paced reading paradigm. Critically, we examined whether individual differences in reading speed modulated single-trial effects on the N400, an ERP component linked to semantic memory access. Consistent with past work, we found that word frequency effects on the N400 were attenuated with increasing predictability. However, effects of orthographic neighborhood density were robust across all levels of predictability. Importantly, individual differences in reading speed moderated the influence of both frequency and predictability (but not orthographic neighborhood density) on the N400, such that slower readers showed reduced effects compared to faster readers. These data show that different lexical factors influence word processing through dissociable mechanisms. Our findings support a dynamic semantic-memory access model of the N400, in which information at multiple levels (lexical, sentential, individual) simultaneously contributes to the unfolding neural dynamics of comprehension.

Specificity of Phonological Representations for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

This study investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are sensitive to mispronunciations of familiar words and compared their sensitivity to children with typical-development. Sixty-four toddlers with ASD and 31 younger, typical controls participated in a looking-while-listening task that measured their accuracy in fixating the correct object when it was labelled with a correct pronunciation versus mispronunciation. A cognitive style that prioritizes processing local, rather than global features, as claimed by the weak central coherence theory, predicts that children with ASD should be more sensitive to mispronunciations than typical controls. The results, however, reveal no differences in the effect of mispronunciations on lexical processing between groups, even when matched for receptive language or non-verbal cognitive skills.

Does speed of processing or vocabulary size predict later language growth in toddlers?

It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that children acquire cognitive representations depends critically on how their processing system is developing. In particular, recent studies suggest that individual differences in language processing speed play an important role in explaining the speed with which children acquire language. Inconsistencies across studies, however, mean that it is not clear whether this relationship is causal or correlational, whether it is present right across development, or whether it extends beyond word learning to affect other aspects of language learning, like syntax acquisition. To address these issues, the current study used the looking-while-listening paradigm devised by Fernald, Swingley, and Pinto (2001) to test the speed with which a large longitudinal cohort of children (the Language 0-5 Project) processed language at 19, 25, and 31 months of age, and took multiple measures of vocabulary (UK-CDI, Lincoln CDI, CDI-III) and syntax (Lincoln CDI) between 8 and 37 months of age. Processing speed correlated with vocabulary size - though this relationship changed over time, and was observed only when there was variation in how well the items used in the looking-while-listening task were known. Fast processing speed was a positive predictor of subsequent vocabulary growth, but only for children with smaller vocabularies. Faster processing speed did, however, predict faster syntactic growth across the whole sample, even when controlling for concurrent vocabulary. The results indicate a relatively direct relationship between processing speed and syntactic development, but point to a more complex interaction between processing speed, vocabulary size and subsequent vocabulary growth.

The time course of age-of-acquisition effects on eye movements during reading: Evidence from survival analyses

Adults process words that are rated as being learned earlier in life faster than words that are rated as being acquired later in life. This age-of-acquisition (AoA) effect has been observed in a variety of word-recognition tasks when word frequency is controlled. AoA has also previously been found to influence fixation durations when words are embedded into sentences and eye movements are recorded. However, the time course of AoA effects during reading has been inconsistent across studies. The current study further explored the time course of AoA effects on distributions of first-fixation durations during reading. Early and late acquired words were embedded into matched neutral sentence frames. Participants read the sentences while their eye movements were recorded. AoA effects were observed in both early and late fixation duration measures, suggesting that AoA has an early and long-lasting effect on word-recognition processes during reading. Survival analysis revealed that the earliest discernable effect of AoA on distributions of first-fixation durations emerged beginning at 158 ms. This rapid influence of AoA was confirmed through the use of Vincentile plots, which demonstrated that the effect of AoA occurred early and was relatively consistent across the distribution of fixations. This pattern of results provides support for the direct lexical-control hypothesis, as well as the viewpoint that AoA may exert an influence at multiple loci within the mental lexicon.

Is the consonant bias specifically human? Long-Evans rats encode vowels better than consonants in words

In natural languages, vowels tend to convey structures (syntax, prosody) while consonants are more important lexically. The consonant bias, which is the tendency to rely more on consonants than on vowels to process words, is well attested in human adults and infants after the first year of life. Is the consonant bias based on evolutionarily ancient mechanisms, potentially present in other species? The current study investigated this issue in a species phylogenetically distant from humans: Long-Evans rats. During training, the animals were presented with four natural word-forms (e.g., mano, "hand"). We then compared their responses to novel words carrying either a consonant (pano) or a vowel change (meno). Results show that the animals were less disrupted by consonantal alterations than by vocalic alterations of words. That is, word recognition was more affected by the alteration of a vowel than a consonant. Together with previous findings in very young human infants, this reliance on vocalic information we observe in rats suggests that the emergence of the consonant bias may require a combination of vocal, cognitive and auditory skills that rodents do not seem to possess.

Statistical models of morphology predict eye-tracking measures during visual word recognition

We studied how statistical models of morphology that are built on different kinds of representational units, i.e., models emphasizing either holistic units or decomposition, perform in predicting human word recognition. More specifically, we studied the predictive power of such models at early vs. late stages of word recognition by using eye-tracking during two tasks. The tasks included a standard lexical decision task and a word recognition task that assumedly places less emphasis on postlexical reanalysis and decision processes. The lexical decision results showed good performance of Morfessor models based on the Minimum Description Length optimization principle. Models which segment words at some morpheme boundaries and keep other boundaries unsegmented performed well both at early and late stages of word recognition, supporting dual- or multiple-route cognitive models of morphological processing. Statistical models based on full forms fared better in late than early measures. The results of the second, multi-word recognition task showed that early and late stages of processing often involve accessing morphological constituents, with the exception of short complex words. Late stages of word recognition additionally involve predicting upcoming morphemes on the basis of previous ones in multimorphemic words. The statistical models based fully on whole words did not fare well in this task. Thus, we assume that the good performance of such models in global measures such as gaze durations or reaction times in lexical decision largely stems from postlexical reanalysis or decision processes. This finding highlights the importance of considering task demands in the study of morphological processing.

Sensitivity to emotion information in children's lexical processing

We tested predictions of multiple representation accounts of conceptual processing, including the proposal that emotion information may provide a bootstrapping mechanism for vocabulary acquisition. We investigated the influence of word valence on children's lexical processing, presenting 40 positive words, 40 neutral words, and 40 negative words in an auditory lexical decision task (ALDT), along with 120 nonwords. We tested 99 children across three age groups: 5, 6, or 7 years. There were no significant effects of valence on the ALDT responses of 5-year-old children. The 6-year-old children, however, were faster to respond to negative words than to neutral words and, for more abstract words, faster to respond to positive words than to neutral words. The 7-year-old children were faster for positive words than for neutral words, regardless of concreteness. As such, children showed sensitivity to word valence in lexical processing, at a younger age than had been established in previous research. In addition, children's language skills were related to their improved processing of more abstract neutral words between 6 and 7 years of age. These results are consistent with multimodal accounts of word meaning and lexical development.

Lexical Processing in Toddlers with ASD: Does Weak Central Coherence Play a Role?

This study investigated whether vocabulary delays in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) can be explained by a cognitive style that prioritizes processing of detailed, local features of input over global contextual integration-as claimed by the weak central coherence (WCC) theory. Thirty toddlers with ASD and 30 younger, cognition-matched typical controls participated in a looking-while-listening task that assessed whether perceptual or semantic similarities among named images disrupted word recognition relative to a neutral condition. Overlap of perceptual features invited local processing whereas semantic overlap invited global processing. With the possible exception of a subset of toddlers who had very low vocabulary skills, these results provide no evidence that WCC is characteristic of lexical processing in toddlers with ASD.

Assessing a continuum of lexical-semantic knowledge in the second year of life: A multimodal approach

Behavioral dissociations in young children's visual and haptic responses have been taken as evidence that word knowledge is not all-or-none but instead exists on a continuum from absence of knowledge, to partial knowledge, to robust knowledge. This longitudinal study tested a group of 16- to 18-month-olds, 6months after their initial visit, to replicate results of partial understanding as shown by visual-haptic dissociations and to determine whether partial knowledge of word-referent relations can be leveraged for future word recognition. Results show that, like 16-month-olds, 22-month-olds demonstrate behavioral dissociations exhibited by rapid visual reaction times to a named referent but incorrect haptic responses. Furthermore, results suggest that partial word knowledge at one time predicts the degree to which that word will be understood in the future.

Atypical audiovisual word processing in school-age children with a history of specific language impairment: an event-related potential study

Background

Visual speech cues influence different aspects of language acquisition. However, whether developmental language disorders may be associated with atypical processing of visual speech is unknown. In this study, we used behavioral and ERP measures to determine whether children with a history of SLI (H-SLI) differ from their age-matched typically developing (TD) peers in the ability to match auditory words with corresponding silent visual articulations.

Methods

Nineteen 7–13-year-old H-SLI children and 19 age-matched TD children participated in the study. Children first heard a word and then saw a speaker silently articulating a word. In half of trials, the articulated word matched the auditory word (congruent trials), while in another half, it did not (incongruent trials). Children specified whether the auditory and the articulated words matched. We examined ERPs elicited by the onset of visual stimuli (visual P1, N1, and P2) as well as ERPs elicited by the articulatory movements themselves—namely, N400 to incongruent articulations and late positive complex (LPC) to congruent articulations. We also examined whether ERP measures of visual speech processing could predict (1) children’s linguistic skills and (2) the use of visual speech cues when listening to speech-in-noise (SIN).

Results

H-SLI children were less accurate in matching auditory words with visual articulations. They had a significantly reduced P1 to the talker’s face and a smaller N400 to incongruent articulations. In contrast, congruent articulations elicited LPCs of similar amplitude in both groups of children. The P1 and N400 amplitude was significantly correlated with accuracy enhancement on the SIN task when seeing the talker’s face.

Conclusions

H-SLI children have poorly defined correspondences between speech sounds and visually observed articulatory movements that produce them.

Lexical factors in conceptual processes: The relationship between semantic representations and their corresponding phonological and orthographic lexical forms

To examine phonological and orthographic effects on semantic processing, the present study utilized a semantic task with nonverbal stimuli. In Experiment 1, Hebrew speakers were asked to decide whether 2 pictorial targets are semantically related or not. In Experiment 2, Hebrew speakers and non-Hebrew speakers were asked to rate the semantic relatedness of the same targets on a 5-point scale. Experiment 3 was identical to the first experiment except that the 2 pictures were presented simultaneously rather than sequentially. In all experiments, we compared responses to semantically unrelated pairs in 2 conditions: In the ambiguous condition, each pair represented 2 distinct meanings of an ambiguous Hebrew word. In the unambiguous condition, the first picture was replaced with an unambiguous control. To disentangle phonological and orthographic effects, three types of Hebrew ambiguous words were used: homonyms, homophones, and homographs. Ambiguous pairs were more difficult to be judged as semantically unrelated in comparison to their unambiguous controls. Moreover, while non-Hebrew speakers did not distinguish between the 2 lexical conditions, Hebrew speakers rated ambiguous pairs as significantly more related than their unambiguous controls. Importantly, in general, the ambiguity effect was stronger for homonyms, where both lexical forms are shared, than for either homophones or homographs, which are only phonologically or orthographically related. Thus, consistent with interactive "triangle" models, the results suggest that (a) conceptual-semantic representations automatically activate both their corresponding phonological and orthographic lexical forms, and (b) these lexical forms, once activated, may in turn affect semantic-conceptual processes via feedback connections.

Neural signatures of second language learning and control

Experience with multiple languages has unique effects on cortical structure and information processing. Differences in gray matter density and patterns of cortical activation are observed in lifelong bilinguals compared to monolinguals as a result of their experience managing interference across languages. Monolinguals who acquire a second language later in life begin to encounter the same type of linguistic interference as bilinguals, but with a different pre-existing language architecture. The current study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the beginning stages of second language acquisition and cross-linguistic interference in monolingual adults. We found that after English monolinguals learned novel Spanish vocabulary, English and Spanish auditory words led to distinct patterns of cortical activation, with greater recruitment of posterior parietal regions in response to English words and of left hippocampus in response to Spanish words. In addition, cross-linguistic interference from English influenced processing of newly-learned Spanish words, decreasing hippocampus activity. Results suggest that monolinguals may rely on different memory systems to process a newly-learned second language, and that the second language system is sensitive to native language interference.

An Analysis of the Time Course of Lexical Processing During Reading

Reingold, Reichle, Glaholt, and Sheridan (2012) reported a gaze-contingent eye-movement experiment in which survival-curve analyses were used to examine the effects of word frequency, the availability of parafoveal preview, and initial fixation location on the time course of lexical processing. The key results of these analyses suggest that lexical processing begins very rapidly (after approximately 120 ms) and is supported by substantial parafoveal processing (more than 100 ms). Because it is not immediately obvious that these results are congruent with the theoretical assumption that words are processed and identified in a strictly serial manner, we attempted to simulate the experiment using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control (Reichle, 2011). These simulations were largely consistent with the empirical results, suggesting that parafoveal processing does play an important functional role by allowing lexical processing to occur rapidly enough to mediate direct control over when the eyes move during reading.

The Involvement of Morphological Information in the Memorization of Chinese Compound Words: Evidence from Memory Errors

The processing of morphological information during Chinese word memorization was investigated in the present study. Participants were asked to study words presented to them on a computer screen in the studying phase and then judge whether presented words were old or new in the test phase. In addition to parent words (i.e. the words studied in the study phase), the test phase also included conjunction lures (constructed out of morphemes in the parent words) and new words (constructed out of entirely new morphemes). Three kinds of words (i.e. subordinate compounds, coordinative compounds, and single-morpheme words) were involved. In both two experiments, performance on lures worsened when both parent words and lures were coordinative compounds, compared to the condition when both were subordinate compounds. The different performance between compounds with different compounding structures in the test phase suggests the involvement of morphological information in the memorization of Chinese compound words. The spreading activation theory for memory and the interactive activation model for the processing of morphologically complex words were referred to for interpreting the results.

Phonological code retrieval during picture naming: Influence of consonant class

Investigations of the time course of various stages of lexical processing have indicated either early or late onset of brain activation for phonological code retrieval. The basis of the differential findings is unclear, but factors related to segmental phonology appear to be part of it. The purpose of the present study was to determine whether phonological encoding is influenced by consonant type. Undergraduate students were presented pictures of common and familiar objects to name. Each picture label had an initial liquid (/l/, /ɹ/) or a stop (/b/, /d/) consonant. Accuracy of picture naming was high and comparable for the two stimulus sets. However, words beginning with liquids elicited larger N2 ERP responses than did those with initial stops. Cluster permutation analysis indicated that the ERP responses elicited by words in the two stimulus sets differed between 293 ms and 371 ms post picture onset. These findings point to a late onset of phonological code retrieval. They have implications for segmental phonology and/or motor planning and execution of speech.

Lexical Processing in School-Age Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Children with Specific Language Impairment: The Role of Semantics

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and specific language impairment (SLI) often have immature lexical-semantic knowledge; however, the organization of lexical-semantic knowledge is poorly understood. This study examined lexical processing in school-age children with ASD, SLI, and typical development, who were matched on receptive vocabulary. Children completed a lexical decision task, involving words with high and low semantic network sizes and nonwords. Children also completed nonverbal updating and shifting tasks. Children responded more accurately to words from high than from low semantic networks; however, follow-up analyses identified weaker semantic network effects in the SLI group. Additionally, updating and shifting abilities predicted lexical processing, demonstrating similarity in the mechanisms which underlie semantic processing in children with ASD, SLI, and typical development.

Masked priming by misspellings: Word frequency moderates the effects of SOA and prime-target similarity

University students made lexical decisions to eight- or nine-letter words preceded by masked primes that were the target, an unrelated word, or a typical misspelling of the target. At a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of 47 ms, primes that were misspellings of the target produced a priming benefit for low-, medium-, and high-frequency words, even when the misspelled primes were changed to differ phonologically from their targets. At a longer SOA of 80 ms, misspelled primes facilitated lexical decisions only to medium- and low-frequency targets, and a phonological change attenuated the benefit for medium-frequency targets. The results indicate that orthographic similarity can be preserved over changes in letter position and word length, and that the priming effect of misspelled words at the shorter SOA is orthographically based. Orthographic-priming effects depend on the quality of the orthographic learning of the target word.

Word and line bisection in typical and impaired readers and a cross-language comparison

Observers exhibit larger leftward bias when bisecting words compared with lines. According to the Attentional Scaling Hypothesis, attempting to access lexical entries involves focusing attention on the initial letters of words to establish a cohort of potential matches with entries in the mental lexicon. We test this account by examining two predictions: (1) greater leftward bias for words should be evident in English readers in which the word beginning is on the left but not in Hebrew readers. (2) Dyslexics who have lexical impairments should show greater bias. Results reveal that word length modulated bisection bias differently for Hebrew and English readers, although the bias stays always leftward. Furthermore, dyslexics exhibited an exaggerated leftward bias than controls. We propose this effect arises from an interaction between reading and spatial attention rather than from the scaling of attention relative to the beginning of the word in the service of lexical access.

Revisiting the incremental effects of context on word processing: Evidence from single-word event-related brain potentials

The amplitude of the N400-an event-related potential (ERP) component linked to meaning processing and initial access to semantic memory-is inversely related to the incremental buildup of semantic context over the course of a sentence. We revisited the nature and scope of this incremental context effect, adopting a word-level linear mixed-effects modeling approach, with the goal of probing the continuous and incremental effects of semantic and syntactic context on multiple aspects of lexical processing during sentence comprehension (i.e., effects of word frequency and orthographic neighborhood). First, we replicated the classic word-position effect at the single-word level: Open-class words showed reductions in N400 amplitude with increasing word position in semantically congruent sentences only. Importantly, we found that accruing sentence context had separable influences on the effects of frequency and neighborhood on the N400. Word frequency effects were reduced with accumulating semantic context. However, orthographic neighborhood was unaffected by accumulating context, showing robust effects on the N400 across all words, even within congruent sentences. Additionally, we found that N400 amplitudes to closed-class words were reduced with incrementally constraining syntactic context in sentences that provided only syntactic constraints. Taken together, our findings indicate that modeling word-level variability in ERPs reveals mechanisms by which different sources of information simultaneously contribute to the unfolding neural dynamics of comprehension.

Interaction between phonological and semantic representations: time matters

Computational modeling and eye-tracking were used to investigate how phonological and semantic information interact to influence the time course of spoken word recognition. We extended our recent models (Chen & Mirman, 2012; Mirman, Britt, & Chen, 2013) to account for new evidence that competition among phonological neighbors influences activation of semantically related concepts during spoken word recognition (Apfelbaum, Blumstein, & McMurray, 2011). The model made a novel prediction: Semantic input modulates the effect of phonological neighbors on target word processing, producing an approximately inverted-U-shaped pattern with a high phonological density advantage at an intermediate level of semantic input-in contrast to the typical disadvantage for high phonological density words in spoken word recognition. This prediction was confirmed with a new analysis of the Apfelbaum et al. data and in a visual world paradigm experiment with preview duration serving as a manipulation of strength of semantic input. These results are consistent with our previous claim that strongly active neighbors produce net inhibitory effects and weakly active neighbors produce net facilitative effects.

Neural correlates of single word reading in bilingual children and adults

The present study compared the neural correlates of language processing in children and adult Spanish-English bilinguals. Participants were asked to perform a visual lexical processing task in both Spanish and English while being scanned with fMRI. Both children and adults recruited a similar network of left hemisphere "language" areas and showed similar proficiency profiles in Spanish. In terms of behavior, adults showed better language proficiency in English relative to children. Furthermore, neural activity in adults was observed in the bilateral MTG. Age-related differences were observed in Spanish in the right MTG. The current results confirm the presence of neural activity in a set of left hemisphere areas in both adult and child bilinguals when reading words in each language. They also reveal that differences in neural activity are not entirely driven by changes in language proficiency during visual word processing. This indicates that both skill development and age can play a role in brain activity seen across development.

Processing lexical ambiguity in sentential context: Eye-tracking data from brain-damaged and non-brain-damaged individuals

The purpose of the present study was to identify general and syndrome-specific deficits in the lexical processing of individuals with non-fluent and fluent aphasia compared to individuals without cognitive, neurological or language impairments. The time course of lexical access, as well as lexical selection and integration was studied using a visual-world paradigm in three groups of Russian speakers: 36 individuals in the control group, 15 individuals with non-fluent aphasia and eight individuals with fluent aphasia. Participants listened to temporarily ambiguous sentences wherein the context biased the interpretation of an ambiguous word toward one of its two meanings. In half of the experimental sentences, a reanalysis was needed upon encountering the disambiguating phrase. The effect of the length of the intervening material between the ambiguous word and the disambiguation point was additionally monitored. All groups of participants showed intact lexical access under slowed speech rate, but non-fluent participants experienced difficulties with timely activation of multiple referents. At later stages of lexical processing, they additionally demonstrated a specific impairment of reanalysis. The deficit in participants with fluent aphasia was not focalized at any specific stage of lexical processing. Rather, the breakdown of lexical processes in fluent aphasia was likely related to difficulties with the inhibition of irrelevant lexical activation, which is further supported by the finding that increased phonological distance between the ambiguous word and ambiguity resolution was influential to the offline performance in this group.

Effects of relative embodiment in lexical and semantic processing of verbs

Research examining semantic richness effects in visual word recognition has shown that multiple dimensions of meaning are activated in the process of word recognition (e.g., Yap et al., 2012). This research has, however, been limited to nouns. In the present research we extended the semantic richness approach to verb stimuli in order to investigate how verb meanings are represented. We characterized a dimension of relative embodiment for verbs, based on the bodily sense described by Borghi and Cimatti (2010), and collected ratings on that dimension for 687 English verbs. The relative embodiment ratings revealed that bodily experience was judged to be more important to the meanings of some verbs (e.g., dance, breathe) than to others (e.g., evaporate, expect). We then tested the effects of relative embodiment and imageability on verb processing in lexical decision (Experiment 1), action picture naming (Experiment 2), and syntactic classification (Experiment 3). In all three experiments results showed facilitatory effects of relative embodiment, but not imageability: latencies were faster for relatively more embodied verbs, even after several other lexical variables were controlled. The results suggest that relative embodiment is an important aspect of verb meaning, and that the semantic richness approach holds promise as a strategy for investigating other aspects of verb meaning.

Electrophysiological evidence for modulation of lexical processing after repetitive exposure to foreign phonotactic rules

In two experiments we investigate how repeated exposure to native and non-native phonotactic regularities alters the N400, an event-related potential related to lexico-semantic access. Participants underwent a Passive Listening (Experiment 1) or a Categorization Training (Experiment 2) for monosyllabic pseudowords over 3 days. During Passive Listening participants solely listened to the stimuli while for Categorization Training they learned to assign items to two arbitrary categories by feedback. Notably, this task did not rely on phonotactic regularities. Before training, N400 was larger for legal compared to illegal items. Over the 3-day exposure Passive Listening yielded a significant decrease in N400-amplitude for illegal pseudowords, however, this effect was abolished and partially inverted by the Categorization Training. We suggest the decrease in N400-amplitude indicates more efficient discrimination between native and non-native pseudowords since only the former are potential lexical candidates. On the contrary, Categorization Training introduces a 'protosemantic' context overriding prelexical selection processes.