Biomedical subjects

Kyrana Tsapkini

Publications and source records attributed to Kyrana Tsapkini.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Lexical processing in illiteracy: effect of literacy or education?

Difficulties in phonological processing in illiterates have been attributed to their limited phonological awareness, a consequence of their lack of literacy. We sought to explore the potential influence of education on auditory lexical processing above and beyond literacy per se. In order to achieve this goal, we compared a lexical decision making paradigm with a repetition paradigm using words and pseudo-words. We based this choice of tasks on previous research, which has shown that pseudo-word repetition is dependent on the phonological loop; such studies have thus demonstrated a literacy effect on repetition. Instead, lexical decision making is known to depend on the size of one's vocabulary, which is influenced by the level of education attained. Our sample comprised three groups: illiterate no education, literate/low education and literate/high education, individuals. The pattern of our findings confirmed that literacy has an effect on the capacity of the phonological loop, as our illiterate group alone had difficulty with repetition, as compared with both literate/educated groups. Also, our findings suggested an education effect on lexical decision making, as we found a gradation in the performance of the three groups. Therefore, we succeeded in dissecting the effect of literacy and education on auditory lexical processing through the application and comparison of two simple paradigms.

Aged↗

PubMed2004

Regularity re-revisited: modality matters.

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical decision experiments (Tsapkini, Kehayia, & Harema, 2002) that also addressed the regular-irregular distinction in Greek. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of input modality in lexical processing and compared different types of regular and irregular verbs. In contrast to our previous intra-modal (visual-visual) priming experiments, in this cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming study, we found that regular verbs with an orthographically salient morphemic aspectual marker elicited the same facilitation as those without an orthographically salient marker. However, irregular verbs did not exhibit a different priming pattern with respect to modality. We interpret these results in the framework of a two-level lexical processing approach with modality-specific access representations at a surface level and modality-independent morphemic representations at a deeper level.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2004

Semantic and phonological processing in illiteracy.

Researchers of cognitive processing in illiteracy have proposed that the acquisition of literacy modifies the functional organization of the brain. They have suggested that, while illiterate individuals have access only to innate semantic processing skills, those who have learned the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes have several mechanisms available to them through which to process oral language. We conducted 2 experiments to verify that suggestion with respect to language processing, and to elucidate further the differences between literate and illiterate individuals in the cognitive strategies used to process oral language, as well as hemispheric specialization for these processes. Our findings suggest that semantic processing strategies are qualitatively the same in literates and illiterates, despite the fact that overall performance is augmented by increased education. In contrast, explicit processing of oral information based on phonological characteristics appears to be qualitatively different between literates and illiterates: effective strategies in the processing of phonological information depend upon having had a formal education, regardless of the level of education. We also confirmed the differential abilities needed for the processing of semantic and phonological information and related them to hemisphere-specific processing.

Aged↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Regularity revisited: evidence from lexical access of verbs and nouns in Greek.

The present study investigates the relationship between morphological regularity and form during lexical processing using a visual priming paradigm varying the prime duration. We addressed the effect of regularity on morphological facilitation in nouns and verbs by exploiting particular characteristics of a highly inflected language, Greek, in which it is possible to manipulate morphological regularity while controlling the degree of orthographic overlap between morphological relatives. The effects of morphological regularity were found to crucially depend on the time course of lexical access. Moreover, morphological regularity was found to affect nouns and verbs differentially. We interpret these findings with respect to the distinction between affix processing and allomorph retrieval and discuss the issues of form overlap and orthographic boundaries in morphological processing.

Cognition↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The role of configurational asymmetry in the lexical access of prefixed verbs: evidence from French.

In this paper we investigated the effects of configurational asymmetry in prefixed verbs in French. We used a simple lexical decision paradigm to compare prefixed verbs with external and internal prefixes as specified in linguistic theory (Di Sciullo, 1997) where external prefixes do not change the aktionsart and the verb argument structure of the verb, but internal prefixes do change the aktionsart and may change the verb argument structure of the verb. In Experiment 1 we tested the bi-valent prefix dé- where the configurational difference between external and internal properties of a prefix did not elicit differential response latencies. However, in Experiment 2, where unambiguous prefixes (internal en- and external ré-) were tested, the external prefix elicited longer latencies. These results are discussed with respect to the linguistic constraints the configurational properties of prefixes place upon psycholinguistic models of lexical access, as well as with respect to the effects of prefix bi-valence in the recognition of prefixed verbs.

Decision Making↗