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PubMed1991

Abnormal processing of affective words by psychopaths.

We tested the hypothesis that psychopathy is associated with abnormal processing of affective verbal material. Criminal psychopaths and nonpsychopaths, defined by the Psychopathy Checklist, performed a lexical decision task ("Is it a word or not?") while we recorded reaction time and event-related potentials in response to letter-strings consisting of affective and neutral words and pronounceable nonwords. On the assumption that they do not make efficient use of affective information, our primary prediction was that psychopaths would show less behavioral and event-related potential differentiation between affective and neutral words than would nonpsychopaths. The results were in accordance with this prediction. The lexical decisions of nonpsychopaths were significantly faster, and relevant event-related potential components were significantly larger, to affective words than to neutral words. In sharp contrast, psychopaths failed to show reaction time facilitation or larger amplitude event-related potentials to affective words. We suggest that psychopaths extract less information from affective words than do other individuals. Possible implications of these and related findings for understanding the behavior of psychopaths are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Levels-of-processing effect on word recognition in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Individuals with schizophrenia have difficulty organizing words semantically to facilitate encoding. This is commonly attributed to organizational rather than semantic processing limitations. By requiring participants to classify and encode words on either a shallow (e.g., uppercase/lowercase) or deep level (e.g., concrete/abstract), the levels-of-processing paradigm eliminates the need to generate organizational strategies. METHODS: This paradigm was administered to 30 patients with schizophrenia and 30 healthy comparison subjects to test whether providing a strategy would improve patient performance. RESULTS: Word classification during shallow and deep encoding was slower and less accurate in patients. Patients also responded slowly during recognition testing and maintained a more conservative response bias following deep encoding; however, both groups showed a robust levels-of-processing effect on recognition accuracy, with unimpaired patient performance following both shallow and deep encoding. CONCLUSIONS: This normal levels-of-processing effect in the patient sample suggests that semantic processing is sufficiently intact for patients to benefit from organizational cues. Memory remediation efforts may therefore be most successful if they focus on teaching patients to form organizational strategies during initial encoding.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Processing of Kanji and Kana characters within Japanese words.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the temporal relationship between whole-word and character processing in Japanese. Two kinds of Japanese script were used as stimuli: Kanji, an ideographic script, and Kana, a syllabic script. In Experiment 1, Kanji word processing and Kanji character processing were examined using a successive visual comparison task. The whole-word advantage (Marmurek, 1986) was not found. In Experiment 2, Kana words and characters were used. As in Experiment 1, no whole-word advantage was found. The absence of the whole-word advantage is attributed to the fact that Kanji and Kana characters represent higher level units of processing than alphabetic letters. The difference between word and nonword processing was shown by manipulations of the visual similarity and the homophony between stimuli presented successively. Visual similarity affected both words and nonwords, whereas homophony affected words only.

Attention↗
PubMed2004

Computing the meanings of words in reading: cooperative division of labor between visual and phonological processes.

Are words read visually (by means of a direct mapping from orthography to semantics) or phonologically (by mapping from orthography to phonology to semantics)? The authors addressed this long-standing debate by examining how a large-scale computational model based on connectionist principles would solve the problem and comparing the model's performance to people's. In contrast to previous models, the present model uses an architecture in which meanings are jointly determined by the 2 components, with the division of labor between them affected by the nature of the mappings between codes. The model is consistent with a variety of behavioral phenomena, including the results of studies of homophones and pseudohomophones thought to support other theories, and illustrates how efficient processing can be achieved using multiple simultaneous constraints.

Humans↗
PubMed1997

Disruption to word or letter processing? The origins of case-mixing effects.

MiXeD-cAsE stimuli have long been used to test whether word recognition is based on holistic visual information or preliminary letter identification. However, without knowing which properties of mixed-case stimuli disrupt processing, it is not possible to determine which visual units mediate word recognition. The present studies examined the effects of case mixing on word and nonword naming as a function of (a) whether spaces were inserted between letters and (b) whether letter size was alternated independent of letter case. The results suggest that case-mixing disruption effects are due to at least 2 factors: the introduction of inappropriate grouping between letters with the same size and case, and the disruption of transletter features. The data support a model of visual lexical access based on the input from multiple visually based units.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Early parallel processing of auditory word and voice information.

The present study investigates the relationship of linguistic (phonetic) and extralinguistic (voice) information in preattentive auditory processing. We provide neurophysiological data, which show for the first time that both kinds of information are processed in parallel at an early preattentive stage. In order to establish the temporal and spatial organization of the underlying neuronal processes, we studied the conjunction of voice and word deviations in a mismatch negativity experiment, whereby the listener's brain responses were collected using magnetoencephalography. The stimuli consisted of single spoken words, whereby the deviants manifested a change of the word, of the voice, or both word and voice simultaneously (combined). First, we identified the N100m (overlain by mismatch field, MMF) and localized its generators, analyzing N100 m/MMF latency, dipole localization, and dipole strength. While the responses evoked by deviant stimuli were more anterior than the standard, localization differences between the deviants could not be shown. The dipole strength was larger for deviants than the standard stimulus, but again, no differences between the deviants could be established. There was no difference in the hemispheric lateralization of the responses. However, a difference between the deviants was observed in the latencies. The N100 m/MMF revealed a significantly shorter and less variant latency for the combined stimulus compared to all other experimental conditions. The data suggest an integral parallel processing model, which describes the early extraction of phonetic and voice information from the speech signal as parallel and contingent processes.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

The processing of inflected words.

Is an inflected word identified by first decomposing it into stem plus suffix or, instead, is it recognized as a whole? Several lexical decision experiments studied the recognition of inflected words in English (a language with few inflections) and Serbo-Croatian (a heavily inflected language). If recognition depended on decomposition, preceding the inflection with a brief exposure of the stem (less than 100 ms) should have primed the lexical entry for the stem and, therefore, facilitated recognition of the whole inflected word that followed. It did not. It was also found that the speed of recognizing an inflected word was more strongly associated with the frequency of the whole inflected form than with the frequency of its stem. The results suggested that in word recognition, lexical contact is first made with the whole word form. Nevertheless, morphological decomposition may still occur in subsequent processing.

Attention↗
PubMed2002

Communication mode and the processing of printed words: evidence from readers with prelingually acquired deafness.

The aim of this study was to elucidate how the primary communication background of prelingual deafened readers affects the way they mediate the recognition of written words. A computer-controlled research paradigm (a semantic decision task) asking for the categorization of familiar Hebrew nouns was used to investigate the participants' sensibility to phonological and orthographic manipulations in the target stimuli. Two groups of readers with hearing impairments and a hearing control group participated in the study. Twenty-seven of the participants with deafness (mean grade 6.9) were raised by hearing parents advocating a strict oral approach at home and at school. For an additional 22 students who were deaf (mean grade 6.9), the majority of them children of deaf parents, Israeli Sign Language was the preferred means of communication. The mean grade of the 39 participants in the hearing control group was 6.5. Findings indicate that both the hearing participants and the participants with prelingual deafness who were trained to communicate orally recoded visually presented target words phonologically. No such evidence was found for participants with deafness who were native signers. Although participants from signing backgrounds seemed to generate nonphonological representations of written words, there was no evidence that for them, the absence of recoding to phonology detrimentally affected on their ability to process such representations flexibly. In all, findings suggest a causal link between an individual's processing strategy for some written words and the modal nature of his or her primary language.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1982

Semantic context effects in visual word recognition, sentence processing, and reading: evidence for semantic strategies.

Earlier research studying the effects of semantic context on single words suggested that subjects may have two strategies for using a context (Becker, 1980). The present research finds that the semantic context strategies may be used in reading short sentences. Further, individual differences in context effects both in a word-level task and in a sentence-level task are related to individual differences in reading continuous text. These results are presented within the framework of the verification model (Becker, 1976, 1980), and the implications for two-process theory (Stanovich & West, 1979, 1981) are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Dual-route processing of complex words: new fMRI evidence from derivational suffixation.

Many behavioral models of the comprehension of suffixed words assume a dual-route mechanism in which these words are accessed sometimes from the mental lexicon as whole units and sometimes in terms of their component morphemes (such as happi+ness). In related neuropsychological work, Ullman et al. (1997) proposed a dual-route model for past tense processing, in which the lexicon (used for access to irregularly inflected forms) corresponds to declarative memory and a medial temporal/ parietal circuit, and the rule system (used for computation of regularly inflected forms) corresponds to procedural memory and a frontal (including Broca's area)/basal ganglia circuit. We used functional MRI and a memory encoding task to test this model for derivationally suffixed words, comparing those words that show evidence of decompositional processing in behavioral studies (-ness, -less, and -able words) with derived words that do not show decomposition effects (-ity and -ation words). By examining Broca's area and the basal ganglia as regions of interest, we found that "decomposable" derived and inflected words showed increases in activity relative to nondecomposable suffixed words. Results support a dual-route model of lexical access of complex words that is consistent with the Ullman et al. proposal.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Limiting lexical activation limits perceptual priming in masked word identification.

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that perceptual priming of a word depends on the prior lexical processing of the word (Rajaram & Roediger, 1993; Weldon, 1991). Experiment 1 showed that first-letter naming reduced priming relative to reading a whole word on two tests: word fragment completion and masked word identification. In Experiment 2, naming the first letter of a word took longer than naming the letter presented alone, and led to better masked word identification. Experiment 3 showed that masked word identification was enhanced by prior word processing more for low frequency words than for high frequency words, but only when words had been read aloud. Experiment 4 tested whether the auditory input accruing from reading a word aloud was the source of facilitation and frequency effects. Participants judged either the frequency of the whole display or the positional frequency of the first letter in the display, and indicated their decisions manually. The major findings from Experiment 3 were replicated, ruling out the cross-modal source of those effects. It was concluded that activation of a lexical unit, one component of word processing (Vriezen, Moscovitch, & Bellos, 1995), is a critical determinant of the perceptual priming of that word.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Word and picture processing in children: an event-related potential study.

In an investigation of the N400 component, event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by 4 types of word stimuli (real words, pseudowords, random letter strings, and false fonts) and 3 types of picture stimuli (real pictures, pseudopictures, and picture parts) presented in separate lists were recorded from 10- and 11-year-old children. All types of word stimuli elicited an anteriorly distributed negativity peaking at about 400 msec (antN400). Words and pseudowords elicited similar ERPs, whereas ERPs to letter strings differed from those to both pseudowords and false fonts. All types of picture stimuli elicited dual anterior negativities (N350 and N430). Real pictures and pseudopictures elicited similar ERPs, whereas pseudopictures and picture parts elicited asymmetrical processing. The results are discussed in terms of increased sensitivity to and dependence on context in children.

Child↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Demonstrating the implicit processing of visually presented words and pseudowords.

This study demonstrates that even when subjects are instructed to perform a nonlinguistic visual feature detection task, the mere presence of words or pseudowords in the visual field activates a widespread neuronal network that is congruent with classical language areas. The implication of this result is that subjects will process words beyond the functional demands of the task. Therefore, contrasting brain activity in a word task that explicitly requires a cognitive function with a word task in which the function is activated implicitly will not necessarily isolate the brain area of interest. Furthermore, in most brain regions, we found that pseudowords, which have unfamiliar phonological associations and no associated semantic association, produce greater activation than words. Greater brain activity associated with pseudowords illustrates that unfamiliar stimuli that are unable to access word associations may activate the neuronal network more strongly than familiar words for which access occurs with ease.

Brain↗
PubMed1990

Effects of characterological anxiety and situational arousal on the solving of a color-word interference task: hemispheric processing implications.

Stroop color-word stimuli permit examination of relative hemispheric contributions to cognition. Subjects of varying trait anxiety levels underwent situational arousal manipulations. Discrete color-word stimuli were projected to the visual half-fields; motor matching responses were made. Trait anxiety affected left-hemisphere activation. Responding was faster and more accurate for moderate than low trait anxiety; at high levels, the left hemisphere became overactivated and inefficient. Situational arousal facilitated right-hemisphere performance; latencies were shorter and accuracy increased in the aroused compared with the relaxed condition. Situational arousal interacted with trait anxiety; highly trait-anxious subjects had longer latencies and decreased accuracy when relaxed than when aroused. A paradoxical effect of trait anxiety is rigidity and stereotypy of cognitive functioning, impairing ability to assume appropriate alternative cognitive modes.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Attention and the processing of emotional words and names: not so special after all.

Previous research has suggested that a person's own name or emotionally charged stimuli automatically "grab" attention, potentially challenging limited-capacity theories of perceptual processing. In this study, subjects were shown two digits surrounding a word and asked to make a speeded judgment about whether the parity of the two digits matched. When the subject's own name was presented on a few scattered trials, responses were markedly slowed (replicating a previous study). However, in a subsequent block of trials in which half the words were the subject's name, the slowing did not occur. The same slowing occurred (but even more fleetingly) when an emotionally charged word was presented between the digits. When the name was embedded among multiple distractor words, it ceased to slow reaction times. The results suggest that perceptual analysis of high-priority stimuli is subject to the usual capacity limitations of other stimuli, but when enough capacity is available for a high-priority stimulus to be perceived, a transient surprise reaction may interrupt ongoing processing.

Affect↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Orthographic processing of polysyllabic words by native and nonnative English speakers.

How polysyllabic English words are analyzed in silent reading was examined in three experiments by comparing lexical decision responses to words physically split on the screen. The gap was compatible either with the Maximal Onset Principle or the Maximal Coda Principle. The former corresponds to the spoken syllable (e.g., ca det), except when the word has a stressed short first vowel (e.g., ra dish), while the reverse is true for the latter (giving cad et and rad ish). Native English speakers demonstrated a general preference for the Max Coda analysis and a correlation with reading ability when such an analysis did not correspond with the spoken syllable. Native Japanese speakers, on the other hand, showed a Max Onset preference regardless of the type of word, while native Mandarin Chinese speakers showed no preference at all. It is concluded that a maximization of the coda is the optimal representation of polysyllabic words in English and that poorer native readers are more influenced by phonology than are better readers. The way that nonnative readers mentally represent polysyllabic English words is affected by the way such words are structured in their native language, which may not lead to optimal English processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

When parallel processing in visual word recognition is not enough: new evidence from naming.

Low-frequency irregular words are named more slowly and are more error prone than low-frequency regular words (the regularity effect). Rastle and Coltheart (1999) reported that this irregularity cost is modulated by the serial position of the irregular grapheme-phoneme correspondence, such that words with early irregularities exhibit a larger cost than words with late ones. They argued that these data implicate rule-based serial processing, and they also reported a successful simulation with a model that has a rule-based serial component--the DRC model of reading aloud (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001). However, Zorzi (2000) also simulated these data with a model that operates solely in parallel. Furthermore, Kwantes and Mewhort (1999) simulated these data with a serial processing model that has no rules for converting orthography to phonology. The human data reported by Rastle and Coltheart therefore neither require a serial processing account, nor successfully discriminate among a number of computational models of reading aloud. New data are presented wherein an interaction between the effects of regularity and serial position of irregularity is again reported for human readers. The DRC model simulated this interaction; no other implemented computational model does so. The present results are thus consistent with rule-based serial processing in reading aloud.

Humans↗