Prepotent task-irrelevant semantic information is dampened by domain-specific control mechanisms during visual word recognition.

Automatic activation of phonology in visual word recognition has been well documented. It has been attributed, at least in part, to the sequential development of speech and literacy which results in the tendency for children to match orthographical input to phonological representation at the early stages of literacy development (e.g., Bosman & De Groot, 1996; Davis, Castles, & Iakovidis, 1998; Goswami, 1993). In contrast to the development of speech prior to literacy in first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) learners typically learn to speak and read at the same time. This raises the question of whether phonology is also automatically activated in L2 reading. This issue was investigated in this study by exploring the pseudohomophone effect in L2 reading using a lexical decision task. The role of learners’ L1 was also examined by including both alphabetic and non-alphabetic learners of English as L2. A strong pseudohomophone effect was found in reaction time among native English speakers and alphabetic non-native speakers. Non-alphabetic learners, however, showed a pseudohomophone effect in error rate but not in reaction time. The findings were discussed in terms of how learning experiences and L1 background affect phonological activation in visual L2 word recognition.

Aging, alzheimer's disease, and word recognition: A review of the recent literature

Previous studies have reported that semantic richness facilitates visual word recognition (see, e.g., Buchanan, Westbury, & Burgess, 2001; Pexman, Holyk, & Monfils, 2003). We compared three semantic richness measures--number of semantic neighbors (NSN), the number of words appearing in similar lexical contexts; number of features (NF), the number of features listed for a word's referent; and contextual dispersion (CD), the distribution of a word's occurrences across content areas-to determine their abilities to account for response time and error variance in lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. NF and CD accounted for unique variance in both tasks, whereas NSN accounted for unique variance only in the lexical decision task. Moreover, each measure showed a different pattern of relative contribution across the tasks. Our results provide new clues about how words are represented and suggest that word recognition models need to accommodate each of these influences.

In the present study, the role of phonological information in visual word recognition is investigated by adopting a large-scale data-driven approach that exploits a new consistency measure based on distributional semantics methods. A recent study by Marelli, Amenta, and Crepaldi (2015) showed that the consistency between an orthographic string and the meanings to which it is associated in a large corpus is a relevant predictor in lexical decision experiments. Exploiting irregular mappings between orthography and phonology in English, we were able to compute a phonology-to-semantics consistency measure that dissociates from its orthographic counterpart and tested both measures on lexical decision data taken from the British Lexicon Project (Keuleers et al., 2012). Results showed that both orthography and phonology are activated during visual word recognition. However, their contribution is crucially determined by the extent to which they are informative of the word semantics, and phonology plays a crucial role in accessing word meaning.

The present study investigated the representation and processing of segmental and tonal information in visual Chinese word recognition in native and non‐native Chinese readers. Two experiments using homophone judgement paradigm were conducted. When judging two Chinese characters (Experiment 1), both groups showed difficulties when the segmental but not tonal information was shared (i.e., S+T− condition), with stronger interference for non‐native readers. When judging a Pinyin and a Chinese character (Experiment 2), non‐native readers' S+T− disadvantage was significantly reduced. Finally, when their L1s share the Latin alphabets with Pinyin, the participants showed stronger segmental reliance compared with the native readers. These findings suggest that while both native and non‐native readers rely more on segmental information in Chinese visual word recognition, this reliance is stronger among non‐native readers. Furthermore, the alphabetic nature of the Pinyin orthography may help non‐native readers' phonological representation and processing in a nonalphabetic writing system.

To what extent does semantic information play a functional role in visual word recognition? Theories of word recognition vary in the importance assigned to semantic information in visual lexical decision, with past research suggesting that the nature of the foils is a crucial determinant of semantic reliance. Here, we explored the conditions under which semantic variables influence lexical decision. Normal readers performed visual lexical decision tasks in which imageability and semantic priming were manipulated, with nonword foils varying systematically in their orthographic and phonological similarity to the real words. The effects of imageability and semantic priming increased in magnitude as nonword foils became progressively more wordlike. These findings provide a clear illustration of the flexible use of semantic information to support normal visual word recognition.

Sereno, O'Donnell, and Sereno (2009) reported that words are recognized faster in a lexical decision task when their referents are physically large than when they are small, suggesting that "semantic size" might be an important variable that should be considered in visual word recognition research and modelling. We sought to replicate their size effect, but failed to find a significant latency advantage in lexical decision for "big" words (cf. "small" words), even though we used the same word stimuli as Sereno et al. and had almost three times as many subjects. We also examined existing data from visual word recognition megastudies (e.g., English Lexicon Project) and found that semantic size is not a significant predictor of lexical decision performance after controlling for the standard lexical variables. In summary, the null results from our lab experiment--despite a much larger subject sample size than Sereno et al.--converged with our analysis of megastudy lexical decision performance, leading us to conclude that semantic size does not matter for word recognition. Discussion focuses on why semantic size (unlike some other semantic variables) is unlikely to play a role in lexical decision.

The neural/mental operations involved in the process of visual word recognition (VWR) are fundamental for the efficient comprehension of written/printed words during reading. The present study used CiteSpace, a visual analysis software, to identify the intellectual landscape where VWR has been reviewed in the past decade. Thus, synthesized co-citation networks were analyzed to explore and discuss the main questions raised in the VWR literature: the research fronts and the emerging trends of research on this topic. Our results showed that the main questions addressed in VWR studies during the last decade have been focused on four main aspects related to "what," "where," "when," and "how" of VWR; to be specific, the different types of representations assessed during VWR ("what"), the locations and the timing of the brain activity involved in VWR ("where" and "when"), and the interactivity among different representations during processing ("how"). Among the revised studies, letter position coding was found to be the main topic of interest, possibly reflecting the critical role of this process. Furthermore, the evidence found in these studies consistently supported that VWR implies access to phonological, semantic, and morphological representations, which interact and modulate the processing of written words, particularly during early stages. Altogether, our findings showed the evolution in VWR literature regarding the different cognitive and neural operations involved in this process, highlighting the growing interest over the last decade toward the top-down way that mental representations interact.

The reading comprehension and visual word recognition in 50 deaf children and adolescents with at least 3 years of cochlear implant (CI) use were evaluated. Their skills were contrasted with reference data of 500 deaf children without CIs. The reading comprehension level in children with CIs was expected to surpass that in deaf children without implants, partly via improved visual word recognition. Reading comprehension scores of children with implants were significantly better than those of deaf children without implants, although the performance in implant users was substantially lagging behind that in hearing children. Visual word recognition was better in children with CIs than in children without implants, in secondary education only. No difference in visual word recognition was found between the children with CIs and the hearing children, whereas the deaf children without implants showed a slightly poorer performance. The difference in reading comprehension performance of the deaf children with and without CIs remained present when visual word recognition was controlled for. This indicates that other reading-related skills were also contributing to the improved reading comprehension skills of deaf children with CIs.

The impact of inverted text on visual word processing: An fMRI study

Although interactivity is considered a fundamental principle of cognitive (and computational) models of reading, it has received far less attention in neural models of reading that instead focus on serial stages of feed-forward processing from visual input to orthographic processing to accessing the corresponding phonological and semantic information. In particular, the left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT) cortex is proposed to be the first stage where visual word recognition occurs prior to accessing nonvisual information such as semantics and phonology. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate whether there is evidence that activation in vOT is influenced top-down by the interaction of visual and nonvisual properties of the stimuli during visual word recognition tasks. Participants performed two different types of lexical decision tasks that focused on either visual or nonvisual properties of the word or word-like stimuli. The design allowed us to investigate how vOT activation during visual word recognition was influenced by a task change to the same stimuli and by a stimulus change during the same task. We found both stimulus- and task-driven modulation of vOT activation that can only be explained by top-down processing of nonvisual aspects of the task and stimuli. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that vOT acts as an interface linking visual form with nonvisual processing in both bottom up and top down directions. Such interactive processing at the neural level is in agreement with cognitive and computational models of reading but challenges some of the assumptions made by current neuro-anatomical models of reading.

Got rhythm… for better and for worse. Cross-modal effects of auditory rhythm on visual word recognition

IntroductionThe current study investigated the influence of the number of meanings on visual word recognition, with a particular focus on hemispheric dynamics.MethodsBy reanalyzing parafoveal Korean lexical decision data, we examined how words with a high versus low number of meanings affect right visual field advantage (RVFA) and bilateral redundancy gain (BRG).ResultsThe words with a greater number of meanings exhibited a stronger RVFA and reduced BRG compared to words with fewer meanings.DiscussionThe findings suggest that the facilitatory effects associated with multiple meanings are more pronounced in the left hemisphere (LH) than in the right hemisphere (RH). Furthermore, the increased lateralization of processing within the LH appears to diminish the need for interhemispheric interactions, leading to decreased coordination between the hemispheres. These results imply that the number of meanings in words shapes interhemispheric dynamics during visual word recognition. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to theoretical models of visual word recognition and hemispheric differences in language processing.

The present study investigated the role of cognitive control on semantic information during visual word recognition by exploiting taboo stimuli in a lexical-decision task. We relied on delta plots and electromyography (EMG) to assess different hypothetical mechanisms of cognitive control. Previous research suggests that taboo stimuli slow down the performance across a variety of tasks due to their attention-grabbing nature. One possibility is that cognitive control counteracts the detrimental effects of taboo connotation by actively dampening such prepotent yet task-irrelevant information. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found a reversal of taboo interference effect in slowest responses, signaling the deployment of a selective suppression mechanism that needs time to fully accrue. For electromyographic data, we focused on partial errors (trials showing a subthreshold activation of the incorrect response hand) to index response-monitoring processes intervening to prevent and correct errors. We found no modulation of the likelihood of partial errors and, more generally, of response accuracy as a function of taboo connotation. Taken together, the results suggest that cognitive control may intervene to selectively suppress fast-acting and distracting taboo information, indicating a controlled semantic processing that optimizes activation to match task-relevant goals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Three experiments were conducted to test the phonological recoding hypothesis in visual word recognition. Most studies on this issue have been conducted using mono-syllabic words, eventually constructing various models of phonological processing. Yet in many languages including English, the majority of words are multisyllabic words. English includes words incorporating a silent letter in their letter strings (e.g., champagne). Such words provide an opportunity for investigating the role of phonological information in multi-syllabic words by comparing them to words that do not have the silent letter in the corresponding position (e.g., passenger). The performance focus is on the effects of removing letters from words with a silent letter and from words with a non-silent letter. Three representative lexical tasks--naming, semantic categorization, lexical decision--were conducted in the present study. Stimuli that excluded a silent letter (e.g., champa_ne) were processed faster than those that excluded a sounding letter (e.g., passen_er) in the naming (Experiment 1), the semantic categorization (Experiment 2), and the lexical decision task (Experiment 3). The convergent evidence from these three experiments provides seminal proof of phonological recoding in multi-syllabic word recognition.