Jakke Tamminen | PubMed Health

PubMed2006

Frequency effects in spoken and visual word recognition: evidence from dual-task methodologies.

The authors report 3 dual-task experiments concerning the locus of frequency effects in word recognition. In all experiments, Task 1 entailed a simple perceptual choice and Task 2 involved lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an underadditive effect of word frequency arose for spoken words. Experiment 2 also showed underadditivity for visual lexical decision. It was concluded that word frequency exerts an influence prior to any dual-task bottleneck. A related finding in similar dual-task experiments is Task 2 response postponement at short stimulus onset asynchronies. This was explored in Experiment 3, and it was shown that response postponement was equivalent for both spoken and visual word recognition. These results imply that frequency-sensitive processes operate early and automatically.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Age of acquisition modulates the amplitude of the P300 component in spoken word recognition.

Words acquired earlier in life are easier to process in adulthood than words acquired later; this is known as the age of acquisition (AoA) effect. The goal of this study was to establish whether the P300 component of event-related potentials (ERPs) is sensitive to AoA. Early-acquired words (12.5%), late-acquired words (12.5%) and pseudo-words (75%) were presented in an auditory lexical decision task. The two sets of words were matched for length, word type, concreteness, imageability and, crucially, word frequency. Early-acquired words were recognised faster and more accurately than late-acquired words. In addition, AoA modulated ERP activity in centroparietal electrode sites, with early-acquired words eliciting a larger positivity (P300) than late-acquired words. This is the first study to demonstrate an ERP correlate of AoA effects. An important implication of our findings is that AoA may need to be controlled in ERP studies of lexical processing, especially in designs in which it is likely to be a confound (e.g., studies of lexical category effects).

Adolescent↗