Biomedical subjects

Ronald Peereman

Publications and source records attributed to Ronald Peereman.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Letter-by-letter processing in the phonological conversion of multiletter graphemes: searching for sounds in printed pseudowords.

Current models of word reading differ in their descriptions of how print-to-sound conversion is performed. Whereas a parallel procedure is generally assumed, the dual-route cascaded model developed by Coltheart and colleagues (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, and Ziegler, 2001) holds that the nonlexical conversion operates letter by letter, serially from left to right. An interesting aspect of the hypothesized serial procedure is that only the first letter of two-letter graphemes is thought to cause activation of its corresponding phonological code, the second letter of multiletter graphemes being directly merged with the preceding letter to form a complex grapheme. This hypothesis was examined in a task in which participants had to detect target phonemes in visually presented pseudowords. The data suggest that phonological codes associated with all the letters of the multiletter graphemes are activated.

Attention↗

PubMed2005

Musical structure modulates semantic priming in vocal music.

It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A., & Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. Cognition, 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further by investigating how musical harmony may potentially interfere with the processing of words in vocal music. Eight-chord sung sentences were presented, their last word being either semantically related (La girafe a un tres grand cou, The giraffe has a very long neck) or unrelated to the previous linguistic context (La girafe a un tres grand pied, The giraffe has a very long foot). The target word was sung on a chord that acted either as a referential tonic chord or as a congruent but less referential subdominant chord. Participants performed a lexical decision task on the target word. A significant interaction was observed between semantic and harmonic relatedness suggesting that music modulates semantic priming in vocal music. Following Jones' dynamic attention theory, we argue that music can modulate semantic priming in vocal music, by modifying the allocation of attentional resource necessary for linguistic computation.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

Learning nonadjacent dependencies: no need for algebraic-like computations.

Is it possible to learn the relation between 2 nonadjacent events? M. Pena, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler (2002) claimed this to be possible, but only in conditions suggesting the involvement of algebraic-like computations. The present article reports simulation studies and experimental data showing that the observations on which Pena et al. grounded their reasoning were flawed by deep methodological inadequacies. When the invalid data are set aside, the available evidence fits exactly with the predictions of a theory relying on ubiquitous associative mechanisms. Because nonadjacent dependencies are frequent in natural language, this reappraisal has far-reaching implications for the current debate on the need for rule-based computations in human adaptation to complex structures.

Association↗

PubMed2003

Inhibitory priming effects in auditory word recognition: when the target's competitors conflict with the prime word.

Several studies indicate that the number of similar sounding words that are activated during recognition is a powerful predictor of performance on auditory targets. Words with few competitors are processed more quickly and accurately than words with many competitors. In the present study, we examined the contribution of the competitor set size in determining the magnitude of the inhibitory priming effect. The data show that the priming effect is stronger when word targets have few competitors. This result supports the view of direct competition between lexical candidates.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

A new set of 299 pictures for psycholinguistic studies: French norms for name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, age of acquisition, and naming latencies.

Pictures are often used as stimuli in studies of perception, language, and memory. Since performances on different sets of pictures are generally contrasted, stimulus selection requires the use of standardized material to match pictures across different variables. Unfortunately, the number of standardized pictures available for empirical research is rather limited. The aim of the present study is to provide French normative data for a new set of 299 black-and-white drawings. Alario and Ferrand (1999) were closely followed in that the pictures were standardized on six variables name agreement, image agreement, conceptual familiarity, visual complexity, image variability, and age of acquisition. Objective frequency measures are also provided for themost common names associated with the pictures. Comparative analyses between our results and the norms obtained in other, similar studies are reported. Finally, naming latencies corresponding to the set of pictures were also collected from French native speakers, and correlational/multiple-regression analyses were performed on naming latencies. This new set of standardized pictures is available on the Internet (http://leadserv.u-bourgogne.fr/bases/pictures/) and should be of great use to researchers when they select pictorial stimuli.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2003

Lexical competition in phonological priming: assessing the role of phonological match and mismatch lengths between primes and targets.

In five experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B replicate and extend Slowiaczek and Hamburger's (1992) observation that inhibitory effects occur when the prime and the target share the first three phonemes (e.g., /bRiz/-/bRik/) but not when they share the first two phonemes (e.g., /bRepsilonz/-/bRik/). This observation suggests that lexical competition depends on the length of the phonological match between the prime and the target. However, Experiment 2 revealed that an overlap of two phonemes is sufficient to cause an inhibitory effect provided that the primes mismatched the targets only on the last phoneme (e.g., /b[symbol: see text]l/-/b[symbol: see text]t/). Conversely, with a three-phoneme overlap, no inhibition was observed in Experiment 3 when the primes mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes (e.g., /bagepsilont/-/baga3/). In Experiment 4, an inhibitory effect was again observed when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme but not when they mismatched the targets on the last two phonemes when the time between the offset of overlapping segments in the primes and the onset of overlapping segments in the targets was controlled for. The data thus indicate that what essentially determines prime-target competition effects in word-form priming is the number of mismatching phonemes.

Competitive Behavior↗