Este estudio describe el diseño de una batería translingüística para la evaluación de la negación en personas con afasia (PCA). La batería está disponible en español, inglés, árabe y hebreo, y consta de cuatro pruebas que evalúan diferentes aspectos del procesamiento: Emparejamiento Oración-Dibujo (EOD), Tarea de Anagrama (TA), Repetición de Oraciones (REP) y Decir lo Opuesto (DECIR OP). Se examinó la sensibilidad de la batería en dos PCA no fluente hablantes de español (P1 y P2). Los resultados revelaron un gradiente de dificultad significativo tanto en P1 como en P2 (EOD > TA > REP > DECIR OP), siendo las tareas de producción oral las más exigentes. Además, se encontró un efecto de polaridad en P2, con un rendimiento consistentemente peor en oraciones con negación que en afirmativas. El análisis de errores también confirmó las dificultades particulares con el procesamiento de la negación de esta participante. Estos hallazgos subrayan la necesidad de utilizar baterías que evalúen diferentes aspectos del procesamiento lingüístico con distintas tareas en PCA para poder caracterizar perfiles diferenciales en la afasia.

Walking has been the focus of much of the existing work on multitasking given its complexity as a cognitive process and importance in daily life. This complexity is evidenced by gait variation observed in dual-task contexts. However, an open question concerns how walking effects concurrently performed cognitive tasks. Thus, we use virtual reality to investigate how walking and visual distraction modulate language processing in an ecologically valid, yet controlled manner. In this novel experimental paradigm, we gradually increase the cognitive burden on participants' lexical decision responses by adding visual distractors and concurrent walking demands. Accordingly, healthy, young participants performed a lexical decision task as either (1) a single-task+, while seated and with randomly appearing visual distractors, or as (2) a multitask, while walking on a self-paced treadmill through a VR city scape including visual distractors. Participants generally made faster lexical decisions while walking. However, in the single-task+ condition, participants made more errors when a distractor was present. These effects were somewhat modulated by individual differences in visual processing. Crucially, no clear dual-task cost was observed; rather, behavior adapted to increased demands within a specific domain. Overall, these findings suggest an interplay of both task-related and individual characteristics determining multitask performance.

BackgroundPeople with aphasia (PWA) experience difficulty producing and comprehending sentences, but relatively little is known about their processing of sentences with negation, a universal phenomenon in human language. Previous studies that have investigated the processing of sentence negation in aphasia have yielded mixed results. In some investigations, people with nonfluent aphasia did not have greater difficulty generating sentences with negation as compared to affirmative sentences. In contrast, other studies found lower accuracy in processing sentences with negation compared to sentences without negation.AimThe aim of this study was to advance our understanding of negation processing in PWA. The study asked whether Spanish-speaking people with nonfluent aphasia have difficulty comprehending and producing sentences with negation markers and whether that difficulty varies across sentence structures and tasks.MethodsTen native speakers of Spanish participated in the study: five people with nonfluent aphasia and a control group of five neurologically healthy people. A negation battery was designed that included four tasks: Sentence-Picture Matching Task, Anagram Task, Repetition Task, and Say-the-Opposite Task. The stimuli in the task conditions included sentences with different argument structures (subject-verb vs. subject-verb-object), tense (sentences with verbs in present simple vs. present progressive tense), and negative concord (never/always; something/anything).ResultsAnalyses of performance accuracy demonstrated that, across all tasks, neurologically healthy people performed at ceiling. For the PWA, response accuracy varied across tasks, with higher performance on the Sentence-Picture Matching and the Anagram tasks and lower performance on the Repetition and Say-the-Opposite tasks. Further analysis of the Say-the-Opposite task demonstrated an interaction between argument structure and negation as well as an effect of negative concord. No reliable effect of tense was observed. Furthermore, the errors committed by the participants demonstrated difficulty with morphosyntactic aspects of the negation markers.ConclusionsThe results support the view that people with nonfluent aphasia have difficulty with negation but that difficulty varies across tasks and is modulated by morphosyntactic properties of the negation markers. The present study highlights the advantages of employing task batteries with varying sentence structures rather than single tasks in order to further our understanding of the processing of sentences with negation.

Compound words exhibit properties of both single words and phrases, raising the question of the extent to which compounds are processed as single units or as word combinations. Most studies have addressed this in Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) which have the similar compound structure of modifier-head ordering. To see whether this limits our understanding of compound word processing and to examine compound decomposition in another language, we presented Persian stimuli auditorily in a paradigm involving typing out stimuli. We examined the effects of semantic transparency, modifier-head ordering and the potential differences between attached compounds written without spaces and those with a space between the constituents. We report the inter-keystroke-interval times, yielding letter-by-letter production of compound structures produced by 31 native speakers of Persian. Results analyzed in a linear mixed-model regression analysis suggested that, for all compounds, typing speed is slowed at the boundary between the constituents of Persian compound words. These effects, which we interpret to be evidence of morphological decomposition, were present for both semantically transparent and opaque compounds, for both head-initial and head-final compounds, and for both attached and spaced compounds. We observed greater morphological decomposition effects in semantically transparent (versus opaque) compounds. We also observed that the way transparency influences the degree of decomposition is moderated by headedness. Thus, this first report for the written production of compound words confirms previous observations of significant decomposition at morphological boundaries in English compounds, but with variation specific to Persian.

How does the language comprehension system identify and interpret word constituents-or morphemes-during sentence reading? We investigated this question by employing words containing semantically ambiguous roots (e.g., bark, with meanings related to both "dog" and "tree") which are disambiguated when affixed by -ing (e.g., barking; related to "dog" only). We aimed to understand whether higher-level access to the meaning of the root bark would be constrained by lower-level morphological affixation. In Experiment 1, using eye-tracking, participants read sentences containing words with semantically ambiguous roots, such as barking (a prime), combined with targets that were either related to two meanings of the root (dog, tree) or they were cloze and unrelated controls. All five eye-tracking measures we employed (first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past time, total reading time, and regressions to target) showed no difference between the two root-related targets, which were slower than cloze, but faster than unrelated. Results show that even in cases where a meaning is inconsistent with the full word form (barking-tree), both meanings of the ambiguous root are activated. These results were supported by Experiment 2, employing a maze task in which the time to select the cloze (night) continuation for the sentence He heard loud barking during the & mldr; was disrupted by the presence of distractors related to both meanings of bark. We discuss the implications of these findings for the nature of morphological parsing and lexical ambiguity resolution in sentence contexts. We suggest that word recognition and lexical access processes involve separating roots from affixes, yielding independent and exhaustive access to root meanings-even when they are ruled out by affixation and context.

EDITORIAL article Front. Commun., 11 July 2023Sec. Psychology of Language Volume 8 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1234942

Abstract Words are the backbone of language activity. An average 20-year-old native speaker of English will have a vocabulary of about 42,000 words. These words are connected with one another within the larger network of lexical knowledge that is termed the mental lexicon. The metaphor of a mental lexicon has played a central role in the development of theories of language and mind and has provided an intellectual meeting ground for psychologists, neurolinguists, and psycholinguists. Research on the mental lexicon has shown that lexical knowledge is not static. New words are acquired throughout the life span, creating very large increases in the richness of connectivity within the lexical system and changing the system as a whole. Because most people in the world speak more than one language, the default mental lexicon may be a multilingual one. Such a mental lexicon differs substantially from a lexicon of an individual language and would lead to the creation of new integrated lexical systems due to the pressure on the system to organize and access lexical knowledge in a homogenous manner. The mental lexicon contains both word knowledge and morphological knowledge. There is also evidence that it contains multiword strings such as idioms and lexical bundles. This speaks in support of a nonrestrictive “big tent” view of units of representation within the mental lexicon. Changes in research on lexical representations in language processing have emphasized lexical action and the role of learning. Although the metaphor of words as distinct representations within a lexical store has served to advance knowledge, it is more likely that words are best seen as networks of activity that are formed and affected by experience and learning throughout the life span.

Compounding is the most common way in which languages can create new words from existing ones. The investigation of how compound words are represented and processed in the mind can therefore reveal fundamental properties of lexical representation and processing. Because of the properties of its morphology and its writing system, Chinese offers a special opportunity for such investigation. In Chinese, it is common for compound words to contain three or more constituents, which are organized into hierarchical structures. Using a lexical decision task, we examined whether the arrangement of such sublexical hierarchies within triconstituent compound words would affect their ease of visual processing. We found that left-branching structures were processed more accurately and more quickly than right-branching ones (left-branching triconstituent compounds are those in which an embedded two-character compound is the modifier and a single character is as the head, as in the English left-branching structure hot dog bun). This processing advantage of left-branching structures was supported by the results of a metalinguistic segmentation task in which participants showed left-branching preferences when presented with special triconstituent compounds which have no feasible branching structure (loanwords and flat structure compounds). In the Chinese character-based writing system, left-branching and right-branching compounds are written exactly the same way. This is in contrast to English in which it is common for the branching direction of a triconstituent compound to be indicated by the presence or absence of a space within the compound structure (e.g., watchdog group, consumer watchdog). Thus, the results from Chinese support the view that hierarchical constituent structure plays a role in processing in the absence of orthographic support and that the observed left-branching preference reflects central aspects of lexical representation and processing.

The field of mental lexicon research has benefitted greatly from the founding metaphor of a dictionary in the mind. That metaphor, however, had its origins in a perspective in which the lexicon was seen as a static repository of representations with fixed structural properties. This paper presents a contrasting view. It is a view that highlights that words are activities that we perform, rather than simply representations that we have. It is proposed that lexical representations are best seen as hierarchies of action within a highly interconnected and dynamic system. The paper presents two principles of lexical organization: morphological transcendence and lexical superstates. The former principle claims that through the activities of language comprehension and production, lexical forms can develop variant forms. Thus, the form key may develop into forms such as key- (e.g., keyboard) and -key, (e.g., turnkey). The paper also discusses how transcendence leads to lexical superstates, which do not have a fixed morphological structure. As part of a lexical superstate, alternative morphological structures exist as potential realizations. Which one is actually realized will depend on the specific circumstances of a lexical action. An account is presented in which the effects of semantic transparency are treated in terms of transcendence and superstate interactions. It is claimed that this approach, which highlights the dynamic and flexible nature of the mental lexicon, has implications for how we approach the modeling of language and cognition in general.

Politicians are skilled language users who deploy words strategically and pay close attention to the emotions that those words evoke. We examined the emotional characteristics of over 92 million words spoken by Canadian Members of Parliament between 2006 and 2021. The analysis brought together the Warriner, Kuperman, and Brysbaert (Behav. Res., 2013, 45, 1191–1207) database of valence (positivity) ratings for English and the Canadian Hansard, which contains a transcription of parliamentary speech. Results revealed that the positivity of words used by politicians in parliament was significantly related to both political and social variables. Politicians increased the positivity of their language after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. Within the time of the crisis, word positivity was linked statistically to month-by-month case counts, indicating a very fine-grained sensitivity to social realities. Our analysis also revealed a fine-grained sensitivity of word valence to political realities. As expected, parties in power used more positive language than those in opposition. In addition, our analysis revealed that individual parties have characteristic levels of word positivity and that those levels change in accordance with political changes as specific as whether or not the party in power holds a majority of seats in parliament. These findings suggest that the emotional properties of words used by Members of Parliament are reliably indexed to sociopolitical dynamics. The findings also suggest that the methodology of linking individual word ratings to Hansard Documents (which are used to document Parliamentary activities in over 25 countries) can provide a key tool for the understanding of specific crises such as the COVID-19 global pandemic as well as more general social and political trends across countries and languages.

We sought to move beyond single word and sentence processing experiments in order to examine textual effects on the processing of compound words in English. We developed minimal texts (sentences pairs that together constitute a story) that had neutral, semantic or lexical relations between the last word of the first sentence and the second word of the second sentence (which was always a compound noun). This generated minimal text triplets that differed only in the last word of the first sentence (e.g., "She walked down to the path/river/water. The waterfall roared in the distance"). Four experiments were conducted with a total 143 native speakers of English. Experiment 1 employed a Modified Maze Task to identify cross-sentence effects on compound processing. Sentence pairs with lexical links differed from those with semantic links, which, in turn differed from neutral pairs, providing evidence of cross-sentence influence on compound processing. In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 2c, we examined compound production using typing tasks. Results indicated that morphological effects found in single word typing persisted in text typing. In addition, constituent priming effects on typing were seen in both single word typing and sentence typing. Finally, morphological effects were correlated with overall story ratings. We thus conclude that morphological effects are not restricted to single word processing, but rather reflect the dynamics of real-world language processing.

Abstract The maze task (Forster, Guererra & Elliot, 2009; Forster, 2010) is designed to measure focal lexical and sentence processing effects in a highly controlled manner. We discuss how this task can be modified and extended to provide a unique opportunity for the investigation of lexical effects in sentence context. We present results that demonstrate how the maze task can be used to examine both facilitation and inhibition effects. Most importantly, it can do this while leaving the target sentence unchanged across conditions. This is an advantage that is not available with other paradigms. We also present new versions of the maze task that allow for the isolation of specific lexical effects and that enhance the measurement of lexical recognition through visual animation. Finally, we discuss how the maze task brings to the foreground the extent to which complex multi-layered priming and inhibition are intrinsic to sentence reading and how the maze task can tap this complexity.

This chapter focuses on the question of how novel compounds are processed. To address this question, morphologically unambiguous compounds such as shotden are contrasted with morphologically ambiguous compounds such as clampeel (which can have the constituent structure clam-peel or clamp-eel). I discuss how these strings can be seen as lexical superstates and present a proposal for how they are parsed. An experiment using progressive demasking and typing is reported. Typing results show evidence of activation of both versions of ambiguous compounds, supporting the view that all lexical substrings in a multiword expression that can be activated, will be activated. I claim that this type of activation is fundamental to the understanding of morphological effects in both the visual recognition and production of English words. Specifically, it enables the creation of morphological superstates, the flexible morphological structures that Libben (2017) claims characterize cognitive processing in lexical comprehension and production.

Compound words may be the language structures that are most fundamental to human linguistic ability and most revealing of its dynamics. We review evidence to date on the representation and processing of compound words in the mind and highlight the implications that they have for the broader understanding of language functioning and lexical knowledge. Our examination of the nature of compounds focuses on their deceptive simplicity as well as their dual nature as words and lexical combinations. Compound processing appears to be advantaged when compounds belong to morphologically productive families and when they are both formally and semantically transparent. We also claim that current findings offer converging evidence that compound word processing is characterized by both whole word and constituent activation for compound types.

We present new opportunities for psycholinguistic research that are made available by presenting experiments online over the web. We focus on PsychoPy3, which is a new version of a system for the development and delivery of behavioural experiments. Crucially, it allows for both these functions to be performed online. We note that experiments delivered over the web have significant efficiency advantages. They also open up new opportunities to increase the ecological validity of experiments and to facilitate the participation of members of populations that have thus far been less studied in the psycholinguistic literature. We discuss the crucial matter of millisecond timing in online experiments. The technical details of implementation of a behavioural psycholinguistic experiment are presented, along with listings of additional technical resources and support. Our overall evaluation is that although online experimentation still has technical challenges and improvements are ongoing, it may well represent the future of behavioural psycholinguistic research.

A key question in the study of lexical processing has been whether the semantic transparency of multimorphemic words affects processing. Previous studies of English and French prefixed words have found that words with greater semantic transparency show greater morphological constituent activation. Studies of German, however, have shown constituent activation that is unaffected by semantic transparency. We report two cross-modal priming experiments that examined the underlying causes of this between-language difference. Experiment 1 investigated German particle verbs, in which the particle can be separated from the verb stem. Experiment 2 investigated prefix verbs, which (as in English and French) cannot be separated from the verb stem. Results showed that semantically transparent and opaque prefix and particle verbs induced equivalent priming relative to form controls. This indicates structured representations for all categories. We discuss these findings in relation to a language user's experience with the particular properties of word types.