The Library

Modeling lexical decision : the form of frequency and diversity effects

Tools

Adeleman, James S. and Brown, G. D. A. (Gordon D. A.). (2008) Modeling lexical decision : the form of frequency and diversity effects. Psychological Review, Vol.115 (No.1). pp. 214-227. ISSN 0033-295X

Preview

PDF
WRAP_Adelman_rankall.pdf - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader
Download (313Kb)

Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.115.1.214

Abstract

What is the root cause of word frequency effects on lexical decision times? W. S. Murray and K. I. Forster (2004) argued that such effects are linear in rank frequency, consistent with a serial search model of lexical access. In this article, the authors (a) describe a method of testing models of such effects that takes into account the possibility of parametric overfitting; (b) illustrate the effect of corpus choice on estimates of rank frequency; (c) give derivations of nine functional forms as predictions of models of lexical decision; (d) detail the assessment of these models and the rank model against existing data regarding the functional form of frequency effects; and (e) report further assessments using contextual diversity, a factor confounded with word frequency. The relationship between the occurrence distribution of words and lexical decision latencies to those words does not appear compatible with the rank hypothesis, undermining the case for serial search models of lexical access. Three transformations of contextual diversity based on extensions of instance models do, however, remain as plausible explanations of the effect.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology
Divisions:	Faculty of Science > Psychology
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Language and languages -- Research
Journal or Publication Title:	Psychological Review
Publisher:	American Psychological Association
ISSN:	0033-295X
Date:	January 2008
Volume:	Vol.115
Number:	No.1
Page Range:	pp. 214-227
Identification Number:	10.1037/0033-295X.115.1.214
Status:	Peer Reviewed
Access rights to Published version:	Open Access
Funder:	Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC), Leverhulme Trust (LT), University of Warwick
Grant number:	RES 000-22-1558 (ESRC), F/215/AY (Leverhulme)
References:	Adelman, J. S., Brown, G. D. A., & Quesada, J. F. (2006). Contextual diversity, not word frequency, determines word-naming and lexical decision times. Psychological Science, 17, 814–823. Anderson, J. R., & Milson, R. (1989). Human memory: An adaptive perspective. Psychological Review, 96, 703–719. Andrews, S. (1989). Frequency and neighborhood effects on lexical access: Activation or search? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 15, 802–814. Andrews, S. (1992). Frequency and neighborhood effects on lexical access: Lexical similarity or orthographic redundancy? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 234–254. Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & Gulikers, L. (1995). The CELEX Lexical Database (Release 2) [CD-ROM]. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., Hutchison, K. A., Neely, J. H., Nelson, D., Simpson, G. B., et al. (2002). The English Lexicon Project: A web-based repository of descriptive and behavioral measures for 40,481 English words and nonwords. Retrieved 11th December, 2004 from http://elexicon.wustl.edu/ . Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., & Pilotti, M. (1999). Item-level analysis of lexical decision: Results from a mega-study. In Abstracts of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomics Society (p. 44). Los Angeles, CA: Psychonomic Society. Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., Sergent-Marshall, S. D., Spieler, D. H., & Yap, M. J. (2004). Visual word recognition of single-syllable words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 283–316. Balota, D. A., Yap, M. J., Cortese, M. J., Hutchison, K. I., Kessler, B., Loftis, B., et al. (2007). The English Lexicon Project. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 445-459. Beran, R. (1988). Prepivoting test statistics: A bootstrap view of asymptotic refinements. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 83, 687–697. British National Corpus Consortium. (2000). British National Corpus World Edition [CD-ROM]. Oxford: Humanities Computing Unit, University of Oxford. Burgess, C., & Livesay, K. (1998). The effect of corpus size in predicting reaction time in a basic word recognition task: Moving on from Kuˇcera and Francis. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments and Computers, 30, 272–277. Colonius, H. (1993). The instance theory of automaticity: Why the Weibull? Psychological Review, 102, 744–750. Coltheart, M., Davelaar, E., Jonasson, J. T., & Besner, D. (1977). Access to the internal lexicon. In S. Dorniˇc (Ed.), Attention and performance VI (pp. 535–555). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108, 204–256. Efron, B., & Tibshirani, R. J. (1993). An introduction to the bootstrap. New York: Chapman and Hall. Galbraith, R. C., & Underwood, B. J. (1973). Perceived frequency of concrete and abstract words. Memory & Cognition, 1, 56–60. Heathcote, A., Brown, S., & Mewhort, D. J. K. (2002). The power law repealed: The case for an exponential law of practice. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7, 185–207. Jacobs, A. M., & Grainger, J. (1994). Models of visual word recognition — sampling the state of the art. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 20, 1311–1334. Kuˇcera, H., & Francis, W. N. (1967). Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press. Landauer, T. K., Foltz, P. W., & Laham, D. (1998). An introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes, 25, 259–284. Logan, G. D. (1988). Toward an instance theory of automatization. Psychological Review, 95, 492–527. McDonald, S. A., & Shillcock, R. C. (2001). Rethinking the word frequency effect: The neglected role of distributional information in lexical processing. Language and Speech, 44, 295–323. Murray, W. S., & Forster, K. I. (2004). Serial mechanisms in lexical access: The rank hypothesis. Psychological Review, 111, 721–756. Norris, D. (2006). The Bayesian reader: Explaining word recognition as an optimal Bayesian decision process. Psychological Review, 113, 327–357. Steyvers, M., & Malmberg, K. J. (2003). The effect of normative context variability on recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 760–766.
URI:	http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/398