We investigated the oscillatory neural correlates of auditory lexical processing in healthy adults. Synthetic aperture magnetometry was used to characterize the timing of event-related desynchronization (ERD)/event-related synchronization (ERS) in superior temporal gyri following low-frequency and high-frequency words in contrast to nonwords. ERS and ERD responses were found with both word and ...

In two fMRI experiments, participants named pictures with superimposed distractors that were high or low in frequency or varied in terms of age of acquisition. Pictures superimposed with low-frequency words were named more slowly than those superimposed with high-frequency words, and late-acquired words interfered with picture naming to a greater extent than early-acquired words. The distractor...

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S. Monsell, K. E. Patterson, A. Graham, C. H. Hughes, and R. Milroy (1992) reported that high-frequency irregular words are named faster when presented in a "pure" block than when mixed with nonwords. They attributed this effect to a de-emphasis of an assembly route in the pure block. The current authors replicated this effect in Experiment 1. In Experiments 2 and 3, similar effects resulted fr...

This functional MRI (fMRI) study investigated the effect of lexical and syllable frequency on visual word processing during lexical decision and reading aloud. Previous research has shown a dissociation of syllable and word frequency effects in Spanish using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, suggesting that sublexical (syllabic) representations are computed and mediate the firing of...

Children who read more tend to be better readers than children who read less. Reading exposure captures not only the number of times words are experienced but also the breadth of the contexts words appear in. Using a large children’s corpus of written language, we quantified the former as word frequency and the latter as Semantic Diversity (SemD) (Hoffman et al., 2013). SemD was indexed using L...

To analyze the impact of outline shape on visual word recognition, the visual pattern of the stimuli can be distorted by size alternation. Contrary to the predictions of models that rely on outline shape (Allen, Wallace, & Weber, 1995), the effect of size alternation was greater for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words in a lexical decision task (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, the...

Word frequency plays a role in reduction processes: high-frequency words undergo more reduction than low-frequency words. Pretonic schwa reduction in Dutch is susceptible to frequency effects in this way, but the well-formedness of the cluster that remains after schwa deletion also plays a role. An experiment shows that cluster well-formedness and frequency effects in fact interact with each ot...