This study investigated the impact of Chinese ESL learners’ second language (L2) proficiency on English word recognition in a lexical decision task. The study focused on the interaction among one between-participant variable (L2 proficiency) and three within-participant variables (orthographic neighborhood density, word frequency, and words/nonwords). ANOVA and two-tailed t-test indicated that:...

Accuracy in identifying a perceptually degraded word (e.g., stake) can be either enhanced by recent exposure to the same stimulus or reduced by recent exposure to a similar stimulus (e.g., stare). In the present study, we explored the mechanisms underlying these benefits and costs by examining the performance of amnesic and control groups in a forced choice perceptual identification (FCPI) task...

BACKGROUND High-frequency deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) improves motor functions in those with Parkinson disease but may worsen frontal functions such as verbal fluency (VF). In contrast, low-frequency DBS leads to deterioration of motor functions. It is not known whether low-frequency STN DBS also has an effect on frontal functions. OBJECTIVE To examine whethe...

Judgments of frequency for targets (old items) and foils (similar; dissimilar) steadily increase as the number of times a target is studied increases, but discrimination of targets from similar foils does not steadily improve, a phenomenon termed registration without learning (D. L. Hintzman & T. Curran, 1995; D. L. Hintzman, T. Curran, & B. Oppy, 1992). The present experiment explores this phe...

Low-frequency words, esp. words occurring only once in a text corpus, are very popular in text analysis. Also many lexicographers draw attention to such words. This paper lists a detailed statistical analysis of low-frequency words. The results provides important information for many practical applications, including lexicography and language modeling.

Zipf’s law states that the frequency of word tokens in a large corpus of natural language is inversely proportional to the rank. The law is investigated for two languages English and Mandarin and for ngram word phrases as well as for single words. The law for single words is shown to be valid only for high frequency words. However, when single word and n-gram phrases are combined together in on...

One of the major challenges faced by researchers in linguistics and psycholinguistics India is lack corpora linguistic information such as word frequency, letter phonological phonetic data on sounds, morphological words, etc, Indian languages. When they do not get stimulus material readily available any corpus, resort to preparing a set that meets criteria for their specific study. This paper p...

This study investigates speech comprehension in competing multi-talker babble. We examined the effects of number of simultaneous talkers and of frequency of words in the babble on lexical decision to target words. Results revealed better performance at a low talker number (n = 2). Importantly, frequency of words in the babble significantly affected performance: high frequency word babble interf...

Two experiments address the nature of the word-frequency mirror effect in episodic recognition performance and the underlying cognitive changes that occur in both healthy aging and in early-stage Dementia of the Alzheimer’s Type (DAT). In Experiment 1, five groups of participants (young, healthy old, healthy old-old, very mildly demented individuals, and mildly demented individuals) studied lis...

In 3 experiments, subjects named pictures with low- or high-frequency superimposed distractor words. In a 1st experiment, we replicated the finding that low-frequency words induce more interference in picture naming than high-frequency words (i.e., distractor frequency effect; Miozzo & Caramazza, 2003). According to the response exclusion hypothesis, this effect has its origin at a postlexical ...