Behavioral experiments have revealed that words appearing in many different contexts are responded to faster than words that appear in few contexts. Although this contextual diversity (CD) effect has been found to be stronger than the word-frequency (WF) effect, it is a matter of debate whether the facilitative effects of CD and WF reflect the same underlying mechanisms. The analysis of the ele...

The Effects of Phonological Neighborhoods on Pronunciation Variation in Conversational Speech by Yao Yao Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Professor Keith Johnson, Professor Susanne Gahl, Co-Chairs This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined a...

The Attentional Boost Effect (ABE) refers to the counter-intuitive finding that the detection of infrequent targets in a divided-attention (DA) condition enhances memory of images co-occurring with targets (as compared with images co-occurring with distractors; Swallow & Jiang Cognition, 115, 118-132, 2010). Previous studies have shown that the ABE also applies to verbal materials (words; Spata...

The current study investigated how lexical factors influence the intelligibility of spoken words, and how those effects interact with visual information. A forced-choice word-identification experiment was carried out under auditory-visual and auditoryonly conditions with varying S/N ratios, and the effects of lexical frequency and neighborhood density on identification accuracy were analyzed. T...

frequency of vocabulary used in a piece of writing, prose or poetry, is one of the stylistic features of the writer. words are like bricks which constitute the structure of a literary work, and the way the writer puts or organizes the words , reflects his/her literary characteristics which in turn distinguishes him/her from other writers. being simply one of the elements constituting the writer...

The present study addressed the issue of syllable activation during visual recognition of French words. In addition, it was investigated whether word orthographic information underlies syllable effects. To do so, words were selected according to the frequency of their first syllable (high versus low) and the frequency of the orthographic correspondence of this syllable (high versus low). For ex...

The aim of the present study was to explore the central (e.g., lexical processing) and peripheral processes (motor preparation and execution) underlying word production during typewriting. To do so, we tested non-professional typers in a picture typing task while continuously recording EEG. Participants were instructed to write (by means of a standard keyboard) the corresponding name for a give...

Tha Uni tion cho Jam use A Bal Was dba 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 lists of highand low-frequency words and were given a yes/no episodic r...