The Influence of Object Relative Size on Priming and Explicit Memory

We investigated the effects of object relative size on priming and explicit memory for color photos of common objects. Participants were presented with color photos of pairs of objects displayed in either appropriate or inappropriate relative sizes. Implicit memory was assessed by speed of object size ratings whereas explicit memory was assessed by an old/new recognition test. Study-to-test changes in relative size reduced both priming and explicit memory and had large effects for objects displayed in large vs. small size at test. Our findings of substantial size-specific influences on priming with common objects under some but not other conditions are consistent with instance views of object perception and priming but inconsistent with structural description views

Connectivity, Not Frequency, Determines the Fate of a Morpheme

Morphemes are the smallest meaningful parts of words and therefore represent a natural unit to study the evolution of words. To analyze the influence of language change on morphemes, we performed a large scale analysis of German and English vocabulary covering the last 200 years. Using a network approach from bioinformatics, we examined the historical dynamics of morphemes, the fixation of new morphemes and the emergence of words containing existing morphemes. We found that these processes are driven mainly by the number of different direct neighbors of a morpheme in words (connectivity, an equivalent to family size or type frequency) and not its frequency of usage (equivalent to token frequency). This contrasts words, whose survival is determined by their frequency of usage. We therefore identified features of morphemes which are not dictated by the statistical properties of words. As morphemes are also relevant for the mental representation of words, this result might enable establishing a link between an individual’s perception of language and historical language change

Meaning is in the beholders's eye: Morpho-semantic effects in masked priming

A substantial body of literature indicates that, at least at some level of processing, complex words are broken down into their morphemes solely on the basis of their orthographic form (e.g., Rastle, Davis and New, 2004). Recent evidence has shown that this process might not be obligatory, as indicated by the fact that morpho-orthographic effects were not found in a cross-case same-different task, i.e., when lexical access is not necessarily required (Dunabeitia, Kinoshita, Carreiras and Norris, 2011). In this study we employed a task that requires to understand a series of words, and thus implies lexical access. Masked primes were shown very briefly right before the appearance of the target word; prime-target pairs entertained either a morpho-semantic (dealer-DEAL), a morpho-orthographic (corner-CORN), or a purely orthographic relationship (brothel-BROTH). Eye fixation times clearly indicate facilitation for transparent pairs, but not for opaque pairs (nor for orthographic pairs, which were used as a baseline). These results indicate that the access to a morpho-orthographic level of representation is not always necessary for lexical identification, which challenges models of visual word identification that cannot account for task-induced effect