Front-end Serial Processing of Complex and Compound Words: The APPLE Model

Native speaker competence in English includes the ability to produce and recognize morphologically complex words such as blackboard and indestructibility &s well as novel constructions such as quoteworthiness. This paper addresses the question: H o w do subjects 'see into these complex strings? It presents, as an answer, the Automatic Progressive Parsing and Lexical Excitation (APPLE) model of complex word recognition and demonstrates how the model can provide a natural account of the complex and compound word recognition data in the literature. The APPLE model has as its core a recursive procedure which isolates progressively larger substrings of a complex word and allows for the lexical excitation of constituent morphemes. The model differs from previous accounts of morphological decomposition in that it supports a view of the mental lexicon in which the excitation of lexical entries and the construction of morphological representations IS automatic and obligatory

Computational Demand and Resources in Aphasia

It is sometimes claimed that interactive-activation models are too powerful, and that it is difficult to constrain them adequately. I illustrate this problem by showing that the basic interactive-activation architecture has several different possible sources for effects of spelling-to-sound regularity on word naming. I then show how data can constrain the architecture. New data lead to a rather different and more constrained version of the interactive-activation model to account for spelling-to-sound conversion. Analysis of the errors made by patients suffering from acquired surface dyslexia confirms the predictions of the constrained model. It is concluded that the traditional interactive activation framework must be considerably constrained to account for normal and disturbed word naming

Variation in Unconscious Lexical Processing: Education an d Experience Make a Difference

Over the past twenty years numerous studies have investigated the extent to which morphological constituents of words are activated during the process of word recognition. In the vast majority of these studies it has been assumed that a correspondence exists between the formal linguistic analysis of a word and its representation in the minds of native speakers. This paper investigates the the extent to which this correspondence can be affected by individual variation that is associated with education, exposure and training. We investigated student who had recently completed a course in medical terminology. These students, and matched control subjects, responded to medical and nonmedical multimorphemic stimuli in a lexical decision task. The results indicate that the medical terminology students' training affected their performance on novel medical words as well as their performance on very common medical words (e.g., psychiatry) that would have been part of their vocabulary prior to taking the course. The results therefore support the view that automatic unconscious lexical processing can indeed be modified by explicit training and specialized exposure. This finding has consequences for the generalizability of studies conducted on university students to the general population of native speakers

High Velocity Impact Performance of a Dual Layer Thermal Protection System for the Mars Sample Return Earth Entry Vehicle

No abstract availabl

Second Culture Acquisition and Second Language Acquisition: Faux amis?

One of the well-known characteristics of modern approaches to second language learning is the view that successful second language acquisition (SLA) is accompanied by second culture acquisition (SCA) (e.g., Hamers & Blanc,1989; Schumann 1978). It seems clear that a learner's acquisition of communicative competence must involve more than the command of the grammatical structures of the target language and a mastery of its phonology. The learner must also acquire new cultural knowledge and a set of culture-specific constraints on linguistic behaviour. The claims above make sense. There is little doubt that, in the best case, expansions of linguistic competence should be accompanied by expansions of cultural competence. But there is also a way in which the claims above make too much sense. They suggest a straightforward parallelism between SLA and SCA as well as a parallelism between the successful end-states of bilingualism and biculturalism. In this paper, we suggest that although the parallels between SLA and SCA are intuitively appealing, they often mask important underlying differences in the ways in which linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge are organized as well as important differences in the acquisition process

Helping a crocodile to learn German plurals: Children’s online judgment of actual, potential and illegal plural forms

A substantial tradition of linguistic inquiry has framed the knowledge of native speakers in terms of their ability to determine the grammatical acceptability of language forms that they encounter for the first time. In the domain of morphology, the productivity framework of Dressler (CLASNET Working papers 7, 1997) has emphasized the importance of this ability in terms of the graded potentiality of non-existing multimorphemic forms. The goal of this study was to investigate what role the notion of potentiality plays in online lexical well-formedness judgment among children who are native speakers of Austrian German. A total of 114 children between the ages of six and ten and a total of 40 adults between the ages of 18 and 30 (as a comparison group) participated in an online well-formedness judgment task which focused on pluralized German nouns. Concrete, picturable, high frequency German nouns were presented in three pluralized forms: (a) actual existing plural form, (b) morphologically illegal plural form, (c) potential (but not existing) plural form. Participants were shown pictures of the nouns (as a set of three identical items) and simultaneously heard one of three pluralized forms for each noun. Response latency and judgment type served as dependent variables. Results indicate that both children and adults are sensitive to the distinction between illegal and potential forms (neither of which they would have encountered). For all participants, plural frequency (rather than frequency of the singular form) affected responses for both existing and non-existing words. Other factors increasing acceptability were the presence of supplementary umlaut in addition to suffixation and homophony with existing words or word forms

Understanding Phishing Email Processing and Perceived Trustworthiness Through Eye Tracking

© Copyright © 2020 McAlaney and Hills. Social engineering attacks in the form of phishing emails represent one of the biggest risks to cybersecurity. There is a lack of research on how the common elements of phishing emails, such as the presence of misspellings and the use of urgency and threatening language, influences how the email is processed and judged by individuals. Eye tracking technology may provide insight into this. In this exploratory study a sample of 22 participants viewed a series of emails with or without indicators associated with phishing emails, whilst their eye movements were recorded using a SMI RED 500 eye-tracker. Participants were also asked to give a numerical rating of how trustworthy they deemed each email to be. Overall, it was found that participants looked more frequently at the indicators associated with phishing than would be expected by chance but spent less overall time viewing these elements than would be expected by chance. The emails that included indicators associated with phishing were rated as less trustworthy on average, with the presence of misspellings or threatening language being associated with the lowest trustworthiness ratings. In addition, it was noted that phishing indicators relating to threatening language or urgency were viewed before misspellings. However, there was no significant interaction between the trustworthiness ratings of the emails and the amount of scanning time for phishing indicators within the emails. These results suggest that there is a complex relationship between the presence of indicators associated with phishing within an email and how trustworthy that email is judged to be. This study also demonstrates that eye tracking technology is a feasible method with which to identify and record how phishing emails are processed visually by individuals, which may contribute toward the design of future mitigation approaches

Representational deficit or processing effect? An electrophysiological study of noun-noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English

The processing of English noun-noun compounds (NNCs) was investigated to identify the extent and nature of differences between the performance of native speakers of English and advanced Spanish and German non-native speakers of English. The study sought to establish whether the word order of the equivalent structure in the non-native speakers' mothertongue (L1) had an influence on their processing of NNCs in their second language (L2), and whether this influence was due to differences in grammatical representation (i.e. incomplete acquisition of the relevant structure) or processing effects. Two mask-primed lexical decision experiments were conducted in which compounds were presented with their constituent nouns in licit versus reversed order. The first experiment used a speeded lexical decision task with reaction time registration, and the second a delayed lexical decision task with EEG registration. There were no significant group differences in accuracy in the licit word order condition, suggesting that the grammatical representation had been fully acquired by the non-native speakers. However, the Spanish speakers made slightly more errors with the reversed order and had longer response times, suggesting an L1 interference effect (as the reverse order matches the licit word order in Spanish). The EEG data, analysed with generalized additive mixed models, further supported this hypothesis. The EEG waveform of the non-native speakers was characterized by a slightly later onset N400 in the reversed constituent order. Compound frequency predicted the amplitude of the EEG signal for the licit word order for native speakers, but for the reversed constituent order for Spanish speakers - the licit order in their L1- supporting the hypothesis that Spanish speakers are affected by interferences from their L1