The British Lexicon Project: Lexical decision data for 28,730 monosyllabic and disyllabic English words

We present a new database of lexical decision times for English words and nonwords, for which two groups of British participants each responded to 14,365 monosyllabic and disyllabic words and the same number of nonwords for a total duration of 16 h (divided over multiple sessions). This database, called the British Lexicon Project (BLP), fills an important gap between the Dutch Lexicon Project (DLP; Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, Frontiers in Language Sciences. Psychology, 1, 174, 2010) and the English Lexicon Project (ELP; Balota et al., 2007), because it applies the repeated measures design of the DLP to the English language. The high correlation between the BLP and ELP data indicates that a high percentage of variance in lexical decision data sets is systematic variance, rather than noise, and that the results of megastudies are rather robust with respect to the selection and presentation of the stimuli. Because of its design, the BLP makes the same analyses possible as the DLP, offering researchers with a new interesting data set of word-processing times for mixed effects analyses and mathematical modeling. The BLP data are available at http://crr.ugent.be/blp and as Electronic Supplementary Materials

Exploring the Relationship between Semantics and Space

The asymmetric distribution of human spatial attention has been repeatedly documented in both patients and healthy controls. Biases in the distribution of attention and/or in the mental representation of space may also affect some aspects of language processing. We investigated whether biases in attention and/or mental representation of space affect semantic representations. In particular, we investigated whether semantic judgments could be modulated by the location in space where the semantic information was presented and the role of the left and right parietal cortices in this task. Healthy subjects were presented with three pictures arranged horizontally (one middle and two outer pictures) of items belonging to the same semantic category. Subjects were asked to indicate the spatial position in which the semantic distance between the outer and middle pictures was smaller. Subjects systematically overestimated the semantic distance of items presented in the right side of space. We explored the neural correlates underpinning this bias using rTMS over the left and right parietal cortex. rTMS of the left parietal cortex selectively reduced this rightward bias. Our findings suggest the existence of an attentional and/or mental representational bias in semantic judgments, similar to that observed for the processing of space and numbers. Spatial manipulation of semantic material results in the activation of specialised attentional resources located in the left hemisphere

Getting a grip on sensorimotor effects in lexical-semantic processing

One of the strategies that researchers have used to investigate the role of sensorimotor information in lexical-semantic processing is to examine effects of words’ rated body-object interaction (BOI; the ease with which the human body can interact with a word’s referent). Processing tends to be facilitated for words with high BOI compared to words with low BOI, across a wide variety of tasks. Such effects have been referenced in debates over the nature of semantic representations, but their theoretical import has been limited by the fact that BOI is a fairly coarse measure of sensorimotor experience with words’ referents. In the present study we collected ratings for 621 words on seven semantic dimensions (graspability, ease of pantomime, number of actions, animacy, size, danger, and usefulness) in order to investigate which attributes are most strongly related to BOI ratings, and to lexical-semantic processing. BOI ratings were obtained from previous norming studies (Bennett, Burnett, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2011; Tillotson, Siakaluk, & Pexman, 2008) and measures of lexical-semantic processing were obtained from previous behavioural megastudies involving the semantic categorization task (concrete/abstract decision; Pexman, Heard, Lloyd, & Yap, 2017) and the lexical decision task (Balota et al., 2007). Results showed that the motor dimension of graspability, ease of pantomime, and number of actions were all related to BOI and that these dimensions together explained more variance in semantic processing than did BOI ratings alone. These ratings will be useful for researchers who wish to study how different kinds of bodily interactions influence lexical-semantic processing and cognition

The ERP signature of the contextual diversity effect in visual word recognition

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 electrophysiological correlates of CD may shed some light on this issue. This experiment is the first to examine the ERPs to high- and low-CD words when WF is controlled for. Results revealed that while high-CD words produced faster responses than low-CD words, their ERPs showed larger negativities (225-325 ms) than low-CD words. This result goes in the opposite direction of the ERP WF effect (high-frequency words elicit smaller N400 amplitudes than low-frequency words). The direction and scalp distribution of the CD effect resembled the ERP effects associated with "semantic richness." Thus, while apparently related, CD and WF originate from different sources during the access of lexical-semantic representations.The research reported in this article has been partially funded by Grants PSI2011-26924 (Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) and GV/2014/067 (Conselleria d'Educacio, Investigacio, Cultura i Esport de la Generalitat Valenciana).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio