Emergence of wordlikeness in the mental lexicon: Language, population, and task effects in visual word recognition

• Author / Creator

  Miwa, Koji

• Various aspects of our higher-level cognition affect the buttom-up information uptake in perception of objects, faces, and scenes. Such interplay between new information and existing information in our memory can be seen also in rapid visual word recognition. Lexical processing architectures proposed to date, however, have been based mostly on studies with specific characteristics: those investigating monolingual English speakers reading English words, with a lexical decision task demand, and with response times as the primary dependent variable (Libben & Jarema, 2002). Phenomena consistently observed across different linguistic characteristics, individuals, and tasks must surely reflect the core of human language processes (i.e. functional overlap). In this dissertation, I investigated consequences of testing different language, population, and task on visual word recognition processes in three studies: primed Japanese kanji lexical decision with Japanese monolinguals (Chapter 2), eye-tracking Japanese kanji lexical decision with Japanese monolinguals (Chapter 3), and eye-tracking English lexical decision with Japanese-English bilinguals, who possess knowledge of orthographically different languages (Chapter 4). The three studies collectively show that language-specific properties, individual differences, and variable task demands, by themselves, do not result in completely different pictures with respect to how wordlikeness emerges in visual word recognition.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Lexical decision
  • Visual word recognition
  • Morphological processing
  • Mixed-effects modeling
  • Bilingual processing
  • Eye-tracking

• Graduation date

  Fall 2013

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R31C1TQ15

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.