In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 810-815). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Inequality between the Classes: Phonological and Distributional Typicality as
Predictors of Lexical Processing
Inequality between the Classes: Phonological and Distributional Typicality as Predictors of Lexical Processing
Padraic Monaghan
Nick Chater
Morten H. Christiansen
Abstract
Information about the syntactic category of a word can be
derived from a number of complementary sources. We focus
here on phonological and distributional cues for
distinguishing nouns and verbs that have been proposed as
useful for language acquisition. In this paper we assessed the
extent to which this information affects lexical processing in
adults. We hypothesised that the phonological or
distributional typicality of a word with respect to its syntactic
class would influence lexical access - words that were more
typical of their class would be accessed more quickly. We
tested this in three tasks: naming, lexical decision, and a
noun/verb decision task. Words that were phonologically
typical of their syntactic category were responded to more
quickly in lexical decision and naming tasks. Distributional
typicality related only to the noun/verb decision task.Click here to download a PDF version.
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