Reexamining the word length effect in visual word recognition: New evidence from the English Lexicon Project

doi:10.3758/BF03193811

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Reexamining the word length effect in visual word recognition: New evidence from the English Lexicon Project

Journal Article•DOI•

Reexamining the word length effect in visual word recognition: New evidence from the English Lexicon Project

Boris New¹, Ludovic Ferrand², Christophe Pallier³, Marc Brysbaert⁴•Institutions (4)

Centre national de la recherche scientifique¹, Paris Descartes University², French Institute of Health and Medical Research³, Royal Holloway, University of London⁴

01 Feb 2006-Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (Psychon Bull Rev)-Vol. 13, Iss: 1, pp 45-52

TL;DR: The effect of word length (number of letters in a word) on lexical decision was reexamined using the English Lexicon Project and an unexpected pattern of results taking the form of a U-shaped curve was revealed.

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Abstract: In the present study, we reexamined the effect of word length (number of letters in a word) on lexical decision. Using the English Lexicon Project, which is based on a large data set of over 40,481 words (Balota et al., 2002), we performed simultaneous multiple regression analyses on a selection of 33,006 English words (ranging from 3 to 13 letters in length). Our analyses revealed an unexpected pattern of results taking the form of a U-shaped curve. The effect of number of letters was facilitatory for words of 3–5 letters, null for words of 5–8 letters, and inhibitory for words of 8–13 letters. We also showed that printed frequency, number of syllables, and number of orthographic neighbors all made independent contributions. The length effects were replicated in a new analysis of a subset of 3,833 monomorphemic nouns (ranging from 3 to 10 letters), and also in another analysis based on 12,987 bisyllabic items (ranging from 3 to 9 letters). These effects were independent of printed frequency, number of syllables, and number of orthographic neighbors. Furthermore, we also observed robust linear inhibitory effects of number of syllables. Implications for models of visual word recognition are discussed.

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Journal Article•DOI•

The English Lexicon Project.

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David A. Balota¹, Melvin J. Yap¹, Michael J. Cortese², Keith A. Hutchison³, Brett Kessler¹, Bjorn Loftis¹, James H. Neely⁴, Douglas L. Nelson⁵, Greg B. Simpson⁶, Rebecca Treiman¹ - Show less +6 more•Institutions (6)

Washington University in St. Louis¹, College of Charleston², Montana State University³, State University of New York System⁴, University of South Florida⁵, University of Kansas⁶

01 Aug 2007-Behavior Research Methods

TL;DR: The motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli are described.

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Abstract: The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.

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2,164 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English

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Marc Brysbaert¹, Boris New²•Institutions (2)

Ghent University¹, Paris Descartes University²

01 Nov 2009-Behavior Research Methods

TL;DR: The size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure were investigated, finding that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence.

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Abstract: Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kucera and Francis frequency norms. By using the lexical decision times of recently published megastudies, we show how bad this measure is and what must be done to improve it. In particular, we investigated the size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure. We observed that corpus size is of practical importance for small sizes (depending on the frequency of the word), but not for sizes above 16–30 million words. As for the language register, we found that frequencies based on television and film subtitles are better than frequencies based on written sources, certainly for the monosyllabic and bisyllabic words used in psycholinguistic research. Finally, we found that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence. Part of the superiority of the latter is due to the words that are frequently used as names. Assembling a new frequency norm on the basis of these considerations turned out to predict word processing times much better than did the existing norms (including Kucera & Francis and Celex). The new SUBTL frequency norms from the SUBTLEXUS corpus are freely available for research purposes from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental, as well as from the University of Ghent and Lexique Web sites.

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2,106 citations

Cites background or methods from "Reexamining the word length effect ..."

...The linear length effect of the number of letters in reality is a compound of word length itself (New et al., 2006, Figure 2) and the number of words resembling the stimulus word (as measured by N, the number of orthographic neighbors)....
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...As the Elexicon includes all types of words, we made a selection similar to the one used by New et al. (2006)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words

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Victor Kuperman¹, Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez², Marc Brysbaert³•Institutions (3)

McMaster University¹, Bangor University², Ghent University³

12 May 2012-Behavior Research Methods

TL;DR: This megastudy presents age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) using the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk to indicate that the ratings collected are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions.

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Abstract: We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from U.S. students reached .93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentage of the variance in the lexical-decision data of the English Lexicon Project, over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth.

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873 citations

Cites background from "Reexamining the word length effect ..."

...Additional syllables induce a processing cost as well (Ferrand et al., 2011; Fitzsimmons & Drieghe, 2011; New et al., 2006)....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Moving beyond Coltheart’s N: A new measure of orthographic similarity

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Tal Yarkoni¹, David A. Balota¹, Melvin J. Yap²•Institutions (2)

University of Washington¹, National University of Singapore²

01 Oct 2008-Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

TL;DR: It is demonstrated that OLD20 provides significant advantages over ON in predicting both lexical decision and pronunciation performance in three large data sets, and interacts more strongly with word frequency and shows stronger effects of neighborhood frequency than does ON.

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Abstract: Visual word recognition studies commonly measure the orthographic similarity of words using Coltheart’s orthographic neighborhood size metric (ON). Although ON reliably predicts behavioral variability in many lexical tasks, its utility is inherently limited by its relatively restrictive definition. In the present article, we introduce a new measure of orthographic similarity generated using a standard computer science metric of string similarity (Levenshtein distance). Unlike ON, the new measure—named orthographic Levenshtein distance 20 (OLD20)—incorporates comparisons between all pairs of words in the lexicon, including words of different lengths. We demonstrate that OLD20 provides significant advantages over ON in predicting both lexical decision and pronunciation performance in three large data sets. Moreover, OLD20 interacts more strongly with word frequency and shows stronger effects of neighborhood frequency than does ON. The discussion section focuses on the implications of these results for models of visual word recognition.

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521 citations

Journal Article•DOI•

Illiterate to literate: behavioural and cerebral changes induced by reading acquisition

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Stanislas Dehaene¹, Laurent D. Cohen², Jose Morais³, Régine Kolinsky³•Institutions (3)

French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission¹, University of Paris², Université libre de Bruxelles³

01 Apr 2015-Nature Reviews Neuroscience

TL;DR: Literacy acquisition provides a remarkable example of how the brain reorganizes to accommodate a novel cultural skill.

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Abstract: The acquisition of literacy transforms the human brain. By reviewing studies of illiterate subjects, we propose specific hypotheses on how the functions of core brain systems are partially reoriented or 'recycled' when learning to read. Literacy acquisition improves early visual processing and reorganizes the ventral occipito-temporal pathway: responses to written characters are increased in the left occipito-temporal sulcus, whereas responses to faces shift towards the right hemisphere. Literacy also modifies phonological coding and strengthens the functional and anatomical link between phonemic and graphemic representations. Literacy acquisition therefore provides a remarkable example of how the brain reorganizes to accommodate a novel cultural skill.

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477 citations

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References

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Journal Article•DOI•

DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud.

[...]

Max Coltheart, Kathleen Rastle, Conrad Perry, Robyn Langdon, Johannes C. Ziegler - Show less +1 more

01 Jan 2001-Psychological Review

TL;DR: The DRC model is a computational realization of the dual-route theory of reading, and is the only computational model of reading that can perform the 2 tasks most commonly used to study reading: lexical decision and reading aloud.

...read moreread less

Abstract: This article describes the Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) model, a computational model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. The DRC is a computational realization of the dual-route theory of reading, and is the only computational model of reading that can perform the 2 tasks most commonly used to study reading: lexical decision and reading aloud. For both tasks, the authors show that a wide variety of variables that influence human latencies influence the DRC model's latencies in exactly the same way. The DRC model simulates a number of such effects that other computational models of reading do not, but there appear to be no effects that any other current computational model of reading can simulate but that the DRC model cannot. The authors conclude that the DRC model is the most successful of the existing computational models of reading.

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3,472 citations

"Reexamining the word length effect ..." refers background in this paper

...…has no effect on word recognition (e.g., because letters are processed in parallel; see Grainger & Jacobs, 1996) or that the effect is inhibitory (e.g., because the nonlexical route for low-frequency words processes letter strings sequentially in a left-to-right cycle; see Coltheart et al., 2001)....
[...]

Journal Article•DOI•

Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence

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Kevin Lund¹, Curt Burgess¹•Institutions (1)

University of California, Riverside¹

01 Jun 1996-Behavior Research Methods Instruments & Computers

TL;DR: A procedure that processes a corpus of text and produces numeric vectors containing information about its meanings for each word, which provide the basis for a representational model of semantic memory, hyperspace analogue to language (HAL).

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Abstract: A procedure that processes a corpus of text and produces numeric vectors containing information about its meanings for each word is presented. This procedure is applied to a large corpus of natural language text taken from Usenet, and the resulting vectors are examined to determine what information is contained within them. These vectors provide the coordinates in a high-dimensional space in which word relationships can be analyzed. Analyses of both vector similarity and multidimensional scaling demonstrate that there is significant semantic information carried in the vectors. A comparison of vector similarity with human reaction times in a single-word priming experiment is presented. These vectors provide the basis for a representational model of semantic memory, hyperspace analogue to language (HAL).

...read moreread less

1,717 citations

"Reexamining the word length effect ..." refers methods in this paper

...As for frequency, we took log HAL frequencies (Lund & Burgess, 1996) provided in the ELP....
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Journal Article•DOI•

Orthographic Processing in Visual Word Recognition: A Multiple Read-Out Model

[...]

Jonathan Grainger¹, Arthur M. Jacobs•Institutions (1)

University of Provence¹

01 Jul 1996-Psychological Review

TL;DR: A model of orthographic processing is described that postulates read-out from different information dimensions, determined by variable response criteria set on these dimensions, that unifies results obtained in response-limited and data-limited paradigms and helps resolve a number of inconsistencies in the experimental literature.

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Abstract: A model of orthographic processing is described that postulates read-out from different information dimensions, determined by variable response criteria set on these dimensions. Performance in a perceptual identification task is simulated as the percentage of trials on which a noisy criterion set on the dimension of single word detector activity is reached. Two additional criteria set on the dimensions of total lexical activity and time from stimulus onset are hypothesized to be operational in the lexical decision task. These additional criteria flexibly adjust to changes in stimulus material and task demands, thus accounting for strategic influences on performance in this task. The model unifies results obtained in response-limited and data-limited paradigms and helps resolve a number of inconsistencies in the experimental literature that cannot be accommodated by other current models of visual word recognition.

...read moreread less

1,062 citations

"Reexamining the word length effect ..." refers background in this paper

...…of visual word recognition has been that word length either has no effect on word recognition (e.g., because letters are processed in parallel; see Grainger & Jacobs, 1996) or that the effect is inhibitory (e.g., because the nonlexical route for low-frequency words processes letter strings…...
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Journal Article•DOI•

Visual word recognition of single-syllable words.

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David A. Balota¹, Michael J. Cortese², Susan D. Sergent-Marshall¹, Daniel H. Spieler³, Melvin J. Yap¹ - Show less +1 more•Institutions (3)

Washington University in St. Louis¹, College of Charleston², Georgia Institute of Technology³

01 Jun 2004-Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

TL;DR: Large-scale regression studies were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables, and semantic variables to investigate visual word recognition, shedding light on recent empirical controversies in the available word recognition literature.

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Abstract: Speeded visual word naming and lexical decision performance are reported for 2428 words for young adults and healthy older adults. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to investigate the unique predictive variance of phonological features in the onsets, lexical variables (e.g., measures of consistency, frequency, familiarity, neighborhood size, and length), and semantic variables (e.g. imageahility and semantic connectivity). The influence of most variables was highly task dependent, with the results shedding light on recent empirical controversies in the available word recognition literature. Semantic-level variables accounted for unique variance in both speeded naming and lexical decision performance, level with the latter task producing the largest semantic-level effects. Discussion focuses on the utility of large-scale regression studies in providing a complementary approach to the standard factorial designs to investigate visual word recognition.

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804 citations

"Reexamining the word length effect ..." refers background in this paper

...As indicated in the introduction, Balota et al. (2004) reported in an experiment with single syllable words ranging from 2 to 8 letters a facilitatory length effect for high frequency words (which probably had a reduced length range) in university students....
[...]
...Another important result of Balota et al. (2004) is that their length effect was obtained after partialling out the length in phonemes, suggesting that the letter length effect is not a phoneme length effect in disguise....
[...]

Journal Article•DOI•

Visual duration threshold as a function of word-probability.

[...]

Davis H. Howes¹, Richard L. Solomon•Institutions (1)

Harvard University¹

01 Jun 1951-Journal of Experimental Psychology

447 citations

"Reexamining the word length effect ..." refers background or methods or result in this paper

...Recently, Juhasz and Rayner (2003) found word length to be a significant predictor of gaze duration and total fixation duration, confirming Rayner et al....
[...]
...Recently, Juhasz and Rayner (2003) found word length to be a significant predictor of gaze duration and total fixation duration, confirming Rayner et al.’s finding. Testing naming performance on 2,820 single-syllable words, Spieler and Balota (1997) found a surprisingly large inhibitory influence of length in letters (4.5% unique variance, 6.3% for log frequency, and 2.2% for orthographic neighborhood size). In a cross-language study, comparing German and English cognates, Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, and Braun (2001) found an inhibitory letter length effect in both languages (in a naming task with items from 3 to 6 letters), although the effect was stronger in German than in English. Furthermore, these effects were still significant when the number of orthographic neighbors was partialled out. Perry and Ziegler (2002) were able to simulate these results with both a German version and the English version of the DRC model....
[...]
...Recently, Juhasz and Rayner (2003) found word length to be a significant predictor of gaze duration and total fixation duration, confirming Rayner et al.’s finding. Testing naming performance on 2,820 single-syllable words, Spieler and Balota (1997) found a surprisingly large inhibitory influence of length in letters (4.5% unique variance, 6.3% for log frequency, and 2.2% for orthographic neighborhood size). In a cross-language study, comparing German and English cognates, Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, and Braun (2001) found an inhibitory letter length effect in both languages (in a naming task with items from 3 to 6 letters), although the effect was stronger in German than in English. Furthermore, these effects were still significant when the number of orthographic neighbors was partialled out. Perry and Ziegler (2002) were able to simulate these results with both a German version and the English version of the DRC model. In a more recent study, testing 2,906 monosyllabic words with 30 young and 30 old participants, Balota, Cortese, Sergent-Marshall, Spieler, and Yap (2004) found a reliable inhibitory length effect in naming (for 2- to 8-letter words) and a reliable but smaller inhibitory effect for lexical decision in older participants but not in university students....
[...]
...Recently, Juhasz and Rayner (2003) found word length to be a significant predictor of gaze duration and total fixation duration, confirming Rayner et al.’s finding. Testing naming performance on 2,820 single-syllable words, Spieler and Balota (1997) found a surprisingly large inhibitory influence of length in letters (4.5% unique variance, 6.3% for log frequency, and 2.2% for orthographic neighborhood size). In a cross-language study, comparing German and English cognates, Ziegler, Perry, Jacobs, and Braun (2001) found an inhibitory letter length effect in both languages (in a naming task with items from 3 to 6 letters), although the effect was stronger in German than in English....
[...]
...Recently, Juhasz and Rayner (2003) found word length to be a significant predictor of gaze duration and total fixation duration, confirming Rayner et al.’s finding. Testing naming performance on 2,820 single-syllable words, Spieler and Balota (1997) found a surprisingly large inhibitory influence of length in letters (4....
[...]