Date:
Tuesday, 2 July, 2019 - 11:00
Abstract:
When investigating visual word recognition, the interface between orthography and semantics is a core issue, in fact, on the one side, orthographic information directly affects visual uptake, on the other side, semantics is at the core of word comprehension.
In this talk, I focus on a quantitative estimate of form-meaning mapping consistency and l provide a brief overlook of its impact in a series of tasks related to word recognition and sentence processing.
The original measure developed in this line of research is the Orthography-Semantics Consistency (OSC). OSC is a corpus-based measure that quantifies the relationship between a letter string and the meanings of all the words in a corpus that share that same sequence.
OSC showed to be a reliable predictor of visual word recognition, being able to explain significant unique variance in unprimed lexical decision on a large number of word items (BLP and ELP), and in morphological masked priming. It also modulated N400 amplitudes in sentence processing. Finally, it interacted with its phonological counterpart, the Phonology-Semantics Consistency (PSC) in a lexical decision task, giving us a better understanding of the relationship between phonological and orthographic information in written words processing.