We present word prevalence data for 61,858 English words. Word prevalence refers to the number of people who know the word. The measure was obtained on the basis of an online crowdsourcing study involving over 220,000 people. Word prevalence data are useful for gauging the difficulty of words and, as such, for matching stimulus materials in experimental conditions or selecting stimulus materials for vocabulary tests. Word prevalence also predicts word processing times, over and above the effects of word frequency, word length, similarity to other words, and age of acquisition, in line with previous findings in the Dutch language.
Reading involves a process of matching an orthographic input with stored representations in lexical memory. The masked priming paradigm has become a standard tool for investigating this process. Use of existing results from this paradigm can be limited by the precision of the data and the need for cross-experiment comparisons that lack normal experimental controls. Here, we present a single, large, high-precision, multi-condition experiment to address these problems. Over 1000 participants from 14 sites responded to 840 trials involving 28 different types of orthographically related primes (e.g., castfe-CASTLE) in a lexical decision task, as well as completing measures of spelling and vocabulary. The data 1.4.1 were indeed highly sensitive to differences between conditions: After correction for multiple comparisons, prime type condition differences of 2.90 ms and above reached significance at the 5% level. This paper presents the method of data collection and preliminary findings from these data, which included replications of the most widely agreed-upon differences between prime types, further evidence for systematic individual differences in susceptibility to priming, and new evidence regarding lexical properties associated with a target word's susceptibility to priming. These analyses will form a basis for the use of these data in quantitative model fitting and evaluation, and future exploration of these data that will inform and motivate new experiments.FORM PRIMING PROJECT 3
One intriguing question in language research concerns the extent to which orthographic information impacts on spoken word processing. Previous research has faced a number of methodological difficulties and has not reached a definitive conclusion. Our research addresses these difficulties by capitalizing on recent developments in the area of word learning. Participants were trained to criterion on a set of associations between novel pictures and novel spoken words. Spellingsound consistent or inconsistent spellings were introduced on the second day, and the influence of these spellings on speech processing was assessed on the third day. Results showed for the first time significant orthographic effects on speech perception and speech production in a situation in which spelling-sound consistency was manipulated with perfect experimental control. Results are discussed in terms of a highly interactive language system in which there is a rapid and automatic flow of activation in both directions between orthographic and phonological representations. Orthography influences the perception 3It is often said that spoken language has primacy over written language. Before acquiring skills in reading and writing, most children have expertise in understanding and producing speech.Indeed, while we are born with the propensity to use spoken language, reading is a learned form of expertise. It is not surprising, then, that language subsystems supporting reading are often characterized as being parasitic on those supporting our spoken abilities (e.g. Pinker, 1997). In line with this characterisation, there is a broad consensus that our experience with the sounds of words (phonology) plays a powerful role in learning to read (e.g. Rayner et al., 2001) and in adult visual word processing (e.g. Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006).The question that has received less attention is whether our experience with the spellings of words (orthography) comes to influence our spoken abilities. Though inconsistent with the primacy model, an increasing body of literature suggests that speech perception may be shaped by information about the printed forms of words, and there is limited research suggesting that the same could be true of speech production. These data have raised the remarkable possibility that information about the
We investigated the time course of activation of the mental representatio ns of word meanings in a series of three cross-modal priming experiments. In Experiment 1, we showed a signi cant priming effect for semantically related targets presented at the "isolation point" of the prime word, con rming earlier evidence for the activation of multiple word meanings before the point at which a word can be recognised. The use of non-associated prime-target materials ruled out the possibility that this could be an artifact of form-based associative priming. Experiment 2 demonstrated that certain semantic properties are made available more rapidly than others in the duration of a spoken word and, speci cally, that for words referring to man-made objects, information about their function and design is activated more quickly than information about their physical form. However, this experiment did not reveal any limit on the activation of a word's meaning as a function of the number of simultaneously activated competitor candidates. Finally, Experiment 3 showed that the results of the rst two experiments could not be explained in terms of backwards priming from target to prime. We interpret the data with respect to both localist and distributed implementations of the cohort model.
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