Susan Lima | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (original) (raw)

Papers by Susan Lima

Research paper thumbnail of Lexical access via an orthographic code? The Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS) reconsidered

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1983

Three lexical decision experiments tested the claim by M. Taft (Journal of Verbal Learning and Ve... more Three lexical decision experiments tested the claim by M. Taft (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 1979, 18, 21-39) that lexical access is based on a word's Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS). Experiment 1 failed to replicate Taft's finding that lexical decisions were faster to monomorphemic words split at their BOSS boundary than those split at their Vocalic Center Group (VCG) boundary. In Experiments 2 and 3, preview of a word's BOSS for monomorphemic words produced no faster lexical decision thaw preview of the initial VCG. There was therefore no evidence that the BOSS is a word's unique lexical access entry. The results of Experiment 3, which employed polymorphemic words, suggested that morphemic units are more likely to be access codes than purely orthographic units.

Research paper thumbnail of General Cognitive Slowing in the Nonlexical Domain: An Experimental Validation

Psychol Aging, 1991

Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classifi... more Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classification, mental rotation, and abstract matching. A positively accelerated relation was observed between older and younger adults' latencies. Consistent with general slowing, the relation observed with the same subjects in each condition was more than 3 times as precise as in a comparable meta-analysis. Further analyses compared the ability of various models to describe the present data and also to predict the data on the basis of parameters estimated from a previous meta-analysis. Compared with linear models, the information-loss and overhead models provided more accurate accounts of general cognitive slowing in the nonlexical domain. , in their meta-analysis of the literature on age-related cognitive slowing, observed a simple and orderly relation between older and younger adults' performances: The longer it took younger adults to perform a task, the larger the age-related difference in response latencies. Based on this relation, more than 90% of the

Research paper thumbnail of Orthographic neighbors and visual word recognition

Journal of psycholinguistic research, 2002

Two lexical decision experiments, using words that were selected and closely matched on several c... more Two lexical decision experiments, using words that were selected and closely matched on several criteria associated with lexical access provide evidence of facilitatory effects of orthographic neighborhood size and no significant evidence of inhibitory effects of orthographic neighborhood frequency on lexical access. The words used in Experiment 1 had few neighbors that were higher in frequency. In Experiment 2, the words employed had several neighbors that were higher in frequency. Both experiments showed that words possessing few neighbors evoked slower responses than those possessing many neighbors. Also, in both experiments, neighborhood size effects occurred even though words from large neighborhoods had more potentially interfering higher-frequency neighbors than words from small neighborhoods.

Research paper thumbnail of Duration discrimination of filled and empty auditory intervals: Cognitive and perceptual factors

Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide w... more Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide which of the two was longer in duration. An adaptive psychophysical procedure was used. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, the base duration was 50 msec, whereas in Experiment 3, the base duration was 1 sec. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, it was found that filled intervals (continuous tones) were discriminated more accurately than empty intervals (with onset and offset marked by clicks). It was concluded that this difference was perceptual rather than cognitive in nature, since performance on filled and empty intervals was not affected by increasing cognitive load in a dual-task procedure (Experiment 2) but was affected by backward masking (Experiment 4). In contrast, the results of Experiment 3 showed that duration discriminationrf fIlled auditory intervals of longer duration was cognitively influenced, since performance was impaired by increasing cognitive load. Implications for notions of perceptual processing and timing mechanisms tanderlyingdifferences in duration discrimination with filled and empty intervals are discussed.

Research paper thumbnail of General slowing in semantic priming and word recognition

Psychology and Aging, 1992

Analyses of lexical decision studies revealed that (a) older (O) adults' mean semantic priming ef... more Analyses of lexical decision studies revealed that (a) older (O) adults' mean semantic priming effect was 1.44 times that of younger (Y) adults, (b) regression lines describing the relations between older and younger adults' latencies in related (O = 1.54 Y-112) and unrelated conditions (O = 1.50 Y-93) were not significantly different, and (c) that there was a proportional relation between older and younger adults' priming effects (O = 1.48 Y -2). Analyses of word-naming studies yielded similar results. Analyses of delayed pronunciation data revealed that word recognition was 1.47 times slower in older adults, whereas older adults' output processes were only 1.26 times slower. Overall, analyses of whole latencies and durations of component processes provide converging evidence for a general slowing factor of approximately 1.5 for lexical information processing.

Research paper thumbnail of General cognitive slowing in the nonlexical domain: An experimental validation

Psychology and Aging, 1991

Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classifi... more Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classification, mental rotation, and abstract matching. A positively accelerated relation was observed between older and younger adults' latencies. Consistent with general slowing, the relation observed with the same subjects in each condition was more than 3 times as precise as in a comparable meta-analysis. Further analyses compared the ability of various models to describe the present data and also to predict the data on the basis of parameters estimated from a previous meta-analysis. Compared with linear models, the information-loss and overhead models provided more accurate accounts of general cognitive slowing in the nonlexical domain. , in their meta-analysis of the literature on age-related cognitive slowing, observed a simple and orderly relation between older and younger adults' performances: The longer it took younger adults to perform a task, the larger the age-related difference in response latencies. Based on this relation, more than 90% of the

Research paper thumbnail of How general is general slowing? Evidence from the lexical domain

Psychology and Aging, 1991

Three analyses are reported that are based on data from 19 studies using lexical tasks and a redu... more Three analyses are reported that are based on data from 19 studies using lexical tasks and a reduced version of the Hale, nonlexical data set. The results of Analysis l revealed that a linear function with a slope of approximately 1,5 described the relationship between the lexical decision latencies of older (65-75 years) and younger (19-29 years) adults. The results of Analysis 2, based on response latencies from 6 lexical tasks other than lexical decision, revealed a virtually identical linear relationship. In Analysis 3, it was found that performance on nonlexical tasks spanning the same range of task difficulty was described by a significantly steeper regression line with a slope of approximately 2.0. These findings suggest that although general cognitive slowing is observed in both domains, the degree of slowing is significantly greater in the nonlexieal domain than in the lexical domain. In addition, these analyses demonstrate how the meta-analytic approach may be used to determine the limits to the external validity of experimental findings.

Research paper thumbnail of Sequential dependencies in the lexical decision task

Psychological Research, 1997

Two experiments addressed whether response latency in a trial of the lexical decision task is ind... more Two experiments addressed whether response latency in a trial of the lexical decision task is independent of the lexical status of the item presented in the previous trial. In Exp. 1, it was found that both word and nonword responses were significantly slower when the previous trial had involved a nonword than when it had involved a word. In Exp. 2, which employed a different list composition, it was found that responses to nonwords and pseudohomophones were significantly slower when the previous trial had involved a nonword or a pseudohomophone than when it had involved a word. However, responses to words were not influenced by the nature of the previous trial. We concluded that sequential dependencies exist across consecutive trials in the lexical decision task even when there is no semantic, morphological, phonological, or orthographic relationship between the items presented during those trials.

Research paper thumbnail of Aging and temporal discrimination of brief auditory intervals

Psychological Research, 1993

In a duration-discrimination experiment, young adults (mean age = 25.1), middle-aged adults (mean... more In a duration-discrimination experiment, young adults (mean age = 25.1), middle-aged adults (mean age = 45.5), and older adults (mean age = 64.6) were presented with two very brief auditorily marked intervals per trial, and their task was to decide which of the two was longer in duration. An adaptive psychophysical procedure was used to determine difference thresholds in relation to a constant standard interval of 50 ms. It was found that duration-discrimination performance was unaffected by age; all three age groups yielded a difference threshold of approximately 17 ms. It was concluded that the ability to discriminate durations of very brief auditory intervals appears to be based on an underlying timing mechanism that does not slow down with advancing adult age.

Research paper thumbnail of Contextual effects on metaphor comprehension in reading

Memory & Cognition, 1984

Subjects read target sentences preceded by either short or long context that induced either a met... more Subjects read target sentences preceded by either short or long context that induced either a metaphoric or a literal target reading. As had been found by , metaphoric targets were comprehended about as quickly as literals when context was long, but more slowly than literals when context was short. The latter result may have been due to the failure of computing a conceptual relationship between short context and metaphoric target; targets unrelated to prior context took as long to comprehend as metaphoric targets. Another experiment showed that metaphorically expressed targets were read more quickly when they followed metaphorically expressed context than when they followed literal context, but literal targets were read quickest when they followed literal context. These results are discussed within a schema framework and within a "process priming" hypothesis.

Research paper thumbnail of Beliefs underlying random sampling

Memory & Cognition, 1984

In Experiment 1, subjects estimated {1) the mean of a random sample of 10 scores consisting of 9 ... more In Experiment 1, subjects estimated {1) the mean of a random sample of 10 scores consisting of 9 unknown scores and 1 known score that was divergent from the population mean and {2} the mean of the 9 unknown scores. The modal answer {about 40% of the responses} for both sample means was the population mean. The results extend the work of Tversky and Kahneman {1971} by demonstrating that subjects hold a passive, descriptive view of random sampling rather than an active-balancing model. This result was explored further in in-depth interviews {Experiment 2}, wherein subjects solved the problem while explaining their reasoning. The interview data replicated Experiment 1 and further showed: {1} that subjects' solutions were fairly stable--when presented with alternative solutions, including the correct one, few subjects changed their answers; !2} little evidence of a balancing mechanism; and {3} that acceptance of both means as 400 is largely a result of the perceived unpredictability of "random samples."

Research paper thumbnail of The Linguistics of Literacy

Research paper thumbnail of Orthographic neighborhood structure and lexical access

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1996

An experiment addressed whether lexical decision response latency and error rate are influenced b... more An experiment addressed whether lexical decision response latency and error rate are influenced by orthographic neighborhood structure. It was found that words with several higher-frequency neighbors were responded to more slowly and less accurately than words with fewer higher-frequency neighbors, even though the stimulus words were matched oh number of neighbors, word frequency, neighborhood frequency, number of higher-frequency neighbors, word

Research paper thumbnail of Idioms in sentences: Effects of frequency, literalness, and familiarity

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1993

This study investigated the relationship between subjective frequency of literal usage (literalne... more This study investigated the relationship between subjective frequency of literal usage (literalness), subjective frequency of figurative usage (familiarity), and mean Kueera and Francis (1967) word frequency for idiom phrases. Kucera and Francis frequency was found to be independent of both familiarity and literalness. Furthermore, it was found that literalness, but not the Kucera and Francis frequency of the words in the phrase, affected reading time for literal uses of idioms. For figurative uses of idioms, familiarity and written frequency interacted. A model of idiom processing consistent with the current results and previous results is proposed. In addition, subjective familiarity and literalness norms" are provided for 245 idioms.

Research paper thumbnail of Lexical access during eye fixations in reading: Effects of word-initial letter sequence

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1985

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that lexical access in reading is initiated on the basis of... more Two experiments tested the hypothesis that lexical access in reading is initiated on the basis of word-initial letter information obtainable in the parafoveal region. Eye movements were monitored while coUege students read sentences containing target words whose initial trigram (Experiment 1) or bigram (Experiment 2) imposed either a high or a low degree of constraint in the lexicon. In contradiction to our hypothesis, high-constraint words (e.g., DWARF) received longer fixations than did low-constraint words (e.g., CLOWN), despite the fact that high-constraint words have an initial letter sequence shared by few other words in the lexicon. Moreover, a comparison of fixation times in viewing conditions with and without parafoveal letter information showed that the amount of decrease in target fixation time due to prior parafoveal availability was the same for high-constraint and low-constraint targets. We concluded that increased familiarity of word-initial letter sequence is beneficial to lexical access and that familiarity affects the efficiency of foveal but not parafoveal processing.

Research paper thumbnail of Duration discrimination of filled and empty auditory intervals: Cognitive and perceptual factors

Perception & Psychophysics, 1991

Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide w... more Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide which of the two was longer in duration. An adaptive psychophysical procedure was used. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, the base duration was 50 msec, whereas in Experiment 3, the base duration was 1 sec. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, it was found that filled intervals (continuous tones) were discriminated more accurately than empty intervals (with onset and offset marked by clicks). It was concluded that this difference was perceptual rather than cognitive in nature, since performance on filled and empty intervals was not affected by increasing cognitive load in a dual-task procedure (Experiment 2) but was affected by backward masking (Experiment 4). In contrast, the results of Experiment 3 showed that duration discriminationrf fIlled auditory intervals of longer duration was cognitively influenced, since performance was impaired by increasing cognitive load. Implications for notions of perceptual processing and timing mechanisms tanderlyingdifferences in duration discrimination with filled and empty intervals are discussed.

Research paper thumbnail of The Reality of Linguistic Rules

Language, 1996

Page 1. STUDIES IN LANGUAGE COMPANION SERIES 26 Я00 THE REALITY OF LINGUISTIC RULES Edited by Sus... more Page 1. STUDIES IN LANGUAGE COMPANION SERIES 26 Я00 THE REALITY OF LINGUISTIC RULES Edited by Susan D. Lima Roberta L Corrigan Gregory K. Iverson Offprint Page 2. This is an offprint from: Susan D. Lima ...

Research paper thumbnail of Lexical access via an orthographic code? The Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS) reconsidered

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 1983

Three lexical decision experiments tested the claim by M. Taft (Journal of Verbal Learning and Ve... more Three lexical decision experiments tested the claim by M. Taft (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 1979, 18, 21-39) that lexical access is based on a word's Basic Orthographic Syllabic Structure (BOSS). Experiment 1 failed to replicate Taft's finding that lexical decisions were faster to monomorphemic words split at their BOSS boundary than those split at their Vocalic Center Group (VCG) boundary. In Experiments 2 and 3, preview of a word's BOSS for monomorphemic words produced no faster lexical decision thaw preview of the initial VCG. There was therefore no evidence that the BOSS is a word's unique lexical access entry. The results of Experiment 3, which employed polymorphemic words, suggested that morphemic units are more likely to be access codes than purely orthographic units.

Research paper thumbnail of General Cognitive Slowing in the Nonlexical Domain: An Experimental Validation

Psychol Aging, 1991

Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classifi... more Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classification, mental rotation, and abstract matching. A positively accelerated relation was observed between older and younger adults' latencies. Consistent with general slowing, the relation observed with the same subjects in each condition was more than 3 times as precise as in a comparable meta-analysis. Further analyses compared the ability of various models to describe the present data and also to predict the data on the basis of parameters estimated from a previous meta-analysis. Compared with linear models, the information-loss and overhead models provided more accurate accounts of general cognitive slowing in the nonlexical domain. , in their meta-analysis of the literature on age-related cognitive slowing, observed a simple and orderly relation between older and younger adults' performances: The longer it took younger adults to perform a task, the larger the age-related difference in response latencies. Based on this relation, more than 90% of the

Research paper thumbnail of Orthographic neighbors and visual word recognition

Journal of psycholinguistic research, 2002

Two lexical decision experiments, using words that were selected and closely matched on several c... more Two lexical decision experiments, using words that were selected and closely matched on several criteria associated with lexical access provide evidence of facilitatory effects of orthographic neighborhood size and no significant evidence of inhibitory effects of orthographic neighborhood frequency on lexical access. The words used in Experiment 1 had few neighbors that were higher in frequency. In Experiment 2, the words employed had several neighbors that were higher in frequency. Both experiments showed that words possessing few neighbors evoked slower responses than those possessing many neighbors. Also, in both experiments, neighborhood size effects occurred even though words from large neighborhoods had more potentially interfering higher-frequency neighbors than words from small neighborhoods.

Research paper thumbnail of Duration discrimination of filled and empty auditory intervals: Cognitive and perceptual factors

Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide w... more Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide which of the two was longer in duration. An adaptive psychophysical procedure was used. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, the base duration was 50 msec, whereas in Experiment 3, the base duration was 1 sec. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, it was found that filled intervals (continuous tones) were discriminated more accurately than empty intervals (with onset and offset marked by clicks). It was concluded that this difference was perceptual rather than cognitive in nature, since performance on filled and empty intervals was not affected by increasing cognitive load in a dual-task procedure (Experiment 2) but was affected by backward masking (Experiment 4). In contrast, the results of Experiment 3 showed that duration discriminationrf fIlled auditory intervals of longer duration was cognitively influenced, since performance was impaired by increasing cognitive load. Implications for notions of perceptual processing and timing mechanisms tanderlyingdifferences in duration discrimination with filled and empty intervals are discussed.

Research paper thumbnail of General slowing in semantic priming and word recognition

Psychology and Aging, 1992

Analyses of lexical decision studies revealed that (a) older (O) adults' mean semantic priming ef... more Analyses of lexical decision studies revealed that (a) older (O) adults' mean semantic priming effect was 1.44 times that of younger (Y) adults, (b) regression lines describing the relations between older and younger adults' latencies in related (O = 1.54 Y-112) and unrelated conditions (O = 1.50 Y-93) were not significantly different, and (c) that there was a proportional relation between older and younger adults' priming effects (O = 1.48 Y -2). Analyses of word-naming studies yielded similar results. Analyses of delayed pronunciation data revealed that word recognition was 1.47 times slower in older adults, whereas older adults' output processes were only 1.26 times slower. Overall, analyses of whole latencies and durations of component processes provide converging evidence for a general slowing factor of approximately 1.5 for lexical information processing.

Research paper thumbnail of General cognitive slowing in the nonlexical domain: An experimental validation

Psychology and Aging, 1991

Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classifi... more Older and younger adults were tested on 4 nonlexical tasks: choice reaction time, letter classification, mental rotation, and abstract matching. A positively accelerated relation was observed between older and younger adults' latencies. Consistent with general slowing, the relation observed with the same subjects in each condition was more than 3 times as precise as in a comparable meta-analysis. Further analyses compared the ability of various models to describe the present data and also to predict the data on the basis of parameters estimated from a previous meta-analysis. Compared with linear models, the information-loss and overhead models provided more accurate accounts of general cognitive slowing in the nonlexical domain. , in their meta-analysis of the literature on age-related cognitive slowing, observed a simple and orderly relation between older and younger adults' performances: The longer it took younger adults to perform a task, the larger the age-related difference in response latencies. Based on this relation, more than 90% of the

Research paper thumbnail of How general is general slowing? Evidence from the lexical domain

Psychology and Aging, 1991

Three analyses are reported that are based on data from 19 studies using lexical tasks and a redu... more Three analyses are reported that are based on data from 19 studies using lexical tasks and a reduced version of the Hale, nonlexical data set. The results of Analysis l revealed that a linear function with a slope of approximately 1,5 described the relationship between the lexical decision latencies of older (65-75 years) and younger (19-29 years) adults. The results of Analysis 2, based on response latencies from 6 lexical tasks other than lexical decision, revealed a virtually identical linear relationship. In Analysis 3, it was found that performance on nonlexical tasks spanning the same range of task difficulty was described by a significantly steeper regression line with a slope of approximately 2.0. These findings suggest that although general cognitive slowing is observed in both domains, the degree of slowing is significantly greater in the nonlexieal domain than in the lexical domain. In addition, these analyses demonstrate how the meta-analytic approach may be used to determine the limits to the external validity of experimental findings.

Research paper thumbnail of Sequential dependencies in the lexical decision task

Psychological Research, 1997

Two experiments addressed whether response latency in a trial of the lexical decision task is ind... more Two experiments addressed whether response latency in a trial of the lexical decision task is independent of the lexical status of the item presented in the previous trial. In Exp. 1, it was found that both word and nonword responses were significantly slower when the previous trial had involved a nonword than when it had involved a word. In Exp. 2, which employed a different list composition, it was found that responses to nonwords and pseudohomophones were significantly slower when the previous trial had involved a nonword or a pseudohomophone than when it had involved a word. However, responses to words were not influenced by the nature of the previous trial. We concluded that sequential dependencies exist across consecutive trials in the lexical decision task even when there is no semantic, morphological, phonological, or orthographic relationship between the items presented during those trials.

Research paper thumbnail of Aging and temporal discrimination of brief auditory intervals

Psychological Research, 1993

In a duration-discrimination experiment, young adults (mean age = 25.1), middle-aged adults (mean... more In a duration-discrimination experiment, young adults (mean age = 25.1), middle-aged adults (mean age = 45.5), and older adults (mean age = 64.6) were presented with two very brief auditorily marked intervals per trial, and their task was to decide which of the two was longer in duration. An adaptive psychophysical procedure was used to determine difference thresholds in relation to a constant standard interval of 50 ms. It was found that duration-discrimination performance was unaffected by age; all three age groups yielded a difference threshold of approximately 17 ms. It was concluded that the ability to discriminate durations of very brief auditory intervals appears to be based on an underlying timing mechanism that does not slow down with advancing adult age.

Research paper thumbnail of Contextual effects on metaphor comprehension in reading

Memory & Cognition, 1984

Subjects read target sentences preceded by either short or long context that induced either a met... more Subjects read target sentences preceded by either short or long context that induced either a metaphoric or a literal target reading. As had been found by , metaphoric targets were comprehended about as quickly as literals when context was long, but more slowly than literals when context was short. The latter result may have been due to the failure of computing a conceptual relationship between short context and metaphoric target; targets unrelated to prior context took as long to comprehend as metaphoric targets. Another experiment showed that metaphorically expressed targets were read more quickly when they followed metaphorically expressed context than when they followed literal context, but literal targets were read quickest when they followed literal context. These results are discussed within a schema framework and within a "process priming" hypothesis.

Research paper thumbnail of Beliefs underlying random sampling

Memory & Cognition, 1984

In Experiment 1, subjects estimated {1) the mean of a random sample of 10 scores consisting of 9 ... more In Experiment 1, subjects estimated {1) the mean of a random sample of 10 scores consisting of 9 unknown scores and 1 known score that was divergent from the population mean and {2} the mean of the 9 unknown scores. The modal answer {about 40% of the responses} for both sample means was the population mean. The results extend the work of Tversky and Kahneman {1971} by demonstrating that subjects hold a passive, descriptive view of random sampling rather than an active-balancing model. This result was explored further in in-depth interviews {Experiment 2}, wherein subjects solved the problem while explaining their reasoning. The interview data replicated Experiment 1 and further showed: {1} that subjects' solutions were fairly stable--when presented with alternative solutions, including the correct one, few subjects changed their answers; !2} little evidence of a balancing mechanism; and {3} that acceptance of both means as 400 is largely a result of the perceived unpredictability of "random samples."

Research paper thumbnail of The Linguistics of Literacy

Research paper thumbnail of Orthographic neighborhood structure and lexical access

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1996

An experiment addressed whether lexical decision response latency and error rate are influenced b... more An experiment addressed whether lexical decision response latency and error rate are influenced by orthographic neighborhood structure. It was found that words with several higher-frequency neighbors were responded to more slowly and less accurately than words with fewer higher-frequency neighbors, even though the stimulus words were matched oh number of neighbors, word frequency, neighborhood frequency, number of higher-frequency neighbors, word

Research paper thumbnail of Idioms in sentences: Effects of frequency, literalness, and familiarity

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1993

This study investigated the relationship between subjective frequency of literal usage (literalne... more This study investigated the relationship between subjective frequency of literal usage (literalness), subjective frequency of figurative usage (familiarity), and mean Kueera and Francis (1967) word frequency for idiom phrases. Kucera and Francis frequency was found to be independent of both familiarity and literalness. Furthermore, it was found that literalness, but not the Kucera and Francis frequency of the words in the phrase, affected reading time for literal uses of idioms. For figurative uses of idioms, familiarity and written frequency interacted. A model of idiom processing consistent with the current results and previous results is proposed. In addition, subjective familiarity and literalness norms" are provided for 245 idioms.

Research paper thumbnail of Lexical access during eye fixations in reading: Effects of word-initial letter sequence

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1985

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that lexical access in reading is initiated on the basis of... more Two experiments tested the hypothesis that lexical access in reading is initiated on the basis of word-initial letter information obtainable in the parafoveal region. Eye movements were monitored while coUege students read sentences containing target words whose initial trigram (Experiment 1) or bigram (Experiment 2) imposed either a high or a low degree of constraint in the lexicon. In contradiction to our hypothesis, high-constraint words (e.g., DWARF) received longer fixations than did low-constraint words (e.g., CLOWN), despite the fact that high-constraint words have an initial letter sequence shared by few other words in the lexicon. Moreover, a comparison of fixation times in viewing conditions with and without parafoveal letter information showed that the amount of decrease in target fixation time due to prior parafoveal availability was the same for high-constraint and low-constraint targets. We concluded that increased familiarity of word-initial letter sequence is beneficial to lexical access and that familiarity affects the efficiency of foveal but not parafoveal processing.

Research paper thumbnail of Duration discrimination of filled and empty auditory intervals: Cognitive and perceptual factors

Perception & Psychophysics, 1991

Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide w... more Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide which of the two was longer in duration. An adaptive psychophysical procedure was used. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, the base duration was 50 msec, whereas in Experiment 3, the base duration was 1 sec. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, it was found that filled intervals (continuous tones) were discriminated more accurately than empty intervals (with onset and offset marked by clicks). It was concluded that this difference was perceptual rather than cognitive in nature, since performance on filled and empty intervals was not affected by increasing cognitive load in a dual-task procedure (Experiment 2) but was affected by backward masking (Experiment 4). In contrast, the results of Experiment 3 showed that duration discriminationrf fIlled auditory intervals of longer duration was cognitively influenced, since performance was impaired by increasing cognitive load. Implications for notions of perceptual processing and timing mechanisms tanderlyingdifferences in duration discrimination with filled and empty intervals are discussed.

Research paper thumbnail of The Reality of Linguistic Rules

Language, 1996

Page 1. STUDIES IN LANGUAGE COMPANION SERIES 26 Я00 THE REALITY OF LINGUISTIC RULES Edited by Sus... more Page 1. STUDIES IN LANGUAGE COMPANION SERIES 26 Я00 THE REALITY OF LINGUISTIC RULES Edited by Susan D. Lima Roberta L Corrigan Gregory K. Iverson Offprint Page 2. This is an offprint from: Susan D. Lima ...