MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences UnitCBSU bibliography search
To request a reprint of a CBSU publication, please
click here to send us an email (reprints may not be available for all publications)
Activation, competition, and frequency in lexical access.
Authors:
Marslen-Wilson, W.D.
Reference:
In G.T.M. Altmann (Ed.), Cognitive Models of Speech Processing: Psycholinguistics and Computational Perspectives (pp.148-172). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Year of publication:
1990
CBU number:
2441
Abstract:
This chapter describes a sequence of experiments evaluating the role of competitor frequency in lexical access. The first three experiments, using the auditory lexical decision, auditory repetition, and gating tasks, show little or no effect of competitor frequency on response time to a given item. In contrast, depending on the task, clear effects of item frequency are obtained. A fourth experiment, using a cross-modal identity priming task, shows that while competitor frequency effects can be directly detected in the visual domain, such effects are much weaker, and highly transient, in the auditory domain. These differences between modalities are attributable to differences in the way information is delivered over time in the two domains.
