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We present a series of computational simulations of the auditory lexical decision task using the jTRACE and TISK models of spoken word recognition. Simulation 1 replicates high accuracy in word recognition and similar performance of these models using the small, default dictionary. Simulation 2 expands the set of words and phonemes, leading to issues in representing certain phonemes in jTRACE. Simulation 3 expands the lexicon of competitors and we find that TISK struggles to select the target word as the winner. Finally, Simulation 4 shows that the decision criteria employed leads to many false positives when pseudowords are presented to the model. None of the model estimates of the time cycle when the winner should be selected predicted participant response latency in the auditory lexical decision task. We discuss these findings and offer suggestions as to what a contemporary model of spoken word recognition should be able to do.

In Hebrew, content words are usually composed of two interleaving morphemes; roots which carry semantic information, and word-patterns which mainly carry grammatical information. The family size effect in languages with non-concatenative morphology has been previously examined only with respect to the root. The present study reports a lexical-decision experiment with 260 Hebrew nouns representing a variety of nominal word-patterns and roots. We observed independent facilitatory effects of morphological family sizes of the roots and the nominal word-patterns. The family size effect of the nominal word-pattern was stronger for words with low frequency. The novelty of these findings is in showing in a within-stimuli design that both morphemes have a role in defining the complex family effect in a language with non-concatenated morphology, despite the massive differences in their linguistic characteristics. The data provide evidence in favour of the proposed multi-dimensional structure of the Hebrew lexicon.

ABSTRACTDespite early evidence that grammatical gender is retrieved prior to phonology in lexical access, more recent studies demonstrating task effects and non-converging evidence raise doubts about the extent to which this is a general feature of the language production system. We employed the dual-choice go/no-go paradigm with event-related potentials (ERPs) in order to further clarify the time course of retrieval of grammatical gender and phonology. Specifically, we examined how task order influences the relative timing with which these features are retrieved. Results find no clear evidence that grammatical gender is retrieved prior to phonology in a serial manner. Instead, the relative timing with which these features are retrieved is subject to task order, suggesting that prior estimates of lexical access obtained with this paradigm may be confounded by task effects. Overall, our result support parallel access models of feature retrieval during lexical access and suggest that attentional biases may ...