title: Word length and lexical activation: longer is better.
abstract: Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a system, long words should produce stronger lexical activation than short words, for 2 reasons: Long words provide more bottom-up evidence than short words, and short words are subject to greater inhibition due to the existence of more similar words. Four experiments provide evidence for this view. In addition, reaction-time-based partitioning of the data shows that long words generate greater activation that is available both earlier and for a longer time than is the case for short words. As a result, lexical influences on phoneme identification are extremely robust for long words but are quite fragile and condition-dependent for short words. Models of word recognition must consider words of all lengths to capture the true dynamics of lexical activation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1222, USA. pitt.2@osu.edu
authors.forename: Mark A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Pitt
authors.forename: Arthur G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Samuel
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D012858:Size Perception; D014825:Vocabulary