Immediate memory span and maximal articulation rate were assessed for word sets differing in frequency, word-neighborhood size, and average word-neighborhood frequency. Memory span was greater for high- than low-frequency words, greater for words from large than small phonological neighborhoods, and greater for words from high- than low-frequency phonological neighborhoods. Maximal articulation...

Dual-process models of the word-frequency mirror effect posit that low-frequency words are recollected more often than high-frequency words, producing the hit rate differences in the word-frequency effect, whereas high-frequency words are more familiar, producing the false-alarm-rate differences. In this pair of experiments, the authors demonstrate that the analysis of receiver operating charac...

This work contributes to two aspects of the understanding of infinite words: the frequency of letters in a morphic sequence and periodicity considerations on infinite words. First, we develop a necessary and sufficient criteria for the existence of the frequency of a letter in a morphic sequence, and give some applications of this result. We show that the frequencies of all letters exist in pur...

Lesion and imaging studies have demonstrated that encoding and retrieval of declarative memories, i.e. consciously accessible events and facts, depend on operations within the rhinal cortex and the hippocampus, two substructures of the medial temporal lobe. Analysis of intracranially recorded EEG in presurgical epilepsy patients revealed that successful memory formation is accompanied within on...

We conducted a statistical analysis of several subsets of words from the Hoosier Mental Lexicon in order to examine some factors underlying the subjective familiarity ratings collected by Nusbaum, Pisoni, and Davis (1984). In this analysis, we grouped words into High-FAM (average familiarity rating greater than 6 on a 7-point scale), Mid-FAM (between 4.5 and 3.5), or Low-FAM (less than 2) sets,...

The present study explores the effects of frequency in learning to parse novel morphological patterns. In two experiments, suffixes were divided into three classes: high, medium and low frequency, based on the proportion of stems in the input that each suffix attached to (high frequency = 12/12, medium frequency = 6/12, and low frequency = 2/12). In Experiment 1, learners were better at segment...

Visual emotion word processing has been in the focus of recent psycholinguistic research. In general, emotion words provoke differential responses in comparison to neutral words. However, words are typically processed within a context rather than in isolation. For instance, how does one's inner emotional state influence the comprehension of emotion words? To address this question, the current s...