The results support a model of the lexicon in which part-of-speech information can influence lexical processes.
This paper presents three naming experiments designed to investigate whether the activation levels of syntactic features associated with lexical items, specifically part-of-speech information, can influence lexical processes.
These results show that L2 listeners' performance crucially depends on the nature of the task, with higher L2 listener accuracy on an acoustic-phonetic analysis task than on tasks involving lexical processes.
This result provides direct evidence that lexical processes influence lower level phonetic perception, and demonstrates the potential value of combining Granger causality analyses and high spatiotemporal resolution multimodal imaging data to explore the functional architecture of cognition.
Accordingly, the auditory pseudowords of the phonological spelling condition may not only have elicited sublexical but also lexical processes.
The strict simultaneity of acoustic, phonological and lexical processing indexes is explained by this model, as neuronal populations in the same local structure, in superior-temporal cortex, are assumed to contribute to acoustic, phonological and lexical processes.
Since word retrieval was assessed by tasks such as confrontation naming of pictures and, therefore, tapping lexical processes instead of linguistic fact retrieval, it was quite different from arithmetic fact retrieval (including simple addition, subtraction, and multiplication).
A combination of effects that may involve lexical processes more specifically is shown in the lower part of Figure 3. Areas showing increasing activity for words of increasing frequency overlap mainly with areas showing increasing activity for words of increasing imageability.
We expected to find: (i) an effect of orthographic legality and word visual familiarity by comparing ERPs to legal pseudo-words and to illegal letter strings; (ii) a graded effect of non-word orthographic neighbours on the amplitude and latency of ERP responses, thus shedding some light on the timing of lexical processes.
This sub-lexical process would help the identification of new words through its morphemes and would also save resources in the lexicon once there would be no need to store all words in their full forms.
