1. A picture is worth a thousand… sounds??? Interactions of imageability and phonology Gail Moroschan and Chris Westbury

2. Today’s talk What is phonology? What is imageability? Why should we expect an interaction? The experiments Single words Sentences What can we conclude? Where do we go from here?

3. What is phonology? How a word sounds Phonological neighbors Words that differ by only 1 sound Ex) hat/bat, hat/hot, hat/ham Phonological neighborhoods How many phonological neighbors a word has Ex) sink has many! (HPN) Ex) wolf has few! (LPN) Phonological neighborhood effect LPN words have faster RT’s in auditory tasks

4. What is imageability? The extent to which you can form a mental image of something Concrete words have high imageability Ex) cat, desk, bicycle Abstract words have low imageability Ex) justice, thought, amount

5. The Concreteness Effect Concrete words have faster RT’s than abstract words in many tasks Ex) lexical decision, naming, etc. Dual Coding Theory (Paivio, 1986) Two ‘systems’ in processing Verbal/Lexical system (words) Imagery system (pictures) Concrete words can use both systems Abstract words only use verbal

6. Neurological evidence fMRI study (Binder, Westbury, McKiernan, Possing, & Medler, 2005) Concrete words (orange) showed activation in sensory association areas Abstract words (blue) activated areas in the frontal and temporal lobes associated with phonological processing

7. Why expect an interaction? If concrete words use both words and images during processing but abstract words only use other words, then abstract words might be more sensitive to lexical factors such as phonological neighborhood size. We would expect to see abstract HPN words take longer to react to than abstract LPN words, and no influence of phonology on concrete words.

8. The experiments - single words Lexical decision task Is it a word or not? Stimuli - manipulated imageability and PN Concrete/HPN words Concrete/LPN words Abstract/HPN words Abstract/LPN words Non-word fillers Visual version and auditory version

9. The results - single words Interaction effect found in auditory LD but not in visual LD Abstract words are more sensitive to PN than concrete words

10. The experiments - sentences Sentence plausibility judgment task Does the sentence make sense or not? Stimuli - both sensible and nonsense sentences made up of Concrete/HPN words Concrete/LPN words Abstract/HPN words Abstract/LPN words Visual version and auditory version

11. The results - sentences Interaction effect found in auditory experiment but not in visual experiment Concrete words are more sensitive to PN than abstract words

12. What can we conclude from this? Interactions of phonology and imageability were found in auditory experiments, but not visual experiments Abstract words are sensitive to manipulations of phonology during single-word lexical access Fits with dual coding theory as well as prior behavioral and neurological evidence However, during sentence processing, concrete words rather than abstract words are influenced by phonology Opposite to the results of processing single words

13. Where do we go from here? Further ideas to explore Different processes involved in sentences vs. words Context effects in sentence processing? Context availability theory (Schwanenflugel, 1989) Concreteness effects disappear in supportive sentences

14. Thank you! Acknowledgements- I would like to thank Sara Knox and Nadia Ahmad for help with data collection.