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Response inhibition control is primarily supported by the right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the prefrontal‐basal ganglia network, though the mechanisms behind right lateralization and regional interplay remain unclear. In this fMRI study, we explore the neural substrates supporting efficient inhibition control and examine whether the typical right lateralization of IFG activation can be modulated by stimulus properties (semantic features) and inhibitory demand (reaction times, RT). We chose a Go/No‐Go lexical decision task, utilizing concrete and words as Go stimuli and pseudo‐word as No‐Go stimuli. Behavioral results reveal that inhibition is more effective during concrete word sessions compared to word sessions, suggesting a modulation of cognitive inhibition by semantic features. Neuroimaging results further demonstrate that successful inhibition activates bilateral IFG, indicating a flexible right lateralization pattern of IFG activation that varies with stimulus properties. To examine how varying inhibitory demands modulate neural activation patterns, we reclassified concrete and sessions into fast and slow sessions based on RT, followed by within‐group comparisons. Our study highlights the crucial role of the bilateral subthalamic nucleus (STN) in efficient inhibition, with increased activation associated with rapid response inhibition. Furthermore, we report enhanced neural coupling between the right IFG and multiple functionally connected regions, including bilateral insula, putamen, and pallidum, as well as between the right middle frontal gyrus and other prefrontal regions during rapid inhibitory responses, whereas no engagement of the left IFG was observed in efficient inhibition. These findings imply a hierarchical functional organization of the bilateral fronto‐basal ganglia circuits, in which the right prefrontal regions play a dominant role in inhibition control, supported by basal ganglia regions, while the left IFG may serve a supplementary function. Stimulus properties can modulate right lateralization, underscoring the dynamic and flexible nature of the prefrontal‐basal ganglia network in inhibition control. The functional asymmetry of the bilateral inhibitory control system in lexical decision task.

Orthography plays a crucial role in L2 learning, which generally relies on both oral and written input. We examine whether incongruencies between L1 and L2 grapheme-phoneme correspondences influence bilingual speech perception and production, even when both languages have been acquired in early childhood before reading acquisition. Spanish–Basque and Basque–Spanish early bilinguals performed an auditory lexical decision task including Basque pseudowords created by replacing Basque /s̻/ with Spanish /θ/. These distinct phonemes take the same orthographic form, . Participants also completed reading-aloud tasks in Basque and Spanish to test whether speech sounds with the same orthographic form were produced similarly in the two languages. Results for both groups showed orthography had strong effects on speech perception but no effects on speech production. Taken together, these findings suggest that orthography plays a crucial role in the speech system of early bilinguals but does not automatically lead to non-native production.

The role of morphological processing has been shown to be highly relevant in learning to read. However, there is little evidence on the processing of derivational suffixes from a developmental perspective. The aim of this study is to assess the developmental emergence of suffixes as meaningful processing units in word recognition. To that aim, 96 children from fourth, fifth and sixth grade, as well as adults, took part in a masked priming lexical decision task (go/no-go version). Complex and simple words were primed by other words sharing the suffix (as in lechero/milkman/-> jornalero/laborer/) and word ending (as in araña/spider/->España/Spain/) or by words not sharing an ending (surfista/surfer/->jornalero/laborer/; carpeta/folder/->España/Spain/). Results in adults replicate previous studies by showing that only the related condition of complex words elicits a significant facilitation (see Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2008). With respect to children, only sixth graders generated a similar pattern to adults. Children in fourth and fifth grade showed no morphological effect. Our data reveal a progressive sensitivity to derivational suffixes in visual word processing. Results are interpreted from a developmental perspective of current findings on morphological processing.

Previous research and the BIA+ model support the hypothesis of language nonselective access during bilingual word recognition with language-ambiguous words like cognates organized in two distinct lexical representations. This paper adds to the existing literature by investigating how task demands and language proficiency influence cognate processing. Twenty-six Danish-English bilinguals with upper-intermediate to advanced L2 proficiencies performed four visual lexical decision tasks in which stimulus list composition (pure or mixed) and target language (L1 or L2) were varied. This study thus distinguishes itself from other studies by employing a within-subjects design to investigate a bilingual’s two languages. Significant cognate inhibition effects were found in the L2 mixed language condition while none of the other three tasks yielded significant results. Especially the absence of cognate facilitation effects in the L2 pure language condition was remarkable given the findings of previous literature. With reference to the BIA+ model’s assumptions of differing resting level activations for L1 and L2 lexical representations, the impact of L2 proficiency on cognate processing was tested in a post-hoc analysis dividing participants into two groups. This analysis revealed cognate facilitation effects for L2 upper-intermediate bilinguals in the L2 pure language condition while the results of the L1 tasks for both groups of bilinguals remained non-significant. The results therefore suggest that within-subject cognate processing is modulated by L2 proficiency in certain circumstances.

This paper investigates the effects of meaning dominance in the time-course of activation for ambiguous words out of context in a second language (L2) based on two models: the ordered access model, where the most frequent dominant meaning is always accessed first, and the multiple access model, where dominant and subordinate meanings are activated. Non-native speakers of English (divided into high and low proficiency groups) and native English speakers completed a lexical decision task. While both L2 high and low proficiency groups retrieved multiple meanings of the ambiguous words at different stimulus-onset asynchronies supporting the multiple access model, the move from the ordered access model to the multiple access model was confirmed for the native English speaker group. The findings indicated developmental change of sensitivity to meaning dominance. The results also demonstrated that the rate of facilitation differed among the groups due to slow and more transient L2 activation.

In this article, we describe the most extensive set of word associations collected to date. The database contains over 12,000 cue words for which more than 70,000 participants generated three responses in a multiple-response free association task. The goal of this study was (1) to create a semantic network that covers a large part of the human lexicon, (2) to investigate the implications of a multiple-response procedure by deriving a weighted directed network, and (3) to show how measures of centrality and relatedness derived from this network predict both lexical access in a lexical decision task and semantic relatedness in similarity judgment tasks. First, our results show that the multiple-response procedure results in a more heterogeneous set of responses, which lead to better predictions of lexical access and semantic relatedness than do single-response procedures. Second, the directed nature of the network leads to a decomposition of centrality that primarily depends on the number of incoming links or in-degree of each node, rather than its set size or number of outgoing links. Both studies indicate that adequate representation formats and sufficiently rich data derived from word associations represent a valuable type of information in both lexical and semantic processing.

Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kučera and Francis frequency norms. By using the lexical decision times of recently published megastudies, we show how bad this measure is and what must be done to improve it. In particular, we investigated the size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure. We observed that corpus size is of practical importance for small sizes (depending on the frequency of the word), but not for sizes above 16–30 million words. As for the language register, we found that frequencies based on television and film subtitles are better than frequencies based on written sources, certainly for the monosyllabic and bisyllabic words used in psycholinguistic research. Finally, we found that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence. Part of the superiority of the latter is due to the words that are frequently used as names. Assembling a new frequency norm on the basis of these considerations turned out to predict word processing times much better than did the existing norms (including Kučera & Francis and Celex). The new SUBTL frequency norms from the SUBTLEXUS corpus are freely available for research purposes from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental, as well as from the University of Ghent and Lexique Web sites.

•Anterior inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) represents lexico-semantic information.•Sublexical processing involves posterior areas, like the supplementary motor area.•Anterior ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC) represents semantic information.•Areas posterior to the vOTC, like V3-V4, participate in sublexical representations.•Psycholinguistic and NLP models converge in ATL, anterior IFG and parahippocampus. While the neural underpinnings of semantic cognition have been extensively studied, the brain mechanisms that allow the extraction of meaning from the initially perceptual visual linguistic input are less understood. These mechanisms have typically been explored through the analysis of psycholinguistic properties that reflect key aspects of semantic processing (e.g., word frequency, familiarity or concreteness), and more recently, through natural language processing (NLP) models. However, both approaches lack a direct comparison of sublexical (i.e., phonological and orthographic) and lexico-semantic aspects of words, with NLP models. Understanding how sublexical and lexico-semantic systems interact and/or overlap is a current challenge in the field of neurobiology of language. In this fMRI study, 30 participants performed a lexical decision task in the MRI, where all aforementioned sublexical and lexico-semantic properties were carefully controlled. The resulting models reflected either sublexical, semantic, or NLP (word vector) relations, which were compared to multivariate brain patterns in representational similarity analysis. Our findings reveal that sublexical and lexico-semantic representations recruit different areas of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and ventral occipitotemporal cortex (vOTC). The anterior IFG and vOTC represented semantic models, while regions posterior to the IFG, like supplementary motor area (SMA), or to the vOTC, like areas V3-V4, showed representations of sublexical models. Importantly, both semantic and NLP models converged in semantic hubs, including the inferior anterior temporal lobe (ATL), parahippocampal gyrus, or anterior IFG. The implications of these results are discussed in line with the most recent neuroscientific evidence.

Masked priming is one of the most important paradigms in the study of visual word recognition, but it is usually thought to require a laboratory setup with a known monitor and keyboard. To test if this technique can be safely used in an online setting, we conducted two online masked priming lexical decision task experiments using PsychoPy/PsychoJS (Peirce et al., 2019 ). Importantly, we also tested the role of prime exposure duration (33.3 vs. 50 ms in Experiment 1 and 16.7 vs. 33.3 ms in Experiment 2), thus allowing us to examine both across conditions and within-conditions effects. We found that our online data are indeed very similar to the masked priming data previously reported in the masked priming literature. Additionally, we found a clear effect of prime duration, with the priming effect (measured in terms of response time and accuracy) being stronger at 50 ms than 33.3 ms and no priming effect at 16.7 ms prime duration. From these results, we can conclude that modern online browser-based experimental psychophysics packages (e.g., PsychoPy) can present stimuli and collect responses on standard end user devices with enough precision. These findings provide us with confidence that masked priming can be used online, thus allowing us not only to run less time-consuming experiments, but also to reach populations that are difficult to test in a laboratory.

We present a new database of lexical decision times for English words and nonwords, for which two groups of British participants each responded to 14,365 monosyllabic and disyllabic words and the same number of nonwords for a total duration of 16 h (divided over multiple sessions). This database, called the British Lexicon Project (BLP), fills an important gap between the Dutch Lexicon Project (DLP; Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, Frontiers in Language Sciences . Psychology, 1, 174, 2010 ) and the English Lexicon Project (ELP; Balota et al., 2007 ), because it applies the repeated measures design of the DLP to the English language. The high correlation between the BLP and ELP data indicates that a high percentage of variance in lexical decision data sets is systematic variance, rather than noise, and that the results of megastudies are rather robust with respect to the selection and presentation of the stimuli. Because of its design, the BLP makes the same analyses possible as the DLP, offering researchers with a new interesting data set of word-processing times for mixed effects analyses and mathematical modeling. The BLP data are available at http://crr.ugent.be/blp and as Electronic Supplementary Materials .