This work presents a large lexical decision mega-study in Spanish, with 918 participants and 7500 words, focusing on emotional content and individual differences. The main objective was to investigate how emotional valence and arousal influence word recognition, controlling for a large number of confounding variables. In addition, as a unique contribution, the study examined the modulation of these effects by individual differences. Results indicated a significant effect of valence and arousal on lexical decision times, with an interaction between these variables. A linear effect of valence was observed, with slower recognition times for negative words and faster recognition times for positive words. In addition, arousal showed opposite effects in positive and negative words. Importantly, the effect of emotional variables was affected by personality traits (extroversion, conscientiousness and openness to experience), age and gender, challenging the \'one-size-fits-all\' interpretation of emotional word processing. All data collected in the study is available to the research community: https://osf.io/cbtqy . This includes data from each participant (RTs, errors and individual differences scores), as well as values of concreteness (n = 1690), familiarity (n = 1693) and age of acquisition (n = 2171) of the words collected exclusively for this study. This is a useful resource for researchers interested not only in emotional word processing, but also in lexical processing in general and the influence of individual differences.

Pupil dilation has been associated with the effort required to perform various cognitive tasks. At the lexical level, some studies suggest that this neurophysiological measure would provide objective, real-time information during word processing and lexical access. However, due to the scarcity and incipient advancement of this line of research, its applicability, use, and sensitivity are not entirely clear. This scoping review aims to determine the applicability and usefulness of pupillometry in the study of lexical access by providing an up-to-date overview of research in this area. Following the PRISMA protocol, 16 articles were included in this review. The results show that pupillometry is a highly applicable, useful, and sensitive method for assessing lexical skills of word recognition, word retrieval, and semantic activation. Moreover, it easily fits into traditional research paradigms and methods in the field. Because it is a non-invasive, objective, and automated procedure, it can be applied to any population or age group. However, the emerging development of this specific area of research and the methodological diversity observed in the included studies do not yet allow for definitive conclusions in this area, which in turn does not allow for meta-analyses or fully conclusive statements about what the pupil response actually reflects when processing words. Standardized pupillary recording and analysis methods need to be defined to generate more accurate, replicable research designs with more reliable results to strengthen this line of research.

Computational models of infant word-finding typically operate over transcriptions of infant-directed speech corpora. It is now possible to test models of word segmentation on speech materials, rather than transcriptions of speech. We propose that such modeling efforts be conducted over the speech of the experimental stimuli used in studies measuring infants\' capacity for learning from spoken sentences. Correspondence with infant outcomes in such experiments is an appropriate benchmark for models of infants. We demonstrate such an analysis by applying the DP-Parser model of Algayres and colleagues to auditory stimuli used in infant psycholinguistic experiments by Pelucchi and colleagues. The DP-Parser model takes speech as input, and creates multiple overlapping embeddings from each utterance. Prospective words are identified as clusters of similar embedded segments. This allows segmentation of each utterance into possible words, using a dynamic programming method that maximizes the frequency of constituent segments. We show that DP-Parse mimics American English learners\' performance in extracting words from Italian sentences, favoring the segmentation of words with high syllabic transitional probability. This kind of computational analysis over actual stimuli from infant experiments may be helpful in tuning future models to match human performance.

Previous studies examining the link between visual word recognition and eye movements have shown that eye movements reflect the time-course of cognitive processes involved in reading. Whereas most studies have been undertaken in Western European languages written in the Roman alphabet, the present developmental study investigates a non-European language-Hebrew, which is written in a non-alphabetic (abjadic) script. We compared the eye-movements of children in Grades 4 to 6 (N = 30) and university students (N = 30) reading familiar real words and unfamiliar (pseudo)words of 3 letters and 5 letters in length. Using linear mixed models, we focused on the effects of word familiarity, word length, and age group. Our results highlight both universal aspects of word reading (developmental and familiarity (lexicality) effects) as well as language-specific word length effect which appears to be related to the unique morphological and orthographic features of the Semitic abjad.

According to the relation-interpretation-competition-evaluation (RICE) hypothesis, compound word processing involves selecting a relational meaning (e.g., moonlight is \'light from moon\') from a larger set of competing possible relational meanings. Prior lexical decision experiments with existing compound words have demonstrated that greater entropy of conceptual relations, i.e., greater competition between conceptual relations, impedes lexical processing speed. The present study addresses two unresolved issues: First, it is unclear whether the competition effect generalizes to the processing of novel compounds (e.g., grassladder), and second, it is not yet known whether competition between possible relational meanings extends to compounds when they are read in a sentence context. A series of self-paced reading tasks examined whether the competition effect operates regardless of (i) compound type (existing vs. novel), and (ii) whether sentence context (semantically supportive vs. semantically non-supportive) moderates the competition effect. The experiments confirmed that reading times of novel and existing compounds read in sentences were impacted by entropy of conceptual relations. Moreover, the effect was equally strong in both sentence context types. Additional analyses indicated that relational meanings are more ambiguous and flexible across different contexts for novel compounds compared to existing compounds.

This study investigates how children aged two to eight years (N = 129) and adults (N = 29) use auditory and visual speech for word recognition. The goal was to bridge the gap between apparent successes of visual speech processing in young children in visual-looking tasks, with apparent difficulties of speech processing in older children from explicit behavioural measures. Participants were presented with familiar words in audio-visual (AV), audio-only (A-only) or visual-only (V-only) speech modalities, then presented with target and distractor images, and looking to targets was measured. Adults showed high accuracy, with slightly less target-image looking in the V-only modality. Developmentally, looking was above chance for both AV and A-only modalities, but not in the V-only modality until 6 years of age (earlier on /k/-initial words). Flexible use of visual cues for lexical access develops throughout childhood.

Dementia is one of the most common disorders among older people. This condition causes cognitive impairment, which can affect memory, thinking, expressive or comprehension language. It affects work and daily life. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a word recognition program on naming and quality of life in older people with high risk of dementia. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a word recognition program on naming and quality of life in older people with high risk of dementia.
A one-group, quasi-experimental pretest-posttest study was conducted at Maeka Subdistrict Administrative Organization, Chiang Mai, Thailand, and participants\' home setting from December 2021 to March 2022. Participants were 6 Thai elderly persons with a high risk of dementia according to MEST10 cut-off score, including 1 (16.66%) male and 5 (83.34%) females. They were assessed on naming using the WAB test. Additionally, they were assessed on quality of life using the WHOQOL-BREF-THAI. The word recognition program delivered 30 min per day for 5-week duration. The results were analyzed by using descriptive statistics and the Wilcoxon signed-rank test to compare the effect on the intervention program.
The older people with high risk of dementia significantly gained in naming after receiving the word recognition program (MD = -9.00 ± 2.344; 95% CI: -20.00 to -4.00; p = 0.031). However, they did not significantly gain in quality of life after receiving the word recognition program (MD = -4.50 ± 3.393; 95% CI: -10.50 to 1.00; p = 0.418).
The current study demonstrates that a 5-week intervention of the word recognition program may be effective in naming to enhance language skills for Thai older people with high risk of dementia.

The transition from on-paper to on-screen reading seems to make it necessary to raise some considerations, as a greater attentional effort has been claimed for print texts than digital ones. Not surprisingly, most university students prefer this digital medium. This research aims to examine reading times by contextualizing this phenomenon into two processes: namely, word recognition and reading comprehension task on paper and on screen. Thus, two different tasks-counterbalanced into digital and print mediums-were carried out per each participant with a preference for a digital medium: a reading comprehension task (RCT) and a lexical decision task (LDT) after reading a specific story. Participants were slower reading print texts and no statistically significant differences were found in RCT accuracy. This result suggests that the task required more cognitive resources under the print medium for those with a worse comprehension performance in reading, and a more conservative pattern in digital RCT for those with a better performance.

Effects of emotional valence have been observed in lexical decision tasks, suggesting that valence information modulates early word recognition. However, is still unclear the processing advantage of the different valence categories, and how these advantages might be modulated by word frequency and arousal. To clarify this question, a lexical decision task was designed using emotional words as stimuli. Emotional words were divided into three categories: 60 positive, 60 negative, and 60 neutral words. Word frequency was manipulated into low and high conditions and arousal was controlled among experimental conditions (word valence and frequency). In the first experiment, 54 participants performed the task with a maximum stimuli exposure time of 2000 ms. In a follow-up experiment, 42 participants performed the same task with two shorter fixed time exposures (150 ms and 300 ms). The results were similar between experiments: positive words were recognized faster and negative words were recognized slower than neutral ones. Furthermore, this valence effect was modulated by word frequency, affecting only words that take longer to be recognized (low-frequency words). However, the valence by frequency interaction was attenuated for high-arousal words when the pressure to respond was high (short exposure time - 150 ms). Overall, the results confirm that the emotional status of a word can affect word processing at early stages when automatic processes are taking place.

In tonal languages such as Thai, lexical tone (the pitch of a syllable) affects word meaning. This study examined the effects of lexical tone awareness (LTA) on early word recognition and the relationship between these abilities and word reading and spelling in subsequent grades. A longitudinal design was used to assess reading-related skills in 259 Thai children, first in kindergarten (130 girls, Mage=67.25months) and later in Grade 3 (Mage=102.25months). In kindergarten, the children were tested on lexical tone identification and differentiation, early literacy skills, non-verbal IQ, and early word recognition. In Grade 3, they were tested on word reading and spelling from dictation. The hierarchical regression analyses showed that the lexical tone identification skills in kindergarten accounted for 2% of the unique variance in early word recognition. However, none of the LTA skills could predict word reading and spelling from dictation after controlling for other literacy-related skills. These findings suggest that LTA skill positively associated with early word recognition at the kindergarten level, but not for word reading and spelling from dictation at a Grade 3 level.