MEGALEX

For more than a century, researchers in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive science have tried to understand the mental processes underlying visual and spoken word recognition (see e.g., Adelman, 2011; Balota, Yap & Cortese, 2006; Ferrand, 2007; Ferrand, New, Brysbaert, Keuleers, Bonin, Méot, Augustinova & Pallier, 2010; Grainger & Holcomb, 2009; Grainger & Ziegler, 2011; Spinelli & Ferrand, 2005; Dahan & Magnuson, 2006; Pisoni & Levi, 2007). To date, nearly all research has been based on small studies involving a limited set of monosyllabic words selected according to factorial designs, with a limited number of independent variables matched on a series of control variables. The present project aims to supplement previous studies with a new approach, the "megastudy approach", by (1) using multiple regression designs involving very large-scale stimuli sets; (2) investigating the cognitive processes underlying the visual and spoken word recognition of more complex words, i.e. polysyllabic and polymorphemic words; and (3) using the psychophysical approach (with the repeated measures design) developed recently by Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, and Brysbaert (2011). This project has two main phases. Phase 1 of the project will collect reaction times and percent errors in the visual lexical decision task on about 28000 French words and 28000 pseudowords with a small group of participants (n=100). The 28000 words (mainly polysyllabic and polymorphemic words of different lengths and frequencies) will be selected among the 130,000 distinct lexical entries available in Lexique (www.lexique.org; New, Pallier, Brysbaert, & Ferrand, 2004). We will also include inflected forms (such as feminine, plural, and verbal forms). Thanks to this mega-corpus, we will provide answers to some important unresolved theoretical issues in the field of visual word recognition. Collected reaction times will be submitted to multiple regression analyses (linear mixed effects: Baayen, Davidson, & Bates, 2008) in order to study the influence of continuous lexical variables that used to be treated as categorized in factorial designs. Phase 2 of the project will collect reaction times and percent errors on the same number of words and pseudowords, in a modality never tested before at such large-scale, namely the auditory modality. Megastudies are virtually nonexistent in auditory word recognition research and the literature on auditory word recognition has been dominated by experimental studies. It is therefore crucial to provide and explore an auditory analogue of what has been already done in visual word recognition. Presenting auditory stimuli will imply more effort than presenting visual stimuli, but it is worth trying because factors specific to the auditory modality are influencing auditory word recognition (e.g., phonological neighborhood density, stimulus duration, uniqueness point, etc.) in plus of the usual factors found in visual word recognition (e.g., word frequency, length in letters and syllables, semantic neighbors, etc.). To succeed in the realization of this ambitious project, we have put together a dynamic and interdisciplinary team (whose members have already worked and published together), which is extremely competent in the areas of psycholinguistics and data mining. The collected reaction times and the sophisticated analyses (mixed models) we will conduct will allow us to (1) understand more precisely the functional architecture of the different levels of processing involved in both visual and spoken word recognition, (2) detail the nature of the representation on which these processes apply, and (3) study the type of coding (orthographic, phonological, morphological, semantic) used by these different levels of processing. These results will be crucial for models of reading and spoken word recognition. Overall, this work will lead us to a better understanding of factors at play in visual and spoken word recognition.