Frequency Drives Lexical Access in Reading but not in Speaking: The Frequency-Lag Hypothesis
Tamar H. Goalln, Timothy J. Slattery, Diane Goldenberg, Eva Van Assche, Wouter Duyck, Keith Rayner · PsycEXTRA Dataset · 2011
To contrast mechanisms of lexical access in production versus comprehension we compared the effects of word-frequency (high, low), context (none, low-constraining, high-constraining), and level of English proficiency (monolinguals, Spanish-English bilinguals, Dutch-English bilinguals), on picture naming, lexical decision, and eye fixation times.Semantic constraint effects were larger in production than in reading.Frequency effects were larger in production than in reading without constraining context, but larger in reading than in production with constraining context.Bilingual disadvantages were modulated by frequency in production but not in eye fixation times, were not smaller in low-constraining context, and were reduced by high-constraining context only in production and only at the lowest level of English proficiency.These results challenge existing accounts of bilingual disadvantages, and reveal fundamentally different processes during lexical access across modalities, entailing a primarily semantically driven search in production, but a frequency driven search in comprehension.The apparently more interactive process in production than comprehension could simply reflect a greater number of frequency-sensitive processing stages in production.