暗微幽光

Rethinking Jared’s studies

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In this post, I attempt to summarize the Jared’s studies of consistency and regularity effects in 1997 and 2002. This summary assist me over-viewing the critical questions in this issue, and remind me the key concepts when I am planning my research projects.

The main contribution of Jared(1997) is her fine-grained work of measuring consistency effects accross word frequency in the well-controlled neighborhood characteristics. According to Jared’s review, the past studies investigated the regularity and consistency effects by comparing the responses of consistent words with higher summed frequency of friends and those of inconsistent words with lower summed frequency of friends. This confound in neighborhood characteristics caused stablly significant but possibly overestimated effect in the low-frequency words. In addition, the high-frequency inconsistent words with lower summed frequency of friends was rarely investigated before 1997. Under this background, Jared designed a series of experiments to measure the magnitudes of consistency effect with the extreme neighborhood characteristic (F<E). Her findings revealed either the high and low words with this neighborhood characteristic caused significant consistency effects which eliminate the interaction of frequency and consistency as well. She also indicated that the neighborhood characteristic (F<E) is necessity of resulted significant consistency and regularity effects for the high frequency words.

(Collect Comments on Jared Here)

Based on the 1997 work, Jared continuouely addressed the best spelling-sound correspondence (regularity or consistency) characterizing the difficulty associated with naming responses and the changing pattern of correspondence effects with the word frequency. She answered these questions based on two criterions: first is the interaction of consistency(inconsistency vs. consistency) and the type of inconsistency (exception vs. regular-inconsistency); second is the interaction of word frequency (high vs. low) and regularity (exception vs. regular-consistency) matched on neighborhood characteristic. If the spelling-sound consistency contribute more to the correspondence effect than the spelling-sound regularity, both the interactions would be eliminated. Her experiments showed the first interaction weak in latency data but strong interactions in error data. Based on these findings, she issued the best characteristic to the spelling-sound consistency but agreed the impact of regularity on naming perfomance to some extent. As for the interaction of frequency and consistency, her experiments confirmed the nieghborhood characteristics deciding the resutled latency but the resulted error.

Jared suggested the frequency by regularity/consistency effects showing  knowledge of spelling-sound correspondence gained from other words is not sufficient to produce a correct pronunciation (EXC, F<E) and much weaker for words whose pronunciations can benefit to a greater extent from such knowledge (EXC, F>E). This suggestion leaves a hypothesis about the processing of exception words with unique word body (e.g., HEART) may been facilitated primarily by word frequency. A significant interaction of frequency and regularity effect of unique word boyd should be predictable. She wished to design an experiment to confirm this hypothesis, but too few such words in CELEX supported her idea. In my research experience of Chinese character naming, there are more opinions for testing this hypothesis.

Jared, D. (1997). Spelling-sound consistency affects the naming of high-frequency words. Journal of Memory and Language, 36(4), 505-529.
Jared, D. (2002). Spelling-sound consistency and regularity effects in word naming. Journal of Memory and Language, 46(4), 723-750.