Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Connecionist approaches to word recognition suggest thai the units of word identification are not part of a fixed architecture, but emerge through extracting co-occurrence regularities. One implication of this idea is that unit-status, and the size of units, may be a matter of degree. This paper investigates the possible unit status of common word collocations, such as adjective-noun pairs {nexi step, large pari) and verb-preposition combinations (look out, appear in). On analogy to the pseudo-words used in word superiority experiments, I contrasted letter detection in near-collocations {next stem, barge part) and random pairs (next role, power part) with performance on collocations (which had been defined as frequent combinations in a printed corpus). Although letter detection for collocations was not better than single words, detection was impaired for random pairs relative to single words and collocations. Near-collocations had a paradoxical effect that was only partially anticipated: an enhancing effect when letter targets were in the first word, and an inhibiting effect when targets were in the second word. Because reaction times were 400msec slower in the latter case, it was inferred that the nearcollocations have a time-dependent effect, one of initial activation of neighbors, followed by inhibition