Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An aim of research on spoken word recognition is to characterize the influence of various lexical characteristics(e.g., word frequency, neighborhood size) on lexical access. Dynamics can be coarsely estimated from single-point measureslike naming or more directly assessed using time course measures like fixation proportions over time in the visual worldparadigm (e.g., Tanenhaus et al., 1995). We propose that cumulative response probabilities (CRPs) over time may allow anew characterization of the activation dynamics of lexical access from single-point measures. We assume that the timing ofresponses in a naming task reflects probabilistic sampling of underlying continuous activation dynamics that can be recoveredby CRPs. We applied CRP analyses to visual word recognition data collected for 40,481 words from 472 participants (theEnglish Lexicon Project; Balota et al., 2007) and report initial efforts to validate this new approach.