Abstract: Nonwords are often used to clarify how lexical pro- cessing takes place in the absence of semantics. This study shows that nonwords are not semantically vac- uous. We used Linear Discriminative Learning [2] to estimate the meanings of nonwords in the MALD database [14] from the speech signal. We show that measures gauging nonword semantics significantly improve model fit for both acoustic durations and RTs. Although nonwords do not evoke meanings that afford conscious reflexion, they do make con- tact with the semantic space, and the angles and...
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