2. Word Recognition

Question 1

What are the main questions concerning word recognition and what studies support them?

Answer 1

1. Eye movement
   (Reichle et al., 2003)
2. Does knowledge about words help letter recognition?
   (Reicher, 1969), (McClelland and Rummelhart, 1981)
3. What factors affect word recognition?
   (Balota et al., 2014), (Brysbaert and Cortese, 2011)
4. Serial or parallel?
   (Forster, 1976), (McClelland and Rummelhart, 1981)
5. How do we encode info about letter position?
   (Grainger and Whitney, 2004), (Davis, 2010)
6. Does sound play a role in recognition?
   (Van Orden, 1987), (Lesch and Pollesk, 1998)
7. How soon do we start to activate meaning?
   (Rodd, 2007)

Question 2

How do we move our eyes during reading?

Answer 2

(Reichle et al., 2003)
• saccades of 8 letter spaces
• considerable variation in timing and 10-15% movements are regressions
• Long words nearly always fixated, short 25% of time

Question 3

Does our knowledge about words help letter recognition?

Answer 3

Word superiority effect:

(Reicher, 1969)
• letters easier to identify in a real word- tachistoscopic presentation

(McClelland and Rummelhart, 1981)
• Bias to identify partially obscured letters such that string forms word

Question 4

What factors affect word recognition?

Answer 4

(Balota et al., 2014)
• MegaStudy approach- used multiple regression to identify effects of different variables on speed of response
• Frequency, length, sound-to-spelling consistency, imageability
• Age of acquisition remains controversial (Brysbaert and Cortese, 2011)

Recent experience:
Pruning and interference- helpful or unhelpful context

Question 5

Is word recognition serial or parallel?

Answer 5

(Forster, 1976)
• Serial Search Model- two stage- forms then content

(McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981)
• Interactive Activation and Competition Model (IAC)
• Interconnected networks of neurones- connectionist view

General consensus of parallel as serial is implausible neurologically

Question 6

How do we code information about letter position?

Answer 6

(McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981)
IAC- slot based coding

(Grainger and Whitney, 2004)
• Subsets of letters give priming effect
• Changing order destroys priming effect
• 92% overlap in garden and gadren priming, 25% in galten
-> encoding based on ordered letter pairs (open bigrams)- relative positions of letters

Led to development of:
Spatial Coding Model of visual word identification- letter position coded dynamically
(Davis, 2010)

Question 7

How soon do we start to activate the meaning of a word?

Answer 7

(Rodd, 2007)
• Experimental evidence for parallel activation of meanings
• Leotard effect- semantic categorisation task
• Slower responses to experimental items
• However, May be due to priming effects/expectation

Question 8

Does the sound of a word play a role in recognition?

Answer 8

(Van Orden, 1987)
• Category decision task- high error rates for homophones with different spellings pair pear

• phonological mediation May play higher role for low-frequency words and poor readers