Chapter 11 Word Recognition Flashcards
What is phonology
Spoken, auditory language
What is orthography
Visual, written language
What is visuo spatial language called
Sign language
What are the three linguistic modalities
Auditory, visual, and visuo spatial
Phonology, orthography and sign languages
What is lexical access?
The process by which memory for a specific word is located, opened or activated
How do infants begin to learn word boundaries in speech?
They tune into regularities in the STRESS PATTERNS (prosody)
90% of English words emphasise the first syllable
Strong weak pattern, but we have some weak strong words like guitar
Also tune into adjacent transitional probabilities in continuous speech
What is prosody?
The stress patterns of a language
How did jusczyk et al. (1999) demonstrate that babies pay attention to the prosody of language?
7.5 month old babies heard sentences with “guitar is” 6 times, and found that children showed the tendency to learn the combination “taris” over guitar.
This was determined by preferential looking time, as they preferred to look at the speaker that said the word taris
Evidence shows babies overcome this by 10.5 months, by being able to integrate multiple sources of info about the likely boundaries of words in fluent speech
What are prelexical cues?
Provide info regarding likely word boundaries prior to lexical access
Cues that are used by babies before they learn to speak such as prosody can cues and transitional probabilities
Adults also use them along with lexical cues
What a transitional probabilities?
Prelexical cue
The likelihood that any given syllable follows another differs within words
Pre is more likely to be followed by ty
Than bay followed by ty
Allows babies to map and work out what the words are, before they even have meanings.
They are sensitive to adjacent transitional probabilities
What did Saffran et al (1996) find with infants and language learning?
Had 8 month old babies habituated to “tibudopabikugolatudaropi” with no prosodic cues
They made it so that transitional probabilities were 1.0 between syllables among the pseudo words, and 0.33 among the adjacent syllables
Babies shoes that they looked for longer at the part words than the pseudo words. Showing that they had identified and habituated to the pseudo words
What is the TRACE model of word recognition? Mccleeland and Elman 1986
Neural network/connectionist model
Based on a system of nodes
3 layers - phonetic feature level, phonemes level and word level.
Each node has a resting level and threshold for action, and when it is activated, (moves from bottom up) nodes can activate or inhibit nodes around it.
Can have LEXICAL FEEDBACK of inhibitory connections going top down
And LATERAL INHIBITION of inhibitory connections within layers - to suppress competing nodes
What’s lexical feedback?
The top down inhibitory signals in the TRACE model
Resolves ambiguity in spoken word recognition that is sometimes cause by coarticulation of phonemes.
Studies have also shown a lexical bias - where if words heard start with r or l, people will think they heard lab just because there is no word rab - due to feedback from your lexicon!!!
What is coarticulation of phonemes and what does it cause?
When the same phoneme is pronounced differently depending on the context of the surrounding phonemes.
Causes ambiguity in the speech stream
Can be cleaned up by feedback from the lexical level
What is parallel activation of lexical candidates
When there is parallel activation of lexical candidates, until one node is activates enough to suppress the competing candidate (lateral inhibition)
We need to do this so that we can identify the word quickly, without waiting for the entire word to finish.
Spivey and dale (2004) showed this by using mouse tracking
