Chapter 9: Reading and speech perception

Question 1

lexical decision task

Answer 1

a task in which individuals decide as rapidly as possible whether a letter string forms a word

Question 2

naming task

Answer 2

a task in which visually presented words are pronounced aloud as rapidly as possible

Question 3

orthography

Answer 3

info about the spellings of words

Question 4

phonology

Answer 4

info about the sounds of words and parts of words

Question 5

semantics

Answer 5

the meaning conveyed by words and sentences

Question 6

priming

Answer 6

influencing the processing of (and response to) a target by presenting a stimulus related to it in some way beforehand

Question 7

homophones

Answer 7

words having the same pronunciations but that differ in the way they are spelled

Question 8

word superiority effect

Answer 8

a target letter is more readily detected in a letter string when the string forms a word than when it does not

Question 9

pseudoword

Answer 9

a pronounceable nonword (e.g. “tave”)

Question 10

orthographic neighbours

Answer 10

with reference to a given word, those other words that can be formed by changing one of its letters

Question 11

semantic priming

Answer 11

the finding that word identification is facilitated when there is priming by a semantically related word

Question 12

lexicon

Answer 12

a store of detailed info about words, including orthographic, phonological, semantic, and syntactic knowledge)

Question 13

lexical access

Answer 13

entering the lexicon with its store of detailed info about words

Question 14

cascade model

Answer 14

a model in which info passes from one level to the next before processing is complete at the first level

Question 15

surface dyslexia

Answer 15

a condition in which regular words can be read but there is impaired ability to read irregular words

Question 16

phonological dyslexia

Answer 16

a condition in which familiar words can be read but there is impaired ability to read unfamiliar words and nonwords

Question 17

deep dyslexia

Answer 17

a condition in which reading unfamiliar words is impaired and there are semantic reading errors (e.g. reading “missile” as “rocket”)

Question 18

saccades

Answer 18

fast eye movements that cannot be altered after being initiated).

Question 19

perceptual span

Answer 19

the effective field of view in reading (letters to the left and right of fixation that can be processed

Question 20

spillover effect

Answer 20

any given word is fixated longer during reading when preceded by rare word rather than a common one

Question 21

phonemes

Answer 21

• Phoneme: basic speech sounds conveying meaning

Question 22

spectrograph

Answer 22

an instrument used to produce visible records of the sound frequencies in speech

Question 23

formants

Answer 23

peaks in the frequencies of speech sounds; revealed by a spectograph

Question 24

The segmentation problem

Answer 24

the listener´s problem of dividing the almost continuous sounds of speech into separate phonemes and words