Investigating human cognition: language and reading Flashcards
What are the main approaches to study human cognition?
Cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, cogntiive neuroscience, computational cognitive neuroscience
What is cogntiive psych?
trying to understand human cognition by using behavioural evidence
What is cognitive neuropsych?
studying brain-damaged patients to understadn normal human cognition
What is cognitive neuroscience?
using evidence from behaviour and the brain to understand human cognition
What is computaitonal cognitvie science?
developing computational models to further our understadning of human cognition
What are the levels of analysis?
experimental, computational, neural
Where was writing invented?
Ancient Sumeria (Iraq) 5000 years ago
What is lexical access?
Identify letters, identify words and retrieve word meaning
What happens after lexical access?
Interpret sentence structure, interpret sentence meaning, interpret intention of speaker
What is a phonemes?
consonant and sound vowels
What are phonemes organised into?
syllables with a stress pattern
What are the written word forms?
Alphabetic, syllabic, ideographic
What does the alphabet script represent?
phonemes
How long does it take to udnersand a word?
200ms
How many words can you identify a second
2 or 3
What are the sources of evidence
Introspective reports, observation, measurement
What do introspecitve reports tell us?
not much anything about how identification is done
What are the two kinds of behavioural measure?
artifical, on-line
What is the word superiority effect in brief exposures?
Three conditions, get a word, a non-word or letter condition. Need to decide what the fourth letter is ( it is briefly flashed). The study has shown that you are much faster when you are briefly faster when with a word.
What is word superiority effect?
Greater accuracy of letter identification in the context of a word than of a matched non-word
What is frequency effect?
RTs for lexical decision, categorisation, and naming shorter for words that are more frequent in the language
What is sentence context effects
RTs for lexical decision and naming are shorter when a word is presented in a sentence context of which it is a plausible continuation.
Faster identifying a word when it fits into the context
What is the moving window technique?
In this example, the window extends 8 characters after (and 8 before) the fixation point. By reducing these numbers until reading performance begins to suffer, we can figure out how far ahead of (and behind) the fixation point useful information is being taken in.
If letters replaced by xs, but spaces preserved, outside the window, then performance deteriorates only when <8 characters visible beyond fixation
What has been found about reading:
» Higher frequency words recognised more easily and faster
» Letters more easily recognised in the context of a word
» Words more easily recognised in the context of a sentence
What can we compare the input of words to?
One pattern in memory at a time or to all the patterns in memory at once
What is comparing the input to one pattern in memory at a time called?
serial
What is comparing the input to all the patterns in memory at once called?
parallel
Who came up with the modified serial model?
murray and foster
What did Foster and murray propose
mental lexicon of word-forms is divided into bins. serial search within that bin.
What does knowing the frequency on lexical decision help?
high, but not low frequency words: consistent with parallel not serial model.
What are the possible pathways for neuropsychology to read.>
text –> orthography –> direct OR phonologically mediated acess.
Direct –> semantics
phonologically –> phonology
WHich words dont produce much of a homophone effect?
High frequency
What is the lexical route?
to know the meaning to pronounce a word
What are the types of dyslexia?
surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia, deep dyslecia
What is surface dyslexia?
Reading regualr words and nonwords, impaired by exception words
What is phonological dyslexia?
reading of higher frequency words (regular and irregular) and impaired reading of nonwords and unfamiliar
What is deep dyslexia?
impaired access to pronounciation for all words + semantic approximations
What is the triangle model?
there is just one direct route: a network that learns to translate both regular and exception patterns, provided they are relatively frequent
How can you measure brain activation?
PET, EEG, fMRI
What does TMS do
- used to disrupt function, very briefly, in region of cortex
• Brief electrical pulse of coil induces brief (1 ms) but strong magnetic flux, which causes disruptive electrical activity in underlying axons.
e.g. disruption of letter recognition
temporary disruption of brain activity
