Investigating human cognition: language and reading

Question 1

What are the main approaches to study human cognition?

Answer 1

Cognitive psychology, cognitive neuropsychology, cogntiive neuroscience, computational cognitive neuroscience

Question 2

What is cogntiive psych?

Answer 2

trying to understand human cognition by using behavioural evidence

Question 3

What is cognitive neuropsych?

Answer 3

studying brain-damaged patients to understadn normal human cognition

Question 4

What is cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 4

using evidence from behaviour and the brain to understand human cognition

Question 5

What is computaitonal cognitvie science?

Answer 5

developing computational models to further our understadning of human cognition

Question 6

What are the levels of analysis?

Answer 6

experimental, computational, neural

Question 7

Where was writing invented?

Answer 7

Ancient Sumeria (Iraq) 5000 years ago

Question 8

What is lexical access?

Answer 8

Identify letters, identify words and retrieve word meaning

Question 9

What happens after lexical access?

Answer 9

Interpret sentence structure, interpret sentence meaning, interpret intention of speaker

Question 10

What is a phonemes?

Answer 10

consonant and sound vowels

Question 11

What are phonemes organised into?

Answer 11

syllables with a stress pattern

Question 12

What are the written word forms?

Answer 12

Alphabetic, syllabic, ideographic

Question 13

What does the alphabet script represent?

Answer 13

phonemes

Question 14

How long does it take to udnersand a word?

Answer 14

200ms

Question 15

How many words can you identify a second

Answer 15

2 or 3

Question 16

What are the sources of evidence

Answer 16

Introspective reports, observation, measurement

Question 17

What do introspecitve reports tell us?

Answer 17

not much anything about how identification is done

Question 18

What are the two kinds of behavioural measure?

Answer 18

artifical, on-line

Question 19

What is the word superiority effect in brief exposures?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

What is word superiority effect?

Answer 20

Greater accuracy of letter identification in the context of a word than of a matched non-word

Question 21

What is frequency effect?

Answer 21

RTs for lexical decision, categorisation, and naming shorter for words that are more frequent in the language

Question 22

What is sentence context effects

Answer 22

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

Question 23

What is the moving window technique?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What has been found about reading:

Answer 24

» 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

Question 25

What can we compare the input of words to?

Answer 25

One pattern in memory at a time or to all the patterns in memory at once

Question 26

What is comparing the input to one pattern in memory at a time called?

Answer 26

serial

Question 27

What is comparing the input to all the patterns in memory at once called?

Answer 27

parallel

Question 28

Who came up with the modified serial model?

Answer 28

murray and foster

Question 29

What did Foster and murray propose

Answer 29

mental lexicon of word-forms is divided into bins. serial search within that bin.

Question 30

What does knowing the frequency on lexical decision help?

Answer 30

high, but not low frequency words: consistent with parallel not serial model.

Question 31

What are the possible pathways for neuropsychology to read.>

Answer 31

text –> orthography –> direct OR phonologically mediated acess.

Direct –> semantics
phonologically –> phonology

Question 32

WHich words dont produce much of a homophone effect?

Answer 32

High frequency

Question 33

What is the lexical route?

Answer 33

to know the meaning to pronounce a word

Question 34

What are the types of dyslexia?

Answer 34

surface dyslexia, phonological dyslexia, deep dyslecia

Question 35

What is surface dyslexia?

Answer 35

Reading regualr words and nonwords, impaired by exception words

Question 36

What is phonological dyslexia?

Answer 36

reading of higher frequency words (regular and irregular) and impaired reading of nonwords and unfamiliar

Question 37

What is deep dyslexia?

Answer 37

impaired access to pronounciation for all words + semantic approximations

Question 38

What is the triangle model?

Answer 38

there is just one direct route: a network that learns to translate both regular and exception patterns, provided they are relatively frequent

Question 39

How can you measure brain activation?

Answer 39

PET, EEG, fMRI

Question 40

What does TMS do

Answer 40

• 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