L10: Psycholinguistic And Pictorial Variables And Cognition Research Methods

Question 0

Manipulating experimental words and controlling irrelevant variables

Answer 0

Word length: n(letters), n (syll) 
Part of speech: noun, verb, adjective 
Word freq: 
- n (in written eng) 
- n (in spoken eng) 
- bigram freq - frequency of adjacent letter pairs (not often used)

Question 1

Cognition exp. stimulus materials

Answer 1

Linguistic

• words
• pronounceable non-words
• sentences

Pictorial

• Snodgrass & Vanderwart objects and animals
• objects, novel objects
• faces and Ekman emotional faces

Question 2

Semantic variables

Answer 2

• image-ability ratings (1-7)
• concrete-ness ratings
• age of acquisition
• familiarity
• word associations
• emotional connotation ratings

Question 3

Emotion induced blindness

Answer 3

• ppl have to detect whether a rotated building (target) is shown in a rapidly presented sequence of pictures
• an emotional picture preceding 100-200 ms before reduces target detection

Question 4

Taboo Stroop (Mackay et al. 2004)

Answer 4

• studied the effect of emotion on memory and attention
• used a ‘taboo’ Stroop task: colour naming of emotive worlds
• taboo words: concrete, body parts, other nouns, adjectives and actions (verbs), many words semantically related
• controls: should have similar features but be emotionally neutral

Question 5

Properties of emotional and neutral words on Stroop experiments (Larsen, Mercer & Balota (2006)

Answer 5

• negative and disorder-specific words vs neutral words were recognized more slowly but they:
  • were longer - n(letters)
  • were less common
  • had smaller orthographic neighborhoods
• these diffs rather than word meaning might cause slower RTs in a reading task