language 1 Flashcards
which methods are used to study word recognition?
eye tracking
lexical decision task
naming task
what is eye tracking?
measure how long people spend looking at a word when reading
what is a lexical decision task?
measure how long people take to indicate that a string of letters is a word or not
what is a naming task?
measure how long people take to start saying a word
what is a lexical decision task often used with?
priming
what happens in an eye tracking experiment?
participant reads words from a computer screen
camera monitors which words they look at
spending lots of time looking at a word= difficult recognition
spending a short time/skipping a word= easy recognition
what happens in a lexical decision task?
presented with a series of letter strings on a computer screen
asked to identify if the letters they are presented with form a word
longer it took= more difficult to recognise
what happens in a naming task?
presented with a word
told to pronounce as quickly as possible without stuttering/mispronouncing
to analyse the data- saw if a word was correctly pronounced or if an error occurred
what factors affect word recognition?
word frequency
predictability
neighbourhood effects
what is word frequency?
commonly used words are recognised more easily than infrequent words
high frequency words are words which we encounter often
who investigated word frequency?
Schilling, Rayner and Chumbley
what happened in the word frequency experiment? (Schilling, Rayner and Chumbley)
used eye tracking for words presented in context
looked at how long readers spent looking at high/low frequency words
what is predictability?
predictable words are recognised more easily than those in neutral or misleading contexts
context in which a word appears in affects how easy it is to recognise
who researched predictability?
Tulving and Gold
what happened in predictability experiments? (Tulving and Gold)
participants read an incomplete sentecne
then had to recognise a single word
may be predictable or unrelated depending on the context of the sentence
measured the exposure time necessary for recognition
increasing relevant context reduced the amount of time needed for participants to recognise the target word
what are neighbourhood effects?
word identification can be sped up when similar words exist in the language
what is the orthographic neighbourhood?
number of words which can be formed by changing one letter of a word whilst maintaining letter position (word spelling)
eg) for tank- ‘task’ and ‘rank’
what is the effect of the orthographic neighbourhood?
recognition is faster for words from large neighbourhoods