Language and Reading 1

Question 1

Methods of studying word recognition

Answer 1

eye-tracking - measure how long people actually spend looking at word when reading
lexical-decision task - measure how long people take to indicate that a string of letters is, or is not, a word
naming task - measure how long people take to start saying a word

Question 2

Factor affecting word recognition - word frequency + research

Answer 2

Schilling, Rayner, Chumbley (1998) - used all three methods of studying word recognition and found commonly used words recognised more easily than infrequent words

Question 3

Factor affecting word recognition - predictability

Answer 3

Tulving and Gold (1963) found that predictable words recognised more easily that those in neutral or misleading contexts

Question 4

Factors affecting word recognition - neighbourhood effects - phonological

Answer 4

Phonological neighbourhood - the number of words that can be formed by changing one phoneme of word e.g., gait, bait, get.
Yates (2005) words with many phonological neighbours are more easily recognised.

Question 5

Factors affecting word recognition - neighbourhood effects - orthographic

Answer 5

Orthographic neighbourhood - number of words that can be formed by changing one letter of word while maintaining the letter position e.g., tank, task, rank.
Andrew (1989) - with low frequency words, recognition is faster for words from large neighbourhoods

Question 6

Logogen model - Morton (1967-1979)

Answer 6

Logogen’s = word detectors - one logged for each word
Each logged has individual activation threshold which needs to be met to be fired - high frequency words have lower thresholds
Predictability effect - cognitive component of model explains how sentences context can affect recognition - semantic information of sentence partially activates logogens, lowering threshold.

Question 7

Word superiority effect - Reicher (1969) and Wheeler (1970)

Answer 7

• Participants given stimulus
• stimulus masked
• given forced choice (e.g., which did you see K or D)
  Condition one = presented with only letter
  Condition two = presented with word containing the letter in the same position

10% improvement in performance with the whole word presented compared to the single letter therefore easier to identify letter in context of word than in isolation

Question 8

Interactive activation model - McClelland and Rumelhart (1982/1983)

Answer 8

• stimulus
• feature detector
• letter detector
• word detector

Types of connections can be either excitatory or inhibitory.
The network evolves towards state of activation in which everything is consistent.

Question 9

Transposed letter priming - Perea and Lupker (2003)

Answer 9

When words are primed by transposed letter prime it becomes easier for participants to recognised than if a substitution prime is used.
This contradicts the interactive activation model as according to model both primes should have been equally bad primes as they both has same number of inconsistent letters with target word.

Question 10

Spatial coding model - Davis (2010)

Answer 10

Letter position is too fixed - accounts for letter priming findings

Question 11

Dual-route model - Colheart et al. (2001)

Answer 11

Direct route: connects visually presented words to whole mental lexicon.
Used with high frequency words

Phonological route: access mental representations of words by using grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules. Used with low frequency words and non-words.

Question 12

Dual-route model with skilled and dyslexic readers

Answer 12

Skilled readers - both routes develop independently as children learn to read

Developmental surface dyslexia - when presented with words readers use lexical route. SD assumes that selective deficit in lexical route, resulting in difficulty pronouncing irregular words.

Developmental phonological dyslexia - difficulty reading non-words. Only way to read novel letter strings is to implement decoding process. PD assumes a selective deficit in developing phonological route