Language and Reading 1 Flashcards
What is the mental lexicon?
Creation of a store of knowledge about the words of language
What does Eye-tracking measure?
Measures how long people actually spend looking at a word when reading
What does Lexical decision task measure?
Measures how long people take to indicate that a string of letters is (or isn’t) a word
What does a Naming task measure?
Measures how long people take to start saying a word
What is Lexical decision often used in conjunction with?
Priming
What is Priming?
Where the PP is ‘primed’ with a certain stimulus before the actual lexical decision task has to be performed
What has priming shown, in relation to the speed of word recognition?
PP are faster to respond to words when they are also shown a semantically related prime
How is a naming task presented?
Pls are presented with a word on a screen and asked to pronounce it as quickly and accurately as possible
Define Word frequency
Commonly used words are recognised more easily than infrequent words
Define Predictability
Predictable words are recognised more easily than those in neutral or misleading contexts
Define Neighbourhood effects
Word identification can be speeded when similar words exist in the language
In relation to Word frequency, when would Naming task and Lexical decision task be used?
With words in isolation
In relation to Word frequency, when would Eye-tracking be used?
With words in context
What type of frequenting words would take longer to recognise?
Low frequency words
Can the context in which a word appears influence how easy it is to recognise?
Yes
How will using the context to make a word more or less predictable affect word recognition time? (in regards to increasing the amount of time) (Tulving and Gold, 1963)
Increasing the amount of relevant context reduces the amount of recognition time
Define Orthographic neighbourhood
The number of words that can be formed by changing one letter of a word while maintaining letter position (info about the spellings of words)
Define Phonological neighbourhood
The number of words that can be formed by changing one Phoneme of a word (info about the sound of words)
What is the Logogen model based on?
Perceivers have a big number of specialised recognition units, that each are able to recognise one specific word
What are logogens also known as?
Word detectors
What do logogens contain?
Info about the sounds of the word, its syntactic and semantic characteristics and info about the word type
In which 2 ways is the logogen activated?
By sensory input and by contextual information
What analogy is a good example for the Logogen model?
logogen is a collector of evidence- when enough evidence is collected, the threshold is reached, the logogen fires, and the word is recognised
Do high frequency words have a higher or lower threshold for firing?
Lower threshold- therefore requires less stimulus info before the word detector is activated
Define the Word superiority effect
the finding that performance is better when the letter string forms a word than when it doesn’t
What does the Interactive Activation model consist of?
3 level detectors- feature detectors, letter detectors and word detectors
What types of connections are there, in relation to the Interactive Activation model?
Excitatory and Inhibitory
Define transposed letter priming
Switching the position of adjacent letters in the base word is a close transposition.
What does the Direct route in the Dual-route model connect?
Connects the visually presented word to the whole word’s mental representation- used for high-frequency/ familiar words
What is the Phonological route in the Dual-route model?
It accesses the mental representations of words by using grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules- used for reading low-frequency words
What does a problem with the formation of one of the dual-routes lead to?
Dyslexia
Define Phonological dyslexia
Difficulty with reading words (assumes a selective deficit in developing the phonological route)
Define surface dyslexia
Problems with reading irregular words e.g., colonel (assumes a selective deficit in the lexical route)
