Language and Reading 1

Question 1

What is the mental lexicon?

Answer 1

Creation of a store of knowledge about the words of language

Question 2

What does Eye-tracking measure?

Answer 2

Measures how long people actually spend looking at a word when reading

Question 3

What does Lexical decision task measure?

Answer 3

Measures how long people take to indicate that a string of letters is (or isn’t) a word

Question 4

What does a Naming task measure?

Answer 4

Measures how long people take to start saying a word

Question 5

What is Lexical decision often used in conjunction with?

Answer 5

Priming

Question 6

What is Priming?

Answer 6

Where the PP is ‘primed’ with a certain stimulus before the actual lexical decision task has to be performed

Question 7

What has priming shown, in relation to the speed of word recognition?

Answer 7

PP are faster to respond to words when they are also shown a semantically related prime

Question 8

How is a naming task presented?

Answer 8

Pls are presented with a word on a screen and asked to pronounce it as quickly and accurately as possible

Question 9

Define Word frequency

Answer 9

Commonly used words are recognised more easily than infrequent words

Question 10

Define Predictability

Answer 10

Predictable words are recognised more easily than those in neutral or misleading contexts

Question 11

Define Neighbourhood effects

Answer 11

Word identification can be speeded when similar words exist in the language

Question 12

In relation to Word frequency, when would Naming task and Lexical decision task be used?

Answer 12

With words in isolation

Question 13

In relation to Word frequency, when would Eye-tracking be used?

Answer 13

With words in context

Question 14

What type of frequenting words would take longer to recognise?

Answer 14

Low frequency words

Question 15

Can the context in which a word appears influence how easy it is to recognise?

Answer 15

Yes

Question 16

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)

Answer 16

Increasing the amount of relevant context reduces the amount of recognition time

Question 17

Define Orthographic neighbourhood

Answer 17

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)

Question 18

Define Phonological neighbourhood

Answer 18

The number of words that can be formed by changing one Phoneme of a word (info about the sound of words)

Question 19

What is the Logogen model based on?

Answer 19

Perceivers have a big number of specialised recognition units, that each are able to recognise one specific word

Question 20

What are logogens also known as?

Answer 20

Word detectors

Question 21

What do logogens contain?

Answer 21

Info about the sounds of the word, its syntactic and semantic characteristics and info about the word type

Question 22

In which 2 ways is the logogen activated?

Answer 22

By sensory input and by contextual information

Question 23

What analogy is a good example for the Logogen model?

Answer 23

logogen is a collector of evidence- when enough evidence is collected, the threshold is reached, the logogen fires, and the word is recognised

Question 24

Do high frequency words have a higher or lower threshold for firing?

Answer 24

Lower threshold- therefore requires less stimulus info before the word detector is activated

Question 25

Define the Word superiority effect

Answer 25

the finding that performance is better when the letter string forms a word than when it doesn’t

Question 26

What does the Interactive Activation model consist of?

Answer 26

3 level detectors- feature detectors, letter detectors and word detectors

Question 27

What types of connections are there, in relation to the Interactive Activation model?

Answer 27

Excitatory and Inhibitory

Question 28

Define transposed letter priming

Answer 28

Switching the position of adjacent letters in the base word is a close transposition.

Question 29

What does the Direct route in the Dual-route model connect?

Answer 29

Connects the visually presented word to the whole word’s mental representation- used for high-frequency/ familiar words

Question 30

What is the Phonological route in the Dual-route model?

Answer 30

It accesses the mental representations of words by using grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules- used for reading low-frequency words

Question 31

What does a problem with the formation of one of the dual-routes lead to?

Answer 31

Dyslexia

Question 32

Define Phonological dyslexia

Answer 32

Difficulty with reading words (assumes a selective deficit in developing the phonological route)

Question 33

Define surface dyslexia

Answer 33

Problems with reading irregular words e.g., colonel (assumes a selective deficit in the lexical route)