Language and Reading 1 Flashcards
identify methods that can be used to investigate word recognition
- eye tracking
- lexical decision task
- naming task
explain eye tracking
measuring how long people spend looking at word when reading
explain lexical decision task
measuring how long people take to identify that a string of letters is not a word
explain naming task
presenting ppt a word and measuring how long is takes to start saying that word
which method is often used in conjunction with priming
lexical decision task
why are non-words included in a lexical decision task
to ensure ppts are not answering ‘yes’ constantly
what happens in a lexical decision task
- ppt presented with series of letter strings on computer screen
- asked to indicate as quickly as possible whether they were presented with word or non-word
- this is done by pressing ‘yes’ or ‘no’
- experimenter would record how long it took ppts to respond
- longer the response time = more difficult word is to recognise
what is priming?
where ppt is ‘primed’ with certain stimuli before actual lexical decision task completed
what effect does priming have on word recognition?
- ppts faster to respond to words when shown semantically similar word
- this is known as. semantic priming effect
what happens during the naming task?
- ppts presented with word on computer screen
- warning tone sounded
- word displayed on monitor
- told to pronounce word as quickly as possible without stuttering
- after response recorded, 2 second interval before the tone signalling the next trial
- regardless of correct response, the time it took for ppts to respond was the indication of how difficult word is to recognise
identify factors affecting word recognition
- word frequency
- predictability
- neighbourhood effects
explain how word frequency affects word recognition
commonly used words are recognised more easily than infrequent words
explain how predicatbility affects word recognition
predictable words are recognised more easily than those in neutral or misleading contexts
explain how neighbourhood effects effects word recognition
word identification can be speeded up when similar words exist in the language
what are high frequency words?
words that are encountered often
what are low frequency words?
words that are not encountered often
Outline Schilling et al. (1998) experiment into word frequency and word recognition
- used a naming task, lexical decision task and eye-tracking task
- naming and lexical-decision task used to examine speed of recognition of words presented in isolation
- ppts were presented with high frequency words i.e.: teacher
- ppts were presented with low frequency words i.e.: armadillo
naming task:
- just had to say word aloud as soon as it appeared on screen
eye-tracking task:
- examined how quickly words were recognised when presented in context
- ppts would read sentences containing high/low frequency words
experimenter calculated how long reader spent looking at target words
what were the findings of Schilling et al. (1998)?
- low frequency words took longer to recognise than high frequency words in all 3 tasks
Naming task
- ppts took longer to say word out loud when it was low frequency than when it was high frequency
Lexical Decision Latency
- ppts took longer to press button to indicate that stimulus was a word with low frequency words
Eye-tracking
- amount of time spent looking at word was also longer for long frequency words
CONCLUSION:
- strong evidence that people find words more difficult to recognise when they encounter them less often
How does Tulving and Gold (1963) investigate the effect predictability has on word recognition?
- several studies show that context can influence how easy it is to recognise a word
- investigating whether increasing the amount of semantically related information that is available before the target word is presented will influence word recognition time
- in this experiment, ppts read an incomplete sentence and were asked to recognise a single word
- found that when presenting relevant context before word presented, makes word more predictable
- more predictable = faster word recognition
predictability has a large effect of word recognition processes