language and reading Flashcards
What is a word?
A form with a function
What is the difference between spoken word form and written word form?
Spoken- sequence of phonemes organised into syllables, some have stress patterns.
Written- a sequence of symbols (graphemes) made of lines, curves or strokes
What is lexical access?
Components of reading:
Identify letters and represent their sequence -> identify words -> retrieve (syntactic class and word meaning) -> interpret sentence structure -> interpret sentence meaning -> interpret intention of speaker/writer
What is the relation between spelling, pronunciation and meaning?
Relation between form and meaning is arbitrary but translation from spelling to pronunciation varies across language- it is semi regular for English
What are the different levels of analysis in word identification?
Levels of analysis: experiential, computational or functional (representations, processes, modules and architecture). Neural- how neurons implement computations and where they are.
We can manipulate certain factors that influence the speed or ease that we can read or understand.
What are the two kinds of behavioural measure?
(artificial) lab tasks designed to exercise and capture a component process: typically discrete stimulus -> response tasks. Allowing for accuracy and/or reaction time to be measured to each stimulus.
On-line measures made during continuous natural performance of the skill
What is the word superiority effect?
greater accuracy of letter idenficication in the context of a word than of a non matched word
What are frequency effects?
RTs for lexical decision, semantic categorisation and naming shorter for words that are more frequent in the language
What are sentence context effects?
RT’s for lexical decision and naming are shorter when a word is presented in a sentence context of which it is a plausible continuation
What did Treisman and Gelade measure in relation to the visual search task?
They measured the time taken to search for a target object that differed from the background objects and varied the number of objects in the display.
What is a task set?
An appropriate organisation of processes to carry out a particular task
How can executive or control processes be measured?
Get ppts to switch back and forth between tasks and measure the effects of this on performance
What are two main functions of selective attention?
Defensive filtering- protecting higher level limited capacity systems from overload (Broadbent).
Positive selection for action- prioritising one of several possible objects or sources for action or further processing. Feature of integration or ‘binding’ combining the properties of an object anaylsed in different cortical maps. Evidence: visual search for conjunction vs single feature targets harder. Illusory conjunctions.
What is the feature integration theory?
Regions of visual cortex are specialised for the local analysis of different attributes such as colour and form. Feature searches can be done pre attentively for targets defined by only one featured. Focused attention is needed to bind features of the same object and only then do we perceive it as an object.
What does the emotional Stroop tests measure?
Emotional stroop uses an indirect measure of emotional bias in psychological disorders as opposed to recognising emotions in faces for example (a direct measure)
What does the emotional Stroop test tend to find?
Time taken to name colour increases as attention to emotion word increases
Patients with depression tend to be slower to name the colour of negative words (indirect negative bias)
What does the emotional Stroop test show in disorder relevant words?
Threat words in anxiety, injury related in PTSD, exam related in students.
Both relatedness to current concern and negativity cause greater interference in patients
What are some limitations of the emotional Stroop test/ alternative explanations?
Unclear what it really measures however not a very clean measure- may be other explanations e.g. emotional reaction triggered by reading certain words. Can interfere with ruminaitons etc. however, some studies have reported effects with subliminal presentation of words. Suggesting it may be a more automatic process of attention allocation rather than people deliberately trying not to look at a word.
What is the mean fixation duration?
200ms
What is the mean saccade length?
8.5 characters
What is the relationship between words, letters and context?
Higher frequency words are recognised more easily and faster- letters are more easily recognised in the context of a word and words more easily recognised in the context of a sentence
What are the two theories for why frequent words are recognised more quickly?
Foster’s serial search model- where we search the lexicon in order of frequency
Style parallel matching process- can also account for frequency where most used detectors are the most ;sensitive’
What is the serial search model?
Encode a spelling pattern
Compare one at a time to each word-form stored in the mental dictionary
If a match is found, we retrieve meaning and/or pronunciation, if not, we continue the search.
For efficiency, the search is in order of frequency in the language, hence a match will be found faster for a higher frequency word.
This does however require many thousands of successive comparisons per second- too fast for neurons but can be done by a computer.
Mental lexicon of word forms is divided into ‘bins’. Serial search within that bin (frequency ordered).
What is the interactive activation (parallel matching word detector model)? Mclelland et al
Model consists of 3 layers- first layer detects the features, feeds the info forwards, depending on which features are fed forwards, the model determines which letter it is, these letter activations get fed forwards to the third layer and depending on activation, the word is found. Only at the end does the word get identified. Some top down activation of letter units can explain the effect of context.
