Language and Reading Flashcards
1
Q
What is the importance of language in cognition?
A
- language can be written, spoken or nonverbal
- through it we communicate our thoughts, ideas, feelings, and needs
- language skills allow us to put our thoughts into words (cognitive skills), put words to emotions (emotional skills) and communicate these thoughts/emotions to the people we encounter daily language can influence how we perceive the world
2
Q
Definition of a word?
A
- form with a function
- form: pronunciation, spelling pattern
- function: meaning, syntactic role, other usage properties
3
Q
What is spoken word form?
A
- sequence of phonemes (smallest unit of sound)
- organised into syllables
- with a stress pattern
- tone (pitch pattern) in some languages
4
Q
What is written word form?
A
- sequence of symbols made of lines, curves or strokes
- different languages’ scripts use different principles: alphabetic (graphemes represent phonemes), syllabic (graphemes represent syllables), ideographic/logographic (graphemes represent meaning units)
5
Q
What are the component processes in reading for meaning?
A
- identifying letters and represent the order of the letters in each word
- identify each string of letters
- retrieve syntactic class and word meaning
- interpret sentence structure and sentence meaning
- interpret intention of speaker/writer
6
Q
What is the translation between spelling, pronunciation and meaning?
A
- relation between form and meaning is arbitrary
- reading requires process that identifies written form and retrieves the meaning associated with that form
- if a script is phonologically transparent the translation from spelling to pronunciation could be done ‘by rule’ without identification of the word
7
Q
How do we identify words?
A
- know as many as 100,000 word forms
- typical reader identifies 2/3 a second
- even with presentation rates as high as 10 per second some comprehension is possible
- identification takes of the order of 200ms
8
Q
What are the sources of evidence for knowing how we observe words?
A
- introspective reports
- observation, measurement and manipulation of behaviour
- measurement and manipulation of brain activity
9
Q
What are the 2 types of behavioural measure?
A
- artificial laboratory tasks: designed to exercise and capture component process, typically use discrete stimulus, allows accuracy and/or reaction time to be measured to each stimulus
- on-line measures: made during continuous natural performance of the skill
10
Q
What are the different theories of word identification?
A
- serial search model (Forster, 1976): encode spelling pattern, compare one at a time to each word-form stored in mental dictionary and if a match is found the meaning and/or pronunciation is retrieved otherwise search is continued
- modified serial model (Murray and Forster, 2004): simple serial model that requires thousands of successive comparisons per second (too fast for neurons), mental lexicon of word-forms is divided into bins. quick and dirty initial process category spelling pattern to select appropriate bin and then a serial search within that bin
- parallel-matching word-detector model: detectors detect first position and are then connected to letter detectors for first position. activation flows up connexions from activated feature detectors which excite letter detectors that they’re consistent and inhibit the inconsistent ones. account for word superiority effect with top-down activation of letter units by word units
11
Q
Why are frequent words recognised more quickly?
A
- Foster’s serial search model: motivated by ready account of frequency effect (search for lexicon in order of frequency). predicted that if it helps then lexical decision should help most for low frequency words
- IA-style parallel-matching process: most-used detectors are the most ‘sensitive’. predicted that advance knowledge of frequency should help decisions for the high frequency words
- Gordon (1983) tested the predictions and found knowing frequency in advance helps for high but no low frequency words
12
Q
What are the 2 possible pathways for recognising spoken words and retrieving meaning?
A
- direct mapping: from spelling patterns to meaning
- phonologically-mediated access: translate spelling patterns to pronunciations then use pre-existing mapping to get to the semantics
13
Q
What evidence shows phonological mediation is not necessary?
A
- effects of brain damage to phonological route
- some brain damaged patients can understand some written words but not access sound pattern
- patient RD couldn’t get pronunciation but understood the meaning of the word
14
Q
What evidence supports that phonological mediation nevertheless occurs?
A
- homophone errors in categorization
- Van Orden (1987) found that many more false positive errors to lures that sound the same as category members that visually similar control items
- concluded that we have to access phonology otherwise the interference effect wouldn’t occur
15
Q
How do both routes contribute to normal reading depending on familiarity of the word?
A
- if both the test word and homophone (>1 word with same pronunciation but different meaning) are in high frequency the homophone effect disappears
- high frequency words don’t produce homophone effect much
- if repeated experience has established strong orthography to spelling mapping, spelling activates meaning quickly enough for semantic decision/comprehension before indirect activation of meaning via pronunciation (otherwise phonological mediation contributes)
