Language and reading- word recognition Flashcards
Mental lexicon
The store of knowledge about the words of a. language
Eye-tracking
Measure how long people actually spend looking at a word when reading
Lexical decision task
Measure how long people take to indicate that a string of letter is/isn’t a word
Naming task
Measure how long people take to start saying a word
Priming
Briefly presented with another word before a lexical decision task speeds up response
Factors affecting word recognition
Word frequency
Predictability
Neighbourhood effects
Word frequency (word recognition)
Commonly used words are more easily recognised
Predictability (word recognition)
Predictable words are more easily recognised
Neighbourhood effects
Word identification can be faster earn similar words exist in the language
What is orthography
Information about the spelling of words
Orthographic neighbourhood
The number of words that can be formed by changing one letter of a word and maintaining letter position
Phonological neighbourhood
The number of words that can be formed by changing one phoneme of a word
Logogen model
A logogen is a word detector
Each logogen has an activation threshold which needs to be met before it fires
High frequency words have a lower threshold for firing
Word superiority effect
Task: asking which letter was seen
First shown as a single letter then as a letter within a word
10% improvement in performance with whole word compared to letter
Conclusion: easier to identify a letter in context of a word rather than in isolation
Interactive activation model
Different connections are excitatory or inhibitory
Pathways are letter/ shapes of a word (see photo)
Developed to explain the word superiority effect
Transposed letter priming types and speeds
Fastest -> slowest
Identity prime, transposed letter prime, substitution prime
Routes in the dual route model
Direct route or phonological route
Dual route model- direct route
Connects visually presented word to the word’s mental representation (mental lexicon)
Used for high frequency or familiar words
Dual route model- phonological route
Accesses the mental representations of words by using grapheme to phoneme conversion rules
Used for low frequency words an non-words
Dual-route and dyslexia
Problems withe each route leads to different types of dyslexia
Phonological dyslexia
Difficulties with reading non-words
Requires use of some process of decoding
Surface dyslexia
Problems reading irregular words
Use lexical route when presented with an irregular words
Selective deficit of lexical route
