Language Comprehension

Question 1

Homophone

Answer 1

Words with same pronunciation but different meanings

Question 2

Homograph

Answer 2

Words with same spelling but different meanings and pronunciations

Question 3

Homonyms

Answer 3

Words with same spelling and pronunciation, but different meanings

Question 4

Co-articulation

Answer 4

One phoneme is influenced by another when put together

Question 5

Ambiguous speech streams

Answer 5

Being unable to tell when one word finishes and another one starts (I scream or ice cream)

Question 6

Mental representations

Answer 6

A hypothetical cognitive signal that represents external reality

Question 7

Kuhl & Miller (1975)

Answer 7

Chinchillas can discriminate between /t/ and /d/ sound
Trained to move to one side of cage for /t/ and the other for /d/
Point at which animals perceive the change of sound was the same as humans

Question 8

Janet Werker

Answer 8

6-8 month old children can discriminate between /ba/ and /da/
They can also discriminate between Hindi sounds which adults cannot
This ability is lost at around 10 months (Werker & Tees, 1984)

Question 9

How does frequency affect word recognition?

Answer 9

Short and frequent words are accessed faster than long, infrequent ones

Question 10

How does neighbourhood density affect word recognition?

Answer 10

Lexical access is slower when words have many neighbours in the mental lexicon (words which differ by one phoneme)

Question 11

Luce & Pistoni (1998)

Answer 11

Response to words like yacht is faster than to words like peach
This is because yacht has a low neighbourhood density (is a hermit word) and peach has a high neighbourhood density

Question 12

How do we comprehend sentences?

Answer 12

Activation of lexical items - selection
Selection of lexical item via matching input to mental representation
Integration of lexical items into context

Question 13

Cohort Model

Answer 13

Marslen-Wilson & Welsh (1979)
Access - lexical retrieval begins with first one or two speech sounds
Selection - words activated but not intended are kicked out until only one remains
Integration - semantic and syntactic properties of activated words are incorporated into high-level utterance representation

Question 14

Revised Cohort Model

Answer 14

Marslen-Wilson & Welsh (1994)
Context influences integration of words into sentences, but not lexical selection
Initial activation is bottom up
Competitor effects leave one word more active than others (Hebbian)
Context can increase activation of cohort members
Activation of candidates who don’t fit context is not eliminated
Cohort members who fit bottom up input are activated regardless of context

Question 15

Marslen-Wilson and Taylor (1980) - word monitoring

Answer 15

Participants asked to monitor speech for ‘motorway’
When the sentence made sense, participants could say the word 200ms after the start
Suggests that they recognise the word after a few sounds
When sentence doesn’t make sense, they are much slower
Context gives an advantage

Question 16

Zwitserlood (1989) - lexical access

Answer 16

Primes were presented auditorily and targets were presented visually
Reaction times to respond to wicket, ship and slave (using primes captain and captive)
When target presented mid word (/capt/) both captive and captain were activated, so the words slave and ship were recognised faster than wicket
When the target was presented after the word /captain/ only ship was recognised faster

Question 17

Zwitserlood (1989) - sentence priming

Answer 17

Neutral sentence ‘the men stood around and watched their…’ was used which could end in captain or captive
Biased sentence ‘the men had spent years serving under their…’ could only end captain
In both conditions, priming occurred for ship and slave
Different to what you would expect as you would think that biased condition would only prime ‘ship’
Shows that context doesn’t affect the mental lexicon as much as you might think

Question 18

Word monitoring

Answer 18

Participants asked to listen for a word and say it aloud when they hear it

Question 19

Lexical decision task

Answer 19

Measures how quickly participants classify stimuli as words or non-words

Question 20

Priming task

Answer 20

Exposure to one stimulus influences a response to subsequent stimuli

Question 21

Cross modal priming

Answer 21

Primes are presented auditorily and targets are presented visually

Question 22

Sentence priming

Answer 22

Using a whole sentence as a prime not just a word