Lecture 1+3 Flashcards
What is Psycholinguistics?
How language is dealt with in the human brain, in other words, how language is processed.
How are words organized in the mind?
Similar to a desktop dictionary: what a word means, how a word is spelled, how a word is pronounced. However, it is organized differently in our mental lexicon: it can accommodate new words, it can be accessed very quickly.
Give an example of how quick we can access our mental lexicon.
Tip-of-the-tongue phenomena.
What is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomena?
This is a situation where you are unable to access a word (remember a word) in your mental lexicon.
What do we need to access a word (remember a word) in our mental lexicon? (Tip-of-the-tongue)
The meaning of the word, the sound of the word, the first letter of the word, or what the word rhymes with.
The technical term for the items in the lexicon is ________.
entries
The mental lexicon can be observed ( ).
X
The mental lexicon cannot be observed.
How can we observe our mental lexicon?
Through creative experiments like: lexical decision and priming.
How is a lexical decision experiment is conducted?
Lexical decision experiment is conducted by asking a native speaker to sit in front of a computer screen where he/she is asked to judge as quick as possible if the word that appears on the screen is a real word. If the word is real the participant clicks ‘yes’, if the word is not real the participant clicks ‘no’.
What are we looking for in the task of the lexical decision experiment?
- Response latency: the time it takes for the participants to respond with a “yes/no”
- Response accuracy: whether or not the participant respond accurately.
The lexical decision experiment measures the ________ and ________ in which the mental lexicon is accessed.
speed, accuracy.
It has been found that it usually takes participants about a half a second to press “yes” for word they know or frequently used words. However, it takes three-quarters of a second to press “yes” for less common words. This is commonly known as the ________.
Frequency effect
What is measured in priming experiment?
The extent the prime influences the participant‘s lexical decision on the target stimuli.
When the target is preceded by a related word the response is usually ________.
A) slower
B) quicker
B) quicker
