Lecture 2: The Mental Lexicon I

Question 1

organization of mental lexicon (2)

Answer 1

• Most likely organized by meaning.
• Evidenced by semantic and phonological connections.

Question 2

semantic priming (2)

Answer 2

• When hearing or reading a word partially activates other words that are related in meaning to that word, making the related words easier to recognize in subsequent encounters.
• Also been found for non-verbal or linguistic stimuli (e.g. Yee & Sedivy, 2006).

Question 3

lexical decision task (4)

Answer 3

• Participants read strings of letters on a screen that might either be actual words or nonsense words.
• Press one button for real word, or a different button for nonsense word.
• Response times for real words are taken as a general measure of the ease of recognizing those words under specific experimental conditions.
• Making offline judgements, which gives limited information.

Question 4

visual world eye tracking (4)

Answer 4

• Records saccades in real-time.
• Locations of saccades as a function of stimulus characteristics.
• No overt button-press/responses are required for data-collection.
• Use of online judgements more telling of processing.

Question 5

mediated semantic priming (1)

Answer 5

• Prime word (e.g. lion) speeds up responses to a target word (e.g. stripes) not because of a direct connection between lion and stripes, but due to an indirect connection via some other intervening word (e.g. tiger).

Question 6

Yee & Sedivy (2006) (5)

Answer 6

• Visual world eye tracking experiments.
• Participant is presented with pictures of a hammer, nail, tissue, and cricket, then told to click on the hammer (they hear the word ‘hammer’).
• Their eyes are more likely to wander to the nail than the cricket.
• Effect also seen for onset competitors and indirectly related stimuli.
• Demonstrates that mental lexicon uses a mix of phonological and semantic info.

Question 7

phonological neighbours (1)

Answer 7

• Words that have many phonological neighbours (i.e. words that differ by one phone, part of “phoneme,” for “sound” bit) take longer to recognize than those with few neighbours.
• e.g. Many: rose—flows, prose, close, froze, etc.; few: death—dead, meth.

Question 8

resting activation (5)

Answer 8

• How activated a lexical entry is at baseline.
• When a word is accessed in the mental lexicon, it gets more activated.
• When it reaches a certain threshold, it has been retrieved.
• Over time, there’s a decay in activation.
• The more often a lexical item is accessed, the higher its resting activation is and the easier it is to retrieve.

Question 9

crossmodal priming task (1)

Answer 9

• Involves both spoken and written modalities; participants typically hear prime words, which are often embedded within full sentences, and they must respond to test words displayed orthographically on a computer screen.

Question 10

Swinney (1979) (8)

Answer 10

• Conducted a cross-modal lexical decision task experiment in which participants were auditorily primed with either ambiguous bugs vs. unambiguous insects.
• Then presented with one of three targets: ant, spy, or sew (lexical decision task).
• Control: Responded after hearing insects, response times for ant were faster than for both sew and spy.
• Responded after bugs: response times were faster to both ant and spy than to sew.
  
  • However, response to spy was not as fast as ant.
  • When response was few ms later than the presentation of prime bugs, the response for ant was faster than that of spy and sew.
• Demonstrated that processing is most likely more bottom-up;
  
  • There can still be activation of the unintended meaning in the context.
  • However, effects are transient, meaning incorrect interpretation is inhibited at some point.

Question 11

Duffy, Morris, & Rayner (1988) (3)

Answer 11

• When context favoured the subordinate meanings of words (e.g. mint or cabinet), subjects read these more slowly than unambiguous control words in the same sentence, indicating competition from alternative meanings.
• When words were equally biased in frequency between two meanings (e.g. pitcher or straw), and when the context favored one of their meanings, people didn’t spend more time reading them.
• Demonstrates importance of matching word frequency in experiments.