Lecture 6 - Recognising Visual Words Flashcards
How many people globally cannot read or write?
796 million (World Literacy Foundation, 2012).
What percentage of people in the UK are considered functionally illiterate, and what is meant by this term?
16% of people can use language to read and write to a high standard and can read to extract information from text, etc.
What are the social perceptions of those with low levels of literacy, and are they valid/warranted?
Social perception is that low literacy is equivalent to low intelligence, but this is not the case. The two are unrelated.
What is a grapheme?
A letter or letter group that corresponds to one sound (phoneme)
Graphemes act as what?
A functional bridge between phonology and orthology.
Use research from Ray et al., (2000) to explain whether we use single letters or grapheme units when we read?
Ray et al., (2000) primed PPS with the letter ‘A’ in the middle of the screen and then implicitly presented words which had an ‘A’ in it. PPS had to report seeing an ‘A’ or not.
When words presented included ‘A’ as a single letter (Brash), it took participants less time to report seeing an ‘A’ than when the word presented it as part of a grapheme (Broad).
This demonstrates that we use graphemes when reading, as PPS had to break down the ‘OA’ unit to detect that the ‘A’ was present.
Do we identify and use syllabic units when we read?
Yes. Prinzmetal et al., (1986) found errors preserving syllabic structure in ‘ANVIL’ are more common than errors preserving colour matching.
They concluded that syllables are represented during reading.
What are pseudo-affix words?
Morphemes which are typically affixes (separate to the root of the word), but happen to be part of the root of a word.
E.g. -ing is normally a suffix (walking, talking, etc), but is part of the root in ‘swing’.
What did Lima & Pollatsek (1983) study about lexical decisions and morphemes (method)?
Primed PPS with different numbers of letters of a to-be-seen target word, for which a lexical decision would have to be made (e.g. te, tea, and teasp before seeing teaspoon and deciding whether it is a word)
What did Lima & Pollatsek (1983) find out about lexical decisions and morphemes?
Found that priming with tea lead to faster reaction times and fewer errors in the LDT, than both priming with ‘te’ and ‘teasp’. This shows that priming with a morpheme in the target word is more effective than having mre letters, demonstrating that we use morphemes when we read, more than individual letters.
What did Rastle et al., (2004) find about comprehension of words with pseudo-suffixes?
Using ‘corner’ to prime ‘corn’ does increase the speed of reaction time, despite corner’s lack of a ‘real’ suffix. If we didn’t read words according to their morphemes, seeing ‘corner’ would not help us recognise whether ‘corn’ was a word, because we would not break ‘corner’ down into corn and er.
Therefore we do read words according to their morphemes.
What did Weekes (1997) find about word length and reading?
The longer the word, the longer the reaction time to articulate it, but only for low-frequency words and non-words. For high-frequency words, there was no significant difference the longer the word was.
Suggests that we do process words one letter at a time if we rarely see them, but process all the letters simultaneously if the word is familiar.
What is serial grapheme-phoneme conversion?
Converting letters into sound one by one.
What is the neighbourhood effect?
Upon recognition of a word, neighbouring words - those which are the same apart from one letter - are also activated and recognised.
How does the neighbourhood effect explain away findings that longer low frequency words take more time to process?
There are less neighbours for long, low frequency words. Therefore, there is less help from the activation of similar words, meaning longer LF words take longer to process.
