Lecture 8

Question 1

What is orthography?

Answer 1

the spelling of words

Question 2

What is phonology?

Answer 2

the sound of words

Question 3

What is semantics?

Answer 3

the meaning of words

Question 4

What is syntax?

Answer 4

rules for combining words e.g. Jamie hit David (who did the hitting?)`

Question 5

What is higher-level discourse integration?

Answer 5

Making inferences e.g. I’m leaving you - Who’s he?

Question 6

What are the three parts of the Interactive Activation Model?

Answer 6

1. feature level
2. letter level
3. word level

Question 7

Describe the feature level

Answer 7

When a feature (e.g. vertical line) is detected, activation is sent to all letters containing that feature

Question 8

Describe the letter level

Answer 8

when a letter is identified, activation is sent to all word units containing that letter in the appropriate position

Question 9

Describe the word level

Answer 9

activate word units increase the level of activation in the letter-level units for the letters forming that word

Question 10

What are three reaction time tasks for studying reading?

Answer 10

1. lexical decision task: is “wug” a word?
2. semantic categorisation task: is hawk an animal?
3. naming (read-aloud) task

Question 11

What are two indirect measures for studying reading?

Answer 11

1. inference tasks e.g. stroop colour naming

2. priming

Question 12

What does the stroop interference effect suggest?

Answer 12

that word meaning (reading) is extracted even when participants try to not process it

Question 13

What is a masked priming stroop effect? Cheesman and Merikle (1984)

Answer 13

stroop colour naming interference effect occurs even when the word name is presented below the level of conscious awareness

Question 14

What did Van Orden (1987) study on phonological processes in reading find?

Answer 14

Participants engaged in phonological processing - made many errors when asked if ‘ROWS’ was a flower

Question 15

What did Rastle and Brysbaert (2006) find about masked phonological priming?

Answer 15

That word processing is faster when preceded by nonwords that sound the same (phonological) than by primes similar in orthography but dont sound the same - - suggests phonological processing occurs rapidly and automatically

Question 16

What are the three varieties of orthography?

Answer 16

1. Logographic e.g. Chinese - symbol maps onto a morphome
2. Syllabic e.g. Japanese - symbol maps onto a syllable
3. Alphabet e.g. English - maps onto phonemes (smallest unit of sound)

Question 17

What were most of the earliest writing systems?

Answer 17

Logographic

Question 18

What is a grapheme?

Answer 18

letter or letter cluster that correspond to a single phoneme e.g. igh (sigh) sh (ship)

Question 19

What does orthographic depth describe?

Answer 19

the consistency of grapheme/phoneme mapping. English is considered a deep orthography because the same clusters of letters can be used for different words e.g. though, cough, tough

Question 20

What is an example of “irregular” mapping? (odd one out)

Answer 20

PINT should rhyme with MINT, HINT, LINT etc.

Question 21

What are the three key assumptions of the Dual-Route Cascaded model?

Answer 21

1. people use both lexical and non-lexical paths when reading aloud
2. naming visually presented words generally depends on the route
3. activation at one level cascades to the next before processing at the first level is complete

Question 22

What are the three types of developmental dyslexia and what do they mean?

Answer 22

1. surface dyslexia - intact nonword reading, poor at reading irregular words e.g PINT, PLAID
2. phonological dyslexia - intact word reading, poor at reading nonwords e.g. JINK
3. deep dyslexia - like phonological dyslexia, plus semantic errors (e.g. read tulip as rose)

Question 23

How many word per second and how many words per minute do we read?

Answer 23

4 words per second & 250 words per minute