Mental Lexicon Flashcards
1
Q
Factors affecting lexical access time
A
- Word features eg frequency, age of acquisitions, length, neighbourhood density, imagabailiy and many more
- Context features eg sentence context and visual context
2
Q
Priming
A
- Tendance of speakers to re use previously mentioned/heard linguistic items.
- Priming= pre activation
- Processing of a linguistic unit influences the processing of the same or a similar linguistic unit
- Priming operates on all linguistic levels
3
Q
Lexical decision tasks (priming)
A
- Participant sits at computer
- 2 buttons: yes/no
- Visual (strings of letters on screen) or auditory (spoken)
- Decide: is this a word?
- Dependant variable: correct? Reaction time?
4
Q
Frequency effects
A
- Words frequency is defined as the number of times that a word appears in a particular sample of language.
- Distinction between types and tokens
- High frequency words (HF) are recognised faster than low frequency words (LF)
5
Q
Measuring frequency
Difference between types and tokens
A
- Tokens: number of words in a text
- Types: number of unique word types
- The only cat the little cat liked was the big cat
- 11 tokens
- 7 types
- Relationship between types and tokes: type-token ratio
- 7:11= 0.63
6
Q
Type token ratio
A
- More types relative to tokens:more varied vocabulary=greater lexical variety
- Eg oh why why why why low ratio 2:10=0.2= low lexical variety
- Eg the best thing to eat on toast is cheese and frizzles high ratio 11:11= 1= high lexical variety
- Can be used by slt to monitor changes in children with under developed vocabulary and adults who have had strokes.
7
Q
Neighbourhood density
A
- Similar sounding words are connected to each other and form neighbourhoods.
- Neighbourhood density: number of neighbours each word has
- A measure of how similar a particular word is to other words in the lexicon
- One phoneme difference rule:
8
Q
What does neighbourhood density tell us
A
- If a word is similar to a few and/or rare words it is easier to recognise than words with many similar and/or frequent other neighbours.
- The lexicon is structured: more similar words (semantic, phonetic) cluster together.
- Lexical processing depends not only on word features but also on properties o the words (structurally)around it. How we process a word is related to how our lexicon is organized.
9
Q
Age of acquisition
A
- The approximate age at which a word was acquired.
- Eg cat= early AoA cognition late AoA
- A proxy for the order of acquisition of words
Which words were acquired before others
Which words served as the early building blocks for the lexicon. - Early acquired words are easier to recognize than later acquired words (faster naming, faster lexical decision times)
10
Q
Why does age of acquisition matter?
A
- Obvious implication- not using words in an intervention with a pre schooler that are typically acquired later.
- Words that are acquired early are more likely to be preserved in aphasia.
11
Q
Imageability
A
- An extent to which an entity can be perceived by senses.
- In practice, most assessment materials use picture based tasks- the visual aspect is most relevant.
- Imageability affects lexical access eg people with aphasia find it easier to access words with high Imageability.
- Control for this factor when selecting materials.
12
Q
Words and non words
A
- Non words are used in clinical resources to avoid the meaning related effects.
- Individuals are required to repeat novel phonological forms such as woogalamic or noitauf.
- Initial research on TD children found that scores on NWR and vocabulary were significantly correlated.
- Performance on NWR predicted later vocabulary attainment.
13
Q
Repetition as a clinical marker
A
- A good marker- the behaviour in question has to be present in individuals who have the disorder and absent in those who do not.
- Sentence repetition and NWR found to be reliable clinical markers.
- The clear majority of children with language impairment have difficulty repeating non words.
14
Q
Factors influencing NWR
A
- Performance on NWR in typically and atypically developing groups shows the influence of phonological and lexical factors such as:
- Length (between 2 and 5 syllables)
- Prosodic structure (with vs without prosody)
- Wordlikeness
- Phontactic probability (low vs high)
- Articulatory complexity (syllables with vs without clusters)
15
Q
Wordlikeness
A
- Both TD and DLD children show superior NWR performance for high word like non word compared to low word like non words.
- High word like non words are more likely to:
- Contains affixes
- Be derived from English words.
- Contain high frequency phonemes.
