Psycholinguistics part 1 Flashcards
Speech perception and word recognition
Source-filter theory
Vocal tone (source) + resinatory cavities (filter) = speech
Perceptual invariance
Phenomenon of variable acoustic input being mapped consistently onto stable units of representation
Coarticulation effects
Variation in the pronunciation of phonemes caused by the articulatory properties of neighbouring sounds
Parallel transmission
Acoustics of phonemes overlap on the speech spectrum
Categorical perception (instead of continuous perception)
Phenomenon where we perceive a continuum of stimuli as being sharply divided into categories (i.e. Phoneme perception in VOT continuums)
Voice onset time
The amount of time between the release of a stop consonant and the vibration of the vocal folds
Forced choice identification task (Lieberman, 1957)
Ask participants to label equally spaced speech sounds on a VOT continuum
ABX discrimination task
Present two stimuli (A & B) then a third (X) and ask if X is more similar to A or B
McGurk effect
Visual stimuli (i.e. videos of articulation) affect how we perceive sound
Ganong effect
Context affects how we perceive sound, i.e. Phonetically ambiguous sounds in words are likely to be perceived as whatever results in a lexical item
Phoneme restoration effect
Context affects how we perceive sound, i.e. Non-speech sounds in the middle of lexical items are perceived (‘hallucinated’) as whatever sound would have fit
Bottom-up effects
Sensory (visual and auditory) input being used to interpret speech
Top-down effects
Knowledge (context + mental grammar) being used to interpret speech
Lexicon
A speaker’s mental dictionary containing lexical entries (words and their associated phonological/semantic information)
Lexical access
The process of retrieving a word from the lexicon
Frequency (lexical property)
A property of words affecting how easily they’re retrieved from the lexicon
Resting activation
How activated a lexical entry is at baseline – increases the more a word is accessed, decays over time
Activation threshold
The threshold that must be reached for a word to be retrieved from the lexicon
Decay function
The rate at which words fade from memory over time so as to return to a baseline level of activation
Spreading activation
The transient activation of other adjacent (related) lexical items when one item is activated
Semantic priming
How the activation of a target word is sped up by a semantically related prime
Mediated semantic priming
How the activation of a target word is sped up by an indirectly semantically related prime
Facilitatory vs. inhibitory effect
Speeding up lexical retrieval vs. slowing it down
Lexical decision task
Participants identify whether a target is real word or not after viewing a prime and their reaction time is measured
Yee & Sedivy (2006) experiment 1
Visual world eyetracking
Participants hear a prime (i.e. ‘hammer’) then are shown a square with equidistant images of the target object (a hammer), a semantically related object (i.e. a nail) and two unrelated objects
Eye movements are tracked and proportions of fixation on each object over the course of a trial are calculated
Result: Participants’ gazes are drawn to the semantically related object more than the unrelated objects
Access and selection model vs. early selection model
Waiting to hear the ambiguous word before the correct meaning is selected vs. selecting its meaning early in the sentence (forming a hypothesis based on context) and confirming or reassessing upon hearing it
Swinney (1979)
Cross-modal lexical decision task for semantically ambiguous words
Participants hear 1 of 2 primes, semantically ambiguous or unambiguous (i.e. ‘bug’ or ‘insect’), then, either immediately after or several syllables downstream, are presented with 3 target words, 1 related to intended meaning (i.e. ‘ant’), 1 related to unintended meaning (i.e. ‘spy’), and 1 completely unrelated
Phonological neighbours
Words that differ in only one sound and are adjacent within the phonological network
Cohort model of word recognition
Words are processed incrementally; onsets temporarily activate onset competitors
TRACE model of word recognition (building on the Cohort model)
We continually process sounds as we hear them (continuous mapping) such that sounds in the middles and ends of words also activate rhyme competitors
Cross modal lexical
decision for semantically
related cohorts
Participants hear a prime (i.e. ‘beaker’) then, either after the first half of the prime or the second half, 3 target words are flashed on screen that they must classify as a word or non-word, 1 semantically related to the prime (i.e. ‘glass’), 1 semantically related to an onset competitor (i.e. ‘insect’; beetle), and 1 semantically related to a rhyme competitor (i.e. ‘stereo’; speaker)
Allopenna et al. (1998)
Visual world eye-tracking
Participants hear a word (i.e. ‘beaker) and must select the matching object in a display of 4 images: the target (a beaker), an onset competitor (a beetle), and 2 unrelated objects
Dual-route model of reading
Direct route: recognize it as a word and access its meaning (i.e. sight reading)
Assembled phonology route: decode the word, recognize it, and access its meaning
Yee & Sedivy (2006) experiment 2
Visual world eye-tracking
