Reading 2 Flashcards
Briefly describe the Interactive Activation Model
Three levels of recognition(feature, letter, word)
When a feature is recognized, it inhibiits others
When a letter activates, it activates all words with the letter in that position
Activated words increase level of activation for words that match all letters
Activation at each level inhibits other possibilites
Bottom up, and top down processes
What is the word superiority effect?
A target letter is more readily detected in a string when the string forms a word
Information about word facilitates letter identification
Pseudoword superiority- letters recognised more quickly in non words that can be prounced than in nonwords that cannot.
How did Reicher 1969 investiage the word superiority effect.
A letter string is presented very briefly followed by pattern mask
Participants decide which of two letters was presented in a particular position
Found that performance was better when letter string forms a word
What are some strengths and weaknesses of the interactive activation model.
Strengths
Influential example of how a connectionist processing system can be applied to visual world recognition
Accounts for word superiority and psuedoword superiority
Weaknesses No account for the role of meaning Does not consider phonological processing Too much important on letter order Does not account for longer words
What are some reading phenomena that models need to explain.
Phonology and meaning can be separately affected in devepmental or acquired dyslexia Word superiority effect Orthographic neighbour effect Semantic priming Rapid context effect Word frequency effects Word consistency effects
What is semantic priming effect?
Is 2nd word a real world or nonword?
Faster decision if primed word is semantically related
Suggests that the primed word automatically activates stored words in lexcion that are related to the priming word
OR the primed word changes expectations
How did Neely(1977) test semantic priming?
Told participants that BIRD would mostly precede a bird, and BODY would mostly precede a building part.
Rapid, automatic priming effect based on semantic relatedness
Slower, attentional effect based on expectation.
What did Lucas 1999 find from meta analysis on semantic priming.
Combining the results of 17 studies, foudn that there was a small but consistent effect of context on lexical access. Appropriate word has greater priming effect than inappropriate word.
How does expectation affect ltaency of evoked potnetial.
“an” generated a larger N400 than “a”.
