W4: Words, word recognition and lexical decision tasks Flashcards
What are words?
Arbitrary symbols
There are a few exceptions: onomatopoeia that are designed to sound like the thing e.g. boom
What are lexical decision tasks?
Need to decide whether words are real words or not
Reaction time is measured in milliseconds
Reaction times in LDT are made up of what?
Lexical access (if the word is available in lexicon)
Decision making
Tapping computer key
What kind of trade-off is there in LDT and are there any gender differences?
Speed-accuracy trade off
Women are more likely to be accurate, men are more likely to be fast
What types of tasks are there in LDTs?
Semantic categorisation
Priming
What is semantic categorization?
Accessing what you know about an object - you need to think about its meaning and how it relates to other things
E.g. are the following objects bigger or smaller than a teacup
Priming in a LDT?
Presenting a priming stimulus before the target
When you see the word ‘nurse’ it becomes activates and this activation spreads to related words
Then, because of this activation recognition of other words such as doctor are quicker
What is stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA)?
The time between the priming stimuli and the target stimuli
What factors affect word recognition (5)?
Physical interference
Frequency, familiarity and age of acquisition
Word length
Neighbouring effects (similar words)
Priming
How might physical interference affect word recognition?
Stimulus degradation
distortion
contrast reduction (background noise)
Backwards masking
presenting another stimulus immediately after target stimulus
How does frequency affect word recognition?
It’s about how often a word tends to appear in print/conversation
There are slight differences for written and spoken language (some things are said more than they are written)
Quicker and more accurate responses to high than to low-frequency words
However, frequency does not always equal…
Familiarity
How is frequency related to word length?
More common words tend to be shorter
How does age of acquisition affect word recognition?
Words learnt at an earlier age are responded to quickly
How does word length affect recognition?
Expect: longer response time for longer words
There is some word length effect, especially if the word is 5-12 letters long
Explain neighbourhood effects in word recognition
For low-frequency words specifically, words are responded to faster/more accurately if they have a large neighbourhood size (words similar but only vary in one sound or one letter)
Word status in word recognition?
People respond faster/more accurately to real words than to non-words
More plausible-looking non-words are responded to more slowly than less plausible looking nonwords (take time to realise they aren’t a word if they look like they may be whereas can respond quickly if they really do not look like a word)
How does repetition priming work?
It is easier to identify a word the second time you see it
What is form-based priming?
When a word is primed by a similar-looking word
Form - From
What is semantic priming?
Easier to identify a word if you’ve seen a word related in meaning
Bread – Butter
What are the 3 arguments as to how morphologically complex words are stored in the lexicon?
- Full listing
- Obligatory decomposition
- Dual-pathway
What is the full listing hypothesis?
Each word has a separate entry (lexeme) in the lexicon
Each variant has its own representations (glass, glasses, glassy, glasshouse)
What is the obligatory decomposition hypothesis?
Words are stored in root/base form and stripped of any affixes
Have a general rule and a list of exceptions
Eg. WALK and all of the bits that go with it ‘s’, ‘er’ and ‘ed’
Obliged to break words down into little bits
To produce them, you access individual morphemes and combine them to make a word
To comprehend: strip word of its affixes and activate the root word plus bound morphemes
What is the dual pathway hypothesis?
Most words are stored in their root form with rules for adding inflections and other affixes
However, some common derived/inflected forms have their own listing
Bit of both of the other two theories