W4: Words, word recognition and lexical decision tasks

Question 1

What are words?

Answer 1

Arbitrary symbols

There are a few exceptions: onomatopoeia that are designed to sound like the thing e.g. boom

Question 2

What are lexical decision tasks?

Answer 2

Need to decide whether words are real words or not

Reaction time is measured in milliseconds

Question 3

Reaction times in LDT are made up of what?

Answer 3

Lexical access (if the word is available in lexicon)

Decision making

Tapping computer key

Question 4

What kind of trade-off is there in LDT and are there any gender differences?

Answer 4

Speed-accuracy trade off

Women are more likely to be accurate, men are more likely to be fast

Question 5

What types of tasks are there in LDTs?

Answer 5

Semantic categorisation

Priming

Question 6

What is semantic categorization?

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Priming in a LDT?

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What is stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA)?

Answer 8

The time between the priming stimuli and the target stimuli

Question 9

What factors affect word recognition (5)?

Answer 9

Physical interference

Frequency, familiarity and age of acquisition

Word length

Neighbouring effects (similar words)

Priming

Question 10

How might physical interference affect word recognition?

Answer 10

Stimulus degradation
distortion
contrast reduction (background noise)

Backwards masking
presenting another stimulus immediately after target stimulus

Question 11

How does frequency affect word recognition?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

However, frequency does not always equal…

Answer 12

Familiarity

Question 13

How is frequency related to word length?

Answer 13

More common words tend to be shorter

Question 14

How does age of acquisition affect word recognition?

Answer 14

Words learnt at an earlier age are responded to quickly

Question 15

How does word length affect recognition?

Answer 15

Expect: longer response time for longer words

There is some word length effect, especially if the word is 5-12 letters long

Question 16

Explain neighbourhood effects in word recognition

Answer 16

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)

Question 17

Word status in word recognition?

Answer 17

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)

Question 18

How does repetition priming work?

Answer 18

It is easier to identify a word the second time you see it

Question 19

What is form-based priming?

Answer 19

When a word is primed by a similar-looking word

Form - From

Question 20

What is semantic priming?

Answer 20

Easier to identify a word if you’ve seen a word related in meaning

Bread – Butter

Question 21

What are the 3 arguments as to how morphologically complex words are stored in the lexicon?

Answer 21

1. Full listing
2. Obligatory decomposition
3. Dual-pathway

Question 22

What is the full listing hypothesis?

Answer 22

Each word has a separate entry (lexeme) in the lexicon

Each variant has its own representations (glass, glasses, glassy, glasshouse)

Question 23

What is the obligatory decomposition hypothesis?

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What is the dual pathway hypothesis?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

What are the models of lexical access (3)?

Answer 25

Serial search (Forsters model)

Parallel access( Morton’s model & Modern interactionist models)

Question 26

Explain serial search models of lexical access

Answer 26

You encounter a word
Then consult the lexicon - is it familiar?
Retrieve information on that word

Only one lexical entry scanned at a time

Question 27

What is Forsters serial search model?

Answer 27

Each word is present in only one place in the lexicon BUT they can be accessed from various ‘access files’

These access files can be orthographic (visual), phonological (sound) and semantic/syntactic (meaning and grammar) - but can only use one at a time

Search to derive words location and partial info

THEN you need to search for words unique location and full information in the MASTER LEXICON

Question 28

What is the master lexicon?

Answer 28

Organized into bins - access files direct search to the most appropriate bin

Entries are searched one by one until the exact match to the perceptual input is found

Most frequent entries are on the top

Question 29

Explain Morton’s logogen model (parallel access model)

Answer 29

Words are accessed by being accessed to a certain threshold

Each word/morpheme has its own logogen - these logogens count the number of features that a lexical entry shares with the input

Info from the stimulus accrues in parallel - these logogens race to reach the activation threshold
Activation reaches one logogens pre-determined threshold and the word is recognized

• Logogen returns to resting level slowly

Question 30

Word frequency in parallel access models?

Answer 30

Frequently used words have representations with lower thresholds so recognised quickly

Question 31

Explain the connectionist model

Answer 31

Computer models of cognitive processing with nodes and connections between these nodes

Organisation: strength of the connection between nodes, based on past association. If they are strong they are likely to excite and activate others

Question 32

Explain how words change in rapid speech and a study that relates to this

Answer 32

The speed of connected speech is fast, words are not clearly articulated yet we understand

• sometimes we need context to understand
• word boundaries are lost in fluent speech

Pollack and Pickett
- Spliced individual words from fluent speech and replayed to participants in isolation.
Listeners found them unrecognisable

Question 33

How long do pauses during speech last? and how often do they occur?

Answer 33

200-250 ms

Occur every 5-8 words, occupying 40-50% of speaking time

Question 34

If the planning demands on the speaker are reduced, do pauses decrease?

Answer 34

If reading aloud from a script, pauses are reduced but still occupy 20% of speech

Suggests that pauses are necessary outside of planning

Question 35

Pauses may be unfilled (e.g. silence), but also filled. What can be used to fill a pause?

Answer 35

Repetition
False starts
Parenthetical remark ‘you know…, like..’

Question 36

What are the two kinds of planning that may constitute pauses?

Answer 36

Macroplanning

Microplanning

Question 37

What is microplanning?

Answer 37

May have difficulty retrieving individual word - this is more common before low-frequency words

(tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon)

Question 38

What is macroplanning?

Answer 38

Difficulty determining syntax and context

Seems to determine more pauses than microplanning difficulties

Question 39

What is prosody?

Answer 39

The acoustic cues accompanying the spoken sentence including:
Intonation (changes in pitch)
Word stress (emphasising different words)
Pauses (help to understand sentences)
Vowel lengthening

Question 40

Are we taught prosody?

Answer 40

No, no one teaches us this. We just pick it up

Question 41

What can prosody help with?

Answer 41

Sentence processing
Signals whether the speaker is happy, sad, angry, sarcastic
Disambiguates meaning

Question 42

What is parsing and why is it important?

Answer 42

Parsing is the assignment of words in a sentence to their linguistic categories (noun, verb, adjectives)

Vital for COMPREHENSION: What makes an alcoholic (noun vs. adjective) drink (verb vs. noun)
And PRODUCTION: the present (adjective vs. noun) studies (noun vs. verb) results

We need to know what the words are in order to understand