Week Four - Word & Sentence Processing Flashcards
Naming task
measure time taken between presenting a word and pronouncing it (naming latency). Usually half a second
Lexical Decision Task (LDT)
Decide whether the words are real words or not
- lexical access
- decision
speed-accuracy trade off
Semantic categorisation task
Deciding categories ie is it smaller or bigger than a tea cup
Priming task
Presenting a prime stim before target
6 factors affecting word recognition?
Physical interference Frequency/familiarity Word length Neighbourhood effects Word status Priming
Explain physical interference effect
Stimulus degraded (distortion, contrast reduction) Backwards masking (present another stimulus immediately after target stimulus)
Explain frequency effects
How often you see/hear the word (respond quicker to high-freq)
Explain word length effects
Some word length effects, really short = longer to process (due to similarity with other short words)
Time increases with number of syllables
Neighbourhood effects
Differ by only one sound.
For low-frequency words, words are faster/more acc if they have large neighbourhood size
Word status effect
Faster/more acc to words than nonwords
Priming effects
Repetition: easier to identify a word second time you see it
Form-based: Word is primed by a similar-looking word
Semantic: easier to identify a word if you’ve seen a word related in meaning
Full Listing hypothesis of word storage?
Every version of every word has a separate entry in our lexicon
Obligatory decomposition hypothesis of word storage?
Words are stored in root/base form, stripped of any affixes
Dual Pathway Hypothesis of word storage?
Most words are stored in their root form with rules for adding inflections and other affixes
Serial Search Model of retrieval
encounter a word
consult lexicon
retrieve info about the word
- bins with most frequent on top
Parallel access models of retrieval
Words are accessed by being activated to a certain threshold
Each morpheme has its own logogen
Nodes and connections
What is lost in fluent speech?
Word boundaries
How do we understand rapid speech? 2
Structure: knowledge of rules and constraints (can predict what word)
- pauses
Prosody
Pauses stats
last 200-500ms
occur every 5-8 words
occupy 40-50% of speaking time
Can be unfilled (silent) or filled (eg ummm, repetition)
Why do we pause?
Microplanning: difficulty retrieving individual word (TOTP)
Macro Planning: Difficulty determining syntax and context (most common)
Effects of prosody ?
Acoustic cues accompanying the spoken sentence
- intonation
- word stress
- pauses
- vowel lengthening
Signals emotion, disambiguate meaning
Surface structure of syntactic processing?
Words you hear/read
Deep structure of syntactic processing?
Meaning underlying the phrase/sentence
Parsing?
Assigning words in a sentence to their linguistic categories
- essential for spoken and written language
Models of syntactic parsing must explain?
How the syntactic function of individual words determines overall syntactic structure of a sentence
