Written language

Question 1

What’s a grapheme?

Answer 1

written symbol that represents phoneme

Question 2

What’s the word superiority effect?

Answer 2

• individual letters perceived better in words than in non-words –> knowledge of words used in identifying letters (=interaction of bottom-up top-down) (but even better in pseudowords) –>

interactive activation model: 3 levels of recognition: 1) feature level, 2) letter level, 3) word level - bidirectionally connected

Question 3

What is a saccade?

Answer 3

Rapid eye movement - information only extracted during fixation

Question 4

What’s the dual-route (cascaded) model?

Answer 4

2 routes (way of dealing with regularities and exceptions):

Route 1: Grapheme-phoneme conversion: spelling (graphemes) turned into sound.
Evidence: Surface dyslexia (regular words can be read irregular can’t)

Route 2: Lexicon + semantic knowledge (Route 3: Lexicon only): Many representations of words stored in inner lexicon, then meaning is found from semantic knowledge
Evidence: Deep dyslexia (problems reading unfamiliar words and non-words and semantic reading errors - reading ship as boat fx)

Question 5

What’s the triangle model?

Answer 5

• Single connectionist route between orthography and phonology: words and non-words pronounced based on interactive system (different from dual-route). 3 levels of triangle:
  1) Orthography (spelling) 2) phonology (sound) 3) semantics (meaning).

2 routes: 1) direct pathway (orthography-phonology) 2) indirect pathway (orthography-semantics-phonology)

Question 6

What’s the dual-route model in writing?

Answer 6

route 1) lexical route (linking phonology, semantic and orthography), 2) non-lexical route (stored rules)

Evidence:
- surface dysgraphia (good spelling reg. words bad irregular words)

• phonological dysgraphia (poor spelling of non-words)
• deep dysgraphia (semantic errors in spelling and non-words spelled incorrectly)