chapter 8 word recognition

Question 1

semantic priming

Answer 1

• hearing or reading a word partially activates other words that are related in meaning to that word
• makes related words easier to recognize in subsequent encounters

Question 2

lexical decision task

Answer 2

• ppl read string of letter on screen that are either real or not real words and they press button to indicate if they think its real or not real
• faster response times for related primed words

Question 3

_____ makes it easier for word recognition to be completed and ____ makes it harder

Answer 3

facilitation, inhibition

Question 4

t or f: in the word sting, the -ng counts as one sound

Answer 4

true

Question 5

neighbourhood density effects

Answer 5

• experimental results demoing that its more difficult and time consuming to retrieve a word from memory if the word bears strong phonological resemblance to many other words in vocal than if it only does few (sparse vs dense)
• occurs even if they aren’t present in convo (only matter that they’re in the vocab)

Question 6

what makes ppl take longer to recognize a word

Answer 6

• dense neighbourhood (resemble many other words)
• length of word
• frequency of word
• words acquired earlier in life are processed more efficiently

Question 7

mediated semantic priming

Answer 7

prime word speeds up response to a target word not bc of a direct connection but due to an indirect connection via some other intervening word

Question 8

decay functioning

Answer 8

• rate at which info fades in memory
• info that has been activated gradually returns to a baseline level of activation

Question 9

Competition effects are seen most clearly among words that are related to each other in _____

Answer 9

form rather than meaning

Question 10

excitatory and inhibitory connections

Answer 10

excitatory: connections along which activation is passed from one unit to another so the more active a unit becomes the more it increases the activation of a unit its linked to
inhibitory: opposite, more active unit = more suppressed activation of a connected unit

Question 11

factors affecting lexical decision times

Answer 11

• length of the word
• frequency of word
• age of acquisition
• semantic priming (facilitation)

Question 12

what approaches to the lexical decision task reduce possibility of participants noticing the relation between primes and targets?

Answer 12

• include lots of filler where no relation between prime and target are shown
• reduce time between prime and target

Question 13

masked priming

Answer 13

• priming task where prime word is presented subliminally (too quick to be consciously recognized)

Question 14

ISI

Answer 14

• interstimulus interval
• amount of time between offset of prime and onset of target

Question 15

localist vs distributed representations

Answer 15

• localist: semantic features are connected to a single word unit (sound>word>features)
• distributed: bundles of sound units connect directly to bundles of semantic features w out intervening word nodes (no middle word)

Question 16

in people with aphasia, what happens in relation to word loss

Answer 16

they lose parts of the word rep rather than the word itself in a persons vocab

Question 17

homophones

Answer 17

two words that have separate meanings but sound the same

Question 18

homographs

Answer 18

words spelt the same but have separate meanings

Question 19

polysemous

Answer 19

words that can convey constellation of related but different meanings

Question 20

what did piantadosi argue about ambiguity

Answer 20

it doesn’t damage understanding but makes it more efficient

Question 21

two approaches to using context to understand meaning

Answer 21

• starts from the bottom: sound > word recognized > context chooses which meaning fits
• top down: context activates semantic features > word reps (words can be more activated before sound)

Question 22

crossmodal priming task

Answer 22

• spoken and written
• ppl listen to passages then respond to test word by saying if its a real or not real word
• showed activation for both terms of ambiguous words briefly

Question 23

cohort competitors

Answer 23

words with overlapping onsets (ex candle, candy, candid)

Question 24

cohort model

Answer 24

• word recognition where many cohort competitors become active after beginning of word is detected and gradually winnow down to single candidate as more info is taken in
• word recog begins right after beginning of the word

Question 25

uniqueness point

Answer 25

point where there is enough info in the incoming speech stream to allow hearer to differentiate single word candidate from cohort competitors

Question 26

incremental lang processing

Answer 26

- hearers begin to generate hypotheses abt meaning of incoming speech on basis of partial acoustic info - this refines and revises the hypothesis on the fly instead of waiting for more info to be certain

Question 27

eye movement and speech competitors

Answer 27

- ppl more likely to look at competitors than unrelated objects - at 400ms they could tell the word but ppl started eye movement at 200ms

Question 28

mondegreens

Answer 28

'slips of the ear' that result in errors of word segmentation

Question 29

TRACE model

Answer 29

stream of sounds input are cont. fed into the word recog system and activate the words that contain them (not just left/beginning edges of the word)