Lang & Comm 3 Flashcards
2 countries of highest and lowest literacy rates
Latvia 99.9%
Chad
How many people are illiterate globally
769,000,000 (World Literacy Found., 2012)
2 types of costs of illiteracy
economic - £2BN per year
social - higher chance of depression, substance abuse, suicidal ideation and poor physical health
visual word recognition
first stage of reading where we transform letters into meaning
through which store do we achieve visual word recogniton
through our mental lexicon
how many words in English speaker’s mental lexicon
60,000-70,000
grapheme
letter groups that correspond to form one phoneme
what do graphemes form the bridge between
phonology and orthogrpahy
how do we test if graphemes are used for visual word recognition?
letter detection (Ray, Ziegler and Jacobs, 2000)
what is this testing and what did it find
if graphemes are used for visual word recognition - they ARE as ‘a’ in broad took longer than a in ‘brash’
morpheme
smallest meaningful unit of language (“un-real” = prefix and root)
complications of morphemes and examples
pseudo-affixes:
de-ter vs de-press
corn-er vs farm-er
se-ed vs look-ed
how do we test if morphemes are used for visual word recognition?
primed lexical decision (Lima and Pollastek, 1983)
what is this testing and what did it find
with no morphemes used, priming expectedly was strongest with most overlap (3>2>1)
with morphemes, priming was strongest with the morpheme option no matter how much overlap it had (2>1=3)
morphemes are access units in visual word recognition
what is this testing and what did it find
had to say it words were real/non-real:
CORNER = pseudo-suffix = greater priming
BROTHEL = no pseudo suffix = priming is comparable
suffixes + pseudo suffixes are used in early word recognition
how do we test if letters are processed in parallel or serially to one another?
word naming (DV = rt + accuracy) (Weekes 1997)
what is this testing and what did it find
word length effects in reading:
HF words all comparable
LF words weak connection
non-words needed serial grapheme-phoneme conversion
why is grapheme-phoneme conversion necessary for non-words
they aren’t stored in our mental lexicon, have to serially letter-by letter
are letters processed in parallel or serially? And what is paid attention to
MOSTLY parallel
first > last letters > middle letters
consonants
activating a whole set of words coded in a similar way
Coltheart’s N: orthographic neighbourhood
how do we test if words with shared letters are all activated when searching for a target?
form-based priming/orthographic priming (Evett and Humphrys 1981)
what is this testing
if we activate all similar words when searching for a target
orthogrpahic neighbourhoods: explain results
real and non-real primes that share letters as target = faster identification
WORDS that share letters are negatively connected in lexicon (inhibit similar words)
NON-WORDS that share letters don’t inhibit
how do we test if there are feedback connections between letters and words?
letter detection (Reicher 1969)
