language 2 Flashcards
What is the Lexical Decision Task?
A task where participants decide if a string of letters is a real word or a non-word.
What does faster recognition of related words in a lexical decision task show?
Semantic priming—activation of one concept spreads to related concepts in the brain’s semantic network.
What is semantic memory?
Memory for meanings and concepts, organized in networks.
What personality trait is associated with more flexible semantic networks?
Openness to experience
What is sub-lexical processing in word recognition?
Recognizing words by breaking them into smaller parts like phonemes or morphemes.
What is lexical (holistic) processing?
Recognizing whole words instantly without decomposing them into parts.
What is the Word Superiority Effect?
Real words are recognized faster than non-words or isolated letters.
What is the Typoglycemia Effect?
We can still read words with scrambled letters as long as the first and last letters are in place.
How do eye movements support holistic reading?
Readers don’t fixate on every word; 15–20% of movements go backward, suggesting word-level processing.
What causes misheard lyrics?
Errors in segmental speech processing (misinterpreting phonemes).
How do we recognize spoken words?
Either by sounding them out (segmentally) or recognizing them as whole units (lexically).
What is morphological priming?
Recognizing a word faster when preceded by a related word stem (e.g., ‘hunt’ helps recognize ‘hunter’).
How do regular verbs form past tense in English?
By adding ‘-ed’ (e.g., walk → walked).
How do irregular verbs form past tense?
Through unpredictable changes (e.g., go → went).
What is the Dual-Route Model of verb processing?
Regular verbs: Rule-based grammar; Irregular verbs: Retrieved from memory.
What is a weakness of the Dual-Route Model?
Difficulty explaining verb recognition in noisy environments or ambiguous cases.
What is the Connectionist Model?
Language is learned through pattern recognition; verb processing lies on a continuum, not separate systems.
What kind of errors does the Connectionist Model predict in children?
Overgeneralization errors like ‘goed’ instead of ‘went.’
How are regular verbs processed?
Often decomposed into base + ‘-ed’ using rules.
How are irregular verbs processed?
Retrieved holistically from memory as whole words.
