language and reading Flashcards
What is a word?
A form with a function
What is the difference between spoken word form and written word form?
Spoken- sequence of phonemes organised into syllables, some have stress patterns.
Written- a sequence of symbols (graphemes) made of lines, curves or strokes
What is lexical access?
Components of reading:
Identify letters and represent their sequence -> identify words -> retrieve (syntactic class and word meaning) -> interpret sentence structure -> interpret sentence meaning -> interpret intention of speaker/writer
What is the relation between spelling, pronunciation and meaning?
Relation between form and meaning is arbitrary but translation from spelling to pronunciation varies across language- it is semi regular for English
What are the different levels of analysis in word identification?
Levels of analysis: experiential, computational or functional (representations, processes, modules and architecture). Neural- how neurons implement computations and where they are.
We can manipulate certain factors that influence the speed or ease that we can read or understand.
What are the two kinds of behavioural measure?
(artificial) lab tasks designed to exercise and capture a component process: typically discrete stimulus -> response tasks. Allowing for accuracy and/or reaction time to be measured to each stimulus.
On-line measures made during continuous natural performance of the skill
What is the word superiority effect?
greater accuracy of letter idenficication in the context of a word than of a non matched word
What are frequency effects?
RTs for lexical decision, semantic categorisation and naming shorter for words that are more frequent in the language
What are sentence context effects?
RT’s for lexical decision and naming are shorter when a word is presented in a sentence context of which it is a plausible continuation
What did Treisman and Gelade measure in relation to the visual search task?
They measured the time taken to search for a target object that differed from the background objects and varied the number of objects in the display.
What is a task set?
An appropriate organisation of processes to carry out a particular task
How can executive or control processes be measured?
Get ppts to switch back and forth between tasks and measure the effects of this on performance
What are two main functions of selective attention?
Defensive filtering- protecting higher level limited capacity systems from overload (Broadbent).
Positive selection for action- prioritising one of several possible objects or sources for action or further processing. Feature of integration or ‘binding’ combining the properties of an object anaylsed in different cortical maps. Evidence: visual search for conjunction vs single feature targets harder. Illusory conjunctions.
What is the feature integration theory?
Regions of visual cortex are specialised for the local analysis of different attributes such as colour and form. Feature searches can be done pre attentively for targets defined by only one featured. Focused attention is needed to bind features of the same object and only then do we perceive it as an object.
What does the emotional Stroop tests measure?
Emotional stroop uses an indirect measure of emotional bias in psychological disorders as opposed to recognising emotions in faces for example (a direct measure)
What does the emotional Stroop test tend to find?
Time taken to name colour increases as attention to emotion word increases
Patients with depression tend to be slower to name the colour of negative words (indirect negative bias)