W3 Flashcards
(102 cards)
what is the issue with studies examining the processes involved in recognising written words
- use a single word in isolation
- limits the generalisability of the findings to natural reading tasks
what is an alternative to studies which use a single word in isolation
have participants read sentences that contain a critical word
how do we measure the time spent reading a word
eye tracking
what is the underlying assumption of eye tracking
where people look in the text coincides with the processing of the word in that location, the time spent reading a given word reflects the processing of a word
Juhasz & Rayner (2003) aims
investigate the influence of 5 intercorrelated variables (word length, word frequency, word familiarity, concreteness, and age of acquisition[AoA]) on word reading time
if a word is highly frequent in a language is it processed faster or slower
faster and more accurately
Written word frequency norms measure?
how often a given word occurs out of a sample of 1 million words
what did William and Morris find
subjective familiarity had a significant effect on eye fixation durations for low-frequency words
what is word concreteness
a measure of the concreteness or abstractness of a word
what is the effect of a word being very abstract
named more slowly than concrete words when presented following a neutral context
when does the concreteness effect disappear
when the target words were presented following a meaningful context
what is the effect of AoA
words that are acquired earlier in life are responded to faster and more accurately than words that are acquired later in life
what is first-fixation duration
the duration of the first fixation on a word, irrespective of how many fixations the word receives- represents early word recognition processes
what is single fixation duration
the duration of the first fixation on the word if and only if the word receives only one fixation on its first-pass reading, measures word recognition time
what is gaze duration
the cumulated time spent on a word before readers move their eyes from it- presumably encompasses all word recognition stage
what is total fixation duration
the sum of all fixation durations on a word, including the time spent rereading
what did Juhasz & Rayner (2003) conclude about word frequency
Word frequency is a strong predictor for all fixation measures- confirming importance in word recognition
what did Juhasz & Rayner (2003) conclude about word familiarity
significantly predicted fixation durations
what did Juhasz & Rayner (2003) conclude about word length
Significant for gaze and total-fixation durations, consistent with findings that longer words tend to cause more refixations
what did Juhasz & Rayner (2003) conclude about concreteness
concreteness influences eye fixations during reading
what did Juhasz & Rayner (2003) conclude about AoA
AoA affects meaning activation in word recognition
Word Superiority Effect-
letters are recognized more easily when they appear in a word than when alone or in a non-word
regular words-
words that follow standard spelling and pronunciation rules (e.g., “cat”).
irregular words-
words that don’t follow normal spelling rules (e.g., “yacht”).