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What is the term for the moment before meaning is accessed in word recognition?
Which of the following tasks is used to measure the amount of time it takes to decide if a string of letters is a valid word?
According to Reicher's 1969 study, what is the effect observed when participants are more accurate in identifying letters in real words compared to non-words?
What is the term for the smallest meaningful units that words can be broken into?
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What type of morpheme changes the meaning of a base word by applying derivations?
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What is the term for the process of recognizing and processing the sounds of words while reading?
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According to Prinzmetal's 1986 study, what is the role of syllables in visual processing of words?
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What is the term for the process of recognizing a word as an existing word in the lexicon?
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What is the primary finding of MARSLEN 1994's study?
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What is the main idea behind Taft's 1976 decomposition account?
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What is the primary effect of orthographic neighborhood on word recognition?
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What is the effect of phonological neighborhood on word recognition?
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What is the relationship between concreteness and imageability?
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What is the effect of sentence level context on word processing?
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What is the purpose of masking screens in the priming paradigm?
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What is the definition of stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA)?
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What is the effect of orthographic priming on word recognition?
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What is the primary effect of phonological priming on word recognition?
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What is the main idea behind the Interactive Activation/Competition Model of letter and word recognition?
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What is the effect of higher frequency words in the Interactive Activation/Competition Model?
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What is the limitation of the Interactive Activation/Competition Model in explaining neighbourhood size effects?
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What is the main limitation of the Interactive Activation/Competition Model in terms of semantic effects?
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What is the main problem of variability in speech perception?
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What is the main problem of segmentation in speech perception?
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What is the strategy to deal with the problem of segmentation in speech perception?
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What is the concept of categorical perception?
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What was the main finding of Liberman's (1957) study on categorical perception?
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What was the main manipulation in Liberman's (1961) study on categorical perception?
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What is the main finding of the study on phoneme perception with short and long VOTs?
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What is the McGurk effect?
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According to Foss (1980), what affects phoneme perception reaction times?
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What is the dual code model?
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According to Foss (1983), what is the primary code used for phoneme identification?
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What is the main finding of Marslen-Wilson (1994) regarding phoneme mediation?
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What is phoneme restoration?
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According to Warren (1970), what is the main finding of the lexical identification task?
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What is the main finding of the follow-up study by Warren (1970)?
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What is the primary function of the Access stage in the Original Cohort Model?
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What is the main difference between the Uniqueness Point and the Recognition Point?
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What was the primary goal of the study by Zwisterlood (1989)?
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What is the primary function of the Integration stage in the Original Cohort Model?
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What is the main finding of the study by Zwisterlood (1989)?
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What is the primary difference between the Original Cohort Model and the Revised Cohort Model?
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What is the role of frequency effects in the Revised Cohort Model?
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What is the primary function of the Selection stage in the Original Cohort Model?
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What is the effect of frequency on word recognition?
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What is the primary stage of processing affected by context effects in word recognition?
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What is the focus of parsing in sentence comprehension?
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What is the characteristic of a temporarily ambiguous sentence?
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What is the purpose of studying ambiguity in sentence processing?
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What is a characteristic of a garden path sentence?
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What is the principle of minimal attachment in the garden path model?
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What is the principle of late closure in the garden path model?
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What was the result of Rayner's 1983 study on the garden path model?
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What is the main assumption of the garden path model?
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What is the primary finding of SINGER's 1980 study on elaborative inference?
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What is the purpose of NP1-bias and NP2-bias verbs in the context of implicit causality?
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What is the primary difference between the focusing and integration accounts of implicit causality bias?
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What is the primary finding of GARNHAM's 1996 study on implicit causality and pronoun resolution?
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What is the term for the process of identifying the object or person a pronoun refers to?
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What is the main difference between elaborative and bridging inferences?
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What is the term for the process of making connections between different pieces of information to form a coherent understanding?
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What is the primary role of implicit causality in pronoun resolution?
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What is the effect of the MOSES ILLUSION on readers' comprehension?
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What is the primary function of inferences in comprehension?
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What is the term for the process of inferring a connection between objects or events to create coherency?
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What is the effect of the primacy effect in sentence comprehension?
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What is the term for the process of inferring a causal relationship between two propositions?
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What is the effect of the situational model on readers' comprehension?
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What is a proposition in linguistics?
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What is the advantage of first mention in sentence comprehension?
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What is the effect of reading times on the processing of semantic anomalies?
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What is the main finding of Ratcliff's 1978 study?
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What is the term for the mental representation of the text that prioritizes the overall meaning of the text?
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What is the term for internal representations of the external world?
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What is the purpose of context in forming a situation model?
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What is the effect of the recency effect on attention in sentence comprehension?
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What type of information is represented in a situation model?
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What is the effect of spatial information on the formation of a situation model?
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What is the main finding of Fletcher's 1990 study?
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What is the role of test bases in the construction stage of comprehension?
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What is the term for the process of constructing a situation model?
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What is the term for the process of updating the situation model as discourse is processed?
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What is a characteristic of the Garden Path Model?
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What is the main difference between the Garden Path Model and Constraint-Based Models?
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What is the main finding of Trueswell's 1994 study?
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What is the main critique of Trueswell's 1994 study by Clifton?
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What is the main difference between the Construction stage and the Integration stage in the Construction-Integration Model?
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According to the Construction-Integration Model, what is the purpose of the Integration stage?
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What type of mental representation is used in the Construction stage of the Construction-Integration Model?
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What is the term for the linguistic unit composed of several sentences or a single sentence with multiple clauses or propositions?
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What is the main difference between the Garden Path Model and the Constraint-Based Models in terms of how they process syntactic and non-syntactic information?
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What is the main characteristic of the Constraint-Based Models?
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Study Notes
Word Recognition
- Word recognition is the process of accessing a word in our mental lexicon.
- The "magic moment" is the moment before meaning is accessed (recognition without lexical access).
- There are three ways to measure word recognition:
- Naming task: amount of time to say a presented word.
- Lexical decision task: amount of time to decide if a string of letters is a valid word.
- Semantic categorization: amount of time to sort the meaning of a word into a relevant category.
Sub-Lexical Unit Processing
- Reicher (1969) showed that letter recognition is influenced by context (word superiority effect).
- Syllables are a unit of speech sound, and evidence suggests that syllabic processing happens simultaneously with word processing.
- Phonological mediation is the process of sounding out words while reading.
Morpheme Processing
- Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of words.
- There are three types of morphemes:
- Derivational: change the meaning of a base word by applying derivations.
- Inflectional: don't change the meaning but change the grammatical properties of a base word.
- Marslen (1994) showed that exposure to a derivational morpheme facilitates recognition of related base words.
Visual Word Recognition
- There are two main types of effects in visual word recognition:
- Frequency effects: the number of appearances of a word in general language use affects the speed of recognition.
- Neighborhood effects: the number of other words that can be created by changing one letter or sound of a word affects the speed of recognition.
- Coltheart (1977) showed that rejecting high-orthographic neighborhood non-words takes longer than low-orthographic neighborhood words.
- Yates (2004) showed that having many phonologically similar words makes it easier to recognize words by sound.
Sentence Level Context Effects
- Sentence level context effects impact word processing, with reaction times shorter when the target word is within a semantically congruent sentence.
- Making priming paradigm: masking screens presented before or after the prime, often reducing the effect of the prime.
Interactive Activation/Competition Model
- McClelland (1981) proposed a connectionist model of letter and word recognition, with visual feature units inputting to letter units, and connections between letter units contributing to the activation of a word unit.
- Each unit is connected to the one immediately before and after it, with bidirectional connections.
- Frequency affects the model, with higher frequency words activated faster and reaching recognition threshold more quickly.
Neighborhood Size Effects
- The model suggests that connection within units are inhibitory, which explains certain neighborhood effects.
- However, the model does not explain other facilitatory effects.
Priming and Sentence Level Context Effects
- The model focuses on connections within the current word, and cannot explain wider context effects or connections between words.
- The model only focuses on physical/visual properties of words, and cannot explain semantic effects.
Variability and Segmentation
- Two main problems in speech processing:
- Variability: same phonemes can sound different in different circumstances.
- Segmentation: the problem of no clear break between words in a spoken phrase.
Categorical Perception
- Way that people perceive speech sounds as either one phoneme or another, with no in-between.
- Liberman (1957) showed that participants could clearly distinguish between sounds without ambiguity.
- Liberman (1961) showed that listeners tend to perceive a sound as one of the existing phonemes in their language.
Phoneme Restoration
- Context effect in auditory word recognition where missing phonemes in words can be filled in by context.
- Warren (1970) showed that listeners use semantic and syntactic information beyond individual phonemes.
- Foss (1980) showed that context and predictability play a significant role in phoneme perception.
Original Cohort Model
- Marslen (1984) proposed a model where we create a cohort of potential word candidates as we hear speech, which gradually narrows down until only one possibility remains.
- The model consists of three stages:
- Access: initial contact where acoustic features are analyzed, and a cohort of potential words is created.
- Selection: lexical selection where one item is chosen from the set of potential words.
- Integration: syntactic and semantic properties of the selected word are utilized for comprehension.
Uniqueness and Recognition Points
- Uniqueness: the point at which a word becomes uniquely identifiable from its initial sound sequence.
- Recognition: the point at which a word is empirically identified.
- Zwisetlood (1989) showed that context effects on word selection have an impact on a later stage of processing.
Revised Cohort Model
- Bottom-up priority is considered, indicating that context cannot form the initial cohort and can only influence the integration stage.
- Frequency effects are also addressed, with high-frequency words having a higher resting level of activation and being recognized more rapidly.
Parsing and Sentence Processing
- Parsing: focuses on syntactic/structural analysis within sentence comprehension.
- Two types of ambiguous sentences:
- Temporarily ambiguous: occurs at some point in the sentence but is resolved later by syntactic or semantic/pragmatic constraints.
- Globally ambiguous: even after reading the whole sentence, there are multiple ways to analyze the structure.
- Garden path sentences: lead us towards one analysis initially, but turn out to be wrong by the end of the sentence.
- The model explains parsing for both ambiguous and unambiguous sentences, with two principles:
- Minimal attachment: the parser initially chooses the simplest syntactic structure.
- Late closure: if minimal attachment doesn't resolve ambiguity, the parser attaches new information to the current clause/phrase.### Sentence Processing Models
- The Garden Path Model:
- Modular and serial processing
- Initial syntactic analysis, followed by reanalysis if necessary
- Difficulty occurs when initial analysis conflicts with later information
- Constraint-Based Models:
- Interactive, parallel, and competitive processing
- All sources of information (e.g., syntactic, semantic, frequency) interact immediately
- Difficulty occurs when multiple analyses are equally activated
Support for Constraint-Based Models
- Truwell's (1994) eye-tracking study:
- Demonstrated that plausibility information affects structural preference
- Results consistent with Constraint-Based Models
- Clifton's (2003) critique of Truwell's study:
- Suggested that the absence of a difference between two conditions may be a null effect
- Conducted a repeat study with different results, opposing the original findings
Discourse Comprehension
- Refers to the comprehension of linguistic units composed of multiple sentences or clauses
- Relevant in both written and spoken language
- Kintsch's (1988) Construction-Integration Model:
- Two stages: construction and integration
- Construction stage: surface representations and text base analysis
- Integration stage: situation model formation, resolution of contradictions
Mental Representations
- Three types: surface, text base, and situation
- Surface representations: word meanings, sentence structures
- Text base representations: networks of propositions and inferences
- Situation representations: networks of inter-related propositions, resolution of contradictions
- Propositions: linguistic units describing events or states, consisting of a verb and its arguments
Psychological Reality of Propositions
- Ratcliff's (1978) sentence/word recall study:
- Demonstrated that propositions are encoded as a cohesive package
- Retrieval rates higher when cue is from the same proposition
Situation Models
- Van Dijk's (1983) mental model:
- Refers to internal representations of the external world
- Comprehenders construct a model as they read or listen to represent the content
- Models encompass various types of information, including space, time, causation, and motivations
- Bransford's (1972) study:
- Demonstrated that context helps readers form a mental model
- Context should be available at the time of comprehension
Representation of Spatial Information
- Bransford's (1972) sentence recognition tasks:
- Demonstrated that comprehenders form a situation model, including spatial relationships
- Memory of the sentence's surface form decays rapidly
Surface Form Representation
- Fletcher's (1990) passage study:
- Demonstrated that the surface form of the text is difficult to remember
- Different types of mental representations are made from the text, with the situational model being maintained fairly well
Moses Illusion
- A phenomenon where readers/listeners do not notice anomalies in the text
- Participants often attempt to answer the expected question instead of pointing out the anomaly
- Suggests that situation-specific real-world knowledge is automatically activated during comprehension
Reducing/Eliminating the Moses Illusion
- Participants take longer to process a word if it appears first in a sentence
- Primacy effect in focus within sentences: comprehenders better at remembering the first-mentioned object
- Reaction times for identifying a word in the second proposition of a sentence are lower than for identifying a word in the first proposition
Inference
- A derivation of additional knowledge from prior knowledge
- Involves going beyond what is explicitly represented in the comprehended material
- Types of inference:
- Bridging inference: connects objects/events to create coherency
- Causal inference: infers causal relationships between propositions
- Elaborative inference: requires linking to real-world knowledge
Bridging Inference
- Haviland's (1974) study:
- Demonstrated that extra time is needed to determine the link between propositions
- Suggests that bridging inference bridges new information to old information
Causal Inference
- Keenan's (1984) study:
- Demonstrated that extra time is needed to infer causal relationships between propositions
- Suggests that causal inference involves a different mechanism than bridging inference
Elaborative Inference
- Singer's (1980) study:
- Demonstrated that elaborative inferences are not an automatic process
- Suggests that elaborative inferences require linking to real-world knowledge
Pronoun Resolution
- The process of identifying the object/person a pronoun refers to
- Sometimes, the connection can be ambiguous, and inferences based on implicit causality are used
- Implicit causality bias:
- Influences attention allocation on the two competing noun phrases
- Expecting an early or late effect on processing
Garnham's (1996) Study
- Demonstrated that implicit verb bias influences pronoun resolution at a later stage
- Suggests that implicit causality bias is used for pronoun resolution during integration, not immediately when the pronoun is encountered
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Test your knowledge of word recognition, including the moment before meaning is accessed, tasks to measure word validity, and morphemes.