Understanding Words PDF

Reminders! And updates! • QUIZ 6?!? • Rescheduled: Next Monday or next Friday? • Garden Path Sentences CogLab due Sun by 11:59 pm • Looking ahead: Results draft due 11/17 • Look at my feedback on Methods draft, see me with questions! Understanding Words Words! What are they good for? Word Supe...

Reminders! And updates! • QUIZ 6?!? • Rescheduled: Next Monday or next Friday? • Garden Path Sentences CogLab due Sun by 11:59 pm • Looking ahead: Results draft due 11/17 • Look at my feedback on Methods draft, see me with questions! Understanding Words Words! What are they good for? Word Superiority Effect: A target letter is more readily detected in a letter string when the letter string forms a word than when it does not • Why? Top-down processing! Reicher, (1969) Is each letter within a word rigidly assigned to a specific position? • Most readers find it easy to read the email, even with numerous letters are transposed (Norris & Kinoshita, 2012) • However, transposed letters always carry a cost, though the cost varies as a function of the placement (Rayner et al., 2006) • Internal Letter Transpositions: 11% increase in RT • End Letter Transpositions: 26% increase in RT • Beginning Letter Transpositions: 36% increase in RT Language is very difficult to put into words. -- Voltaire Investigating the Lexicon Investigating Word Access: Lexical Priming Computer Cheese • Lexical priming: Word activates a mental representation • Words facilitate responses to related words • Mouse à Cheese vs. Mouse à Candle Mouse Rat Pet Rodent Lexical Decision Task xx ms xx ms Mouse Cheese Related w nw Mouse xx ms Candle Mouse Chert w nw w nw Unrelated Fillers Explanation: Automatic or Controlled Processing??? Masked priming studies provide evidence in favor of automatic processing (Andrews et al., 2017) Timid Factors Impacting Word Access To what extent do past experiences impact word processing? • Word Frequency Effect • Respond more rapidly to high-frequency words than low frequency words High Frequency Words: Story, Band Low Frequency Words: Goat, Bucket • Demonstrated in: • Lexical decision tasks (e.g., Scarborough et al., 1997) • Eye tracking (e.g., Raney & Rayner, 1995) Factors Impacting Word Access To what extent is phonological (sound) information activated during word processing? • Phonological Neighborhood: Words are phonological neighbors if they differ in only one phoneme • Example: Wipe, pipe, tap are neighbors to type In lexical decision tasks, words with large phonological neighborhoods were verified more rapidly than words with small phonological neighborhoods (Yates, Locker, & Simpson, 2004) Lexical Ambiguity What meanings are activated? Condition 1: NOUN Condition 2: VERB She held a rose (ambiguous) They all rose (ambiguous) She held a post (control) They all touched (control) Probe: Flower Explanation of Results • People briefly access all meanings of a word (Exhaustive Access) • Then rely on context to narrow down accurate meaning Tanenhaus et al. (1979) Influence of Meaning Dominance Biased Balanced BALL BARK > = Meaning Dominance: Some meanings are used more frequently than others Influence of Meaning Dominance & Context Word with balanced dominance: CAST (play); CAST (plaster) Word with biased dominance: TIN (metal); tin (food container) No Prior Context Balanced > Biased Why? Because competing meanings automatically activated in balanced ambiguous words slows down processing Prior Context Subordinate > Dominant Why? Competition between dominant meaning (auto-activated) and context-appropriate subordinate meaning slows down processing Baseball fans don’t like lumpy batters Wiley, George, & Rayner (2016) • How does prior knowledge interact with the resolution of biased ambiguous words? Abby waited quietly for the orchestra practice begin. She was sure the pitch(chord) would be too high for the vocalist. Target Post-Target Disambiguating • Low baseball knowledge: ambiguous > control in post-target region • High baseball knowledge: ambiguous > control in disambiguating region Prior knowledge made it more difficult to “let go” of the dominant meaning Reflection! • Would an ideal language eliminate lexical ambiguity? Why or why not? Under what conditions is lexical ambiguity most likely to cause processing problems?