what did James Cattell do?
- Frequency of usage of words in a language influences tasks involving printed words (Cattell, 1886)
- measurements of brain processes used a device called a chronoscope precisely measure how long it takes to make a decision on words
- accuracy in milliseconds
Monsell et al (1898) investigation into word frequency effects in lexical decision, semantic categorisation and word naming.
- Stimuli: High (student / desk), medium (widow / furnace) and low frequency words (tyrant / shawl).
- Main effect of frequency. No interaction between task and frequency
mehl et al. (2007) - Are women more talkative than men?
Large study with 396 participants revealed that men and women both speak about 16,000 word tokens per day. Thus, speaking and listening is about 32k per day.
context diversity Adelman et al al. (2006)
- Contextual diversity (CD) not word frequency (WF) determines word naming and lexical decision times.
CD: number of different contexts a word has been seen (number of different documents). - Analysis based on different corpora (e.g. K&F, BNC) and lexical decision and word naming studies.
- Regression analyses showed an improvement of variance explained for WF and CD. However, improvement for CD higher than WF. Thus, CD more predictive of reaction times than WF.
what did Jones et al. (2012) suggest about semantic diversity?
- it’s more important than CD because CD ignores information redundancy.
- Word BANK can occur in similar documents (e.g. about mortgages) or two very different documents (mortgages, and rivers). Although word can have a large document count it does not mean that these are reflecting truly distinct contextual uses of the word.
outline Jones et al. (2012) reaction time experiment
Reaction times and naming latencies obtained from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007). Document count and SD count obtained from three corpora
Chateau and Jared (2000), impact of the exposure to print word recognition
- Exposure to print was measured using the Author Recognition Task
- 64 participants, 4 tasks (Lexical Decision, Form priming, Naming)
- conclusion: print exposure not only affects vocabulary and general knowledge (Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992) but it also enhances word recognition processes
Mol and Bus (2011), meta analysis investigating the impact of print exposure from infancy to adulthood
- Print exposure in readers aged 3-5 was associated with oral language skills. Reading routines for children in school provide substantial advantages for oral language growth.
- Reading for pleasure may also improve academic success in college and university students.
Aron and Snyder (2010), frequency effects for multi-word phrases
- Material: 4-word sequences (4-grams)
- Frequency information obtained from a large telephone conversation corpus (counts converted to frequency per million).
- Task: Phrase decision task have to indicate if the phrase is a possible sequence in English
- Participants: 26 students
Results - High bin: High frequency (HF) phrases (1040 ms) faster than low frequency (LF) phrases (1100 ms).
- Low bin: Also phrase-frequency effect (HF: 1059 ms, LF: 1125 ms).
Siyanova-Chanturia et al. (2011) Binomial expressions
- Binomial expressions are three-word phrases that are formed by two content words of the same lexical class and a conjunction e.g. bride and groom, king and queen
- Participants (native and non-native English speakers) read sentences containing binomials (e.g. bride and groom) and their reversed forms (groom and bride) embedded in sentences.
- Eye movements were recorded used an eye tracker.
- Conclusion: Readers are sensitive to the frequency of multiword sequences.
Lexical similarity coltheart (1977).
- Orthographic Neighbours: Number of words that can be created by changing one letter of a target word.
e.g. target: MINE, neighbours: PINE, LINE, MIND, MINT (N=29)
Andrews (1992) experiment on lexical decision task
Neighbourhood density was manipulated (number of neighbours, small N vs. large N) and word frequency (high vs. low).
results: significant interaction between frequency and neighbourhood density.
Orthographic neighbours
Neighbourhood size/density (number of neighbours)
- Andrews (1989, 1992): facilitation (low frequency words)
- Coltheart et al. (1977): no effects
- Carreiras et al. (1997): inhibition
what is the multiple read out model? Grainger and Jacobs
IA model with decision criteria
Three noisy response criteria:
- M: single word node activity (μ)
- ∑: summed activity of all active words (σ)
- T: time threshold (t)
with these three criteria the model can account for facilitation effects of neighbourhood density
where are internal stores of knowledge of words?
- The mental lexicon
- Semantic memory (word meaning) - conceptual store
what is decompositional theory?
- Word meanings best described in terms of sets of bivalent
- semantic features or semantic markings (+<feature> or -<feature>)</feature></feature>
types of features
- Defining features = distinguished between defining and characteristic features
- Characteristic features = features possessed by most of a class of object, e.g., ‘flies’ and ‘builds a nest’
semantic features (McRae, de Sa, & Seidenberg (1997))
Intercorrelated features:
- tend to occur together.
- living things tend to be represented by many intercorrelated features.
- many members of a natural kind category will share intercorrelated features
Distinguishing (or distinctive) features:
- enable us to distinguish among things.
- exclusive to single items within a category.
- artefacts tend to be represented by many distinguishing features.
what is the semantic network model (Collins & Quillian, 1969)
Characteristics:
- Concepts represented by nodes in a network.
- Nodes joined together by links representing relations between concepts, e.g. set membership (Fido is a dog), set inclusion (dogs are animals), part-whole (a seat is part of a chair), and property attribution (canaries are yellow).
- The meaning of a word is determined by the place of the node in the network as a whole.
- Set inclusion links (usually called IS-A link) mean that nets are hierarchically organised.
- Semantic Economy.
what did Hollan (1975) show about semantic network?
Showed that simple semantic networks and feature theories were formally equivalent.
what did Rips, Smith and Shoben (1975) ahow about semantic networks?
Pointed out that formal equivalence does not imply psychological equivalence, i.e. different processing assumptions may results in more or less satisfactory performance models.
what is prototype theory?
- Concepts are centred around a representation of a prototypical member of the class. e.g. ‘robin’ versus ‘ostrich’ for the concept ‘bird’.
- The meaning of a word is given by its prototype together with some specification of how far instances can differ from the prototype and still be a category member, i.e. ‘bird’.
- Boundaries may often be ‘fuzzy’ rather than well-defined.
Outline sentence verification task
Subjects asked to respond true or false to sentences of the following kind:
- Set Inclusion: ‘A robin is a bird’; ‘A whale is a fruit’ and/or
- Property Attribution: ‘A robin has feathers’; ‘A whale has seeds’.
rationale
- Words presented in sentential context as in normal comprehension.
- Use of simple sentence frames to control differences in syntactic processing.
- Reaction times used to infer how knowledge about word meaning is stored/used in the process of comprehension.
what is the principle of cognitive economy?
- Information about concepts is stored at the highest appropriate level in the hierarchy.
- e.g. ‘has feathers’ stored with ‘bird’ rather than with each different exemplar such as ‘robin’ or ‘canary’
- Early studies confirmed prediction that sentence verification times would increase as distance in the hierarchy increased
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Introduction to Perception31
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Taste and Smell33
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Touch21
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analysing images and human contrast sensitivity20
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The Visual Pathway68
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Visual Perception47
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Human memory19
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Encoding in Real World15
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Effective encoding19
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Storage failures20
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Active Forgetting20
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Types of Retrieval11
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Improving Retrieval14
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Autobiographical Memory14
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Visual Word Recognition 121
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Visual Word Recognition 234
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Embodiment - language and reading18
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shallow processing - language and reading21
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Thinking 127
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Bounded Rationality I15
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Bounded Rationality 215
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attention and consciousness26
