Word recognition

Question 1

What did Moon et al (2013) find about babies hearing and sucking dummies?

Answer 1

• 30-hour old babies were exposed to vowels unique to their mother’s language (English or Swedish) and to vowels unique to the other language.
• Babies sucked their dummy harder when listening to the foreign language – not already familiar with
• Hearing system is mature enough 7 months after conception, babies can learn about speech
• Suggests that babies listen to speech in the womb and are learning about it!

Question 2

Which two characteristics of speech make word recognition difficult?

Answer 2

• The segmentation problem (ice cream vs I scream)

- The invariance problem

Question 3

What is the segmentation problem?

Answer 3

• Speech is a continuous stream of sound. No white spaces between words

Question 4

What are the solutions to the segmentation problem?

Answer 4

• Possible word-constraint (Norris et al., 1997), “fapple” vs. “wuffapple” - any segmentation that results in impossible words is likely rejected (e.g. “fapple”), segmented into wuff sound and apple
• Stress (Cutler & Butterfield, 1992) - first syllable typically stressed, “conduct ascents uphill” heard as “the doctor sends the bill” (stressed syllable underlined)
• Different languages have different strategies

Question 5

What is the Invariance problem?

Answer 5

• Speech sounds (e.g. phonemes) are shaped by external factors.
• Co-articulation - /b/ in “bill”, “ball”, “bull”, “bell” is acoustically different
• Bacon example: lean, bacon, lean bacon (how tongue and lips move)
• Has to take in variability, makes speech more fluent
• Dialect, accent, speech rate…

Question 6

What is the - Phoneme restoration effect (Warren & Warren, 1970) ?

Answer 6

– cough sound replacing a phoneme harder to detect what word is being affected compared to silencing a phoneme

• The state governors met with their respective legislature convening in the capital city (sentence example)
• Mind constantly filling in missing gaps in speech

Question 7

What was the *eel test?

Answer 7

• It was found that the *eel was on the orange (peel)
• It was found that the *eel was on the axle (wheel)
• It was found that the *eel was on the shoe (heel)
• It was found that the *eel was on the table (meal)
• Cough in front of eel changing how word is heard

Question 8

Two of the most prominent theories in spoken language are …

Answer 8

TRACE and the Cohort model

Question 9

What is TRACE (McClelland and Elman, 1986)?

Answer 9

• Word units (e.g. cat, bad, bat)
• Phoneme units (activated at this level, starts to inhibit competing phonemes. Inhibition makes it easier for one phoneme to be the dominant one)
• Feature units
• Information can flow bottom-up and top-down across the three levels!

Question 10

What does TRACE explain?

Answer 10

• TRACE can explain context effects

- This is because it allows higher-level information to affect lower-level information (top-down effects)

Question 11

What does TRACE overestimate and what’s an example of this?

Answer 11

• TRACE overestimates the influence of context and predicts top-down effects where they do not exist
• Frauenfelder et al. (1990): TRACE predicts it’s hard to detect /t/ in (French) nonword vocabutaire because of the similar real word vocabulaire. Data did not support prediction.
• French participants heard French words and non-words

Question 12

What is the Cohort model - Marslen-Wilson (1984)?

Answer 12

• Speech unfolds overtime compared to written language
• table tea tide tomorrow tooth traffic trainer and all other words that begin with the /t/ phoneme!
• When more information/phonemes of the word come in you can eliminate words which don’t match the cohort
• Remove competitors, allows you to eliminate all but one candidate

Question 13

In the original Cohort model, the selection stage is influenced by…

Answer 13

• In the original Cohort model, the selection stage is influenced by the auditory presentation of the word (like seen in previous slides) and the semantic or syntactic context
• A word can be recognised before its uniqueness point if context supports only one candidate in the cohort
• Example: “The poacher ignored the sign not to tres-” … In this sentence context “trespass” has a recognition point that comes before the uniqueness point

Question 14

The original Cohort model failed to deal with two problems, which are?

Answer 14

• If the first phoneme is mispronounced or misperceived, the word should never be recognised
• but hearing focabulaire activates vocabulaire (Frauenfelder et al., 2001)

Question 15

-Context does not eliminate words from the cohort! What happened in Zwitserlood(1989) semantic priming experiment?

Answer 15

• E.g. the word ‘cap’ being primed to ship and money
• The part-word cap… semantically primes both ship and money. So both captain and capital were activated when hearing cap….
• Another example: “With dampened spirits the men stood around the grave. They mourned the loss of their cap…”. Original Cohort model says capital should be eliminated from the cohort by the sentence context. But it was not! Cap.. still primes money!

Question 16

What is the revised cohort model (Marslen-Wilson, 1990)?

Answer 16

• The Revised Cohort model solved the two problems
• Context no longer allowed to influence early stages, including the initial cohort, i.e. the revised model is less interactive, more bottomup.
• Words are not totally eliminated from cohort, instead their activation level decreases and can be revived later if new information comes in (this deals with mispronunciations etc)

Question 17

Recognising spoken words is difficult because of…

Answer 17

– the segmentation problem (where does a word start and where does it end)
– the invariance problem (phonemes sound different in different contexts)

Question 18

Is reading innate?

Answer 18

• Reading is not an innate skill
• Reading has to be taught and learned
• We learn to understand and produce speech before we learn to read
• So does spoken language processing (phonology) play a role in written language processing (orthography)?

Question 19

What did Van Ordern (1987) find with homophomes?

Answer 19

• “Is this a flower: ROWS” – sounds like rose but doesn’t look like rose
• “Is this a flower: ROBS” – easier to decipher
• The former is more difficult to get right

Question 20

Is phonology associated with reading?

Answer 20

• Phonology can sometimes make reading easier
• Phonological neighbourhood (neighbours differ in one phoneme: gate, bait, get) size: bigger is better
• Phonological priming (klip primes clip, even if klip didn’t reach consciousness)

Question 21

What are theories of visual word recognition?

Answer 21

• Interactive activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981)
• Dual-route cascaded model (Coltheart et al., 2001)
• The connectionist triangle model (Harm & Seidenberg, 2004)

Question 22

What is the Interactive activation model - McClelland and Rumelhart, 1981 made up of?

Answer 22

• Word units
• Letter units
• Feature units
• Arrows = excitatory, Circles = inhibitory

Question 23

What is the Dual-route cascaded model - Coltheart et al 2001?

Answer 23

• Different routes from seeing a word printed then converting it into speech
• Route 2: make contact with orthographic input lexicon (list of all the words you know), feed activation to word meanings, then enter phonological output system (how words are pronounced)
• Route 3: short cut, bypass the meanings

Question 24

What happens in route 1 of the DRCM?

Answer 24

• Route 1: Grapheme-phoneme conversion
• Grapheme is the visual unit that corresponds to a phoneme (i in “pig”, igh in “high”)
• Conversion rules used to convert each grapheme into a phoneme. Rules determined by the most common grapheme-phoneme association in the language
• Good for regular words and non-words, bad for irregular words!

Question 25

What happens with route 1 and surface dyslexia?

Answer 25

- Route 1: Grapheme-phoneme conversion - Patients with surface dyslexia have access only to Route 1 - Patient KT (McCarthy & Warrington, 1984) - 100% accurate on reading nonwords - 81% accurate on reading regular words - 41% accurate on irregular words

Question 26

What are the differences between route 2 and 3?

Answer 26

- Route 2: Lexicon + semantics - Route 3: Lexicon only - Orthographic input lexicon stores the spelling of all the words you know - Activates meaning and/or phonology - Good for reading all familiar words, bad for reading unfamiliar word

Question 27

What is phonological dyslexia and what routes do they have access to?

Answer 27

- Find with reading familiar words, impaired with unfamiliar words and non-words - Patients with phonological dyslexia have access only to Routes 2 and 3 - Patient data (Caccappolo-van Vliet et al., 2004) - Above 90% correct on both regular and irregular familiar words - Less than 60% correct on unfamiliar words and nonwords

Question 28

What are the problems with DRC?

Answer 28

- Semantics is important in reading but DRC vague about how or why - Underestimates phonological influence - Doesn’t explain how reading is learned

Question 29

What is the Connectionist triangle model - Harm and Seidenberg 2004?

Answer 29

- Two possible routes to take you from spelling to sound: 1. Direct pathway from orthography to phonology 2. Indirect pathway from orthography to phonology via semantics - Highly interactive model: all types of knowledge can influence reading. - Activating information in the orthography unit first (when reading), makes you respond such as reading out loud - Doesn’t have different routes

Question 30

What is the Taze and Tave test? (CTM)

Answer 30

- Taze is a consistent nonword because its neighbours have consistent pronunciations (e.g. gaze, laze, maze), all sound the same, highly consistent non-word - Tave is an inconsistent nonword because its neighbours have many different pronunciations (e.g. gave, save, have), sound different despite ending in -ave - People struggle to read inconsistent words, because there are no rules, existing knowledge of similarity is unhelpful

Question 31

How is semantics important in the models?

Answer 31

- Semantics is a critical component or word reading in the triangle model, less important in the dual-route model - McKay et al. (2008) taught participants to read new words (e.g. bink) - Participants learned a meaning for some words, not for others - Words that had meaning were read faster (but only if they were inconsistent)

Question 32

Surface dyslexia and the triangle model?

Answer 32

- Surface dyslexia occurs if there is damage to the semantic system. “Breaking” the model’s semantic system results in similar impairments as seen in human surface dyslexics (Plaut et al., 1996). - Good reading of consistent words, difficulties with inconsistent words.

Question 33

What is phonological dyslexia?

Answer 33

- Phonological dyslexia due to a general phonological impairment affecting not just reading. - Mixed evidence for this in the patient literature; many but not all patients have general phonological impairments.