Reading and Comprehension
PERTEMUAN 8
7.1 Understanding words:
Recognising spoken and written words
• Crucial to understanding what people say to us
is the ability to recognise the individual words
that make up the message
• In one study subjects identified a target word in
a spoken passage and pressed a button to
indicate that they had done so, on average 275
milliseconds after the start of the word, even
though the average duration of the words in the
passage was 370 milliseconds (Marslen-Wilson
and Tyler, 1980).
• to recognise written words sometimes as
fast as 150 milliseconds per word (Rayner
and Pollatsek, 1989)
Eye Movements
• Our eyes do not move smoothly, but in a series of small
jumps called saccades.
• In reading, each saccade lasts about 25 msec, and
moves the point of foveal fixation (see Topic B1) seven
to nine letters forward at once.
• During a fixation, we can take in and process visual
information from roughly four letters to the left of the
fixation point and fourteen letters to the right.
– The fixations can last from 20 to 500 msec, depending on what
is being read, but are on average around 225 msec.
– A skilled reader will make about 250 fixations a minute, reading
around 300 words.
Morrison’s model of eyemovements: smooth reading
Morrison’s model of eyemovements: Skipping a word
Morrison’s model of eye-movements:
Long and Short fixations
7.2 Understanding words:
Production of spoken words
• Lexicalisation is the name given to this
process by which the thought that
underlies a word is turned into the sound
of the word.
• two-stage process (Levelt, 1989, 1992).
– Lemma
– Lexeme
– `tipof- the-tongue state'
7.3 Understanding sentences:
Sentence comprehension
• Garden path effects
• Ambiguous sentences
• Inference
7.4 Understanding sentences:
Sentence production
Slip of the tongue phenomena
• Four types which he thought to be
particularly important for an understanding
of speech production processes were:
– Word substitutions
– Word exchanges
– Sound exchange
– Morpheme exchange
Examples of types of slips of the
tongue
• Slips of the tongue (speech errors)
– very regularized errors based on the three levels of
language (phonemic, semantic, and grammatical)
– errors occur within but not across levels in the
heirarchy
– three levels produce three categories of errors
• phoneme exchanges - “dazy lays” for “lazy days”
• morpheme exchanges - “slicely thinned” for “thinly sliced”
– exchange is always with same part of speech ie. Stem for stem,
prefix for prefix, and suffix for suffix
• word exchanges - noun for noun, verb for verb
– “gave my dollar a brother” for “gave my brother a dollar”
7.5 Language and thought
• Relationship between language and
thought
• Theory of Mind
7.6 Dyslexia
• Dyslexia is defined as a difficulty in
reading despite an otherwise normal range
of cognitive skills.
• acquired dyslexia
• developmental dyslexia