Visual Word
Recognition
Language Use and Understanding
Class 4
Announcements
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For next week: Castles and Coltheart, not
Rayner and Pollatsek.
Also Gernbacher
Assignment procedure change:
1) All discussion Qs must arrive by email,
inside the email itself (not attached).
 2) Due at midnight, but better late than never
(before class, that is).
 3) ** All reading Qs must be turned in on
paper in class.
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Outline
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Review from last week - major issues in
psycholinguistics
Word Recognition
Preparation for next week
Notes about presentations and discussion
Qs
Looking ahead…
Major Issues in Psycholinguistics
Goal of Psycholinguistics
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How do we extract meaning from the
linguistic signal?
How do we turn thought into words in
language production?
General Issues
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Cognitive architecture - encapsulated or not?
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Interaction of different levels
Linguistic vs. nonlinguistic sources of information
Audience design / Theory of Mind
How does this architecture develop in
children? (role of input, constraints of
architecture itself)
Individual differences
Neural architecture
Language and Thought
Levels of Processing
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Comprehension
Sound / speech perception
 Visual and Spoken Word recognition
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Representations of words
 Matching of signal with words
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Word segmentation
Ambiguity
Sentence Processing
 Discourse Processing
 Role of Prosody
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Levels of Processing
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Production
How do we access words?
 How do we construct syntax?
 How do we construct sounds?
 How is prosody generated?
 How do we choose referring expressions?
 How do we encode discourse status?
 What leads to production difficulty and how
does this impact production?
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Word Recognition
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How do we read words?
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What processes/representations are
involved?
Discussion Q: Why study reading?
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How much can studying reading tell us about
the fundamental processes of
psycholinguistics since it's not an ability that
develops naturally, and is actually quite rare,
anthropologically speaking?
Models of reading
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Direct access mode of reading:
orthography
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Phonolgical mediation
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Red --> sequence of letters is linked to a
stored memory of lexical item
Red --> /rEd/ --> sounds linked to a stored
memory of lexical item
Dual-access theories - both used, but what
is relation between them?
A separate question…
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Does reading use “rules” or “distributed
representations”?
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More on this next week…
Discussion: Why make
computational models
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What is the logic behind telling a computer
to process input a certain way, and then
inferring what the brain must be doing
from what you told the computer to do?
Even if the output from the computer is the
same as it is from a human, that doesn't
mean we've figured out what happens in
the brain. It just seems like a more
sophisticated version of behaviorism.
Van Orden’s Q’s:
1. Does phonological mediation occur?
 2. What is time course of orthographic
and phonological influences?
 3. Does word identification include a
verification process?
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Phonological Mediation
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What is the previously existing evidence?
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Lexical Decision task: is this a word?
DYME - longer to reject
 DYTE - shorter time to reject
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What are some criticisms of this?
Looks only at “no” responses
 Perceived familiarity may affect results
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Van Orden’s task
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What was the task?
How did it take care of criticisms of lexical
decision task?
Discussion of Task
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Doesn’t the repeated presentation of
homophone foils alert subjects and keep
them from being fooled by them?
Experiment 1
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Homophone vs. spelling control
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ROWS vs. ROBS vs. ROSE
Degree of orthographic similarity of
homophone
MEET
 ROWS
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Results?
Exp. 1 Results
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More false positives for homophone foils
than spelling controls
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More false positives to similarly spelled
homosphones than less similarly spelled
homophones
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Supports all dual-access theories
Experiment 2
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Are phonological effects “early” or “late”?
Time course of processing
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Issue of general interest in processing
Which processes are “early” or “late”?
Which precede which?
Are there techniques to tap only the early
processes?
Emphasis on early processes as most
important
Word Superiority Effect
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Reicher, 1969, Wheeler, 1970
D
K
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WORD
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WORD
D
ORWD
D
K
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Experiment 2
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Same as Exp. 1, but with pattern masking
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Results?
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Homophony results replicated
No difference on basis of spelling similarity
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What does this mean?
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Phonological effects are “early”
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There’s some “orthographically
determined process” that is affected by
pattern masking. (I.e., the spelling effect
disappeared).
Exp. 3 - Bypass vs.
Verification
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What predictions about frequency does
the bypass hypothesis make?
What about the verification model?
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What do the results of Exp. 3 show?
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Frequency X Regularity
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Frequency - more frequent words are
easier to read
Regularity - words with a regular spellingto-sound conversion are easier, but only
for low-frequency words
How does the bypass hypothesis explain
this?
How does Van Orden explain it?
Further Discussion
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If reading is heavily depenedent on phonological
processing, then how do congenitally deaf
individuals who have never heard words spoken
process them?
How would this finding be affected if subjects
were flower experts? Would they be less likely to
say ROWS is a flower?
What does the fact that a reader will be more
likely to misinterpret the string ROWS as ROSE
if she does not have much experience reading
have to say about the relationship between a
word's phonology and its lexical interpretation?
Student presentations
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Think about which classes you would like to lead
the discussion for
Give a short (5-10 minute) overview of the
papers assigned, laying out the main findings
and main issues for discussion.
Use the discussion questions provided by other
students to help you organize a framework for
the discussion.
Powerpoint or xeroxed notes can be helpful and
are encouraged.
Feel free to run your plan by me ahead of time if
you’re unsure.
Discussion Questions
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What makes a good discussion question?
Next week
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Castles and Coltheart
Gernsbacher 1993