VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION

The Journey from Features to Meaning

• What is Word Recognition?

• Features, letters & word interactions Interactive Activation Model

• Lexical and Sublexical Approach Orthographic input lexicon and Phonological output Lexicon

• Lexical- level Variables

• Semantic Variables for Isolated words

• Context Priming Effect

• Orthographic Priming Effect

• Phonological Priming Studies

• Semantic Priming Effects

• Syntactic Priming

In this presentation:

Why do you think you could read this?

Words are saved in our minds as a whole in the orthographic lexicon, where

words are recognized and stored.

Orthography : االمالئي الرسم

We will take the word Laep as an example. Hmmm read it again!! is it Leap or Laep?

You could read it in the right way because the non-word Laep has the same features of the

word leap! While it is impossible to expect the word Deal instead of Leap because they don’t share the same features!

(a coming video will explain it all. Be patient)

WHAT IS WORD RECOGNITION?

The process of retrieving word characteristics (including orthographic, phonological, and semantic information) on the basis of the input letter string (Dijkstra, 2005).

In other words, it is how readers retrieve and select the right representation among others in the mental lexicon.

1. FEATURES, LETTERS & WORD INTERACTIONS

Word recognition research has been central to work in cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics because words are relatively well-defined minimal units that carry many of the interesting codes of analysis (i.e., orthography, semantics, syntax). The interest here is to define the perceptual unit in word recognition, it would seem obvious that the letter should be the primary unit of analysis in visual word recognition i.e. words are made up by letters!

Variables that have been pursued in word recognition:

Features

Letters

INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION MODEL

Word Detector

Letter detector

Feature Detector

LEXICAL AND SUBLEXICAL APPROACH• With the lexical approach you see a word and it goes through the orthographic input

lexicon. This contains the memory of written and learnt words. It then moves into the phonological output lexicon which contains the memory of spoken words and pronunciation. Basically this means that if you see the word and have it stored in the memory you will know what it means and how to say it.

• In the sublexical approach you use grapheme phoneme conversion. This means it bypasses the lexical system. It uses your knowledge of phonemes (the sounds of letters) and graphemes (the sound of groups of letters) to decode the word.

• You essentially need both approaches to become fluent in reading and comprehension as without sublexical abilities you cannot decode and learn new words. Without lexical abilities you have problems distinguishing between similar words and also can’t locate already learnt words, or store new words.

Reference: http://phillippadoran.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/lexical-and-sublexical-approaches-to-learning-simplified/

Orthographic Lexicon:

C H E E S E

Phonological Lexicon:

/tʃiːz/

cat

C A T

/kæt/

Orthographic input lexicon and Phonological output lexicon

Chat

C H A T

/kæt/ ??!

Ch = /tʃ/

/tʃæt/

Orthographic input lexicon and Phonological output lexicon

LEXICAL-LEVEL VARIABLES Length word Frequency Familiarity Age of Acquisition Orthographic Neighborhood Effects Phonological Neighborhood Effects

Length: The longer the word is the more time it needs to be recognized.

Fear v.s. Automysophobia (Fear of getting dirty)

word Frequency : The frequency with which a word appears in print has an influence on virtually all word recognition tasks.

since, before, however…. Familiarity: familiar words are easier to be recognized. Panadol , Paracetamol , Brufen, Omeprazole (which words are more familiar to you?)

Age of Acquisition: age of acquisition produces a unique influence on word recognition. Orthographic Neighborhood Effects: words are not recognized in isolation from other

orthographically related representations.

The orthographic neighbors of the word FALL include MALL FELL BALL. Phonological Neighborhood Effects: Lexical decision performance is facilitated by words

with large phonological neighborhoods. GATE has the neighbors HATE and GET

SEMANTIC VARIABLES FOR ISOLATED WORDS

•We will review the semantic variables that play role in word recognition

Concreteness/ Imageability Effects Meaningfulness Grounded Semantics in Large-Scale Databases

CONCRETENESS/ IMAGEABILITY EFFECTS

• Concreteness refers to whether a word can be the object of a sense verb (e.g. touch, see, hear, feel, taste, watch, see) • Can you see that airplane?• Can you taste this soup for me?

• Imageability : Involves subjects rating words on a low to high Imageability scale. High- Imageable words maybe better recognized that low- Imageable words.

MEANINGFULNESS

• The number of dictionary meaning which can vary in subtle but related ways.

CLUB means : to hit : Organization

GROUNDED SEMANTICS IN LARGE-SCALE DATABASES

• To ground semantic via analysis of large databases of natural languages, this approach avoids some of the pitfalls in trying to quantify meaning as feature list.

• DOG the word dog may include the features: furry, bank, pet, four-legged. Or some abstracts prototype : the Modal Dog that is based on your

experience with all dogs.

CONTEXT PRIMING EFFECT

The influences of contexts on word recognition processes.

Two letter strings are typically presented and the researcher manipulates the relation between the two string.

The types of Relationship between the Primes and Targets:

Orthographic Priming Effects Phonological Priming Effects Semantic Priming Effects Syntactic Priming Effects

ORTHOGRAPHIC PRIMING EFFECTS

• In this paradigm, subjects are briefly presented two letters strings that are both preceded and followed by pattern masks.• The two letters string vary in terms of Orthographic phonologically and

semantically.• On most trials, subjects are unable to consciously identify the prime

items and hence any influence of the prime items presumably reflects early access process.• Subjects are better at identifying the second letter string when it

shares letters with the first letter string.

PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING STUDIES

• Pairs of words that are phonologically related

• Bribe – Tribe

SEMANTIC PRIMING EFFECTS

o The prime and the target are from the same semantic category and share features.

The word Dog is a semantic prime for Wolf. (Because the two are both similar animals)

o When a person think of one item in a category, similar items are stimulated by the brain. Even if they are not words, morphemes can prime for complete word that include them. E.x: the morpheme Psych can prime for the word Psychology.

o Associative Priming the target is a word that has a high probability of appearing with

the prime, and is “associated” with it, but not necessarily related in semantic features.

e.g.: Glove and Hat Glove is associative prime for hat since the words are closely

associated and frequently appear together.

SYNTACTIC PRIMING

• Syntax plays role in word recognition when they come within a context and not single word. This means after the word is already recognized.

Thank you

Done by Fawzia Ammoura

@

Islam al Tamimi