week 9 - cognitive

• Language


  A shared symbolic system for communication
• Linguistics


  The discipline that takes language as its topic
• Psycholinguistics


  The study of language as it is used and learned by people
• We understand a sentence in the same way whether we read text or listen to someone talking
• There are crucial differences between reading and speech perception
• Reading processes


  • Orthography (word spelling)
  • Phonology (word sound)
  • Semantics (word meaning)
  • Syntax and grammar
  • Higher-level discourse integration
• Naming task


  Say printed word out loud as rapidly as possible
• Lexical decision task


  Decide rapidly whether string of letters forms a word
• Prime words task


  Does a word presented before a target word effect processing of the target?
• Majority of studies on reading consider the English language
• English children learn to read more slowly than children learning a more consistent language
• Weak phonological model


  Phonological processing is inessential for word identification
• Strong phonological model

  Phonological processing central for word identification
• Homophones


  Words with one pronunciation, but two spellings
• More errors made when a word is the homophone of a real word
• Phonological neighbours

  Words that differ in one phoneme
• When reading a sentence, look at words with many neighbours for a shorter amount of time
• Phonological priming


  Words processed faster when prime is phonologically identical
• Brain damaged patients can have impaired phonological processing, but still understand the meaning of words
• Interactive activation model

  Model of visual word processing with recognition units at feature, letter and word levels
• Word superiority effect


  Target letter readily detected in a letter string when the string forms a word rather than a non-word
• Orthographic neighbours


  Words formed by changing one of a target word's letters and can influence recognition time
• Neighbours facilitate target word recognition if they are less frequent, and inhibit it if they are more frequent
• Semantic priming


  Target word recognised faster if preceded by semantically related word
• Dual-route model


  Two routes between printed word and speech: grapheme-phoneme conversion and lexicon/semantic knowledge
• Connectionist triangle model


  Two routes from spelling to sound: direct route and indirect route via word meaning
• Surface dyslexia

  Difficulties reading irregular words
• Phonological dyslexia

  Difficulties reading words and non-words
• Deep dyslexia

  Difficulties reading words and non-words, with semantic errors
• Stages of speech perception

  • Select signal of interest from irrelevant inputs
  • Extract (or decode) the elements of interest (e.g. phonemes) from the speech signal
  • Word identification
  • Comprehension and interpretation
• Adverse conditions decrease speech intelligibility
• Cues used to deal with variability in speech

  • Stress
  • Coarticulation
  • Sentence context
• Hearing loss can make communication more difficult, especially when there is background noise
• Phonetic restoration effect


  Listeners unaware that a phoneme has been removed and replaced by a non-speech sound