Greg Detre
Friday, November 03, 2000
How does context affect word recognition?
Do we access multiple interpretations of ambiguous words
during the process of word recognition?
Are serial and interactive models of word recognition
necessarily incompatible with each other?
Lexical processing is one of the early steps in language: in comprehension it involves lexical access and (then) word recognition, or in production involves lexical selection
The mental lexicon is like a dicitonary: it stores information about the pronunciation, spelling, part of speech and points to the meaning of a word
Lexical processing refers to recognising a word and its meaning, both in spoken or written form. This requires separating the auditory or visual input into words, on the basis of pauses/gaps and other features of the signal. This is all perceptual information. Information like the topic of discussion, accompanying images (e.g. in an advertisement), cultural norms etc. is contextual information.
Lexical access is differentiated from word recognition in some models as throwing up a number of candidates from which the final one is confirmed/identified/selected.
There are various experimental findings which any model of lexical processing needs to account for:
frequency effect � more common words (measurable for instance in terms of the number of occurrences in a linguistic corpus) are responded to faster in lexical decision and pronounciation tasks
word/non-word effect � non-words that don�t conform to the rules of English orthography/phonotactics are rejected very fast. Also, the closer a non-word is to a real word, the harder it is to reject
context effect � if previous words or a pair of words are related in context, then lexical decision is faster than if the context is neutral, e.g. �xxxxx butter� as opposed to �bread butter�. It is not clear exactly though what types of clues context offers.
degradation or stimulus quality effect � ink blots and anything else that affects the perceptual information adversely obviously makes lexical processing harder and slower
word-superiority effect � it seems that we are better at recognising a letter as part of a word than on its own, implying that we don�t just look at the letters and then see which word they seem to form, but that the emerging list of candidate words affects our guesses about letters
aren�t the frequency effect and the context effect to do with priming???
difference between orthography + phonotactics???