Spoken and visual word recognition

What did Dahan et al find in an eye tracking study to investigate parallel activation of sound matches using bench (target), bed, bell and apple pictures?

• Fixation on bench from about 500ms

• Roughly equal fixation on bed, bell and bench before 500 ms, multiple words matching input are activated.

• Highest fixation on bed at start → maybe most common

• Less fixation on apple

What did Yee and Sedivy find in a eye tracking study of semantic matches using pictures lock (target), key, deer and apple?

• Highest fixation on lock

• Also fixation on key over the other words, even once already looking at lock

• Suggests semantic association

What can be suggested about eye tracking studies and parallel activation?

Perhaps seeing pictures in study is partially responsible for activating other words

What is competition theory of parallel activation?

• Different words might have numbers of different other similar words which compete with each other.

• E.g. rat → hat, cat, mat, rap, ran

• BUT e.g wolf → wolf, wool

• Wolf less competitors so may be easier to recognise

What did Ziegler et al find in study of competition in parallel activation where ppts were presented with recordings of real words with few or many competitors (e.g. rat vs wolf) as well as fake words (e.g. dax) and had to indicate whether they were hearing real word or not?

• Slower to say yes with words that have many sound competitors compared to those with few sound competitors

• E.g. slower for wolf than rat

What is priming in parallel activation of words?

• When hearing word may activate multiple words → e.g snow → snack. These words may activate other semantically related words, e.g. cold, food

• Idea that if words activated should be recognised rapidly in comparison to unactivated words

What did Zwitserlood (1989) find in a study of priming in parallel activation of words where ppts listened to one set of words that may activate other candidates but ask them to recognise target words on screen (real or fake words) and have them decide if target on screen is real or fake?

• Ppts faster to recognise targets that are semantically related to words they hear at same time in comparison to unrelated words.

• Priming effect for multiple related words

What is activation of meanings in relation to parallel activation?

• Multiple meanings triggered from one word'

• E.g. second → time or second place?

What did Rodd et al find in a study of competition for meanings in parallel activation using words with many meanings vs words with single meanings (e.g. second vs carrot)?

Slower to recognise words with many meaning competitors compared to few meaning competitors

How can context influence word recognition?

• Constrains parallel activation of words

• Constrains parallel activation of meanings