Some techniques and effects related to lexical access and word recognition
- Lexical decision task -- Respond "word" or "not word"
- What is measured: Reaction time and accuracy rate
- What is relevant:
- There are effects of frequency/familiarity, neighborhood density (how many similar words exist)
- Priming can affect results
- Words and nonwords have different response patterns
- Examples
- Priming -- Stimulus A primes stimulus B when prior presentation of A
makes the response to B faster
- Semantic priming: DOCTOR primes NURSE
- Phonetic/phonological priming: Similar-sounding words prime each other (this can have semantic priming effects; in Dutch, auditory presentation of kapitein 'captain' and kapitaal 'capital' both primed a word meaning 'money')
- Is there "morphological priming"? Is it separate from the above? Suppose we find that unhappy primes unkind -- what are some possible explanations for this fact, and how could we try to distinguish among them?
- Eye-tracking -- What images people look at while hearing a stimulus can indicate what linguistic representations they are accessing or constructing
- Neurolinguistic methods -- An area under rapid development
- Examine which areas of the brain are active in processing linguistic stimuli
- Use this information to determine (for example) whether two kinds of linguistic structures or linguistic 'errors' are of similar or different types, are dealt with by the linguistic processing system at earlier or later stages, etc.
- Examples
Some issues to keep in mind when interpreting the results of psycholinguistic experiments
- How automatic is the task? Are people being asked to make decisions directly about the linguistic property in question, or is some more subconscious effect being measured?
- Is the linguistic system being tapped "directly", or are other factors -- such as working memory -- involved in the subject's response as well?
- If other factors are involved, can they be controlled for or held constant?