Deck 7: Word Recognition

Question 1

If participants were asked to complete a lexical decision task, which priming word would result in the fastest recognition of bread as a real word?

A) Baker, because of the semantic link between bread and a bakery
B) Child, because children often enjoy baked goods that come from bakers
C) Mailbox, because of the similar shape between a mailbox and a loaf of bread
D) White, because this is the typical color of bread

Answer 1

A

Question 2

Which scenario provides evidence of inhibition?

A) When participants are shown a display containing pictures of a boat, a seed, a goat, and a light bulb, and are asked to click on the boat, the movement of their eyes to the target is slower than when the goat is replaced by a present.
B) When participants are shown a display containing pictures of a boat, a seed, an anchor, and a light bulb, and are asked to click on the boat, the movement of their eyes to the target is faster than when the anchor is replaced by a present.
C) During a lexical decision task, participants more quickly identify still as a word if they were previously primed by the word stiff than if primed by door.
D) When asked to click on the hammer, participants ignore the picture of a box of tissues because it is not related to a hammer.

Answer 2

A

Question 3

Competition tends to

A) facilitate word recognition.
B) inhibit word recognition.
C) lead to steady improvement in word recognition over time.
D) enhance semantic priming.

Answer 3

B

Question 4

Which of the following words has the highest phonetic neighborhood density?

A) Bee
B) Orange
C) Swing
D) Harp

Question 5

_______ is the phenomenon in which it takes longer to recognize a word that shares sounds with many other words than it does to recognize a word that is very phonetically distinct from other words.

A) Semantic priming
B) Facilitation
C) Neighborhood density effect
D) Mediated semantic priming

Question 6

Which word activation sequence best represents what you would expect to occur during mediated semantic priming?

A) hemlock → key → door → window
B) spit → spin → spot → spout
C) bike → pedal → foot → sock
D) stem → flower → petal → rose

Question 7

Here is a lexical decision task in which a prime is presented very briefly, covered by a "mask," and then followed by a target word. What is the rationale for using this masked priming methodology?
Related Prime
Prime: NURSE (50 ms)
Mask: ##### (500 ms)
Target: DOCTOR
Unrelated Prime
Prime: WRENCH (50 ms)
Mask: ###### (500 ms)
Target: DOCTOR

A) It reduces the likelihood that participants will use a task-specific strategy of trying to think of words related to NURSE or WRENCH.
B) It increases the likelihood that participants will respond faster to DOCTOR when it is preceded by a related word, such as NURSE, than an unrelated word, like WRENCH.
C) It decreases the likelihood that participants will respond faster to DOCTOR when it is preceded by a related word, such as NURSE, than an unrelated word, like WRENCH.
D) It allows researchers to present the target stimulus at just the right time when a priming effect is most likely to occur.

Question 8

Which of the following is not a factor affecting word recognition time?

A) Frequency
B) Age when the word is first acquired
C) Transitional probability between phonemes
D) Length

Question 9

If you were designing a study, which of the following two words would not be fair to include in the same condition due to differences in how they are accessed?

A) Battle and paddle because they rhyme and are a minimal pair
B) Doctor and ornithologist because they differ in frequency, length and age of acquisition
C) Teacher and teaches because they are two different parts of speech
D) Love and peace because they are too conceptually similar and conceptually abstract

Question 10

If participants were asked to respond by pulling a lever toward or away from them, which of the following results might happen?

A) Pulling faster toward themselves for the target sentence She opened the drawer than for She closed the drawer
B) Pushing faster away from themselves for the target sentence She opened the drawer than for She closed the drawer
C) Pushing faster away from themselves for the target sentence She grabbed a cold soda from the fridge than for She put the soda in the fridge
D) Pulling faster toward themselves for the target sentence She pushed her friend toward the door than for She pulled her friend away from the door

Question 11

Identify the pair of homophones.

A) listen, hear
B) breed, bred
C) sew, sewn
D) peer, pier

Question 12

Which scenario describes a crossmodal task?

A) Participants primed with an image of a horse must decide if the letter sequence they see next is a word or a non-word.
B) Participants hear the sentence John jumped in the water, and must decide if the letter sequence they see next is a word or a non-word.
C) After hearing the word anger, participants are asked to say as many semantically related words as possible in 30 seconds.
D) After seeing a series of various dog faces, participants are asked to categorize visually presented words as animal or object.

Question 13

In Swinney's 1979 crossmodal priming study, which condition led to decreased activation of the test word's meaning that was not primed?

A) Decreasing the ISI between the test word and the prime
B) Presenting the study passage at a louder volume
C) Increasing the ISI between the test word and the prime
D) Presenting the study passage text on the screen along with the auditory presentation of the study passage

Question 14

You are running a study similar to Duffy et al.'s 1988 experiment. You will present participants with the following sentence: The advisory _______ met once per week. The blank will be filled with either cabinet or group. Which word will take participants longer to read, and why?

A) Group, because it is a more commonly used word than cabinet in the English language
B) Cabinet, because it is the more often used and dominant term for a collection of people
C) Group, because it is an unambiguous word for a collection of people
D) Cabinet, because it is the less frequently used and subordinate term for a collection of people

Question 15

Which scenario illustrates implicit priming of behavior?

A) Observing the rate of yawning in participants when presented with words related to sleep (including dream and bed) versus words not related to sleep
B) Observing whether participants choose an item of clothing based on its accessibility/position in their closet
C) Comparing food sales at 9:00 am with those at to 5:00 pm at a fast food restaurant
D) Measuring participants' positive/negative ratings of the phrase energy exploration compared with drilling for oil

Question 16

You hear the sentence "Liam was out in the yard digging in the garden," and subsequently you recognize the word mole faster as the animal and not in the sense of being a spy. Which is not a realistic explanation for this effect?

A) Pre-activation of semantic features based on context
B) Bottom-up recognition of multiple meanings
C) Inhibitory links between multiple meanings of polysemous words
D) Masked priming

Question 17

As you begin to hear the word storm, other phonetically similar words such as store and stomp may also be activated during the first few hundred milliseconds of storm. Which model or effect best accounts for this type of spoken word activation?

A) Neighborhood density effect
B) Marslen-Wilson's cohort model
C) McGurk effect
D) Implicit semantic priming

Question 18

The uniqueness point for the word rotund is

A) ro.
B) rot.
C) rotu.
D) rotun.

Question 19

Which word pair represents the closest cohort competitors of the word sandwich?

A) sandy, sandal
B) sumo, sushi
C) satiate, satire
D) song, seal

Question 20

Which example supports the idea that semantic information about cohort competitors may be activated during incremental language processing?

A) Presentation of batter speeds up lexical decision responses to battle and bat.
B) Presentation of batter increases eye fixation times for an image of a soldier compared with a librarian.
C) Presentation of batter increases eye fixation times for an image of a bat compared with a phone.
D) Presentation of batter speeds up lexical decision responses to cake.

Question 21

Imagine that your child is learning a popular holiday song, and instead of singing "All of the other reindeer," she has learned the words as "Olive, the other reindeer." This is an example of

A) the rhyme effect.
B) a homograph.
C) a mondegreen.
D) the Ganong effect.

Question 22

Refer to the figure.
You are carrying out an eye-tracking experiment using this display, similar to one used in Allopenna et al. (1998). The longer eye fixation on the parrot compared to the nickel at the prompt Pick up the carrot is best explained by the

A) cohort model.
B) McGurk effect.
C) Ganong effect.
D) TRACE model.

Question 23

In Spivey and Marian's 1999 study, bilingual English-Russian speakers heard instructions such as Can you hand me the marker? At the same time, the subjects were shown a set of objects that included a stamp, which is pronounced /marka/ in Russian, and a marker. The results of the study support the conclusion that

A) lexical items belonging to different languages can compete with one another.
B) the neighborhood density effect applies to each language separately.
C) the McGurk effect is found only in a person's dominant language.
D) phoneme restoration applies to both languages, but not to the same degree.

Question 24

Imagine you are learning an obscure language spoken by only a few dozen people in the Sahara Desert. They tell you the translation for "apple" in their language is pronounced "kal-ko-MAR-ko." They write this word like so: What type of writing system do these Saharans use?

A) Logographic
B) Syllabic
C) Morphemic
D) Alphabetic

Question 25

The equation 4 + 3 = 7 conveys meaning using a _______ writing system, whereas the word seven conveys meaning using a _______ writing system.

A) syllabic; logographic
B) alphabetic; syllabic
C) logographic; alphabetic
D) logographic; syllabic

Question 26

_______ is required to identify the distinct phonemes contained in the word trilobite, a difficult task for young children and illiterate adults.

A) Masked priming
B) Incremental language processing
C) Perceptual invariance
D) Phonemic awareness

Question 27

Considering models of reading, the word _______ is more likely to be activated via the direct route, whereas _______ would be activated by the assembled phonology route.

A) mint; fit
B) colonel, mint
C) mint; enough
D) enough; colonel

Question 28

At the county fair, you hear your sister yell, "Look at the be_ le." You are surrounded by barking dogs and thus interpret be_ le as beagle, not beetle. Proponents of _______ would argue that your awareness of the context affected your interpretation of the ambiguous word.

A) a modular mind design
B) an integrative mind design
C) the cohort model
D) the dual route model

Question 29

Which of the following is not a reason the English language's system of spelling is very loosely connected to pronunciation?

A) Language pronunciation has been changing while spelling has stayed the same.
B) Scribes spelled words with an influence of French and Latin.
C) A centralized group of scribes decided spelling early on and did not update the rules.
D) Anglo-Saxons adopted an alphabet that did not perfectly correspond to individual phonemes of the English language.

Question 30

If you are shopping at a market in a country where you do not speak or read the language, you are most likely to understand how much to pay for goods if their prices are presented in

A) morphemes.
B) syllabic characters.
C) logographs.
D) alphabetic characters.

Question 31

Yee and Sedivy's 2006 study used the eye-tracking technique to investigate auditory semantic priming. Provide an example of the kind of visual display that was used, describe their findings, and briefly relate these findings to investigations of the same phenomenon using a lexical decision task.

Question 32

Using the lexical decision task, design an experiment to compare the effects of form versus semantic priming on word activation. Include the expected results in your answer.

Question 33

How does mediated semantic priming provide support for a spreading activation model of word activation?

Question 34

Describe how both excitatory and inhibitory connections can contribute to the process of recognizing the word stove.

Question 35

Are words in memory isolated abstract representations of meaning, or are they linked to perceptual memories of our experiences of the meanings of words? Support your answer with evidence from the text.

Question 36

Refer to the figure.
Based on the figure, describe the effects of context on word activation and how the models in A and B differ with regard to how they characterize the influence of context on understanding the ambiguous word bank.

Question 37

Consider the Berger and Fitzsimons (2008) study in which photographs of dogs were presented to people, after which they felt more positively about products with the Puma brand name. This is presumably because the semantic relationship between dogs and pumas made the brand name feel more familiar, a factor that is known to promote positive attitudes. Design an experiment involving brand names to further explore the link between familiarity and attitudes, but focus on familiarity related to the sounds of brand names rather than their meanings. Be sure to include examples of key stimuli and appropriate controls, and to specify which conditions you are comparing and the results you expect.

Question 38

Refer to the figure.
Based on Allopenna et al.'s 1998 study, describe the time course of spoken word activation and what would happen as subjects hear the word beaker while viewing this figure.

Question 39

What prediction would the cohort model make about the activation of the word weaver when subjects hear the word cleaver? What prediction would the TRACE model make in the same scenario? Explain the mechanisms behind each model's predictions.

Question 40

You want to observe and measure lexical activation and describe the incremental dynamics of some process. What measurement tools might you use and why?

Question 41

Consider Perfetti et al.'s 2010 analysis of which brain areas are activated during reading of Chinese and English characters and what you know about the differences between the alphabetic and logographic writing systems. What advice would you give an English speaker learning to read Chinese?

Question 42

Use the connectionist model of reading to explain how we learn to read both irregularly spelled words (such as knock and enough) and phonetically regular ones (e.g., mint and stab).

Question 43

If you were to redesign the orthography of the English language to better correspond to pronunciation, what aspects would you change, and what challenges to a uniform pronunciation would you encounter?