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?

Accepted Answer

Baker is the best choice as it has a semantic link with bread, as bakers are the individuals who make and sell bread. This link makes it easier for the brain to recognize bread as a real word when it follows the prime word "baker."

Question 2

Which scenario provides evidence of inhibition?

Accepted Answer

In scenario A, the movement of participants' eyes to the target is slower when there is an irrelevant distractor present (the goat) compared to when there is a relevant distractor present (the present). This suggests that there is inhibition occurring, as the presence of an irrelevant distractor is slowing down the participant's ability to reach the target. Inhibition is the ability to suppress irrelevant or distracting information.

Question 3

Competition tends to

Accepted Answer

Competition among words can create interference, making it more difficult to accurately recognize a specific word. This is known as the interference theory of word recognition.

Question 4

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

Accepted Answer

Phonetic neighborhood density refers to the number of words that can be created by changing one phoneme (sound) in a word. "Bee" has a high phonetic neighborhood density because many words can be formed by changing one sound (e.g., see, pea, fee). The other options have fewer phonetically similar neighbors.

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.

Accepted Answer

The phenomenon described is called the neighborhood density effect. Words that share sounds with many other words (i.e. have a high phonological neighborhood density) are more difficult and take longer to recognize than words that are phonetically distinct from others (i.e. have a low phonological neighborhood density). Semantic priming refers to the activation of related concepts, facilitation refers to the speeding up of a process, and mediated semantic priming involves the activation of an intermediate concept before accessing the target word. None of these terms accurately describe the phenomenon described in the question.

Question 6

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

Accepted Answer

Mediated semantic priming involves presenting a cue word (e.g. bike) followed by a related target word (e.g. pedal) and then a semantically unrelated word (e.g. sock). This creates a chain of activation from the cue word to the related target word and then to the unrelated word. Choice C best represents this sequence as the activation flows from bike to pedal to foot (related but less strongly) to sock (unrelated). The other choices either lack a clear related/unrelated word sequence or have unrelated words in between related words.

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

Accepted Answer

Masked priming reduces the likelihood of participants using conscious strategies to think of related words, allowing researchers to study automatic processing.

Question 8

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

Accepted Answer

Transitional probability between phonemes is more related to phonological processing rather than directly affecting word recognition time.

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?

Accepted Answer

Doctor and ornithologist differ in frequency, length, and age of acquisition, making them difficult to compare in the same condition. The other options have more comparable linguistic properties and semantic relationships.

Question 10

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

Accepted Answer

The answer of If participants were asked to respond by...

Question 11

Identify the pair of homophones.

Accepted Answer

The words "peer" and "pier" are homophones, words that sound the same but have different meanings and spellings.

Question 12

Which scenario describes a crossmodal task?

Accepted Answer

A crossmodal task involves processing information across different sensory modalities, such as hearing a sentence and then seeing a letter sequence.

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?

Accepted Answer

Swinney's 1979 study found that increasing the ISI (interstimulus interval) between the test word and the prime led to decreased activation of the test word's meaning that was not primed. This suggests that the processing of the prime interferes with the processing of the test word, and that more time is needed for the interference to dissipate before the test word can be processed accurately.

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?

Accepted Answer

Duffy et al. found that subordinate words take longer to read than dominant words. "Cabinet" is a less frequently used and subordinate term for a collection of people, whereas "group" is a more commonly used and less subordinate term, making "cabinet" the word that would take longer to read.

Question 15

Which scenario illustrates implicit priming of behavior?

Accepted Answer

Implicit priming of behavior refers to an unconscious influence on behavior caused by previously encountered stimuli. In this scenario, participants are unconsciously primed to think about sleep-related concepts when presented with words related to sleep, which leads to an increased rate of yawning.

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?

Accepted Answer

Masked priming involves presenting a stimulus below the level of conscious awareness to influence processing, which is not relevant to the context-based recognition of word meanings.

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?

Accepted Answer

Marslen-Wilson's cohort model proposes that all possible words that could match the incoming phonological input are activated in parallel during initial processing. These activated words form a cohort, and through further processing, the cohort is reduced until the correct word is recognized. This can lead to phonetically similar words such as store and stomp being activated during the initial processing of storm.

Question 18

The uniqueness point for the word rotund is

Accepted Answer

The uniqueness point of a word is the point at which it can be distinguished from all other words in a list or dictionary. For "rotund," "rotu" is the earliest point in the word where it can be uniquely identified, distinguishing it from similar words like "rot," "rote," or "rotor."

Question 19

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

Accepted Answer

The answer of Which word pair represents the closest cohort...

Question 20

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

Accepted Answer

The presentation of batter increasing eye fixation times for an image of a soldier (a cohort competitor that shares some semantic features with batter, such as being related to war) supports the idea that semantic information about cohort competitors may be activated during incremental language processing.

Quiz 7: Word Recognition