I am M.A Linguistics Student and this is my first presentation about Psycho linguistics titled: Visual Word Recognition; in which my colleague and I explain how our minds recognize words. The journey starts from the orthographic lexicon and ends in meaning. I welcome your comments.

1. VISUAL WORD
RECOGNITION

2. In this presentation:
• What is Word Recognition?
• Features, letters & word interactions
Interactive Activation Model
• Lexical and Sublexical Approach
Orthographic input lexicon and Phonological output Lexicon
• Lexical- level Variables
• Semantic Variables for Isolated words
• Context Priming Effect
• Orthographic Priming Effect
• Phonological Priming Studies
• Semantic Priming Effects
• Syntactic Priming

3. Why do you think you could read this?

4. Words are saved in our minds as a whole in the orthographic lexicon, where
words are recognized and stored.
Orthography : الرسم الاملائي
We will take the word Laep as an example. Hmmm read it again!! is it Leap or Laep?
You could read it in the right way because the non-word Laep has the same features of the
word leap! While it is impossible to expect the word Deal instead of Leap because they
don’t share the same features!
(a coming video will explain it all. Be patient)

5. WHAT IS WORD RECOGNITION?
The process of retrieving word characteristics (including
orthographic, phonological, and semantic information) on the
basis of the input letter string (Dijkstra, 2005).
In other words, it is how readers retrieve and select the right
representation among others in the mental lexicon.

6. 1. FEATURES, LETTERS & WORD INTERACTIONS
Word recognition research has been central to work in cognitive psychology and
psycholinguistics because words are relatively well-defined minimal units that carry
many of the interesting codes of analysis (i.e., orthography, semantics, syntax). The
interest here is to define the perceptual unit in word recognition, it would seem
obvious that the letter should be the primary unit of analysis in visual word
recognition i.e. words are made up by letters!
Variables that have been pursued in word recognition:
 Features
 Letters

7. INTERACTIVE ACTIVATION MODEL

8. LEXICAL AND SUBLEXICAL APPROACH
• With the lexical approach you see a word and it goes through the orthographic input
lexicon. This contains the memory of written and learnt words. It then moves into the
phonological output lexicon which contains the memory of spoken words and
pronunciation. Basically this means that if you see the word and have it stored in the
memory you will know what it means and how to say it.
• In the sublexical approach you use grapheme phoneme conversion. This means it bypasses
the lexical system. It uses your knowledge of phonemes (the sounds of letters) and
graphemes (the sound of groups of letters) to decode the word.
• You essentially need both approaches to become fluent in reading and comprehension as
without sublexical abilities you cannot decode and learn new words. Without lexical
abilities you have problems distinguishing between similar words and also can’t locate
already learnt words, or store new words.
Reference: http://phillippadoran.wordpress.com/2011/03/07/lexical-and-sublexical-approaches-to-learning-simplified/

9. Orthographic
Lexicon:
C H E E S E
Phonological
Lexicon:
/tʃiːz/

10. cat
C A T
/kæt/
Orthographic input lexicon and Phonological output lexicon

11. Chat
C H A T
/kæt/ ??!
Ch = /tʃ/
/tʃæt/
Orthographic input lexicon and Phonological output lexicon

12. LEXICAL-LEVEL VARIABLES
 Length
 word Frequency
 Familiarity
 Age of Acquisition
 Orthographic Neighborhood Effects
 Phonological Neighborhood Effects

13.  Length: The longer the word is the more time it needs to be recognized.
Fear v.s. Automysophobia (Fear of getting dirty)
 word Frequency : The frequency with which a word appears in print has an influence on
virtually all word recognition tasks.
since, before, however….
 Familiarity: familiar words are easier to be recognized.
Panadol , Paracetamol , Brufen, Omeprazole (which words are more familiar to you?)
 Age of Acquisition: age of acquisition produces a unique influence on word
recognition.
 Orthographic Neighborhood Effects: words are not recognized in isolation from
other orthographically related representations.
The orthographic neighbors of the word FALL include MALL FELL BALL.
 Phonological Neighborhood Effects: Lexical decision performance is facilitated by
words with large phonological neighborhoods.
GATE has the neighbors HATE and GET

14. SEMANTIC VARIABLES FOR ISOLATED WORDS
•We will review the semantic variables that play role in word
recognition
Concreteness/ Imageability Effects
 Meaningfulness
 Grounded Semantics in Large-Scale Databases

15.  CONCRETENESS/ IMAGEABILITY EFFECTS
• Concreteness refers to whether a word can be the object of a sense verb (e.g. touch,
see, hear, feel, taste, watch, see)
• Can you see that airplane?
• Can you taste this soup for me?
• Imageability : Involves subjects rating words on a low to high Imageability scale.
High- Imageable words maybe better recognized that low- Imageable words.

16.  MEANINGFULNESS
• The number of dictionary meaning which can vary in subtle
but related ways.
CLUB means
: to hit
: Organization

17.  GROUNDED SEMANTICS IN LARGE-SCALE DATABASES
• To ground semantic via analysis of large databases of natural
languages, this approach avoids some of the pitfalls in trying to
quantify meaning as feature list.
• DOG
the word dog may include the features: furry, bank, pet, four-legged.
Or some abstracts prototype : the Modal Dog that is based on your
experience with all dogs.

18. CONTEXT PRIMING EFFECT
The influences of contexts on word recognition processes.
Two letter strings are typically presented and the researcher manipulates the
relation between the two string.
The types of Relationship between the Primes and Targets:
Orthographic Priming Effects
 Phonological Priming Effects
 Semantic Priming Effects
 Syntactic Priming Effects

19. ORTHOGRAPHIC PRIMING EFFECTS
• In this paradigm, subjects are briefly presented two letters strings that
are both preceded and followed by pattern masks.
• The two letters string vary in terms of Orthographic phonologically and
semantically.
• On most trials, subjects are unable to consciously identify the prime
items and hence any influence of the prime items presumably reflects
early access process.
• Subjects are better at identifying the second letter string when it
shares letters with the first letter string.

20. PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING STUDIES
• Pairs of words that are phonologically related
• Bribe – Tribe

21. SEMANTIC PRIMING EFFECTS
o The prime and the target are from the same semantic category and
share features.
The word Dog is a semantic prime for Wolf. (Because the two are
both similar animals)
o When a person think of one item in a category, similar items are
stimulated by the brain. Even if they are not words, morphemes can
prime for complete word that include them. E.x: the morpheme
Psych can prime for the word Psychology.

22. o Associative Priming
the target is a word that has a high probability of appearing with
the prime, and is “associated” with it, but not necessarily related in
semantic features.
e.g.:
Glove and Hat
Glove is associative prime for hat since the words are closely
associated and frequently appear together.

23. SYNTACTIC PRIMING
• Syntax plays role in word recognition when they come within a
context and not single word. This means after the word is
already recognized.

24. Done by Fawzia Ammoura
@
Islam al Tamimi
Thank you 