Visual Word Recognition

Dr.sc. Anita Memievi

Visual words
literacy is a relatively new development
some interesting facts:
university students receptive vocabulary c.
50000 words
their reading rates c. 300 words per minute one word in 0.2 seconds (recognition +
comprehension)
visual word recognition extremely fast!

Basic terms bottom-up & topdown processing

bottom-up: processing that is purely data
driven
putting parts of language together, in a linear fashion (letters into
words, words into phrases, phrases into clauses, clauses into sentences,
sentences into text)

top-down: processing that involves

knowledge coming from higher levels
e.g. the context may influence the way you understand sentences or
words; the sentence level may influence how you perceive or
understand a particular word; etc.

Methods

6 main methods to explore:

1) brain imaging,
2) eye movements,
3) measuring naming times,
4) measuring lexical decision times,
5) measuring categorisation times,
6)tachitoscopic identification

Measuring eye movements

limbus tracking - good at horizontal, but bad at
vertical eye movements
Purkinje system - accurate at tracking both
horizontal and vertical movements
eye-tracking:
saccades = fast movements of the eye
fixation = still periods
regression = returning to the previous material

Eye-tracking
measures: first fixation, gaze duration,
regression path duration - they reflect
integration processes
measures: repeated fixations in a region,
duration of saccades between fixations,
likelihood of skipping over the ROIs indicate difficulty in language processing

Eye-tracking
The preferred fixation point in English: between the
beginning and middle of the word (most informative part
of the word)
Try reconstructing the following sentences. Which is easier
to reconstruct?
1 _he ___tion _f ___tions ___ies _n ___ding.
2 Th_ loca___ o_ fixa_____ var___ i_ read___.

Reaction times
naming task - visually presented word, subjects have to name it latency typically around 500ms
lexical decision task - is a string of letters a word or not (both RTs and
error rate)
semantic categorisation - make a decision that taps semantic processes:
e.g. - is word apple a fruit or a vegetable, is object referred to by a
word bigger or smaller than a ball, etc.
tachitoscopic identification - show words for very brief times - we
measure thresholds at which subjects can no longer identify items
priming - prime & target - SOA= stimulus-onset asynchrony - the time
between stimulus onset and the start of target

What makes word recognition

easier?
we can slow down recognition!
stimulus degradation (breaking up letters, rotating the word, reducing
contrast);
backwards masking (another stimulus immediately after the target):
energy masking - masking stimulus is unstructured (e.g. a burst of
light)
pattern masking - masking stimulus structured (e.g. random patterns of
letters)
masking - used to study perception without awareness - we can access
semantic info without conscious awareness of the item COMPLICATED!

What makes word recognition

easier?
frequency of words - commonly used words are easier to
recognise - IMPORTANT TO CONTROL FOR FREQUENCY
IN EXPERIMENTS!
age-of-acquisition of a word - children learn more common
words early (BUT exceptions: giant, fairy, etc.) - words learned
early named quicker and more accurately
word length - some effect for words between 5 and 7 letters
syllables have more effect
neighbourhood effects - words that have more neighbours easier
to recognise, naming is faster for those that have fewer
neighbours

Words - Nonwords
words responded to faster than nonwords
pseudowords (pronounceable nonwords) takes longer to reject them (e.g. siant - takes
more time to reject than tnszv)

Priming effects
repetition priming - once you see it, its easier to recognise
it; in lexical decision tasks - repetition priming effects
stronger for low frequency words than for high frequency
semantic priming - identification of a word can be
facilitated by prior exposure to a word related in meaning faster to say that doctor is a word if it is preceded by
nurse than by bread
other properties that affect recognition: grammatical
category, imageability, meaningfulness, concreteness

Stroop test

Stroop

red

Stroop

green

Stroop

yellow

Stroop

red

Attentional processes in visual

word recognition

when we see a word we cant help but read it!

Stroop task : red, green, yellow, red
mechanisms involved in priming:
1) automatic processing - fast, parallel, not prone to
interference, does not demand working memory space,
cannot be prevented, always facilitatory, not directly
available to consciousness
2) attentional processing - slow, serial, sensitive to
interference, uses WM space, can be prevented, can involve
inhibition, results often directly available to consciousness

Frequency
When does it have effect?
Is it inherent in the way words are stored?
Does it merely affect the way in which
participants respond in experimental tasks?
Most researchers believe that frequency
does have an automatic, lexical effect on
word recognition

Is there a special visual-word

recognition system?
reading - a new phenomenon
more likely - word recognition system tacked onto
other cognitive and perceptual processes
visual word form area - part of the left ventral
visual cortex around the fusiform gyrus more
sensitive to words and pseudowords than strings of
consonants - area sensitive to orthographic
properties of words (processes words at an abstract
level of representation)

Meaning-based facilitation of
visual word recognition
type of priming influences reaction
associative priming (words are associated if subjects produce one in
response to another in a word association task)
non-associative priming (still have a relation in terms of meaning to
the target, but are not produced as associates: e.g. dance - skate,
animal - fox)
association - seems to be primary influence - e.g. doctor - nurse frequently co-occur which leads to strengthening of connections in the
lexicon (and not because of overlap in meaning)
but at least some aspects of semantic relation can cause automatic
facilitation

Does sentence context affect

visual word recognition?
It is important to brush your teeth every
single ________. - facilitates recognition of
a word such as day; evidence - N400
sentence context can have either an early
perceptual effect or a late post-perceptual
effect

Models of visual word

recognition

all models:
input = a perceptual representation of a word;
output = desired information (i.e. meaning, sound and familiarity)
all models have to answer 4 questions:
1) Is processing autonomous or interactive? (esp. top-down effects)
2) Is lexical access a serial or a parallel process?
3) Can activation cascade from 1 level to a later one, or must processing
by the later stage wait until the earlier one is completed?
4) How do we find items? Searching through the lexicon, or because their
storage location is defined by their content (content addressability)?
2 types of models: serial access; multiple activation of units (Logogen)

Forsters autonomous serial

search model
we identify words by a serial search through
the lexicon - access files that point to master
files
items ordered in terms of frequency - more
frequent terms examined first
very influential model - standard against
which others are compared

Logogen model
Morton (1969, 1970)
every word we know has its own simple feature logogen - corresponding to it
logogen accumulates evidence until its individual
threshold level is reached - when this happens word
is recognised
lexical access is direct, simultaneous and in parallel
for all words
a precursor to connectionist models

Interactive activation and

competition (IAC)

McClelland & Rumelhart (1981)

simple processing units arranged in 3 levels:
1) input level of visual feature units
2) level where units correspond to individual
letters
3) output level - each unit corresponds to a
word

Hybrid models
combine parallelism with serial search
CONCLUSION:
most researchers agree that the initial stages
of lexical access involve parallel direct
access, although serial processes might
subsequently be involved in checking
prepared responses

Context and visual word

recognition
Paran (2003):
It is poor readers who use context for
guessing words, whereas good readers are
distinguished by quick automatic
recognition of words

Context and visual word

recognition
it seems that context does influence word recognition
the reason why no clear experimental results were obtained
because in skilled readers automatic recognition of
words (bottom-up processing) is so fast that the word is
normally recognised before the context had a chance to
exert an effect (top-down processing; guessing)
when bottom-up processing is slowed down for some
reason, context and guessing come to play a compensatory
role

Context and visual word

recognition

What can slow down the bottom-up processing?

poor reading skills
poor quality of print\illegible handwriting
reading non-standard language (e.g. learner language)

in all these cases top-down processing (i.e. context) will have to

compensate for the problems experienced in bottom-up processing
it is not that good and poor readers have different strategies for using
context good readers do not have to rely on context as much to
recognise words

Coping with lexical ambiguity

homophones, heterographic homophones (e.g.
knight/night), homographs, polysemous words
most of the time we arent aware of this ambiguity
and use context of the sentence to disambiguate
the sentence
when we encounter an ambiguous word all
meanings are activated and context is subsequently
used to very quickly select the right meaning