Five experiments, involving 265 subjects, were performed with the objective of extending the analysis of response probability as a determinant of the practice effect in tachistoscopic word recognition. The results showed that the response probabilities of words may be manipulated and act as a determinant of the practice effect under certain limited experimental conditions. A more powerful determinant appears to be a general skill in tachistoscopic recognition which improves as a function of the number of stimuli recognized and transfers to the recognition of different stimuli. This skill was examined in the final experiment. The overall results were discussed in terms of both response probability and a general tachistoscopic skill. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

An ambient odour of anise was used in a context-dependent memory study with three different memory tasks targeting both declarative and non-declarative memory functions. Declarative memory was assessed by means of two episodic memory tests; recall of a prose text and a complex figure. Priming was used to assess the non-declarative memory with word fragment completion. Memory was tested immediately and after 48 hours. The results showed a significant main effect of context (odour or not) for all three tests in favour of the olfactory context. In addition, a significant main effect of time was observed for all three tests and a significant interaction effect between context and time for the priming test were observed. This interaction showed that the priming effect was equal in size across both conditions at immediate testing, although when the odour was reinstated at the delayed test the results showed larger priming relative the control condition.

No description available.

Embodied accounts contend that word meaning is grounded in sensory-motor representation. In support of this view, research has found rapid motor priming effects for words like eagle or shoe, which differ as to whether they are typically associated with an up or down spatial direction. These priming effects are held to be the result of motor representations evoked as an obligatory part of understanding the meaning of a word. In a series of experiments, we show that prime words associated with up or down spatial locations produce vertical perturbations in the horizontal movements of a computer mouse, but that these effects are contingent either on directing conscious attention to the spatial meaning of the word, or on the inclusion of the primed spatial direction in the response set, and that this is true even for strongly spatial words such as up and down. These results show that the motor representations associated with such words are not automatically evoked during reading. We discuss implications for claims that spatial representations reflect our embodied perception of the world. / Graduate

Stroop interference through the colour-word task has been a popular means of studying selective attention since its introduction in 1935. Little effort has been made to adapting a non-verbal task for use with pre-school children. Cramer (1976) devised a colour-picture task where pictures characteristically associated with a particular colour (such as a picture of a banana and the colour yellow) were presented in incongruous colours (e.g., a blue banana). A series of studies was conducted with children aged between 3 and 8 years of age which investigated facets of this colour-picture task. Two methods of responding were compared - a verbal response, and a manual response that allowed younger children to participate (a card-sorting technique). In addition to the basic colour-picture task where children named colours and forms, another task was introduced where children 'prescribed' the correct colour of incorrectly-coloured pictures (Santostefano, 1978; Sebovà & Árochovà, 1986). Results showed that children consistently displayed increased latencies when colour-naming and colour-sorting characteristically and uncharacteristically-coloured pictures. Interference was frequently found for inappropriately-coloured but not appropriately-coloured pictures in form-naming/sorting tasks. The prescribing task proved difficult for children to complete and produced increased latencies and error rates. Performance of the naming colour-picture task was compared to classic Stroop colour-word procedures in children aged between 5 and 8. There were correlations between colour naming in the colour-picture and colour-word tasks for children aged 5 - 7. Performance in the prescribing task did not correlate. It is concluded that the tasks are good measures of selective attention but not necessarily direct equivalents of the colour-word task. An evaluation of the verbal and non-verbal methods is also given.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

The purpose of this study was to examine and compare the effectiveness of teacher-directed instruction (i.e., teacher-directed instruction without using an iPad, TDI) and iPad-assisted instruction (IAI) on the word identification and oral reading fluency of elementary school students with reading learning disabilities (RLD), who have reading goals on their individual education plans (IEPs). Four 5th grade students with RLD participated in the study. An alternating treatments design combined with a multiple baseline design across the participants was applied. Visual analysis indicated that a moderate experimental effect from TDI and IAI on word identification and oral reading fluency was present for all four students when the baseline and intervention phases were compared. Specifically, regarding word identification, the percentage of non-overlapping data (PND) and non-overlap of all pairs (NAP) indicated that TDI and IAI are effective reading instructional procedures according to single-case research design standards. The finding was also supported by a Tau-U analysis that suggests both TDI and IAI demonstrated a large effect on improving word identification. Regarding oral reading fluency, however, the results were mixed; Tau-U indicates there was a large and significant effect from TDI and IAI for three of the four students in terms of increasing their oral reading fluency. Although data analysis indicates that TDI and IAI demonstrate moderate evidence in improving word identification and oral reading fluency, there was no clear differentiation found between the two treatments. A social validity questionnaire that examined student perspectives about intervention showed the students' positive views on their intervention experience and revealed their perspectives that intervention was helpful in building their reading skills. The second social validity questionnaire that asked the students about their reading perspectives indicated that the intervention increased their positive attitudes toward their reading (e.g., reading is a source of excitement and interest, reading is fun). / text

This work consists of an investigation into the properties of unknown words in HPSG, and in particular into the phenomenon of multi-word unknown expressions consisting of multiple unknown words in a sequence. The work presented consists first of a study determining the relative frequency of multi-word unknown expressions, and then a survey of the efficacy of a variety of techniques for handling these expressions. The techniques presented consist of modified versions of techniques from the existing unknown-word prediction literature as well as novel techniques, and they are evaluated with a specific concern for how they fare in the context of sentences with many unknown words and long unknown sequences. / text

The primary claim of this dissertation is that children and adults process language in the same manner, meaning that when children are acquiring their first language what they are truly doing is perfecting their language processing abilities. Language acquisition and processing both start from the same place. Both work to find patterns in the signal that will, eventually, be paired with meaning. This dissertation argues that differences in how children and adults accomplish these tasks are one of degree and not kind. To show this, three experiments tested how adults and children responded to a conflict between the lexical and prosodic parse of an utterance. The participants’ response to this conflict reveals information about where they are in the language acquisition process. In these experiments, prosody was used to disambiguate phrases that can be interpreted either as a list of two items (e.g., fruit, salad) or as a single compound item (e.g., fruit-salad). Prosody was also made to conflict with the lexical parse of an utterance. When the word cactus is said with List Prosody two non-words /kæk/ and /tʌs/ result. When the words nail and key are said with Compound Prosody, the non-word nailkey is created. By exploiting the overlap between the prosodic system and the lexical system, it is possible to evaluate how language is being processed. The results show that adults tend to parse utterances based on the lexical content, and ignore ambiguities created by a conflict between the prosodic and the lexical interpretation of the phrase. In contrast, children tend to respond based on the prosody, making increasing use of the lexical content as they mature. When the same items are tested with abstract shapes rather than representational images, adults make greater use of prosody. This suggests that visual input plays a role in spoken word processing. The dissertation also proposes a modified model of spoken word recognition that accounts for the difference seen between the adults and the children, and for the effect of visual content. This model integrates phonetic details, prosodic content, lexical knowledge, visual content, and pragmatic understanding during spoken word recognition.