LINA02H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Lexical Decision Task, Psycholinguistics, Spinach
Document Summary
The mind imposes discrete, abstract categories which don"t exist in the physical world. Gradations in the phonetic categories are ignored. Spanish: prevoicing, boundary at oms: spanish [p] sounds like english [b] Our perception of speech doesn"t necessarily match the acoustic/physical stimulus. We impose our native language categories on continuous acoustic dimensions. Morphemes (words: re, -ing, happy, wash, dog, rules, info about non-predictable meaning, psycholinguistics studies how these are all organized in your mental grammar. 250 ms to find" a word in the. Meaning: semantics: brain-damage sometimes leads to difficulties in accessing particular categories. Tools, fruits, veggies, animals, closed-class words: suggests semantic organization of the lexicon (somewhere in the brain, words about fruits are clustered together, lexical decision task: word is flashed on computer screen. Decide as quickly and accurately as possible whether a stimulus is a word or not. Response latency (reaction time) comparison for different kinds of stimuli teach us something about how the lexicon is structure and accessed.
