Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition

Understanding Words • 303

●FIGURE 11.5 (a) The procedure for Swinney’s (1979) experiment. See text for details.

(b) The results of Swinney’s experiment. The fact that the reaction times to ant and spy were

not signifi cantly diff erent showed that people briefl y accessed both meanings of the word

bugs as they heard this word in a sentence. (Source: Based on D. A. Swinney, “Lexical Access During

Sentence Comprehension: (Re)considerations of Context Eff ects,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18,

645–659, 1979.)

(a)

ANT

“... and other bugs.. .”

Flashes when

person hears the

word “bug”

Lexical decision: Word or nonword?

(b)

“Ant” “Spy”

1,000

950

900

Reaction time to lexical^850

decision (ms)

0

“Sky”

Test words

TABLE 11.2 Understanding Words

Eff ect Description Conclusion

Word frequency Words vary in the frequency with which they are used in a

particular language (examples: pretty, demure).

High-frequency words are read faster than low-frequency

words (lexical decision task; eye movements).

Lexical ambiguity Many words have more than one meaning (example: bug). When a word is used in a sentence, multiple meanings are

accessed rapidly, but then the content of the sentence quickly

determines the correct meaning.

is often described in terms of its individual components—such as letters, words, and

sentences—these components are not processed in isolation. As we discuss how we

understand sentences in the next section, we will see more examples of how each of

these components interacts with and infl uences the others.

1. What is special about human language? Consider why human language is
   unique and what it is used for.


2. What events are associated with the beginning of the modern study of language
   in the 1950s?


3. What is psycholinguistics? What are its concerns, and what part of psycholin-
   guistics does this chapter focus on?


4. What are the two components of words?


5. Describe the following demonstrations of how context helps with the percep-
   tion of words and components of words: (1) phonemic restoration effect;
   (2) isolating words from conversations (Pollack and Pickett experiment);
   (3) speech segmentation.

TEST YOURSELF 11.1

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