300 • CHAPTER 11 Language
baby. There is evidence that young children learn these rules about what sounds go
together in words and what sounds are more likely to be separated into two different
words (Gomez & Gerkin, 1999, 2000; Saffran et al., 1999).Reading: Perceiving Letters Although most of the research we will be describing in
this chapter involves spoken language, it is worth noting that the effect of context in
perceiving phonemes and words has also been demonstrated to play a role in perceiving
written letters. The word superiority effect refers to the fi nding that letters are easier
to recognize when they are contained in a word than when they appear alone or are
contained in a nonword. This effect was fi rst demonstrated by G. M. Reicher in 1969
using the following procedure.METHOD Word Superiority Eff ect
A stimulus that is either (a) a word (such as FORK), (b) a single letter (such as K), or (c) a non-
word (such as RFOK) is fl ashed briefl y. It is followed immediately by a random pattern where
the stimulus was and two letters, one that appeared in the original stimulus (K in this example)
and another that did not (M in this example). The pattern and letters are fl ashed rapidly, and
the participants’ task is to pick the letter that was presented in the original stimulus. In the
example in ● Figure 11.3a, the word FORK was presented, so K would be the correct answer. K
would also be the correct answer if the K were originally presented alone (Figure 11.3b) or if it
were presented in a nonword such as RFOK (Figure 11.3c). Identifying the K more quickly and
accurately when preceded by the word FORK is evidence for the word superiority eff ect.When Reicher’s participants were asked to choose which of the two letters they had
seen in the original stimulus, they did so more quickly and accurately when the letter
had been part of a word, as in Figure 11.3a, than when the letter had been presented
alone, as in Figure 11.3b, or as part of a nonword, as in Figure 11.3c. This more rapid
processing of letters within a word—the word superiority effect—means that letters in
words are not processed one by one but that each letter is affected by its surroundings.
Table 11.1 summarizes the effects of context on perceiving phonemes, words and letters.Understanding Words
In the last section, we focused on how we perceive phonemes. We will now describe
some of the factors that infl uence how we understand the meanings of words. We begin
by considering the effect of word frequency—the relative usage of a word in a particu-
lar language—and follow with a discussion of how we understand words that have
more than one meaning.●FIGURE 11.3 Procedure
for an experiment that
demonstrates the word
superiority eff ect. First
the stimulus is presented,
then a random pattern and
two letters. Three types
of stimuli are shown: (a)
word condition; (b) letter
condition; and (c) nonword
condition.FORKKRFOKK M K M K M(a)(b)(c)TABLE 11.1 Perceiving Phonemes, Words, and Letters
Eff ect Description ConclusionPhonemic restoration A phoneme in a spoken word in a sentence can be perceived
even if it is obscured by noise.Knowledge of meaning helps “fi ll in the blanks.”Words isolated from
conversational speechIt is diffi cult to perceive isolated words. The context provided by the rest of the conversation aids in
the perception of words.
Speech segmentation Individual words are perceived in spoken sentences even
though the speech stimulus usually doesn’t indicate breaks
between words.Knowledge of the meanings of words in a language and
other characteristics of speech, such as sounds that usually
go together in a word, help create speech segmentation.
Word superiority Letters presented visually are easier to recognize when in a word. Letters are aff ected by their surroundings.Word
SuperiorityCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.