Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Word Recognition In The Parafovea: An Eye Movement Investigation Of Chinese Reading, Jinmian Yang

Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014

Chinese is a logographic writing system that drastically differs from alphabetic scripts in many important aspects. Thus, the nature of parafoveal processing in reading Chinese may be different from that in reading alphabetic languages. Here, four eye-tracking experiments using the boundary display change paradigm (Rayner, 1975) were conducted to explore the role of high level information, like semantic and plausibility information, in the parafovea for Chinese readers.

Experiments 1 and 2 used two-character words that can have the order of their component characters reversed, and still be lexical units as target words. Readers received a parafoveal preview of a target …

Statistical Bootstrapping Of Speech Segmentation Cues, Nicolas O. Planet

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Various infant studies suggest that statistical regularities in the speech stream (e.g. transitional probabilities) are one of the first speech segmentation cues available. Statistical learning may serve as a mechanism for learning various language specific segmentation cues (e.g. stress segmentation by English speakers). To test this possibility we exposed adults to an artificial language in which all words had a novel acoustic cue on the final syllable. Subjects were presented with a continuous stream of synthesized speech in which the words were repeated in random order. Subjects were then given a new set of words to see if they had …

Modeling Source Memory Decision Bounds, Angela M. Pazzaglia

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Current Signal Detection Theory models of source memory necessitate assumptions about the underlying distributions of source strengths to describe source memory performance. The current experiments applied a modified version of the same-different task in order to plot individual memory stimuli along a controlled dimension of the average frequency of voices. This technique allowed us to determine that subjects were using an independent-observations strategy rather than a differencing strategy when deciding whether two test words were spoken by the same or different female speakers at study. By including two male and two female voices and changing the task distinction from same …

Transposed Letter Effects In Prefixed Words: Implications For Morphological Decomposition, Kathleen M. Masserang

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The nature of morphological decomposition in visual word recognition remains unclear regarding morphemically complex words such as prefixed words. To investigate the decomposition process, the current study examined the extent to which effects involving transposed letters are modulated when the transposed letters cross a morpheme boundary. Previous studies using masked priming have demonstrated that transposed letter effects (i.e. superior priming when the prime contains transposed letters than when it contains replacement letters) disappear or markedly decrease when the transposition occurs across a morpheme boundary. The current experiments further investigated transposed letter effects in prefixed words using both parafoveal previews in …