Factors Affecting Lexical Access Time Essay

Words argon know as the building blocks of language, as they help us to understand both written and spoken language. Word recognition and lexical accession are known to be bottom up processes, meaning that we bum identify what something is by learning its parameters and building our ideas upwards. lexical accessing is the act of accessing our mental lexicon and obtaining all information about a banter, such as its meaning, sound and display (Harley, 2010). Lexical processing consists of 3 main comp hotshotnts, identifying, naming, and understanding. Identifying a word consists of simply deciding if the earn pull in is or is not a word. Understanding a word is the ability to access a address meaning. Naming a word consists of accessing the sound of a word (Harley, 2010).Psycholinguists are very interested in investigating word processing, thus the lexical finality task was introduced. This task consists of timing how long a histrion takes to identify whether a word is familia r or not when they are presented with a geartrain of garners that may be a real word, an unaccep get across non- speech communication or a thinkable. Whereas real voice communication are words of English that follow phonotactic constraints and have meaning, possible non-words obey phonotactic constraints but lack meaning, and impossible non-words violate phonotactic constraints and lack meaning.During this lexical decision process, many factors go forth affect how long the participant will take to identify if the letter string is a word or not. To name a few, the absolute frequency effect states that the more(prenominal) common or frequently used a word is, the easier it is to recognize as a word (Harley, 2010). Age of learning, is an effect that states that the earlier in life that a word is acquired, that the word will be easily recognized (Harley, 2010). Lastly, word concreteness and imagery has an affect as rob words evoke less imagery than concrete words, in turn, hi gh imagery words have separate memory recall (Ho head, 2010).MethodIn the present experiment, the experimenter is simultaneously the participant. The participant was provided with two garb lists of letter strings. Each list of letter strings consisted of 20 letter strings that were either words, non-words or overbearing strings of letters, in which the participant was instructed to wind up a lexical decision task based on these letter strings. First, the participant was instructed to read the first list of letter strings, and say aloud to themselves yes if they resolute the letter string was a word, and no if they decided the letter string was not a word. The participant was instructed to clip and record how long it took for them to complete the list. The first list of letter strings is the following tlat, revery, voitle, chard, wefe, cratily, inveigle, zner, raflot, oriole, voluble, boovle, mrock, awry, signet, trave, crock, cryptic, ewe, himpola. Next, the participant was i nstructed to cause the same task using the second fixed list of letter strings, also timing and preserve how long it took to complete this list. The second list of words is the following mulvow, clock, bank, tuglety, gare, relief, ruftily, history, pindle, develop, norve, busy, front, garvola, match, sard, pleasant, coin, maisle.ResultsThe participant completed the lexical decision task of list 1 in 28.3 seconds and completed list 2 in 23.7 seconds. The following table shows the decisions made by the participant for each word. List 1 List 2tlat norevery novoitle nochard yeswefe nocratily nodecoy yes zner noraflot nooriole yes voluble yesboovle nomrock noawry yes signet notrave nocrock no cryptic yesewe nohimpola no mulvow noclock yesbank yestuglety nogare norelief yesruftily no history nopindle nodevelop yes gardot nonorve nobusy yes effort yes garvola nomatch yessard nopleasant yescoin yesmaisle noDiscussionIn evaluating the results of this experiment, many factors get hold in to action that effect the participants lexical access. Firstly, it is key to note the differences between the two set lists of letter strings. List 1 consists of both words, possible non-words and impossible non-words, while list 2 nevertheless consists of words and possible non-words. Due to the fact that impossible non-words are easily recognizable as a string of letters that is not in the English language, list 1 automatically decreases its total decision time, as both tlat and mrock both violate phonotactic constraints of the English language. This is because it was noted that impossible non-words are rejected more quickly than possible non-words (Howell, 2012). Aside from these two impossible non-words, one can see both set lists of words contain all possible words of English, which then causes the participant to go beyond the identifying spot in lexical processing and advance to the following stage, understanding.In the understanding stage, the words meaning is attempt to be accessed to aid in determining whether the string of letters is or is not a word. The frequency effect comes into play in this stage, as frequent words have a much shorter answer time in the lexical decision task because they are familiar. Therefore, words such as decoy and cryptic in list 1 and clock, bank, relief, history, develop, effort, match, pleasant and coin in list 2, which are frequent to the participant, are quickly decided as words. Due to the frequency effect finally because of the familiarity of the words, the meaning of these words does not need to be accessed. This is because high frequency words are accessed faster than low frequency words (Forster & Chambers, 1973). However, when possible non-words are at hand, the understanding stage is entered, to aid in this decision. When the participant does not immediately access a meaning for the letter string, the word deems to be given the status of no.Consequently, this causes a longer chemical reaction time in deter mining whether a possible non-word is or is not a word. As one can see list 1 has many more possible words than list 2, which ultimately causes list 1 to take longer to complete in the decision task. The factor of age of acquisition is also seen as an effect in this experiment as when dealing with the real words, those that were acquired at a junior age such as clock, coin, and bank were also identified speedy than other real words such as relief, pleasant and develop. Along with this point, the disengagement between the words acquired at a younger age and those acquired later, is that the words acquired at a younger age are concrete words rather than the other words being abstract words. This is because abstract words evoke less imagery than concrete words do, and high imagery words genuinely have better memory recall, thus affecting the speed of lexical access (Howell, 2012).ConclusionIn addressing the differences of performance between the two lists of word strings, it is cle ar that the participant took longer to decide if a possible word was a word or not due to the fact that it was necessary to advance to the next stage of lexical processing, understanding, to search their mental lexicon for a meaning. Highly frequent words as well as low frequent were easily recognized, as a meaning was instantly accessed, causing the participant to remain in the identification stage. While impossible words were also equally recognized and dismissed due to their obvious violation of the phonotactic constraints of English. After evaluating these factors that specifically affect the lexical access time, one can clearly see why the first word list would take the participant longer to complete due to it having more possible words than real words or impossible words.ReferencesForster, K. & Chambers, S. (1973). Lexical access and naming time. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour 12, 627-635 Harley, T.A. (2010). Talking the talk Language, psychology, and science. Hove, England Psychology Press. Howell, J. (oral communication, public lecture 5 Meaning. October 16th , 2012).