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The influence of task demands on familiarity effects in visual word recognition: a Cohort model perspective

Jankowski, Scott Steven

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2006, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Psychology.
Familiar words are recognized more easily than are unfamiliar words. Readers become more familiar with words occurring frequently in the language, as well as with the letter-patterns that are common to many words. One measure of letter-pattern familiarity is the number of letter-positions within a word that can be changed to form another word. Two experiments examined the effects of changing task demands on how easily readers recognize words of varying levels of familiarity. In Experiment 1, readers made word/nonword decisions on words varying in their frequency of occurrence in written English texts and their number of letter-positions that yield more than one word. The response latency advantage for familiar words was greater when readers pronounced the words as opposed to a button-press response. This effect was also greater when wordlike nonwords were used in the task as opposed to unwordlike consonant strings. Additionally, words with many positions yielding multiple words delayed responses, but only in the context of wordlike nonwords. While consonant strings would be distinguishable from words almost immediately due to their highly irregular letter-patterns, wordlike nonwords would force readers to resolve each letter-position until either one candidate remained (in the case of a word) or all were eliminated (in the case of a nonword). Furthermore, readers responded to unwordlike nonwords more quickly in the context of words with many positions that could be changed to form other words, again indicating the readers’ sensitivity to this dimension of familiarity. In Experiment 2, the subsequent recognition memory of the readers was tested. Pronouncing words during the lexical-decision task led to more reliable memory for the words, as did the inclusion of regular nonwords during the lexical-decision task. The latter observation reinforces the notion that wordlike nonwords force the readers to completely resolve each letter-position until a point of uniqueness is reached. These findings support a view of visual word recognition in which readers must resolve all of the letter positions in a word only under certain circumstances, depending on the demands of the particular reading task.
Neal Johnson (Advisor)

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Jankowski, S. S. (2006). The influence of task demands on familiarity effects in visual word recognition: a Cohort model perspective [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1148583565

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Jankowski, Scott. The influence of task demands on familiarity effects in visual word recognition: a Cohort model perspective. 2006. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1148583565.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Jankowski, Scott. "The influence of task demands on familiarity effects in visual word recognition: a Cohort model perspective." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1148583565

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)