Essay
What factors influence how we recognise words? Review the evidence and evaluate the methods that have been used to address this question.
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Essay of 5 pages for the course Cognitive Psychology at UON
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Student ID: 4314752What factors influence how we recognise words? Review the evidence and evaluate the
methods that have been used to address this question.
‘Recognition’ is defined by Oxford Dictionary as “Identification of someone or something from
previous encounters or knowledge”.
The recognition of words can be explained by a range of influencing factors that affect the
speed of our processing. These include word frequency (Schilling, Rayner & Chumbley, 1998),
predictability and neighbourhood, all of which I will describe in greater detail throughout this
essay. Psychologists have developed various methods by which they monitor the speed people
are able to recognise words to test the influencing effects of these factors. They use methods
such eye tracking, semantic priming, a naming task and a lexical decision task that volunteers
would participate in to test the effects these factors have on how we recognise words.
A key factor involved in our recognition of words is described by the term ‘word frequency’. By
this, we mean how often a word is used in our day to day vocabulary. Psychologists have tested
the effect of word frequency on our ability to recognise words through performance on three
different tasks: the naming task, the lexical decision task and reading, with eye fixation times on
a target word being measured.
Balota et al. (1999) argued that “reading involves several kinds of processing, these being:
orthography, phonology, semantics, syntax or grammar and higher-level integration”(Eysenck &
Keane, 2015). The issues with the following methods were that they did not necessarily
integrate all of these processes into their testing.
The ‘naming task’ (Schilling, Rayner & Chumbley, 1998) involves simply presenting a volunteer
with word on screen and the participant says the word out loud. The experiment tests how long
it takes participant to be able to say this word and thus recognize it. It was found that higher
frequency words took less time to be able to say and were therefore easier to recognize than
low frequency words, so they concluded frequency of words in our vocabulary does therefore
have an effect on how easy it is for us to recognize them. The limitation here is that the naming
task emphasizes links solely between orthography and phonology, not taking into account the
processing of syntax or higher-level integration which normal reading involves.
Furthermore, In the lexical decision task Schilling, Rayner & Chumbley, 1998) participants are
presented with strings of letters on a computer screen. They are then asked to answer yes or no
in relation to whether or not the presented word is an actual word. Schilling et al. proposed if it
takes the participant longer it suggests its harder to recognize, which was found more often
with lower frequency words in comparison with high frequency words. However, the lexical
decision task focuses on the relation between orthography and semantics, ignoring higher level
integration and any influences that syntax, making it not the most realistic representation of
actual reading.
Additionally, with the lexical decision task, the method of ‘priming’ may be used, where a lexical
decision task would still take place but a prime word is shown to participants just before the
target word’ to influence how quickly they can recognize the target word (Meyer and
, Student ID: 4314752
Schvanevldt, 1971). The prime word may have a related meaning or similar spelling to the
target word for example ‘nurse’ may be shown before the target word ‘doctor’. This would be
an example of semantic priming as the two words are related. It was found that target words
primed correctly would be recognised by participants as a real word quicker than without the
priming word or with an irrelevant priming word preceeding the target word. This study also
takes into account the role of neighbourhood and context effects, which I will go on to explain
later on in this essay.
With the reading task (eye-tracking), participants would be given a passage of writing to read
on a computer screen whereby a selection of target words of different word frequency are
included and a camera would track how long the persons eye would spend fixated on these
target words, suggesting the length of time it took to read and recognise these words. This is
known as eye tracking. The limitations here are that it is difficult to determine what type of
processing occurs during “fixation” (the period that the eye remains still and fixated on a
particular word). Despite this, eye tracking seems to be possibly the most representative and
useful method as it provides an “unobtrusive and detailed on-line record of attention related
processes”.(Eysenck & Keane, 2015). Researchers found that participants would spend longest
looking at low frequency words, whilst spending much less time fixated on high frequency
words, suggesting these are easier to recognise.
Furthermore, the predictability of words in their given context has been found to have a great
influence on the speed in which people are able to recognise the words. I.e. if a person predicts
a certain word to come after a string of words in the same context, they will be quicker to
recognize this word than a word completely irrelevant to the context given. Tulving and Gold
(1963) conducted a study to test the question “Will using the context to make a word more or
less predictable affect its word recognition time?”. Participants were presented with an
incomplete sentence to read. They then were given a single word which they would attempt to
recognise either in the predictable context or in misleading context. The amount of context
given to the participant was varied and the target word was presented at different exposure
durations. Researchers would measure the exposure time necessary the participant to
recognise the word. Providing participants with more relevant context resulted in faster
recognition whilst more irrelevant and misleading context would make it harder for participants
and cause them to need longer for word recognition. This effect is that support the results of
the ‘priming’ study (Meyer and Schvaneveldt, 1971) that showed words preceeded by a
contextually or semantically similar word were easier to recognise. Overall the study proved
fairly effective in proving the facilitating effect of context on word recognition.
Neighbourhood effects play a key role in word recognition. The term ‘orthographic
neighbourhood’ refers to the number of words that can be formed by changing one letter of a
word while maintaining letter position. An example of this would be the word ‘bank’, two
neighbours of which would be ‘sank’ and ‘bark’. It was found that word recognition for low
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