St Andrews Research Repository

St Andrews University Home
View Item 
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • Psychology & Neuroscience (School of)
  • Psychology & Neuroscience
  • Psychology & Neuroscience Theses
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • Psychology & Neuroscience (School of)
  • Psychology & Neuroscience
  • Psychology & Neuroscience Theses
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • Psychology & Neuroscience (School of)
  • Psychology & Neuroscience
  • Psychology & Neuroscience Theses
  • View Item
  • Login
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Investigating the relationship between visual and contextual cues in visual word recognition

Thumbnail
View/Open
AilisMurphyPhDThesis2000_original_C.pdf (27.11Mb)
Date
2000
Author
Murphy, Ailis F.
Supervisor
Johnston, Derek W.
Metadata
Show full item record
Altmetrics Handle Statistics
Abstract
A well documented finding in the word recognition literature is that accurate report of a word is facilitated when it is embedded in a meaningful and grammatical sentence. Previous researchers have accounted for the influence of context on word recognition in two ways. From a modular perspective, word recognition is unaffected by sentence structure or content, the effects arise from post-perceptual decisions and from spreading activation between associated words within the lexicon. In contrast, from an interactive perspective, word recognition receives direct facilitation from sentence content and structure either by pre-activating or constraining activation to likely word candidates. The experiments reported in this thesis investigate the role of sentence contexts in visual word recognition in order to distinguish between modular and interactive perspectives. This was done by contrasting the effects on target word perception produced by legal, word replacement, nonword and transposed sentence contexts when the effects of semantic word association were suppressed. Performance was measured using the alternate forced choice Reicher-Wheeler Task to suppress the influences of sophisticated guesswork. Low constraint legal sentences produced superior accuracy than control contexts. High constraint legal sentences containing predictable and unpredictable target words but little word association produced superior performance for predictable targets over all other context conditions. When predictability was made more salient by increasing the amount of legal sentences in the experimental session there was no reliable effect of context. However, predictable targets were reported more accurately and unpredictable targets less accurately in legal and transposed contexts than in control conditions. Blurred target words in low and high constraint sentences produced legal sentence advantages. These findings suggest that legal sentence contexts do influence actual word perception at low relatedness proportions but not at high relatedness proportions. The findings favour the dual route multistage activation model of context effects on word recognition.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosopy
Collections
  • Psychology & Neuroscience Theses
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/21807

Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Advanced Search

Browse

All of RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunderThis CollectionBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunder

My Account

Login

Open Access

To find out how you can benefit from open access to research, see our library web pages and Open Access blog. For open access help contact: openaccess@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Accessibility

Read our Accessibility statement.

How to submit research papers

The full text of research papers can be submitted to the repository via Pure, the University's research information system. For help see our guide: How to deposit in Pure.

Electronic thesis deposit

Help with deposit.

Repository help

For repository help contact: Digital-Repository@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Give Feedback

Cookie policy

This site may use cookies. Please see Terms and Conditions.

Usage statistics

COUNTER-compliant statistics on downloads from the repository are available from the IRUS-UK Service. Contact us for information.

© University of St Andrews Library

University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013532.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter