Reference no: EM133564889

Assignment: Lexical Decision Experiment

For this experiment, you will need to complete the Lexical Decision CogLab and answer the questions at the bottom of this page. The experiment will take about 15 minutes to complete.

A. If you start the experiment and cannot complete it in one session, do not save the data. Try again when you have 15 minutes to complete it.

B. The experiment involves around 50 trials.

C. On each trial, a string of letters will be presented at a fixation point.

D. Your task is to decide as quickly as possible whether the string of letters is a word or non-word.

E. Press the "/" key if the item is a word. Press the "z" key if the item is not a word.

F. The item will disappear when you press either of these keys, so you will know your response has been recorded.

G. Two to three seconds later, the next word or non-word will appear.

H. Again, decide if the item is a word or non-word by pressing the "/" key or "z" key as quickly as possible.

I. You will receive feedback when you respond too quickly (before the item appears), too slowly, or incorrectly.

J. There are at least 51 total trials. You must classify the items correctly for the trial to count, so if you find that you are making many classification mistakes, slow down.

Basic Questions

A. What types of information are held in one's mental lexicon?

B. Were your results consistent with the demonstration predictions? Explain your answer.

C. Demonstrations like the one you just completed typically show semantic priming. What is semantic priming?

D. You enjoy watching game shows and one of your favorites is Jeopardy. Jeopardy is a quiz show in which contestants answer questions from a set of identified categories. When you watch the show, you notice that if you did not see the question category before the question was asked you are never able to come up with the correct answer before the question timer runs out. Using what you have learned from this demonstration, why might this be the case?

E. Identify words that would prime each of the following words: cold, angry, and soft.

F. You are writing a test and you want to make it as challenging as possible. Using what you have learned in this demonstration, how can you organize the test questions to achieve this goal?

G. This demonstration showed semantic priming. What other types of word priming are there? Describe each one you come up with.

Task

Question 1. How difficult did you find this experiment to be?

Question 2. Did your data confirm the prediction that you would be faster at identifying words when the previous word was associated? If your data did not confirm this prediction, how do you explain your results? Provide evidence (from your results) to support your answer.

Question 3. How is the word superiority effect related to semantic priming (from Lesson 10)?

Question 4. Is the word superiority effect an example of top-down or bottom-up information processing? Explain your answer.

Question 5. Describe how both bottom-up and top-down processing are involved in our perception of words.