A course focusing on methodology.
Syllabus_Psych425_Fall_2024.pdf
Final project
The Effect of ADHD on Disfluency: a Case Study
Quiz question
- Toddlers typically begin to combine words together in their own speech in the second year of life. What can we conclude about these multi-word utterances?
- Incorrect answer: Children are guessing about what words likely go together to form sentences and relying on adults for feedback
- Correct Answer: Children may exhibit knowledge of syntactic structure (aka rules), but it's also possible that the knowledge may be coming from another source (E.g. distributional knowledge)
Overview
- Main themes
- “The unconscious guessing game”
- unconscious processes
- guessing game: simultaneously weigh many pieces of information
- Learning to play the game
Methodology
- General psychology
- Priming
- Rosenbaum et al., 2007.
- Move hand in curvature even when the obstacle is removed.
- Corssmodal priming
- Participants typically hear prime words (typically embedded within full sentences) and then respond to test words displayed orthographically on a computer screen
- Masked priming paradigm in visual word/image/anything recognition
- Before/after presenting the prime word/pseudoword, present a mask like “######”. The prime only present for less than 80ms such that the participant cannot strategically utilize the association between prime and target.
- Example: Lila Gleitman et al., 2007
- Interstimulus interval (ISI): the amount of time between the offset of the prime and the onset of the target. If too small, the relevant “representation” needed for the priming effect may not have spread yet.
- forced-choice identification task [category perception]
- An experimental task in which subjects are required to categorize stimuli as falling into one of two categories, regardless of the degree of uncertainty they may experience about the identity of a particular stimulus.
- The stimuli are often varied in increments between the two categories, and participants are forced to choose what category those stimuli lie in. This type of design indicates how our perception of a stimulus varies as a stimulus’ characteristic is varied.
- Often use population mean as the credence
- ABX discrimination test. A test where participants hear two different stimuli followed by a third that is identical to one of the first two. participants must decide whether the third stimulus is the same as the first or the second.
- Reading span test. A behavioral test intended to measure an individual’s verbal working memory. The test involves having the individual read a sequence of sentences while holding the last word of each sentence in memory. The number of words successfully remembered corresponds to that individual’s memory span.
- How to let babies make choices?
- head-turn preference paradigm
- Developed by Janet Werker for studying allophone articulation difference
- To study baby (4.5-18 month old, with good neck control) cognition
- They attend to unfamiliar sounds or images in a way differs from how they attend to familiar ones. Sometimes they prefer familiar ones [often for younger kids learning hard things] but sometimes novel ones [often for older kids learning easy things].
- Attention at the age of 6 or 7 months: turn their head to stare. Amount of attention correlates to amount of looking time.
- Familiarization phrase:
- want the kid to learn to turn the head whenever they notice something
- rewarding them to do so by showing a bunny at the place they should turn their head to look at when there is something worth noting
- also establishes baseline looking time for the stimuli (when it is the same allophone repeating)
- “The sucking paradigm”
- Psycholinguistics
- Lexicon-level
- The switch task for probing mapping.
- Mapping from auditory labels to visual objects
- Stager & Janet Werker (1997): Past evidence shows that babies do map words to their associated visual objects in a switch task by 14 mos and thus, will be surprised if this mapping is violated. However, if the words are very phonetically similar, they are not surprised, despite being able to normally differentiate between phonetically similar words by 14 mo.
- Semantic priming to study similarity in comprehension
- hear or silently read a prime word, and then read the target word out loud
- RT(bank→river) < RT(bank→dog) and RT(bank→money) < RT(bank→picture) [despite the word senses]
- Lexical decision making task: figure out whether it is a real word or not
- Add some fake words only to have yes/no task demanding
- Ignore nonsense words in analysis
- Equipped with masked priming. Or, add filler items (like fake words in this case), grantted by the long-lasting effect of priming.
- Other factors
- Word frequency, word length, age of acquisition (words acquired earlier in life are processed more efficiently)
- Sentence level
- Moving window self-paced reading
- people press a button to read each word
- Moving window: use underlines that match with word lengthes to represent unseen words to eliminate unnatural reading when words appear from nowhere
- Spillover effect: it’s possible for subjects to click the button to advance to the next word before they’ve processed the preceding word, so the reading time that should be recorded for one phrase is actually recorded for the following instead.
- Shadowing task
- Subjects are asked to repeat the words of a speaker’s sentence almost as quickly as the speaker produces them.
- Visual world paradigm
- Language level
- How are experiments that test whether babies allocate more of their cognitive resources to statistical hypotheses that are likely to be true of natural languages typically conducted? [textbook p.291]
- create an artificial language with statistically patterning typical to a natural language and another with patterning atypical to a natural language
- test if the group exposed to the natural pattern absorbs the pattern more quickly than the group with the unnatural pattern
- Brain
- Dichotic listening tasks to assess brain lateralization
- Participants listen to spoken words over headphones. Left ear word goes to right hemipshere. Right ear word goes to left hemisphere. Most participantns typically show an advantage for words piped into the right ear because the distance to travel to the language processing area of the brain is slightly shorter.
Terms
- Def. Habituation: Decreased response to a stimulus after repeated presentations to a stimulus
- Def. Ideophones: a class of words, often with special linguistic properties, in which sounds are used to convey information about sensory information related to sound, size, texture, or certain aspects of motion
- E.g. “doki-doki” in Japanese
- Def. Onomatopoeia: the use of language sounds to imitate non-linguistics sounds, for example “moo” or “bang”
Fun facts
- Phonological priming / inhibition.
- Semantic priming / inhibition
Animal Communication