Posted: September 15th, 2015

word superiority effect.

Identifying objects without some kind of contextual information is difficult to do. When we learn to read, we often look to the other letters and words to help identify letters and the sounds they make. When letters are better recognized in the context of a word, it is called the word superiority effect. Other CogLabs suggest that our memory systems have limited resources and the recall of letters presented alone should be better than when they are presented with other letters, but this is not the case. These results suggest that context is very important for some cognitive activities, like reading.

Questions for the topic to get ideas

1. What might it suggest if your recall for letters within words was better than for those in isolation?
2. 2)  What do you think a sentence superiority effect is?
3. 3)  What kind of processing does the word superiority effect suggest, top-down or bottom-up?
4. 4)  How does the word superiority effect seem to contradict what you know about the constraints of human memory?
5. 5)  How do the results of this lab parallel the fact that you have trouble recognizing your dentist outside of his office?
6. 6)  How could you test to see if the length of the word that the letter is put into has an effect on the word superiority effect?
7. 7)  If you wanted to test for significant differences in recall rates for the above example, what kind of analyses would you perform? What would be the independent variable and the levels of that variable?
8. 8)  Explain the differences between top-down and bottom-up recognition of objects and how this relates to the Word Superiority CogLab.
9. 9)  Do you think that the letter “s” in isolation, or within the word “island,” would be recognized faster? Do you think it matters that the “s” in island is silent?
10. 10)  How does parallel distributed processing (i.e., McClelland & Rumelhart’s model) help explain the word superiority effect?

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