Greek Nonword Reading
2009/09/05 at 7:39 pm | In Cognition, Research | Leave a CommentThis presentation deeply connects with the orthography-to-phonology correspondence issue which has been broadly investigaged in English literatures but infrequently cared in the other lanaguages. Protopapas was interested in a graphophonemic case of Greek, his native language, that might be stored as a form of cateograical rule in Greek readers’ mind. In addition to 95% of feedforward consistent graphophonemic correspondences, the /i/ in the syllable strucute CiV could be pronunceable or read palatally. Protopapas attempt to confirm wheather the the pronunciation of nonwords reflect the regular rules compromised the real words. This observation would be evident when the nonwords were generally pronunced as /i/ or palatal in consideration of the neighborhood aspects. In the final part, they failed to isolate the regular reading of CiV words and proposed an argument to rethink the theoretical implications of DRC model.
In Protopapas’ corpus survey, there are 79,825 CiV words (by type and by token) which could be pronunced /i/ or palatal. Because it is impossible to figure out which pronunciation pattern is “regular”, he decide the major pronuciation type of a CiV sequence by the type and token frequency (2:1). The principle of DRC would predict both kinds of pronuciations would be the “regular reading” of CiV words: the reading pattern will be consistent with the default pronunciation of source words or the majority pronunciation. His study firstly classifies the CiV words into four groups according to the source words pronunciation ( /i/ or palatal) and the group majority pronuciation (/i/ versus palatal). Then ecah word generates two pronunceable nonwords: one had one letter modified and the other had several letters modified (In his presented case, the letter sequence mapping CiV keeps contant). Therefore, the final stimuli list had 8 groups of 20 nonwords and 40 unrecognizable nonwords from the CiV words without clear major pronunciation pattern (conflict between type and token).
The primary results are the response rates of /i/ for these critical nonwords. The analysis showed no effect of the number of replaced letters, but this factor interact with the other two factors. For the nonwords similar to the source words, the response rate of /i/ is related to the source word pronunciation rather than the group majority pronunciation. However, this tendency was reversed for the nonwords dissimilar to the source words. This means that the pronuncing Greek words may have no determinatic influence from the GPC rules.
I leave three questions and comments for his study:
Q1: why did not he analyze the effect of source word frequency? Is that because the error rates are the only data for his analysis?
Q2: Their analysis focused on the pronunciation of /i/. Did they consider the consistency between the pronunciation pattern and the source word pronunciation?
Q3: Reaction times of reading these nonwords have no difference among these conditions. Why did not they design an experiment for the source words? This may offer a clear picture for their interpretation.
This study also generate some ideas I can test in the Chinese study:
1. The tendency to read nonwords aloud might rely on the clearest orthography-phonology mapping aspects embedded in the word forms.
2. There will be a solid argument about nonword reading if we have a acceptable findings about real words reading.
3. The theoretical thinking of Chinese character reading should consider the aspects about the phonetics.
After Inaugural Day
2009/01/24 at 8:48 pm | In Cognition, Psychologist, Research, Thought | Leave a CommentJanuary, 20, 2009 is a day remarked the coming of new era for the American people. This year I also experienced the change within the research society I am contacting. At the day after the inaugural day, the top science journal “Nature” published a paper that will challenge the basic assumption accepted by every researchers depending on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dr. Sirotin and Dr. Das proposed the evidence that, in addition to the neural activity, a novel preparatory mechanism in the primates brain bring additional change to blood volume. I wonder the respond of my friends using fMRI as their research responds to this study. This news, in my opinion, is not totally bed for the future of cognitive neuroscience. This is the other opportunity for us to admit the complicated nature of the brain and to think of the bold but naive intention to build the link between brain and mind. The novel mechanism revealed by this study might be a caution for the optimistic views of building the link between behavior and brain function without sufficient understanding of behavioral facts.
The other change I am watching is the raising of the new perspective to the psycholinguists’ analytic tools. In the psycholinguistic studies, the generality of the empirical evidence is constrained by the variation of participants’ performance and the variation of stimuli property. For a group of stimuli with the same property according to a experimental definition, each stimuli usually generate a random effect within a wide variation. This situation increases the difficulty to conclude the effect of stimuli property based on the collected data. For a very long time, psycholinguists like to use by-item analysis for the confirmation of the observed effects. With the thousands of data accumulated, more and more psycholinguists have a thought if this analytic tool is really helpful to make conclusions. We might be expanding the frontier with an inaccurate compass. Keeping this awareness is what we should take care hour and hour in doing the psycholinguistic studies. Further reading about this issue is in the last volume of journal of memory and language, 2008.
New eye to see language
2008/12/11 at 10:30 am | In Cognition, Language, Research, Thought | Leave a CommentLike the color of hairs or the allergy to special substance, language is suggested to be a genetic mechanism created by a long evoluation process. This concept is the agreement for many scientific disciplines that explore human nature being able to communicate with language. As Marc Hauser and Thomas Bever emphasize, human neural system make us learn and use our knowledge of language seperated from the other abilities to communicate. This biological aspect of language surrounds the rules and constraints constituenting a mature individual’s knolwedge of language. All paricipanted scientific disciplines have the tasks to understand the acquisition and the mediation mechanism of these rules and constraints, to isolate the parts sharing with other animals, to trace their evolucation process, and to ask the usage of the knowledge in communicative expression. Hauser and Bever listed some study cases towarding these goals, but there is a far distance because each discipline has to break its boundary before connect with each other.
Take the issue of lexical processing I participant in as an example, there are many interesting topics waiting our investigations. Our goal is to illustrate the temporal relation between the lexical property of words and the reading performance. A pressumption under this goal is that our knowledge of language underlying the processing decides the temporal relation. The known temporal relations just cover parts of rules and constraints identified by linguistists. One reason restricting us to look at a few temporal relation is the structure of exerpimental design. An observed effect on the performance needs an appropriate fit among variables, and the serach of such an effect usually costs a series of experiments. We have broad image to connect our findings and other disciplines, but we have a extraordinary patient to accumulate the knowledge till the break of boundry. After all, the undating of scientific knolwedge is a slow process which most people are hard to understand in their daily life.
Schedule to write a research report
2008/07/31 at 11:18 am | In Research, Writing | Leave a Comment(A note I left in my abandoned MSN space. I am reviewing if my real policy following this schedual.)
This is the brief list summarized from the book “Writing research papers”. This schedule represents researches are recursive works from finding a question then solving it. The process is monotonous but challenging. A man’s wisdom would be sharper and sharper after completing one schedule by another schadule. Here they are:
- Date Term Target
Topic approved by the instructor A built-in question or argument
Reading and creating a working bibliography Discover the quantity and quality of available sources
Organizing Plans for writing
Creating notes Brainstorming
Drafting the paper Seek instructors’ or peers’ suggetions while drafting
Formatting the paper Proper manuscript design
Writing a list of your references List various sources used in my study in the proper format
Revision and proofreading Examining and making necessary corrections.
Submitting the manuscript Battle with editors and reviewers
Realize a limited mind from incomplete models
2008/04/25 at 12:05 pm | In Cognition, Infrastructure, Research | Leave a CommentTags: Add new tag
This is a demonstration of establishing the computational model of word recognition in the approach of nested modeling. Considering the weakness of previous computational models (triangle model, DRC, and CDP) in simulating the human performance, Perry et al. merge the IA lexical network of DRC and the association network of CDP in the CDP+ model. The characteristics of lexical and sub-lexical routes success their predecessors. The sub-lexical route deal with the stimuli input stored in the graphemic buffer in terms of the trained association strengths. Based on these principles, they test the performance of CDP+ on the data sets that challenge the previous models.
To demonstrate the accountability of CDP+, they propose the notion “strong inference testing” which verifies the outcome performance in the analyses of factorial design and large human data. If one of these models has the descriptive adequacy on simulating human data, in their logic, both analyses would value this model in the highest rank.
I put my comment on the CDP+ based on its simulating the consistency effect. Indeed, this model successfully simulated the Jared’s findings, which both the DRC and the triangle failed, in the analysis of variance. The authors also convince readers the highest accountability of CDP+ with the regression method. It is without doubtful that this model has the highest adequacy in describing the consistency effect in the world. In a subsequent test of weakening the contribution of lexical route, they report the result that the consistency effect is the product of sub-lexical route. It is obviously contrary to the DRC assuming the consistency effect as the product of lexical route.
This simulation case makes me rethinking the level of addressing “adequacy” in scientific research. The first scientific theory considered “adequacy” is the grammar theories proposed by Chomsky. When this term used in the discipline of computational model, it refers to the boundary of data sets accounted by a model. The first level, observational adequacy, means the capability of a model handling the data under a specific topic, for instance, consistency effect. The second level, descriptive adequacy, refers to the scope of a model covering the studies of a general issue, such as orthography to phonology mapping. The final level, explanatory adequacy, suggests the potential of a model generalizing the theoretical implication beyond its default scope.
Like their predecessors, Perry et al. plan the CDP+ in the level of descriptive adequacy. There are accumulated behavioral data supporting them standing on this level. Their conclusion that the sub-lexical route results in the consistency effect builds on the simulation case that the operation of lexical route is neutralized. However, this argument has being debated among behavioral studies, which means there is debate if the observational adequacy has been achieved.
As for a researcher who plans to build the computational model of Chinese word recognition, the advantage as well as the disadvantage is fewer behavioral cases for simulation. This is a disadvantage because we could not consider as many questions as English studies. This is also an advantage because we could seriously consider which the constituents of observational adequacy for a topic are. After this adequacy is satisfied, nested modeling approach could support the development of computational models toward the descriptive adequacy. So far, concentrating on a specific topic is the principle that the developers of Chinese models should obey.
Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C., & Zorzi, M. (2007). Nested Incremental Modeling in the Development of Computational Theories: The CDP+ Model of Reading Aloud. Psychological Review, 114, 273-315.
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