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« Angela Carpenter Now Assistant Professor At Wellesley | Main | Seminar on Models of Phonological Learning»

Psychology Talk: Eiling Yee on Word Recognition

Eiling Yee
Brown PhD; now on a post-doc at Penn

Word recognition, from sound to meeting

Thursday, January 22, 10:30-12:00, Tobin 521B

Abstract

If you and I are chatting and I produce the sounds in the word hammer, how do you pick out that word from among the thousands you know? And once you've identified hammer, how do you know what it means? In this talk I will discuss these two facets of concept retrieval. First, I will describe studies exploring the processing that occurs as a heard word leads to an activated concept. I will argue that the results suggest that the word recognition system is highly interactive, with continuous feed-forward and feedback activation. Next, I will describe studies investigating how that activated concept is represented in semantic memory. I will argue that these studies support models of semantic memory in which concepts are patterns of activation that are distributed across semantic features (including both sensorimotor and more abstract), with relationships among concepts captured via overlapping patterns of representation.