How Does Phonological Neighborhood Density Influence Image Naming?
Mentor 1
Sabine Heuer
Location
Union Wisconsin Room
Start Date
27-4-2018 1:00 PM
Description
Everyone is familiar with the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. This common word finding difficulty is known as anomia and is one of the hallmark characteristic of aphasia, a neurologic communication disorders caused by stroke. Aphasia causes difficulty with speaking, understanding, reading, and writing and affects the person’s quality of life negatively. Naming is an intuitive process that unfolds rapidly. However, our understanding of the naming process remains incomplete. As a result, our clinical approaches to treating anomia also remain limited in scope. While some traditional therapies can improve naming performance, gains are typically restricted to trained words, with only minimal improvement for untrained words. Of particular relevance to the current study is the use of words and pictures with varying phonological neighborhood density (PND). A phonological neighbor differs from a target by a single phoneme (e.g., tear – deer; coin - cane). Neighborhood density refers to the number of phonological neighbors of a given target word. The purpose of this research is to understand the role of PND in image naming. Specifically, we will determine whether high PND pictures result in faster naming reaction times compared to low PND pictures. In this experiment, 21 college-age language-normal participants were presented with a series of 96 well-controlled images and are asked to name each image as accurately as quickly as possible. The images are all based on monosyllabic words with a 1:1 ratio of low to high phonological neighborhood density. Naming response times will be analyzed for differences across PND condition. It is anticipated that high PND words will be produced more quickly than low PND words, suggesting that a greater number of phonological neighbors facilitates the activation of target words. This study is the first of a series of experiments designed to specify phonological processing assumptions in the spreading activation models of word selection.
How Does Phonological Neighborhood Density Influence Image Naming?
Union Wisconsin Room
Everyone is familiar with the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. This common word finding difficulty is known as anomia and is one of the hallmark characteristic of aphasia, a neurologic communication disorders caused by stroke. Aphasia causes difficulty with speaking, understanding, reading, and writing and affects the person’s quality of life negatively. Naming is an intuitive process that unfolds rapidly. However, our understanding of the naming process remains incomplete. As a result, our clinical approaches to treating anomia also remain limited in scope. While some traditional therapies can improve naming performance, gains are typically restricted to trained words, with only minimal improvement for untrained words. Of particular relevance to the current study is the use of words and pictures with varying phonological neighborhood density (PND). A phonological neighbor differs from a target by a single phoneme (e.g., tear – deer; coin - cane). Neighborhood density refers to the number of phonological neighbors of a given target word. The purpose of this research is to understand the role of PND in image naming. Specifically, we will determine whether high PND pictures result in faster naming reaction times compared to low PND pictures. In this experiment, 21 college-age language-normal participants were presented with a series of 96 well-controlled images and are asked to name each image as accurately as quickly as possible. The images are all based on monosyllabic words with a 1:1 ratio of low to high phonological neighborhood density. Naming response times will be analyzed for differences across PND condition. It is anticipated that high PND words will be produced more quickly than low PND words, suggesting that a greater number of phonological neighbors facilitates the activation of target words. This study is the first of a series of experiments designed to specify phonological processing assumptions in the spreading activation models of word selection.
