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Imagery and concreteness in the reading of blind and sighted children
Author(s) -
Pring Linda
Publication year - 1983
Publication title -
british journal of developmental psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.062
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 2044-835X
pISSN - 0261-510X
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-835x.1983.tb00909.x
Subject(s) - concreteness , psychology , cognitive psychology , lexicon , word recognition , reading (process) , auditory imagery , contrast (vision) , semantics (computer science) , lexico , mental image , linguistics , cognition , artificial intelligence , computer science , neuroscience , philosophy , programming language
Two experiments were carried out to investigate the role of auditory and visual imagery in word recognition processes of blind and sighted children. In Expt 1 children made lexical decisions to high auditory imagery and low auditory imagery words matched for concreteness. In contrast to results found by Paivio & Okovita (1971) in paired‐associate learning, neither the blind nor the sighted benefited from auditory imagery in word recognition. In a second experiment the blind children, who cannot use visual imagery, were significantly faster in recognizing concrete relative to abstract words matched for word frequency. This result was also found for the sighted children. It is argued that this may suggest that the lexicon is structured in terms of concreteness and that visual imagery need not play a necessary role in word recognition processes.