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Welcome!

Before starting, please exit all other applications, webpages, and turn off other electronic devices.

Additionally, please complete this study with a pair of plug-in head-/earphones if you have them.

Finally, make the current window full screen and do NOT exit it during the experiment as the study will stop working.

Click or press Enter to start

Task Overview

In this study, you will hear pronunciations of made-up words.

Your task is to listen carefully and select the written word whose vowel sound is most similar to the one in the pronunciation.

For example, the “ea” in a string like kead might rhyme with bead or head.

Please listen carefully to each audio clip before responding.

Press Enter to continue.

Consent

When you signed up on SONA, you were asked to review the consent form.

Did you review and agree to the terms of the consent form??

Press Y for Yes, N for No.

Before we start:

How many times have you completed this study?

Press 0 if first time, 1 if once, 2 if twice, 3 if thrice, 4 if four times, or 5 if five times .

Use number keys.

Demographics

Please answer a few questions before we begin.

Are you 18 years or older?
Select Yes No

Gender:
Select Female Male Prefer not to respond

Any history of hearing, language, or neurological deficits?
Select No Yes

Native language:

Press Enter to continue.

Let’s go through a few practice trials first.

Please select the botton for the word whose vowel sound is most similar with the made-up word you hear.

In most cases, the words will rhyme, but we really only care about the vowel sound and not the final sounds.

You can press the SPACE bar to replay the audio as many times as you need.

Try to be as accurate as you can without spending too much time on any one trial.

Press Enter to begin.

Again, some trials might be harder than others. That’s okay! If you’re not sure, just choose the response that seems most likely. Now you're ready to begin the main task! It consists of 4 blocks, each taking about 5-10 mins to complete.

Press Enter to begin the main task.

Break

1/4 blocks complete. You may now take a break.

Press Enter to continue.

You’ve completed all the trials!

Thank you for sticking with the task.

Press Enter to continue.

At this point, it is very helpful for our scientific analyses if you let us know whether you took the task seriously (i.e., tried your best on each trial), or mainly clicked through without paying much attention.

Please answer honestly – this will not affect your credit or compensation.

Press Y if you took the task seriously.
Press N if you mainly clicked through.

At the start of the study, we asked you to use plug in earphones, exit all other windows, make the study full screen. Did you follow these instructions?

Please answer honestly – this will not affect your credit or compensation.

Press Y if you did.
Press N if you did not.

Debriefing (1/2)

This experiment investigates which properties of written words make them easier or harder to learn and to generalize to new, made-up words. The nonwords you saw differed in how consistent their spellings and pronunciations were with patterns found in English. For example, some items had very typical spellings and sounds, whereas others used rarer spelling–sound combinations.

By comparing performance across these different types of items and levels of exposure, we can test predictions from computational models of reading about how new word knowledge is acquired and generalized, and how this may inform classroom instruction in first and second languages.

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Debriefing (2/2)

If, now that you know the purpose of the study, you would like your data to be withdrawn and not analyzed, you may contact the researcher (irysamelie.nadeau@mail.utoronto.ca) and your data will be deleted.

If you would like to read more about related work, you can look up the following paper: Armstrong, Dumay, Kim, & Pitt (2017), Generalization from newly learned words reveals structural properties of the human reading system, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Once this project is complete, publications related to this work will be made available on the lab website.

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Thank you for participating!

Your contribution helps us better understand how people learn to read new words.

Please allow up to 48 hours for your SONA credit to be assigned.

Press Enter to finish.

You are now finished.

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