Response bias and judgments of the location of clicks in sentences

This study examines the view that response bias is the basis of the “click effect,” i.e., the influence of grammatical structure on subjects’ location of clicks sounded during the presentation of a sentence. It is argued that, since response bias is more likely to operate when one is unsure of one’s perception, if response bias generates the “click effect,” the effect should be weaker for certain than for uncertain responses. Subjects were asked to identify the location of the click and allowed to make more than one response if they were uncertain of their first choice. Using the number of locations selected as an index of uncertainty, it was found that when a subject was less certain, the click was less likely to be judged as having occurred in the major grammatical break. Further, performance was superior when the click had been in the break, and this effect, which was more pronounced for “certain” responses, was not eliminated by correcting for possible response bias. It is concluded that the "click effect" is not attributable solely to response bias.     

The perception of emotionally toned sentences by right hemisphere-damaged and aphasic subjects

The perception of 60 emotionally toned sentences, divided into meaningful and meaningless utterances, by high- and low-verbal aphasics and right hemisphere-damaged subjects who were not aphasic was investigated. The intended moods were happiness, sadness, and anger. Results indicated (a) significant differences between the aphasic groups in identifying the intended emotion but none between groups in identifying the intended emotion but none between either of these groups and the right hemispheric dysfunction subjects; (b) sentence meaningfulness only affected the responses of high-verbal aphasics; and (c) while the happy mood seemed to be the least frequently selected among the three moods, closer inspection indicated that the subjects in absence of response bias were distinguishing among the three moods with equal success.     

Idioms in sentences: Effects of frequency,literalness, and familiarity

This study investigated the relationship between subjective frequency of literal usage (literalness), subjective frequency of figurative usage (familiarity), and mean Kucera and Francis (1967) word frequency for idiom phrases. Kucera and Francis frequency was found to be independent of both familiarity and literalness. Furthermore, it was found that literalness, but not the Kucera and Francis frequency of the words in the phrase, affected reading time for literal uses of idioms. For figurative uses of idioms, familiarity and written frequency interacted. A model of idiom processing consistent with the current results and previous results is proposed. In addition, subjective familiarity and literalness norms are provided for 245 idioms.Portions of the normative study were based upon subjects in Schweigert and Cronk (1992).     

Nonsense strings,words, and sentences: Some cross-linguistic comparisons

Summary Three experiments were carried out in which strings of 15 syllables were presented to native German speakers. Each S heard the same string 25 times. In Exp. I, the strings were nonsense stems with no structure, morphological structure, or morphological and syntactic structure characteristic of the English language. In Exp. II, the strings were either a random list of English words or a meaningful sentence. In Exp. III, the strings were either a random list of German words or a meaningful sentence. In all the experiments, the strings were either monotone or intonated. The results of Exp. I confirmed the finding of O'Connell, Turner, and Onuska (1968) that linguistic structure facilitates recall. Facilitation was limited to intonated versions and localized at the high structure level (morphology and syntax). The remaining experiments indicated that, in strings of actual lexical items, the relative facilitative influence of intonation and structure depends on the redundance of the linguistic cues. In all experiments, the rate of speech production by Ss approached that of spontaneous speech as a function of both structure and intonation in the stimulus string.

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Zusammenfassung In 3 Experimenten wurden deutschsprachigen Vpn Ketten aus 15 Silben dargeboten. Jede Vp hörte dieselbe Kette 25mal. Die Ketten im ersten Experiment bestanden entweder aus sinnlosen Silben ohne jede Struktur, mit morphologischer Struktur oder mit morphologischer und syntaktischer Struktur. Alle Strukturmerkmale wurden der englischen Sprache entnommen. Die Ketten im zweiten Experiment stellten entweder eine Zufallsliste englischer Wörter oder einen sinnvollen Satz dar. Im dritten Experiment wurde eine Zufallsliste aus deutschen Wörtern oder ein sinnvoller Satz verwendet. In allen Experimenten wurden die Ketten entweder monoton oder intoniert dargeboten. Die Ergebnisse des ersten Experiments bestätigten den Befund von O'Connell, Turner, und Onuska (1968), daß die sprachliche Struktur zu einer Verbesserung der Wiedergabe führt. Diese Verbesserung trat nur bei der intonierten und hochstrukturierten Bedingung (Morphologie und Syntax) auf. Die übrigen Experimente zeigten, daß der Verbesserungseffekt von Intonation und Struktur in den Wortketten und Sätzen von den sprachlichen Cues abhängig ist. In allen Experimenten näherte sich die Sprechgeschwindigkeit der Vpn der Geschwindigkeit der spontanen Sprache als Funktion der Struktur und Intonation der Stimuluskette.

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The research reported in the following article has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Bad Godesberg, Germany, and by the Psychological Institute of the Free University of Berlin. It was made possible by the generosity of Saint Louis University in granting the author a leave of absence for purposes of research. The assistance of Miss Sabine Kowal is gratefully acknowledged.     

Left and right visual field superiority for letter classification

Two letter classification experiments examine the hypothesis that lateral asymmetries in perceptual processing are sensitive to subtle changes in task demands. The first experiment reports a right visual field superiority for an easy letter classification, but a left field superiority for a difficult classification using the same population of stimuli. Experiment II demonstrates that the right field superiority can be reversed if the easy classification trials are embedded among more difficult trials. The implications of these results for theories of hemispheric localization are discussed.     

Left to right: representational biases for numbers and the effect of visuomotor adaptation

Adaptation to right-shifting prisms improves left neglect for mental number line bisection. This study examined whether adaptation affects the mental number line in normal participants. Thirty-six participants completed a mental number line task before and after adaptation to either: left-shifting prisms, right-shifting prisms or control spectacles that did not shift the visual scene. Participants viewed number triplets (e.g. 16, 36, 55) and determined whether the numerical distance was greater on the left or right side of the inner number. Participants demonstrated a leftward bias (i.e. overestimated the length occupied by numbers located on the left side of the number line) that was consistent with the effect of pseudoneglect. The leftward bias was corrected by a short period of visuomotor adaptation to left-shifting prisms, but remained unaffected by adaptation to right-shifting prisms and control spectacles. The findings demonstrate that a simple visuomotor task alters the representation of space on the mental number line in normal participants.     

Queer sentences,ambiguity, and levels of processing

Subjects judged linguistic strings "meaningful" or "meaningless." Meaningful sentences were identical for all subjects; however, for each of five groups, meaningless foils containing different kinds of linguistic violation were interspersed among the meaningful sentences. Type of foil influenced processing time for meaningful items, suggesting that laboratory language processing may be determined by the entire set of linguistic materials used. Effect of foil type on comprehension depth for meaningful items was assessed from the extent to which three kinds of ambiguity slowed judgments on those items as compared to unambiguous sentences. Foil type appears to affect depth of meaningful sentence processing in such a way as to support a "levels of analysis" view of sentence comprehension. Foil type and kind of ambiguity interacted to suggest that sentence comprehension requires computation of underlying logical relationships prior to computation of surface structural relationships and the unequivocal determination of word meanings.     

Pictures in sentences: understanding without words

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To evaluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a word (rebus sentences). Previous research has shown that isolated pictures and words are processed equally rapidly in conceptual tasks, but that pictures are markedly slower than words in tasks requiring lexical access. The lexical hypothesis would therefore lead one to expect that rebus sentences will be relatively difficult, whereas the conceptual hypothesis would predict that rebus sentences would be rather easy. Sentences were shown using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at a rate of 10 or 12 words per second. With one set of materials (Experiments 1 and 2), readers took longer to judge the plausibility of rebus sentences than all-word sentences, although the accuracy of judgment and of recall were similar for the two formats. With two new sets of materials (Experiments 3 and 5), rebus and all-word sentences were virtually equivalent except in one circumstance: when a picture replaced the noun in a familiar phrase such as seedless grapes. In contrast, when the task required overt naming of the rebus picture in a sentence context, latency to name the picture was markedly longer than to name the corresponding word, and the appropriateness of the sentence context affected picture naming but not word naming (Experiment 4). The results fail to support theories that place word meanings in a specialized lexical entry. Instead, the results suggest that the lexical representation of a noun or familiar noun phrase provides a pointer to a nonlinguistic conceptual system, and it is in that system that the meaning of a sentence is constructed.     

Deriving meaning: Distinct neural mechanisms for metaphoric, literal, and non-meaningful sentences

In this study, we used a novel cognitive paradigm and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (ER-fMRI) to investigate the neural substrates involved in processing three different types of sentences. Participants read either metaphoric (Some surgeons are butchers), literal (Some surgeons are fathers), or non-meaningful sentences (Some surgeons are shelves) and had to decide whether they made sense or not. We demonstrate that processing of the different sentence types relied on distinct neural mechanisms. Activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG), BA 47, was shared by both non-meaningful and metaphoric sentences but not by literal sentences. Furthermore, activation of the left thalamus appeared to be specifically involved in deriving meaning from metaphoric sentences despite lack of reaction times differences between literals and metaphors. We assign this to the ad hoc concept construction and open-endedness of metaphoric interpretation. In contrast to previous studies, our results do not support the view the right hemispheric is specifically involved in metaphor comprehension.     

Functional structure in sentences: A performance analysis

Two experiments are reported which attempt to define the groupings of component words within sentences which subjects have committed to memory. The structural groupings are indexed by judgement latencies for pairs of words and these serve as the input matrix for a hierarchical clustering (HC) analysis. It is concluded that when subjects make judgements concerning the forward order of pairs of words, the latencies imply the presence of a hierarchical organization. Although the tree structures obtained do not follow in any detail the surface structures of the sentence types in either experiment, nonetheless when constituent analysis indicates no difference it is accompanied by identical performance structures, and when a surface distinction is called for, an appropriate difference is found in the tree diagrams produced by cluster analysis. Deep structure differences involving the rearrangement of component words are not found in the hierarchical structure subjects imposed. The pausing patterns followed by subjects when reading the sentences are shown to relate to the structural diagrams generated by the HC analysis.     

The perception of clicks in linguistic and nonlinguistic messages

Three experiments were run analyzing Ss’ abilities to locate clicks in auditory messages. In Expenment 1 it was found that the intonation pattern of the linguistic message largely determined the types of errors Ss made in click placement; syntactic factors were only marginally effective and semantic factors were effectively irrelevant. In addition to these linguistic factors, there was evidence that such nonlinguistic factors as attention, memory, and response biases were contributing to the data. Experiment 2 supplied additional evidence favoring these nonlinguistic factors. Experiment 3 was a mock-up of Experiment 2 except that broad-band white noise was used as the primary message instead of English sentences. The patterns of placement errors Ss made in these several experiments (especially Experiments 2 and 3) were sufficiently similar to one another to force the conclusion that nonlinguistic factors are primarily responsible for the errors Ss make in trying to locate clicks in messages. A neo-Titchenerian attention hypothesis based upon the law of prior entry was proposed to account for the data.     

The accessibility of characters in single sentences: proper names,common nouns,and first mention

Accessibility of characters in two-character sentences (e.g., The butler helped Calvin at the wedding reception) was investigated with a probe recognition task. Probes were either the first character (e.g., butler) or the second character (e.g., Calvin) in a sentence and were designated by proper names or common nouns crossed with name or noun nonprobes. Results show that (1) probes in first position are more accessible than those in second position, but not when noun probes are paired with name nonprobes, (2) characters designated by names are generally more accessible than those designated by nouns, and (3) the first name in a sentence is more available than other characters, regardless of position. Thus, accessibility of characters in a sentence seems dependent on discourse function, with named characters seen as main characters, rather than on nondiscourse-related factors, such as temporal distinctiveness.     

Constructing comparative sentences: Linguistic marking and affect

Past research has demonstrated a greater naturalness of comparative constructions with the unmarked adjective. Not only do subjects typically create sentences of the form A is longer than B more frequently than B is shorter than A, but such constructions are also more quickly verified. One explanation for this preference is in terms of Linguistic Marking (e.g., Clark, 1969a, b). Because the semantic featural coding hypothesized for unmarked adjectives is simpler than that of marked adjectives, the observed facilitation effects would be expected. However, an equally viable explanation is in terms of the greater positive affect of the unmarked adjective (see Osgood et al., 1957). Since linguistic marking and affect are typically confounded in past research (the unmarked adjective is also the most affectively positive), the present experiment discriminates between these two interpretations by providing also contexts in which linguistic marking and affect are not confounded. Here, analysis of the comparatives constructed by 96 subjects revealed the preference for the unmarked adjective only where it was also the most affectively positive. Where the marked was the more positive, the reverse was observed, as predicted by Osgood (et al., 1957).