Effects of nonlinguistic auditory variations on lexical processing in Broca's aphasics

In a series of experiments, the effect of white noise distortion and talker variation on lexical access in normal and Broca's aphasic participants was examined using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Masking the prime stimulus in white noise resulted in reduced semantic priming for both groups, indicating that lexical access is degraded by nonlinguistic white noise distortion. However, talker variation within a prime-target pair had no effect upon the performance of either the normal or aphasic individuals. The absence of a talker variation effect suggests that voice-specific information is not encoded in the lexical representations of words. The normal performance of Broca's aphasics under conditions of both white noise and talker variation supports the view that these patients have a lexical processing impairment rather than a more generalized language deficit characterized by limited computational resources.     

Sentence comprehension by Broca's aphasics: Effects of some suprasegmental variables

Three subtests of comprehension (one of varying sentential stress, one of shifting juncture, and one of applying emphatic stress to functors) were administered to eight Broca's aphasics and eight controls to determine the effects of stress and juncture on disambiguation of these sentences. Data indicated that the aphasic group performed significantly worse than the normals on all three subtests of comprehension. In addition, there was a strong positive correlation between severity of aphasia and error scores for all three tests. Results are discussed in relation to intact-vs.-disordered comprehension.     

Shortcuts to geographic profiling success: a reply to Rossmo (2005)

In ‘Geographic profiling: The fast, frugal, and accurate way’ (Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2004, vol. 18, pp. 105–121), we demonstrated that most people are able to predict the home location of a serial offender by using a simple prediction strategy that exploits patterns found in the offender's spatial behaviour. In this issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology, Rossmo challenges the validity of this research with respect to our data selection and methods of analysis. In response, we argue that: his proposed method for selecting data is unscientific; there is little evidence to support his claim that five crimes are required before profiles can be accurate; search area as a measure of profile accuracy has not yet been shown to be more useful than error distance; the heuristics we have examined are defined correctly and do lead to improvements in profile accuracy; and computerized geographic profiling is not a free service. Our comments aim to generate constraint in those intent on building confidence in computerized geographic profiling systems in the absence of strong empirical evidence to support their use. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Pancultural self-enhancement reloaded: a meta-analytic reply to Heine (2005)

C. Sedikides, L. Gaertner, and Y. Toguchi (2003) reported findings favoring the universality of self-enhancement. S. J. Heine (2005) challenged the authors' research on evidential and logical grounds. In response, the authors carried out 2 meta-analytic investigations. The results backed the C. Sedikides et al. (2003) theory and findings. Both Westerners and Easterners self-enhanced tactically. Westerners self-enhanced on attributes relevant to the cultural ideal of individualism, whereas Easterners self-enhanced on attributes relevant to the cultural ideal of collectivism (in both cases, because of the personal importance of the ideal). Self-enhancement motivation is universal, although its manifestations are strategically sensitive to cultural context. The authors respond to other aspects of Heine's critique by discussing why researchers should empirically validate the comparison dimension (individualistic vs. collectivistic) and defending why the better-than-average effect is a valid measure of self-enhancement.     

On-line sensitivity to local and long-distance syntactic dependencies in Broca's aphasia

Seven agrammatic Broca's aphasics and ten normal control subjects performed a word-monitoring task to determine the degree to which violations of syntax would affect word-monitoring performance. Both local and long-distance dependencies were explored, as well as the effects of additional interceding words. Results indicated that normal subjects' word-monitoring latencies were significantly slower to target words in ungrammatical contexts for both local and long-distance dependencies. Aphasic subjects showed a significant sensitivity to ungrammaticality in the local dependency condition; for the long-distance dependencies, however, no reaction time difference emerged between grammatical and ungrammatical stimuli. Results are discussed in relation to current theories of the nature of agrammatic deficits.     

Bayesian eggs and Bayesian omelettes: reply to Stern (2005)

In this response to Stern's (2005) discussion of Klugkist, Laudy, and Hoijtink (2005), model inference based on posterior probabilities on the parameter space is discussed. Furthermore, the authors respond to Stern's example in which all possible orderings are included via a short discussion of exploratory versus theory-based modeling. Finally, the authors show that the Bayesian approach is flexible and can deal with many types of constraints. This is illustrated using a model with constraints on the differences between means.     

Nasal consonant production in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics: speech deficits and neuroanatomical correlates

The present study investigated the articulatory implementation deficits of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics and their potential neuroanatomical correlates. Five Broca's aphasics, two Wernicke's aphasics, and four age-matched normal speakers produced consonant-vowel-(consonant) real word tokens consisting of [m, n] followed by [i, e, a, o, u]. Three acoustic measures were analyzed corresponding to different properties of articulatory implementation: murmur duration (a measure of timing), amplitude of the first harmonic at consonantal release (a measure of articulatory coordination), and murmur amplitude over time (a measure of laryngeal control). Results showed that Broca's aphasics displayed impairments in all of these parameters, whereas Wernicke's aphasics only exhibited greater variability in the production of two of the parameters. The lesion extent data showed that damage in either Broca's area or the insula cortex was not predictive of the severity of the speech output impairment. Instead, lesions in the upper and lower motor face areas and the supplementary motor area resulted in the most severe implementation impairments. For the Wernicke's aphasics, the posterior areas (superior marginal gyrus, parietal, and sensory) appear to be involved in the retrieval and encoding of lexical forms for speech production, resulting in increased variability in speech production.     

Confirming and disconfirming theories about ideomotor compatibility in dual-task performance: a reply to Greenwald (2005)

Because small dual-task costs with ideomotor-compatible tasks do not necessarily indicate the absence of a bottleneck, M.-C. Lien, R. S. McCann, E. Ruthruff, and R. W. Proctor (2005) considered additional sources of evidence regarding bottleneck bypass. This evidence argued against complete bottleneck bypass and, instead, supported an engage-bottleneck-later model in which early bottleneck substages are bypassed but late substages are not. A. G. Greenwald (2005), however, contended that M.-C. Lien et al. did not use the procedures needed to produce complete bottleneck bypass and that a complete bottleneck bypass hypothesis, combined with additional assumptions, could explain their data. The authors contend that this disagreement stems from Greenwald's focus on confirming predictions of complete bottleneck bypass (small dual-task costs) without disconfirming predictions of bottleneck presence. In particular, Greenwald neglects to consider the possibility that a latent bottleneck limitation could also produce small dual-task costs.     

Accessibility of case and gender contrasts for agent--object assignment in Broca's aphasics and fluent anomics

Yugoslav agrammatic Broca's aphasics, fluent anomics, and control subjects were tested for comprehension of agent-object relations in a series of simple Serbo-Croatian sentences in the conversational past tense, consisting of two nouns and a transitive action verb. The availability of two closed class cues--case contrasts and gender contrasts--as well as the availability of an open class lexical cue--animacy contrasts--was varied across sentences. An analysis of subjects' agent-object assignments yielded the following results: Both Broca's aphasics and fluent anomics showed a selective impairment in sensitivity to closed class morphology, although anomics were considerably less impaired than Broca's aphasics. This finding was interpreted as evidence for a non-syndrome-dependent vulnerability of abilities to process closed class morphology for comprehension. In addition, the pattern of agent-object assignments for Broca's aphasics revealed that the degree to which they were able to access the two closed class cues depended on a convergence of the various cues to agent-object relations. In particular, a convergence of case and gender contrasts had an interactive effect on Broca's responses: Gender agreement cues were accessed only in the presence of convergent case contrasts. Conversely, sensitivity to case contrasts was dramatically heightened in the presence of convergent gender contrasts. These results were consistent with a view that the two cues function as intrasentential "primes" or "retrieval cues" for one another.     

Lexical, morphological, and syntactic aspects of verb production in agrammatic aphasics

Agrammatic aphasics do not exhibit a normal pattern of verb production; their spontaneous speech is said to lack verbs, and the verbs that are produced lack inflection. The current article focuses on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic aspects of verbs in spontaneous speech of a group of Dutch agrammatic speakers. Dutch is a so-called verb-second language in which the finite verb in the matrix clause is in the second position and nonfinite verbs are in the final position. The analysis shows that agrammatic speakers are sensitive to this relation; they virtually never produce finite verbs in the final clause position or nonfinite verbs in the second position. Nevertheless, they produce significantly fewer finite clauses than do non-brain-damaged speakers. The diversity of the lexical verbs in spontaneous speech is also lower than in non-brain-damaged speakers, but this is due to less variation in the finite lexical verbs. Hence, it is suggested that the problems with verbs in Dutch agrammatic spontaneous speech are restricted to finite lexical verbs. In an experiment, it was evaluated whether these problems with finite lexical verbs are caused by a morphological deficit or a syntactic deficit. The data show that a syntactic deficit is more likely; Dutch agrammatic speakers produce finite verbs in the base-generated position (i.e., in the embedded clause) significantly better than finite verbs that have been moved to the second position (i.e., in the matrix clause). From these data, the authors conclude that in Dutch, a verb-second language, agrammatic aphasics demonstrate specific problems with moved finite verbs, although they are perfectly aware of the relation between verb position and verb finiteness. This syntactic problem affects not only the proportion of finite verbs but also the diversity of the verbs and, hence, communicative contents.     

Gender effects on reaction time variability and trial-to-trial performance: reply to Deary and Der (2005)

Deary and Der (2005) reported significant gender effects on intraindividual variability in choice reaction time (CRT), and suggested several potential causes. In their procedure it was not possible to examine RTs on a trial-to-trial basis. We therefore investigate an additional possible cause: that men and women differ in their rate of performance improvement across trials, creating an apparent difference in variability. Using data from a large online CRT study, we replicate the finding that women are more variable in RT than men. However, we also demonstrate an interaction between gender and trial number for RT: women were initially slower than men, but became faster than men across a block. When the first two trials of the block are excluded, the gender effects on RT variability disappear.     

Sentence understanding and knowledge of the world: Evidences from a sentence-picture matching task performed by aphasic patients

The abilities of aphasic patients to perform a sentence-picture matching task were investigated on simple declarative reversible sentences. Two factors were found to differentially affect Broca's versus Wernicke's aphasics' performance: sentence plausibility and spatial arrangement. Sentence plausibility, that is to say, the liability of two given nouns in a sentence to act as agent and recipient according to normal subjects' expectancies, had a significant effect on the frequency of correct responses of Broca's aphasics but not on those of Wernicke's. Conversely, the latter were found to be more sensitive to a match or mismatch in the left-to-right spatial arrangement of the grammatical subject and object in a sentence on the one hand, and the order of the corresponding personages in the picture on the other. The results are discussed in terms of “frame selection” and the handling of ordered structure strategies contributing to normal system, but selectively disturbed in the case of brain damage.     

An attentional learning account of the shape bias: reply to Cimpian and Markman (2005) and Booth, Waxman, and Huang (2005)

Recently, Developmental Psychology published 2 articles on the shape bias; both rejected the authors' previous proposals about the role of attentional learning in the development of a shape bias in object name learning. A. Cimpian and E. Markman (2005) did so by arguing that the shape bias does not exist but is an experimental artifact. A. E. Booth, S. R. Waxman, and Y. T. Huang (2005), in contrast, concluded that the shape bias (and its contextual link to artifact categories) does exist but that the mechanisms that underlie it are conceptual knowledge and not attentional learning. In response, in this article the authors clarify the claims of the Attentional Learning Account (ALA) and interpretations of the data under question. The authors also seek to make explicit the deeper theoretical divide: cognition as sequestered from processes of perceiving and acting versus as embedded in, and inseparable from, those very processes.     

Mystery and meaning: a reply to Green (2000)

In "George A. Miller, Language, and the Computer Metaphor of Mind" (see Note 1), I sought to explain how and why Miller invested the computer metaphor of mind with such strongly revolutionary, antibehaviorist meanings. In reply, Christopher Green (see Note 2) has argued that the answer to this question has to do with the importance of mental representation was an important issue to cognitivists. In response, I argue that, though mental representation was an important issue to cognitivists, there were several other factors of equal or greater importance: specifically, the fascination of Miller and his cohort with language and communication, their frustration with the narrowness of the disciplinary vision of the behaviorists, and their involvement in a different experimental program than that of mainstream behaviorists.     

The dynamic events that capture visual attention: A reply to Abrams and Christ (2005)

We recently demonstrated that, contrary to previous findings, some types of irrelevant motion are capable of capturing our attention (Franconeri & Simons, 2003). Strikingly, whereas sitmulated looming (a dynamic increase in object size) captured attention, simulated receding (a decrease in object size) did not. Abrams and Christ (2003, 2005) have provided a different interpretation of this evidence, arguing that in each case attention was captured by the onset of motion rather than by motion per se. They argued that the only published finding inconsistent with their motion onset account is our evidence that simulated receding motion failed to capture attention. Abrams and Christ (2005) presented a receding object stereoscopically and found that it did capture attention, leading them to conclude that the motion onset account explains existing data more parsimoniously than our account does. Our reply has three parts. First, we argue that evidence of capture by receding motion is interesting but irrelevant to the debate over whether capture by motion requires a motion onset. Second, we show that the original empirical evidence in support of the motion onset claim (Abrams & Christ, 2003) put the motion-only condition at a critical disadvantage. We present a new experiment that demonstrates strong capture by motion in the absence of a motion onset, showing that motion onsets are not necessary for attention capture by dynamic events. Finally, we outline what is known about the set of dynamic events that capture attention.