Contextual control over lexical and sublexical routines when reading English aloud

Are the processes responsible for reading aloud single well-formed letter strings under contextual control? Despite the widespread contention that the answer to this question is “yes,” it has been remarkably difficult to provide a compelling demonstration to that effect. In a speeded naming experiment, skilled readers read aloud exception words (such asPint) that are atypical in terms of their spelling sound correspondences and nonwords (such asFlad) that appeared in a predictable sequence. Subjects took longer to name both words and nonwords when the item on the preceding trial was from the other lexical category, relative to when the preceding item was from the same lexical category. This finding is consistent with the relative contributions of lexical and sublexical knowledge being controlled. We note a number of different ways that this control could arise and suggest some directions for future research.     

Typing versus thinking aloud when reading: Implications for computer-based assessment and training tools

The goal of this study was to assess the impact of modality of production of think-aloud protocols on reading strategies. Readers in two studies spoke or typed protocols for narrative or science texts and completed comprehension tests for each text. Human judges identified the presence of paraphrasing, bridging inferences, and elaborating within the protocols. Reading comprehension skill was assessed with the Nelson-Denny test. With respect to narrative texts, paraphrasing and bridging were less frequent when readers were typing than when they were thinking aloud. With respect to science texts, less-skilled readers made bridging inferences more frequently when typing than when speaking. Conversely, skilled readers generated more paraphrases than bridges when typing thoughts but not when speaking. These results have implications for computer-based tools for reading assessment and intervention.     

On the role of set when reading aloud: A dissociation between prelexical and lexical processing

Two experiments investigated the role that mental set plays in reading aloud using the task choice procedure developed by Besner and Care [Besner, D., & Care, S. (2003). A paradigm for exploring what the mind does while deciding what it should do. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 57, 311–320]. Subjects were presented with a word, and asked to either read it aloud or decide whether it appeared in upper/lower case. Task information, in the form of a brief auditory cue, appeared 750 ms before the word, or at the same time as the word. Experiment 1 yielded evidence consistent with the claim that at least some pre-lexical processing can be carried out in parallel with decoding the task cue (the 0 SOA condition yielded a smaller contrast effect than the long SOA condition). Experiment 2 provided evidence that such processing is restricted to pre-lexical levels (the word frequency effect was equivalent at the 0 SOA and the long SOA). These data suggest that a task set is a necessary preliminary to lexical processing when reading aloud.     

There goes the neighbourhood: Contextual control over the breadth of lexical activation when reading aloud

There are currently two computational accounts of how the time to read pseudohomophones (like BRANE) and their nonword controls (like FRANE) varies with changes in context. In Reynolds and Besner's (2005) account, readers vary the breadth of lexical activation in response to changes in context. A competing account proposed by Kwantes and Marmurek (2007 Kwantes, P. and Marmurek, H. 2007. Controlling lexical contributions to the reading of pseudohomophones. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14: 373–378. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and independently by Perry, Ziegler, and Zorzi (2007 Perry, C., Ziegler, J. C. and Zorzi, M. 2007. Nested incremental modeling in the development of computational theories: The CDP+ model of reading aloud. Psychological Review, 114: 273–315. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) has readers varying their response criterion in response to changes in context. The present work adjudicates between these two accounts by examining how the effect of neighbourhood density changes as a function of list context when reading pseudohomophones aloud. The results of an experiment and simulations from a leading computational model support the lexical breadth account, but are inconsistent with the response criterion account.     

Automatic activation of phonology in silent reading is parallel: evidence from beginning and skilled readers

The picture-word interference paradigm was used to shed new light on the debate concerning slow serial versus fast parallel activation of phonology in silent reading. Prereaders, beginning readers (Grades 1-4), and adults named pictures that had words printed on them. Words and pictures shared phonology either at the beginnings of words (e.g., DOLL-DOG) or at the ends of words (e.g., FOG-DOG). The results showed that phonological overlap between primes and targets facilitated picture naming. This facilitatory effect was present even in beginning readers. More important, from Grade 1 onward, end-related facilitation always was as strong as beginning-related facilitation. This result suggests that, from the beginning of reading, the implicit and automatic activation of phonological codes during silent reading is not serial but rather parallel.     

Intention stability: Literature and methodological review

IntroductionIt has been argued that intention stability is a pre-eminent determinant of individuals’ ability to direct their behaviour over time.ObjectiveThe aim of the review was to detail the existing literature and examine whether the relationships described are reliably indexed by the array of operationalisations of the construct.MethodsWeb of Science, PsycINFO, PubMed, and EMBASE were searched for English language articles reporting use of the construct in moderating a relationship between an IV and behaviour.ResultsEleven studies met the inclusion criteria. We identified six methods of estimating intention stability. The ostensible finding of the review was that greater intention stability associated with a stronger positive relationship between intention and behaviour. These findings are, however, largely invalidated by the serious flaws in measurement methods.ConclusionFurther thought must be given to the construct as an attribute of the individual, and how this attribute should be operationalised. The usefulness of “intention stability” will not be able to be evaluated prior to definition of a measurement model and its psychometric validation.     

There goes the neighbourhood: contextual control over the breadth of lexical activation when reading aloud

There are currently two computational accounts of how the time to read pseudohomophones (like BRANE) and their nonword controls (like FRANE) varies with changes in context. In Reynolds and Besner's (2005) account, readers vary the breadth of lexical activation in response to changes in context. A competing account proposed by Kwantes and Marmurek (2007) and independently by Perry, Ziegler, and Zorzi (2007) has readers varying their response criterion in response to changes in context. The present work adjudicates between these two accounts by examining how the effect of neighbourhood density changes as a function of list context when reading pseudohomophones aloud. The results of an experiment and simulations from a leading computational model support the lexical breadth account, but are inconsistent with the response criterion account.     

The Effects of Helper Intention on Gratitude and Indebtedness

Gratitude and indebtedness have often been equated in psychology. Emerging research, however, suggests that these emotions are experienced differently and occur in response to different situations (Gray, Emmons, & Morrison, 2001). The current set of experiments investigated the effects of helper intention on grateful and indebted reactions to a favor. Study 1 utilized scenario methodology to present participants with a favor that was given with benevolent or ulterior motives. Participants felt significantly more grateful when the helper had benevolent intentions. Reactions of indebtedness did not vary as a function of helper intention. In Study 2, participants recalled favors that had been done for them for either unselfish or selfish reasons. Participants reported significantly more gratitude for the favor when they were instructed to recall an unselfish favor. Levels of indebtedness were not affected by helper intention. Study 3 provided participants with an ambiguous favor scenario to better assess individuals' natural reactions to receiving help, and replicated the results of Study 1. Together, these three experiments provide support for differences between grateful and indebted emotions.

‘The doing is everything’: a middle-voiced reading of agency in Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

Nietzsche's famous claim, ‘das Thun ist Alles’, is usually translated as ‘the deed is everything’. I argue that it is better rendered as ‘the doing is everything’. Accordingly, I propose a processual reading of agency in GM 1 13 which draws both on Nietzsche's reflections on grammar, and on the Greek middle voice, to displace the opposition between deeds and events, agents and patients by introducing the notion of middle-voiced ‘doings’. The relevant question then is not ‘is this a doing or a happening?’ but ‘what is the process unfolding in the doer, and what is her engagement with it?’. I argue (a) that this middle voiced reading makes better sense than either naturalist or expressivist interpretations of the key thought in GM 1 13 that ‘there is no doer behind the doing’, and (b) that GM 1 13 does not only provide us with a critique of slave morality, as is often said, but also with an example of a middle-voiced doing: self-deception. I explore the phenomenology of middle-voiced doings in other passages and show that it has at least three features: (pre-)reflective awareness of being engaged with an internal process, responsiveness, and absence of reflective control.     

Thinking aloud during reading: A descriptive model and its application

The problem-solving aspect of reading was studied by a thinking-aloud procedure. A model was developed, describing the information attended to, the thought operation used, and the result derived. Four main operations were identified: Reading, Evoking, Interpreting , and Comparing. A coding system, based upon this model, was developed. Its interrater reliability was between 0.86 and 0.92. This system was used to study the effect of reading purpose. An experimental group was instructed to apply a text concerning creativity to the problem of inducing constructive learning at the university. A control group was assigned reading with no particular purpose in mind. The experimental group used the Interpreting operation more often. Also, the Comparing operation, applied to a comparison between the text and the subjects' own knowledge, less often resulted in disagreement. Thus, the coding system is detailed enough to reflect differences in thought processes.     

Morpheme-based reading aloud: evidence from dyslexic and skilled Italian readers

The role of morphology in reading aloud was examined measuring naming latencies to pseudowords and words composed of morphemes (roots and derivational suffixes) and corresponding simple pseudowords and words. Three groups of Italian children of different ages and reading abilities, including dyslexic children, as well as one group of adult readers participated in the study. All four groups read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of root and suffix than simple pseudowords (Experiment 1). Unlike skilled young and adult readers, both dyslexics and younger children benefited from morphological structure also in reading aloud words (Experiment 2). It is proposed that the morpheme is a unit of intermediate grain size that proves useful in processing all linguistic stimuli, including words, in individuals with limited reading ability (dyslexics and younger readers) who did not fully develop mastering of whole-word processing. For skilled readers, morphemic parsing is useful for reading those stimuli (i.e., pseudowords made up of morphemes), for which a whole-word lexical unit does not exist; where such whole-word lexical units do exist, skilled readers do not need to rely on morphological parsing because they can rely on a lexical (whole-word) reading unit that is larger than the morpheme.     

Age-of-acquisition effects in reading aloud: Tests of cumulative frequency and frequency trajectory

Several studies have reported that the age at which a word is learned affects skilled reading. This age-of-acquisition effect is potentially important for theories of reading and learning. The effect has been difficult to pin down, however, because the age at which a word is learned is correlated with many other lexical properties. Zevin and Seidenberg (2002) analyzed these phenomena, using connectionist models that distinguished between cumulative frequency (the total number of times a word is experienced) and frequency trajectory (the distribution of these experiences over time). The models prompted a reevaluation of the empirical literature on this topic. The present research tested and confirmed three behavioral predictions derived from these models. First, cumulative frequency has an impact on skilled word naming, more so than standard measures of frequency derived from such norms as those of Kucera and Francis (1967). Second, frequency trajectory affects age of acquisition: The timing of exposure to words affects how rapidly they are learned. However, frequency trajectory does not affect skilled reading aloud, because the consistencies in mapping between spelling and sound eventually wash out the effects of early differences in frequency of exposure. Thus, in skilled performance, the timing of exposure to words is less important than the amount of exposure. The results clarify the conditions under which age-dependent learning effects occur in reading aloud.     

Two distinct parsing stages in nonword reading aloud: Evidence from Russian

Word reading partly depends on the activation of sublexical letter clusters. Previous research has studied which types of letter clusters have psychological saliency, but less is known about cognitive mechanisms of letter string parsing. Here, we take advantage of the high degree of context-dependency of the Russian orthography to examine whether consonant–vowel (CV) clusters are treated as units in two stages of sublexical processing. In two experiments using a nonword reading task, we use two orthogonal manipulations: (a) insertion of a visual disruptor (#) to assess whether CV clusters are kept intact during the early visual parsing stage, and (b) presence of context-dependent grapheme–phoneme correspondences (GPCs; e.g., л[а] → /l/; л[я] → /l^j/), to assess whether CV clusters remain intact or are split during the print-to-speech conversion stage. The results suggest that although CV clusters are initially processed as perceptual units in the early visual parsing stage, letters and not CV clusters drive print-to-speech conversion.     

Intention as action under development: why intention is not a mental state

This paper constructs a theory according to which an intention is not a mental state but an action at a certain developmental stage. I model intention on organic life, and thus intention stands to action as (e.g.) tadpole stands to frog. I then argue for this theory by showing how it overcomes three problems: intending while (1) merely preparing, (2) not taking any steps, and (3) the action is impossible. The problems vanish when we see that not all actions are mature. Just as some frogs (such as tadpoles) are immature frogs, some actions (such as intentions) are immature actions.     

The Cognitive Architecture of Perceived Animacy: Intention,Attention, and Memory

Human vision supports social perception by efficiently detecting agents and extracting rich information about their actions, goals, and intentions. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture of perceived animacy by constructing Bayesian models that integrate domain‐specific hypotheses of social agency with domain‐general cognitive constraints on sensory, memory, and attentional processing. Our model posits that perceived animacy combines a bottom–up, feature‐based, parallel search for goal‐directed movements with a top–down selection process for intent inference. The interaction of these architecturally distinct processes makes perceived animacy fast, flexible, and yet cognitively efficient. In the context of chasing, in which a predator (the “wolf”) pursues a prey (the “sheep”), our model addresses the computational challenge of identifying target agents among varying numbers of distractor objects, despite a quadratic increase in the number of possible interactions as more objects appear in a scene. By comparing modeling results with human psychophysics in several studies, we show that the effectiveness and efficiency of human perceived animacy can be explained by a Bayesian ideal observer model with realistic cognitive constraints. These results provide an understanding of perceived animacy at the algorithmic level—how it is achieved by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and working memory, and how it can be integrated with higher‐level reasoning about social agency.     

Basic processes in reading: A critical review of pseudohomophone effects in reading aloud and a new computational account

There are pervasive lexical influences on the time that it takes to read aloud novel letter strings that sound like real words (e.g.,brane frombrain). However, the literature presents a complicated picture, given that the time taken to read aloud such items is sometimes shorter and sometimes longer than a control string (e.g.,frane) and that the time to read aloud is sometimes affected by the frequency of the base word and other times is not. In the present review, we first organize these data to show that there is considerably more consistency than has previously been acknowledged. We then consider six different accounts that have been proposed to explain various aspects of these data. Four of them immediately fail in one way or another. The remaining two accounts may be able to explain these findings, but they either make counterintuitive assumptions or invoke a novel mechanism solely to explain these findings. A new account is advanced that is able to explain all of the effects reviewed here and has none of the problems associated with the other accounts. According to this account, different types of lexical knowledge are used when pseudohomophones and nonword controls are read aloud in mixed and pure lists. This account is then implemented in Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, and Ziegler’s (2001) dual route cascaded model in order to provide an existence proof that it accommodates all of the effects, while retaining the ability to simulate three standard effects seen in nonword reading aloud.     

Neighborhood effects in reading aloud: new findings and new challenges for computational models

A word from a dense neighborhood is often read aloud faster than a word from a sparse neighborhood. This advantage is usually attributed to orthography, but orthographic and phonological neighbors are typically confounded. Two experiments investigated the effect of neighborhood density on reading aloud when phonological density was varied while orthographic density was held constant, and vice versa. A phonological neighborhood effect was observed, but not an orthographic one. These results are inconsistent with the predominant role ascribed to orthographic neighbors in accounts of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Consistent with this interpretation, 6 different computational models of reading aloud failed to simulate this pattern of results. The results of the present experiments thus provide a new understanding of some of the processes underlying reading aloud, and new challenges for computational models.     

Knowledge is not everything: analysis of children's performance on a haptic comparison task

The relative effects of developmental level and domain-specific knowledge on children's ability to identify and make similarity decisions about object concepts based only on haptic (touch) information were investigated. Children aged 4-9 years with varying levels of dinosaur knowledge completed a cross-comparison task in which they haptically explored pairs of familiar (dinosaur) and unfamiliar (sea creature) models that varied in terms of their degree of differentiability. Older children explored models more exhaustively, found more differentiating features and consequently made fewer errors than younger children did. High knowledge enabled children to identify models correctly, but was also associated with the use of a hypothesis testing strategy, which led children to make greater numbers of "miss" errors on the cross-comparison task. Performance in the control domain illustrated that the hypothesis testing strategy was specific to the high knowledge domain. Potential explanations for the role of knowledge and development in haptic exploration are considered.     

DRC: a dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud

This article describes the Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) model, a computational model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. The DRC is a computational realization of the dual-route theory of reading, and is the only computational model of reading that can perform the 2 tasks most commonly used to study reading: lexical decision and reading aloud. For both tasks, the authors show that a wide variety of variables that influence human latencies influence the DRC model's latencies in exactly the same way. The DRC model simulates a number of such effects that other computational models of reading do not, but there appear to be no effects that any other current computational model of reading can simulate but that the DRC model cannot. The authors conclude that the DRC model is the most successful of the existing computational models of reading.     

Intention matters to make you (im)moral: Positive-negative asymmetry in moral character evaluations

ABSTRACT

Is intention, even if unfulfilled, enough to make a person appear to be good or bad? In this study, we investigated the influence of unfulfilled intentions of an agent on subsequent moral character evaluations. We found a positive-negative asymmetry in the effect of intentions. Factual information concerning failure to fulfill a positive intention mitigated the morality judgment of the actor, yet this mitigation was not as evident for the negative vignettes. Participants rated an actor who failed to fulfill their negative intention as highly immoral, as long as there was an external explanation to its unfulfillment. Furthermore, both emotional and cognitive (i.e., informativeness) processes mediated the effect of negative intention on moral character. For the positive intention, there was a significant mediation by emotions, yet not by informativeness. Results evidence the relevance of mental states in moral character evaluations and offer affective and cognitive explanations to the asymmetry.