物体的空间关系对语义相关判断的影响

采取快速语义判断任务探讨物体空间关系对语义相关判断的影响。实验1考察词对呈现方式与其指称物空间次序经验的关系对语义相关判断的影响。结果表明,词对呈现位置与其指称物的一般空间次序经验一致时语义判断快。实验2探讨词对呈现方式与其指称物构成方式的关系对语义相关判断的影响。结果表明,词对呈现方式与其指称物的构成方式一致时语义判断快。研究结果支持了知觉符号理论。     

道德概念的空间形象性：语言因素和具身因素的共同作用

采用事件相关电位(ERP)技术探讨抽象道德概念的空间形象性效应, 以及语言因素和具身因素对该效应的影响机制及其加工进程。实验1检验词对空间位置对道德词对语义判断(反义程度)所产生的影响, 结果表明不符合空间形象性呈现条件(即道德-下, 不道德-上)诱发了较大的N400, 并且词对语义判断的反应时较长; 实验2检验词对语义的反义程度对道德词对空间形象性判断所产生的影响, 结果表明语义无关词对诱发了较大的N200和N700, 并且词对空间形象性判断的反应时较长。研究结果表明, 抽象道德概念的加工能够表现出空间形象性效应, 该效应由语言因素和具身因素共同塑造, 前者在概念加工过程中优先被激活并发挥持久影响, 后者仅在概念加工的中期发挥作用。     

Hemispheric differences in semantic-relatedness judgments

Subjects judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs presented to the left or right visual field. The word pairs were presented one below the other. On critical trials, the words' referents had a typical spatial relation, with one referent oriented above the other (e.g. ATTIC/BASEMENT). The spatial relation of the words either matched or mismatched the spatial relation of their referents. When presented to the left hemisphere, the match or mismatch did not have an effect. However, there was a reliable mismatch effect for pairs presented to the right hemisphere. The results are interpreted in the context of perceptual theories of mental representation.     

The linguistic and embodied nature of conceptual processing

Recent theories of cognition have argued that embodied experience is important for conceptual processing. Embodiment can be contrasted with linguistic factors such as the typical order in which words appear in language. Here, we report four experiments that investigated the conditions under which embodiment and linguistic factors determine performance. Participants made speeded judgments about whether pairs of words or pictures were semantically related or had an iconic relationship. The embodiment factor was operationalized as the degree to which stimulus pairs were presented in the spatial configurations in which they usually occur (i.e., an iconic configuration, e.g., attic presented above basement). The linguistic factor was operationalized as the frequency of the stimulus pairs in language. The embodiment factor predicted error rates and response time better for pictures, whereas the linguistic factor predicted error rates and response time better for words. These findings were modified by task, with the embodiment factor being strongest in iconicity judgments for pictures and the linguistic factor being strongest in semantic judgments for words. Both factors predicted error rates and response time for both semantic and iconicity judgments. These findings support the view that conceptual processing is both linguistic and embodied, with a bias for the embodiment or the linguistic factor depending on the nature of the task and the stimuli.     

Embodied relations are encoded in language

Studies of embodied cognition have shown that comprehenders process iconic word pairs (attic-basement) more quickly than reverse-iconic pairs (basement-attic) when the pairs are presented to them in a vertical spatial arrangement. This effect disappears in a horizontal spatial arrangement. This has been claimed to show that comprehenders perceptually simulate these word pairs. A complementary explanation is that linguistic conceptualizations (word order) reflect prelinguistic conceptualizations (spatial iconicity), whereby comprehenders use these linguistic conceptualizations in the comprehension process. The results of corpus linguistic, rating, and semantic judgment studies reported here supported this explanation: Iconic word pairs were more frequent than reverse-iconic word pairs; frequency of word order explained response times in a semantic judgment task better than iconicity did; and when iconic word pairs were presented in a horizontal arrangement, the iconicity effect disappeared, but the word order effect remained. These findings show that spatial iconicity patterns are reflected in word order patterns and that comprehenders are sensitive to these word order patterns in language-processing tasks.     

Effects of iconicity and semantic relatedness on lexical access in american sign language

Iconicity is a property that pervades the lexicon of many sign languages, including American Sign Language (ASL). Iconic signs exhibit a motivated, nonarbitrary mapping between the form of the sign and its meaning. We investigated whether iconicity enhances semantic priming effects for ASL and whether iconic signs are recognized more quickly than noniconic signs are (controlling for strength of iconicity, semantic relatedness, familiarity, and imageability). Twenty deaf signers made lexical decisions to the 2nd item of a prime-target pair. Iconic target signs were preceded by prime signs that were (a) iconic and semantically related, (b) noniconic and semantically related, or (c) semantically unrelated. In addition, a set of noniconic target signs was preceded by semantically unrelated primes. Significant facilitation was observed for target signs when they were preceded by semantically related primes. However, iconicity did not increase the priming effect (e.g., the target sign PIANO was primed equally by the iconic sign GUITAR and the noniconic sign MUSIC). In addition, iconic signs were not recognized faster or more accurately than were noniconic signs. These results confirm the existence of semantic priming for sign language and suggest that iconicity does not play a robust role in online lexical processing.     

象似性和手语学习经验对中国手语-汉语跨模态语义启动效应的影响

采用启动条件下的词汇判断任务,考察熟练手语使用者和无手语经验成年听人的跨模态语义启动效应。结果发现：1)在象似词条件下,两组被试判断汉语语义相关词的反应时均快于语义无关词,说明手语象似词和汉语词之间存在跨模态语义启动效应。2)在非象似词条件下,仅手语熟练被试判断汉语语义相关词的反应时快于语义无关词,无手语经验被试判断汉语语义相关词和无关词的速度没有差异。这是由于前者心理词库中的手语词和口语词共享语义表征,而后者主要依赖手语象似词的视觉模拟性。整个研究表明,中国手语和汉语间存在跨模态语义启动效应,但该效应受到手语词象似性和手语学习经历的调节。     

Iconic gestures prime words

Using a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm, both experiments of the present study investigated the link between the mental representations of iconic gestures and words. Two groups of the participants performed a primed lexical decision task where they had to discriminate between visually presented words and nonwords (e.g., flirp). Word targets (e.g., bird) were preceded by video clips depicting either semantically related (e.g., pair of hands flapping) or semantically unrelated (e.g., drawing a square with both hands) gestures. The duration of gestures was on average 3,500 ms in Experiment 1 but only 1,000 ms in Experiment 2. Significant priming effects were observed in both experiments, with faster response latencies for related gesture-word pairs than unrelated pairs. These results are consistent with the idea of interactions between the gestural and lexical representational systems, such that mere exposure to iconic gestures facilitates the recognition of semantically related words.     

Iconic Prosody in Story Reading

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance (e.g., Shintel et al., 2006). This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed (e.g., a fast drive, slow career progress) and size (e.g., a small grasshopper, an important contract). Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect of speed was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to size‐related words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech.     

Iconicity in the speech of children and adults

Iconicity – the correspondence between form and meaning – may help young children learn to use new words. Early‐learned words are higher in iconicity than later learned words. However, it remains unclear what role iconicity may play in actual language use. Here, we ask whether iconicity relates not just to the age at which words are acquired, but also to how frequently children and adults use the words in their speech. If iconicity serves to bootstrap word learning, then we would expect that children should say highly iconic words more frequently than less iconic words, especially early in development. We would also expect adults to use iconic words more often when speaking to children than to other adults. We examined the relationship between frequency and iconicity for approximately 2000 English words. Replicating previous findings, we found that more iconic words are learned earlier. Moreover, we found that more iconic words tend to be used more by younger children, and adults use more iconic words when speaking to children than to other adults. Together, our results show that young children not only learn words rated high in iconicity earlier than words low in iconicity, but they also produce these words more frequently in conversation – a pattern that is reciprocated by adults when speaking with children. Thus, the earliest conversations of children are relatively higher in iconicity, suggesting that this iconicity scaffolds the production and comprehension of spoken language during early development.     

Ease-of-learning judgments are based on both processing fluency and beliefs

Processing fluency influences many types of judgments. Some metacognitive research suggests that the influence of processing fluency may be mediated by participants’ beliefs. The current study explores the influence of processing fluency and beliefs on ease-of-learning (EOL) judgments. In two experiments (Exp 1: n?=?94; Exp 2: n?=?146), participants made EOL judgments on 24 six-letter concrete nouns, presented in either a constant condition (high fluency) with upper-case letters (e.g., BUCKET) or an alternating condition (low fluency) with mixed upper- and lower-case letters (e.g., bUcKeT). After judging words individually, participants studied the words and completed a free recall test. Finally, participants indicated what condition they believed made the words more likely to be learned. Results show constant-condition words were judged as more likely to be learned than alternating condition words, but the difference varied with beliefs. Specifically, the difference was biggest when participants believed the constant condition made words more likely to be learned, followed by believing there was no difference, and then believing the alternating condition made words more likely to be learned. Thus, we showed that processing fluency has a direct effect on EOL judgments, but the effect is moderated by beliefs.     

道德概念垂直空间隐喻对空间关系判断的影响

本研究通过三个实验考察道德概念垂直空间隐喻对空间关系判断的影响。涉及的空间关系判断包括上下关系判断、远近关系判断和距离判断。研究结果显示：（1）上下判断中,在空间上方时,道德词的反应快于不道德词;在空间下方时,不道德词的反应快于道德词;（2）远近判断中,在空间上方时,个体更倾向于将道德词判断为"远",即道德词更偏上;在空间下方时,没有显著的偏向;（3）在距离判断中,个体对道德词的判断出现显著的向上偏移,对不道德词的判断则出现显著的向下偏移。由此得出结论：道德概念的垂直空间隐喻会影响个体对空间关系的判断,具体来说是"道德是上"的隐喻会导致空间关系判断产生"向上"的偏移效应;而"不道德是下"的隐喻则会导致空间关系判断产生"向下"的偏移效应。     

Semantic satiation and lexical ambiguity resolution.

This study examines the effects of semantic satiation on lexical ambiguity resolution. On a given trial, participants were presented with a word triad. The first word (e.g., HEART) was presented on average 2.5, 12.5, or 22.5 times, and then participants received 2 new words for relatedness judgments. The first of the two new words was always a homograph (e.g., "ORGAN") and the other word was a related or unrelated pairmate (e.g., "KIDNEY"). In Experiment 1, when blocks of trials were intermixed with concordant (e.g., "HEART-ORGAN-KIDNEY"), discordant (e.g., "PIANO-ORGAN-KIDNEY"), and neutral (e.g., "CEILING-ORGAN-KIDNEY") trials, participants did not produce evidence of semantic satiation. In a second experiment in which only concordant and neutral trials were presented, however, participants did produce evidence of semantic satiation in the concordant condition. Taken together, Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that semantic satiation of the context-appropriate meaning of a homograph may impede ambiguity resolution.     

Korean deaf adolescents' recognition of written words for taxonomic categories of different levels

Deaf college students seem to have relatively stronger associations from words for taxonomic categories of basic (e.g., snake) to those of super-ordinate (e.g., reptiles) level than vice versa compared with hearing students in word association (Marschark, Convertino, McEvoy & Masteller, 2004). In deciding whether two sequentially presented words for taxonomic categories of different levels are conceptually related, deaf adolescents might therefore have a poorer performance when they see a category name before than when they see it after one of the corresponding exemplar words. Deaf Korean adolescents were found to recognize words for taxonomic categories of super-ordinate level with lower efficiencies than those of basic level. Their accuracy seemed to reflect a reversed typicality effect when they decided that first-presented words for taxonomic categories of basic level were conceptually related to second-presented words for those of super-ordinate level. It was argued that deaf Korean adolescents went through a temporary stage of having iconic representations of several exemplars of the category aroused in working memory before the abstract semantic representation was fully activated when they saw the word for a taxonomic category of super-ordinate level.     

Why Choo‐Choo Is Better Than Train: The Role of Register‐Specific Words in Early Vocabulary Growth

Across languages, lexical items specific to infant‐directed speech (i.e., ‘baby‐talk words’) are characterized by a preponderance of onomatopoeia (or highly iconic words), diminutives, and reduplication. These lexical characteristics may help infants discover the referential nature of words, identify word referents, and segment fluent speech into words. If so, the amount of lexical input containing these properties should predict infants’ rate of vocabulary growth. To test this prediction, we tracked the vocabulary size in 47 English‐learning infants from 9 to 21 months and examined whether the patterns of growth can be related to measures of iconicity, diminutives, and reduplication in the lexical input at 9 months. Our analyses showed that both diminutives and reduplication in the input were associated with vocabulary growth, although measures of iconicity were not. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that phonological properties typical of lexical input in infant‐directed speech play a role in early vocabulary growth.     

When do children overestimate their knowledge of unfamiliar targets?

We report four investigations in which 5 to 7 year olds judged whether or not they knew familiar- and unfamiliar-named targets. Under some conditions judgments were made in relation to performance on a relevant task, e.g., children judged whether they knew the picture they had picked from a set was the target. Under other conditions, children judged their state of knowledge not in relation to performance, e.g., they answered "Do you know who (target) is?" Under both types of condition, children nearly always made correct "know" judgments when targets were familiar. Correct "don't know" judgments about unfamiliar targets were relatively common when judgments were not made in relation to performance on a task (average scores 80-90% correct), but were less frequent when knowledge was judged in relation to performance on a task (average scores 40-70% correct). Knowledge judged in relation to performance was overestimated even when children did not choose the picture they thought might be the target before making their judgment, when the pictures were face-down, and when children predicted performance on a task not yet present. It seems that although children can make relatively accurate judgments of their own knowledge states, they tend to overestimate their competence when assessing their knowledge in relation to performance on a task. We discuss why this might be.     

Differential interference effects of negative emotional states on subsequent semantic and perceptual processing

Past studies have revealed that encountering negative events interferes with cognitive processing of subsequent stimuli. The present study investigates whether negative events affect semantic and perceptual processing differently. Presentation of negative pictures produced slower reaction times than neutral or positive pictures in tasks that require semantic processing, such as natural or man-made judgments about drawings of objects, commonness judgments about objects, and categorical judgments about pairs of words. In contrast, negative picture presentation did not slow down judgments in subsequent perceptual processing (e.g., color judgments about words, size judgments about objects). The subjective arousal level of negative pictures did not modulate the interference effects on semantic or perceptual processing. These findings indicate that encountering negative emotional events interferes with semantic processing of subsequent stimuli more strongly than perceptual processing, and that not all types of subsequent cognitive processing are impaired by negative events.     

EFFECTS OF CONTINGENCYAND CONTRAST CONTEXTS ON THE COGNITION OF WORDS: A study of stereoscopic rivalry

R ommetveit , R., T och , H. & S vendsen , D. Effects of contingency and contrast contexts on the cognition of words. A study of stereoscopic rivalry. Scad r. Psychol ., 1968, 9, 138–144.—Two typographically very similar words (like 'hell' and 'tell') were presented in a binocular rivalry situation, each appearing after a contrast context (e.g. 'heaven') or a contingency context (e.g. 'devil') had been presented to both eyes. Context effect was then assessed in terms of the frequency with which the context-relevant word was reported as seen. The effect of contrast compared with contingency context was weak when context and test words were presented consecutively, but strong when the context stimulus appeared above the rivalry pair on the same stereogram.     

The KEY to the ROCK: Near-homophony in nonnative visual word recognition

To test the hypothesis that native language (L1) phonology can affect the lexical representations of nonnative words, a visual semantic-relatedness decision task in English was given to native speakers and nonnative speakers whose L1 was Japanese or Arabic. In the critical conditions, the word pair contained a homophone or near-homophone of a semantically associated word, where a near-homophone was defined as a phonological neighbor involving a contrast absent in the speaker’s L1 (e.g., ROCK-LOCK for native speakers of Japanese). In all participant groups, homophones elicited more false positive errors and slower processing than spelling controls. In the Japanese and Arabic groups, near-homophones also induced relatively more false positives and slower processing. The results show that, even when auditory perception is not involved, recognition of nonnative words and, by implication, their lexical representations are affected by the L1 phonology.     

Implicit word activation during prerecognition processing: False recognition and remember/know judgments

Recognition memory for spoken words is influenced by phonetic resemblance between test words and items presented during study. Presentation of derived nonwords (e.g., /d/ransparent or transparen/d/) on a study list produces a higher than normal false recognition rate to base words (e.g., transparent). Test words that share beginning phonemes with studied nonwords have more false recognitions than do those that share ending phonemes. The latter difference has been attributed to familiarity resulting from prerecognition processing of spoken stimuli. As a listener hears/traens/, "transparent" may be activated as a potential solution. In the present experiments, we minimized contributions of postrecognition processing to this phenomenon by presenting a semantically unrelated test word (transportation) that was also expected to be activated during prerecognition stages of processing. The results indicated that false recognition was increased for words presumed to be activated only during prerecognition processing. Remember (R) and know (K) judgments revealed that the majority of studied words were R, and the majority of false recognitions were K. The lowest proportion of R judgments occurred for test words that were not activated during postrecognition processing (e.g., transportation and control words).