The semantics of 'unless' conditionals: evidence from 'unless' and disjunctive inferences

We report the results of an experiment investigating conditional inferences from conditional assertions such as 'Juan won't go to León unless Nuria goes to Madrid' and 'Either Nuria goes to Madrid or Juan won't go to León'. This experiment addresses Dancygier's claims about the semantics of 'unless' by examining inferential endorsements of 'not-A unless B' and 'Either B or not-A' in the canonical order, presenting the categorical premise after the conditional assertions, and in the inverse order, presenting the categorical premise before the conditional assertions. The results of the experiment confirm that the representation of 'unless' includes two possibilities, although as Dancygier holds one of the possibilities may not be complete. The implications of the results are discussed in the context of the strategic nature of conditional reasoning and recent convergent theories of linguistic processing.     

Syntactic priming in comprehension: evidence from event-related potentials

Syntactic priming is the facilitation of processing that occurs when a sentence has the same syntactic form as a preceding sentence. Such priming effects have been less consistently demonstrated in comprehension than in production, and those that have been reported have depended on the repetition of verbs across sentences. In an event-related potential experiment, subjects read target sentences containing reduced-relative clauses. Each was preceded by a sentence that contained the same verb and either a reduced-relative or a main-clause construction. Reduced-relative primes elicited a larger positivity than did main-clause primes. Reduced-relative targets that were preceded by a main-clause prime elicited a greater positivity than the same target sentences following a reduced-relative prime. In addition, syntactic priming effects were dissociated from effects of lexical repetition at the verb.     

Illusory inferences from a disjunction of conditionals: a new mental models account

(Johnson-Laird, P.N., & Savary, F. (1999, Illusory inferences: a novel class of erroneous deductions. Cognition, 71, 191-229.) have recently presented a mental models account, based on the so-called principle of truth, for the occurrence of inferences that are compelling but invalid. This article presents an alternative account of the illusory inferences resulting from a disjunction of conditionals. In accordance with our modified theory of mental models of the conditional, we show that the way individuals represent conditionals leads them to misinterpret the locus of the disjunction and prevents them from drawing conclusions from a false conditional, thus accounting for the compelling character of the illusory inference.     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: evidence from masked phonological priming

Bilingual written language representation was investigated with the masked phonological priming paradigm. Pseudohomophonic and control primes of French target words were used to show that Dutch-French bilinguals exhibit the same pattern of phonological and orthographic priming as native French speakers, which suggests that the same processes underlie first-and second-language processing. It was also found that for bilinguals, but not monolinguals, it is possible to prime a target word of the second language with a homophonic stimulus (either word or nonword) of the first language. This interlingual phonological priming effect was of the same size as the intralingual priming effect. Implications for theories of bilingual written language representation and for the interpretation of the masked phonological priming paradigm are discussed.     

Age-related differences in semantic priming: evidence from event-related brain potentials

Hasher and Zacks (1988) suggested that aging may affect processes involved in the inhibition of irrelevant information during language processing. Our experiment tested this hypothesis using the N400 event-related brain potential in a priming paradigm and assessed whether older subjects could benefit from the constraints of a sentence context. Twenty older (63 to 88 years) and 20 young (19 to 29 years) subjects read sentences and word pairs. Each final word varied on the degree of relatedness to the preceding context, with some being highly related (BC), moderately related (R), or unrelated (U). Younger subjects showed the expected N400 effect gradient (U > R > BC) in both the sentence and word-pair contexts, while older adults showed no discrimination between the conditions (U = R = BC) for the sentence and limited discrimination (U > BC) for the word pairs. These results support the inhibition-deficit hypothesis, whereby older adults fail to inhibit related items in working memory, and suggest that older adults do not benefit from the constraints of a sentence context.     

Phonological mediation in visual masked priming: evidence from phonotactic repair

In a series of 4 experiments, the authors show that phonological repair mechanisms, known to operate in the auditory modality, are directly translated in the visual modality. This holds with the provision that printed stimuli are presented for a very brief duration and that the effect of phonological repair is tested after a delay of some 100 ms has elapsed after that presentation. The case of phonological repair chosen to exemplify the parallelism between print and speech is the prosthesis of /e/ in utterances beginning with /s/ followed by a consonant in Spanish. Native speakers of Spanish hear a prothetic /e/ in auditorily presented pseudowords such as special (/speojal/, derived from "especial") as well as stuto (/stuto/, derived from "astuto"). It is shown here that they also hear that same vowel /e/ when presented with the printed pseudowords "special" and "stuto." This finding of a phonological repair effect in print has implications for the issue of phonological activation from print, as well as for the prelexical locus and mandatory nature of phonological repair mechanisms in general.     

Naming two-digit arabic numerals: evidence from masked priming studies

The authors investigated how 2-digit Arabic numerals are named by looking at the effects of masked primes on the naming latencies. Target numerals were named faster when prime and target shared a digit at the same position (e.g., the target 28 primed by 18 and 21). In contrast, naming latencies were slower when prime and target shared 1 or 2 digits at non-corresponding places (e.g., the target 28 primed by 82, 86, or 72). Subsequent experiments showed that these priming effects were situated at the level of the verbal production of the Arabic numerals. The data point to a non-semantically mediated route from visual input to verbal output in the naming of 2-digit Arabic numerals.     

The comprehension of anomalous sentences: evidence from structural priming

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones constructed for well-formed sentences; and a semantic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are erroneous, or altogether missing, and interpretation is achieved on the basis of semantic representations instead. To distinguish between these accounts, we used structural priming. First, we ruled out the possibility that anomaly per se influences the magnitude of the priming effect: Prime sentences with morphologically incorrect verbs produced similarly enhanced priming (lexical boost) to sentences with the same correct verbs (Exp. 1). Second, we found that prime sentences with a novel verb (Exp. 2) or a semantically and syntactically incongruent verb (Exp. 3) produced a priming effect, which was the same as that produced by well-formed sentences. In accord with the syntactic account, we conclude that the syntactic representations of anomalous sentences are similar to those constructed for well-formed sentences. Our results furthermore suggest that lexically-independent syntactic information is robust enough to produce well-formed syntactic representations during processing without requiring aid from lexically-based syntactic information.     

Phonological effects in handwriting production: evidence from the implicit priming paradigm

In the present article, we report 3 experiments using the odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm, aimed at determining the role played by phonological information during the handwriting process. Participants were asked to write a small set of words learned in response to prompts. Within each block, response words could share initial segments (constant homogeneous) or not (heterogeneous). Also, 2 variable homogeneous blocks were created by including a response word that did not share orthographic onset with the other response (odd-man-out). This odd-man-out could be phonologically related to the targets or not. Experiment 1 showed a preparation effect in the constant homogeneous condition, which disappeared (spoil effect) in the variable condition not phonologically related. However, no spoil effect was found when the odd-man-out shared the phonological initial segment with the targets. In Experiment 2, we obtained a spoil effect in the variable phonologically related condition, but it was significantly smaller than in the variable not phonologically related condition. The effects observed in Experiment 2 vanished in Experiment 3 under articulatory suppression, suggesting that they originated at a sublexical level. These findings suggest that phonological sublexical information is used during handwriting and provide evidence that the implicit priming paradigm (and the odd-man-out version of this) is a suitable tool for handwriting production research.     

Mental models and the suppositional account of conditionals

The mental model theory of conditional reasoning presented by P. N. Johnson-Laird and R. M. J. Byrne (2002) has recently been the subject of criticisms (e.g., J. St. B. T. Evans, D. E. Over, & S. J. Handley, 2005). The authors argue that the theoretical conflict can be resolved by differentiating 2 kinds of reasoning, reasoning about possibilities given the truth of assertions and reasoning about the truth of assertions given possibilities. The standard mental model theory accounts for the former kind of reasoning but does not adequately account for the latter, contrary to the suppositional approach favored by J. St. B. T. Evans et al. (2005). The authors thus propose a modified mental model theory of conditionals that reconciles the 2 theoretical approaches. It is demonstrated that this theory is able to explain the key findings that have been opposed to the standard theory by J. St. B. T. Evans et al. and makes new predictions that are empirically verified.     

Semantic priming and repetition priming from masked words: evidence for a center-surround attentional mechanism in perceptual recognition

Two lexical decision experiments compared semantic and repetition priming by masked words. Experiment 1 established prime-mask stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) with presence-absence detection judgments. Primes presented at detection-threshold SOAs produced equal facilitation for repeated and semantically related targets: 26 ms and 24 ms. Experiment 2 established SOAs with semantic judgments. Primes presented at 70% of the semantic-threshold SOA to mimic the exposure conditions of Experiment 1 produced slightly greater facilitation for repeated targets but a tendency toward inhibition for semantically related targets: 38 ms and -6 ms. These results confirm Dagenbach, Carr, and Wilhelmsen's (1989) report that strategies induced by threshold-setting tasks can influence masked priming. In addition, Experiment 2 suggests a mechanism for retrieving weakly activated semantic codes into consciousness that relies on the center-surround principle to enhance activation of sought-for codes and to inhibit related codes stored nearby in the semantic network.     

Natural scene categorization with minimal attention: evidence from negative priming

Research has demonstrated that objects in natural scenes are categorized without the deployment of attention. However, in these types of studies, participants were required to directly respond to peripherally presented scenes, which might lead some participants to move their attention. If this is the case, the above conclusion concerning natural scenes may not be valid. We investigated this issue by using a negative priming (NP) paradigm in which participants did not directly respond to peripheral stimuli. Our results showed NP effect from ignored stimuli in natural scene categorization, but neither in letter discrimination (Experiment 1) nor in line-drawing categorization (Experiment 2). In addition, NP effects were observed even when probe stimuli were words (Experiments 3A and 3B). These findings suggest that people can categorize objects in natural scenes with minimal attention, that this process is specific to natural scenes, and that it is based on the semantic information of the images.     

Perception without awareness: further evidence from a Stroop priming task

In the present research, we examined the influence of prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) on Stroop-priming effects from masked words. Participants indicated the color of a central target, which was preceded by a 33-msec prime word followed either immediately or after a variable delay by a pattern mask. The prime word was incongruent or congruent with the target color on 75% and 25% of the trials, respectively. The words followed by an immediate mask produced reliable Stroop interference at SOAs of 300 and 400 msec but not at SOAs of 500 and 700 msec. The words followed by a delayed mask produced a reversed (i.e., facilitatory) Stroop effect, which reached significance at an SOA of 400 msec or longer, but never at the shorter 300-msec SOA. Such an differential time course of both types of Stroop priming effects provides further evidence for the existence of qualitative differences between conscious and nonconscious perceptual processes.     

Episodic accessibility and morphological processing: evidence from long-term auditory priming

Long-term priming studies of lexical processing have yielded conflicting claims as to whether abstract versus episodic representations are involved during word recognition. A critical piece of evidence that could separate the two accounts rests on the existence of full morphological priming, where morphologically related words yield the same amount of priming as repeated words. In this study, participants performed speeded lexical decision on lists of auditory words and non-words, which contained repeated, morphologically related, semantically related and phonologically related pairs of items. In order to minimize the involvement of episodic factors, we increased the prime-target interval and decreased their physical similarity by introducing a change in speaker’s voice. We show that under conditions that minimize access to episodic features, the magnitude of repetition priming decreased to attain that of morphological priming. Importantly, morphological and repetition priming for words were always observed in the absence of any semantic and phonological priming, suggesting that they cannot be reduced to formal or meaning overlap. Our results support the view that long-term priming taps both abstract lexical codes with a morphological format and episodic memory components. Further, they show that episodic influences on priming can be modulated by prime-target interval and physical similarity.     

Threat processing in obsessive-compulsive disorder: evidence from a modified negative priming task

Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often experience intrusive thoughts. These intrusions may be due to biases in information processing mechanisms, including attention, memory, and learning. To examine this hypothesis, we presented a modified negative priming (NP) paradigm with idiographically selected words to 19 individuals with OCD (OCs) and 19 matched non-anxious control participants (NACs). The words included OCD-relevant threat, OCD-relevant positive, and neutral words. This paradigm typically elicits positive priming because participants may learn the contingency between the prime and probe that facilitates responding [Frings and Wentura (2006). Strategy effects counteract distractor inhibition: NP with constantly absent probe distractors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 32, 854-864]. As predicted, NACs showed facilitation (i.e., positive priming) rather than NP for all word types, whereas OCs exhibited facilitation for only neutral words. For positive words, OCs exhibited no priming and for threat words they exhibited NP. These results suggest that for idiographic, OCD-relevant threat information, individuals with OCD show difficulty learning the contingency between the information in the prime and probe displays relative to the NACs.     

Early access to abstract representations in developing readers: evidence from masked priming

A commonly shared assumption in the field of visual‐word recognition is that retinotopic representations are rapidly converted into abstract representations. Here we examine the role of visual form vs. abstract representations during the early stages of word processing – as measured by masked priming – in young children (3rd and 6th Graders) and adult readers. To maximize the chances of detecting an effect of visual form, we employed a language with a very intricate orthography, Arabic. If visual form plays a role in the early stages of processing, greater benefit would be expected from related primes that have the same visual form (in terms of the ligation pattern between a word's letters) as the target word (e.g.– [ktz b–ktA b] – note that the three initial letters are connected in prime and target) than for those that do not (– [ktxb–ktA b]). Results showed that the magnitude of priming effect relative to an unrelated condition (e.g. –) was remarkably similar for both types of prime. Thus, despite the visual complexity of Arabic orthography, there is fast access to the abstract letter representations not only in adult readers by also in developing readers.     

Decreased parahippocampal activity in associative priming: evidence from an event-related fMRI study

In recent years, there has been intense debate on the neural basis of associative priming, particularly on the role of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in retrieving associative information without awareness. In this study, event-related fMRI was used while healthy subjects performed a perceptual identification task on briefly presented unrelated word pairs and an associative recognition memory task. Contamination of priming by explicit memory was successfully controlled, as associative priming and explicit memory were dissociated on the behavioral level. The fMRI results showed a functional dissociation within the MTL with respect to associative priming effects. The right parahippocampal cortex, but not the hippocampus, showed decreased activation for old vs. new pairs and old vs. recombined pairs (associative priming). The bilateral hippocampus and the right parahippocampal cortex were involved in explicit associative memory. These data provide evidence that subregions of the MTL participate in associative priming even when explicit involvement was controlled. Thus, different regions within the MTL play distinct roles in explicit and implicit associative memory.     

Selection and inhibition in infancy: evidence from the spatial negative priming paradigm

We used a spatial negative priming (SNP) paradigm to examine visual selective attention in infants and adults using eye movements as the motor selection measure. In SNP, when a previously ignored location becomes the target to be selected, responses to it are impaired, providing a measure of inhibitory selection. Each trial consisted of a prime and a probe, separated by 67, 200, or 550 ms interstimulus intervals (ISIs). In the prime, a target was accompanied by a distractor. In the probe, the target appeared either in the location formerly occupied by the distractor (ignored repetition) or in another location (control). Adults exhibited the SNP effect in all three ISI conditions, producing slower saccade latencies on ignored repetition versus control trials. The SNP effect obtained for infants only under 550 and 200 ms ISI conditions. These results suggest that important developments in visual selection are rooted in emerging inhibitory mechanisms.     

Reasoning with conditionals: a test of formal models of four theories

The four dominant theories of reasoning from conditionals are translated into formal models: The theory of mental models (Johnson-Laird, P. N., & Byrne, R. M. J. (2002). Conditionals: a theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference. Psychological Review, 109, 646-678), the suppositional theory (Evans, J. S. B. T., & Over, D. E. (2004). If. Oxford: Oxford University Press), a dual-process variant of the model theory (Verschueren, N., Schaeken, W., & d'Ydewalle, G. (2005). A dual-process specification of causal conditional reasoning. Thinking &Reasoning, 11, 278-293), and the probabilistic theory (Oaksford, M., Chater, N., & Larkin, J. (2000). Probabilities and polarity biases in conditional inference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 26, 883-899). The first three theories are formalized as multinomial models. The models are applied to the frequencies of patterns of acceptance or rejection across the four basic inferences modus ponens, acceptance of the consequent, denial of the antecedent, and modus tollens. Model fits are assessed for two large data sets, one representing reasoning with abstract, basic conditionals, the other reflecting reasoning with pseudo-realistic causal and non-causal conditionals. The best account of the data was provided by a modified version of the mental-model theory, augmented by directionality, and by the dual-process model.