Different selection principles of freestanding and bound morphemes in language production

Freestanding and bound morphemes differ in many (psycho)linguistic aspects. Some theorists have claimed that the representation and retrieval of freestanding and bound morphemes in the course of language production are governed by similar processing mechanisms. Alternatively, it has been proposed that both types of morphemes may be selected for production in different ways. In this article, the authors first review the available experimental evidence related to this topic and then present new experimental data pointing to the notion that freestanding and bound morphemes are retrieved following distinct processing principles: freestanding morphemes are subject to competition, bound morphemes not.     

The processing of free and bound gender-marked morphemes in speech production: evidence from Dutch

In many languages, the production of noun phrases requires the selection of gender-marked elements like determiners or inflectional suffixes. There is a recent debate as to whether the selection of freestanding gender-marked elements, such as determiners, follows the same processing mechanisms as the selection of bound gender-marked morphemes, such as adjective suffixes. Most of the evidence on which this debate is based relates to the gender-congruency effect in picture-word interference experiments. In the present article, the authors address this issue with a pure picture-naming task, extending previous work in German (H. Schriefers, J. D. Jescheniak, & A. Hantsch, 2005). The results of the present study on noun phrase production in Dutch show that both types of gender-marked morphemes are selected via the same basic processing mechanisms.     

The acquisition of morphemes: Some evidence from Spanish

A research on the acquisition of morphemes of plural, diminutive, augmentative, gerund, imperfect, and preterite with 109 Spanish children from 3 to 6 is reported. The results, obtained using a technique similar to that of Berko (1958), are compared with existing data in other studies that permit us to analyze several processes. These confirm any of the operating principles proposed by Slobin (1973, 1985) and seem to explain certain errors that children commit in the ages studied. Data are viewed in a developmental pattern of reorganization of linguistic knowledge.     

Crossing grammar and biology for gender categorisations: investigating the gender congruency effect in generic nouns for animates

In formal gender languages, all nouns have grammatical gender, regardless of whether their referents have a biological sex. The question of whether the grammatical gender affects how the denoted entities are conceptualised is subject to ongoing debate. Here, we investigate the extent to which a gender congruency effect emerges for three categories of nouns, with a particular focus on generic nouns (or epicenes). In two experiments and two replications with native speakers of German, we used an implicit measure to test possible associations of nouns with biological sex. These experiments revealed a stable gender congruency effect for congruent animates, and a weaker effect for generic animates and non-animates. In a fifth experiment, we combined the implicit measure with an explicit measure and contrasted items that have strong versus weak associations with biological sex. The results indicate that the congruency effect is driven by item-specific associations rather than by grammatical gender.     

Orthographic congruency effects in the suprasegmental domain: evidence from Thai

The influence of orthographic knowledge on lexical tone processing was examined by manipulating the congruency between the tone and the tone marker of Thai monosyllabic words presented in three metalinguistic tasks. In tone monitoring (Experiment 1) and same-different tone judgement (Experiment 2)--that is, tasks that require an explicit analysis of tone information---an orthographic congruency effect was observed: Better performance was found when both tone and tone marker led to the same response than when they led to opposite, competing responses. In rhyme judgement (Experiment 3), a metaphonological task that allows tone to be processed in a more natural way since it does not require explicit analysis of tone, the orthographic effect emerged only when the interstimulus interval was lengthened from 30 to 1,200 ms. In addition to demonstrating the generalization of the orthographic congruency effect to the suprasegmental domain in Thai, the present data also suggest relatively late and task-dependent activation of orthographic representations of tone.     

No grammatical gender effect on affective ratings: evidence from Italian and German languages

In this study, we tested the linguistic relativity hypothesis by studying the effect of grammatical gender (feminine vs. masculine) on affective judgments of conceptual representation in Italian and German. In particular, we examined the within- and cross-language grammatical gender effect and its interaction with participants’ demographic characteristics (such as, the raters’ age and sex) on semantic differential scales (affective ratings of valence, arousal and dominance) in Italian and German speakers. We selected the stimuli and the relative affective measures from Italian and German adaptations of the ANEW (Affective Norms for English Words). Bayesian and frequentist analyses yielded evidence for the absence of within- and cross-languages effects of grammatical gender and sex- and age-dependent interactions. These results suggest that grammatical gender does not affect judgments of affective features of semantic representation in Italian and German speakers, since an overt coding of word grammar is not required. Although further research is recommended to refine the impact of the grammatical gender on properties of semantic representation, these results have implications for any strong view of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.     

The action congruency effect on the feelings of agency

Previous studies suggest that the sense of agency (SoA), the feeling of control about one’s own actions and ensuing effects is also generated during action selection processes. We investigate whether the conflict at the action selection stage induced by a supraliminal stimulus, modulates an implicit measure of SoA, namely intentional binding. Furthermore, we were interested to investigate the influence of different types of stimulus-response compatibility on SoA. To this aim we compared the influence of an automatic imitation task and a stroop-like task on intentional binding. In both tasks participants performed congruent and incongruent fingers movements (key release) in response to an external stimulus. Their movements caused an effect and participants estimated the time between their action and the ensuing effect. We found a reduced intentional binding effect in incongruent compared to congruent conditions in both tasks. The results are discussed within the theoretical framework of the fluency of action.     

Studying the role of cognitive control in reasoning: evidence for the congruency sequence effect in the ratio-bias task

In this study, we investigated whether control of the conflict between incongruent heuristic and analytical answer options in a reasoning task is modulated by the presence of conflict on previous trials. In two experiments, we found that the incongruency of the previous trial has a significant effect on the control exhibited on the current trial. Our data also showed that this adaptation effect is modulated by the incongruency of the previous series of trials. These results demonstrate the same control adaptation effects for a reasoning task as observed for standard response interference tasks. Coinciding control effects in the two research areas suggest that cognitive control might be an important mechanism underlying performance on reasoning tasks. Based on these results we argue that the study of cognitive control in reasoning could potentially facilitate the refinement of empirical predictions and provide a new tool to explore the exertion of top-down control in human thinking.     

Memory for details about people: familiarity,relatedness, and gender congruency

This study examines factors that influence memory for details about people. In two experiments, subjects learned fictitious details about familiar (friends, relatives) and/or unfamiliar individuals, and were tested both immediately and after a 1-week delay. To control for a confounding between familiarity and genetic relatedness in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 specific relationships (identical twin, first cousin, acquaintance) were assigned to unfamiliar individuals. Across experiments, retention was enhanced for familiar compared to unfamiliar individuals, for friends/acquaintances compared to relatives, for more closely than distantly related individuals, and for individuals of the opposite gender as the subject.     

The representation of homophones: evidence from the distractor-frequency effect

Current models of word production offer different accounts of the representation of homophones in the lexicon. The investigation of how the homophone status of a word affects lexical access can be used to test theories of lexical processing. In this study, homophones appeared as word distractors superimposed on pictures that participants named orally. The authors varied distractor frequency, a variable that has been shown to modulate the interference that distractors produce on picture naming. The results of 3 experiments converged in showing that words interfered in proportion to their individual frequency in the language, even if they have high-frequency homophone mates. This effect of specific-word frequency is compatible with models that assume (a) distinct lexical representations for the individual homophones and (b) that access to such representations is modulated by frequency. The authors discuss the extent to which current models of word production satisfy these constraints.     

The face-specific proportion congruency effect: social stimuli as contextual cues

Previous research shows that larger interference is observed in contexts associated with a high proportion of congruent trials than in those associated with a low proportion of congruent trials. Given that one of the most relevant contexts for human beings is social context, researchers have recently explored the possibility that social stimuli could also work as contextual cues for the allocation of attentional control. In fact, it has been shown that individuals use social categories (i.e., men and women) as cues to allocate attentional control. In this work, we go further by showing that individual faces (instead of the social categories they belong to) associated with a high proportion of congruent trials can also lead to larger interference effects compared to individual faces predicting a relatively low proportion of congruent trials. Furthermore, we show that faces associated with a high proportion of congruent trials are more positively evaluated than faces associated with a high proportion of incongruent trials. These results demonstrate that unique human faces are potential contextual cues than can be employed to apply cognitive control when performing an automatic task.     

Reversing the affective congruency effect: The role of target word frequency of occurrence

In this research the outcome of an affective priming experiment is shown to critically depend on the frequency of occurrence of the target words used. Low frequency target words (5.7 occurrences per million words) resulted in an affective congruency effect, i.e., faster responses following affectively congruent than incongruent primes. High frequency target words (32.6 occurrences per million) resulted in a reverse priming effect, i.e., faster responses following incongruent than congruent primes. The size of the congruency effect was larger than the size of the reverse priming effect, thus masking its emergence when word frequency was not taken into account. We propose that target word frequency has its influence via an accessibility-related mechanism having to do with differences in observed changes in affect between prime and target.     

背景颜色对一致性序列效应的调节

为满足迅速变化的环境要求,个体需要快速灵活地调整认知加工策略。背景颜色是一个重要的环境因素,它能够影响人的认知和行为表现。然而,背景颜色对认知控制在线调整的影响,是一个关键但又被忽略的问题。为解决这个问题,本研究采用字母flanker任务,考察了灰色、蓝色和红色背景条件下的一致性序列效应。结果发现,蓝色背景下的一致性序列效应不显著,而灰色和红色背景下得到了显著的一致性序列效应;此外,在这三种颜色背景下,flanker干扰效应无显著差异。这些结果说明,蓝色背景影响一致性序列效应,但干扰效应不受背景颜色的调节。当前的研究首次揭示了背景颜色对认知控制在线调整的影响,也进一步加深了我们对一致性序列效应的理解。     

Morphological analysis of disrupted morphemes: Evidence from Hebrew

In concatenative languages such as English, the morphemes of a word are linked linearly so that words formed from the same base morpheme also resemble each other along orthographic dimensions. In Hebrew, by contrast, the morphemes of a word can be but are not generally concatenated. Instead, a pattern of vowels is infixed between the consonants of the root morpheme. Consequently, the shared portion of morphologically-related words in Hebrew is not always an orthographic unit. In a series of three experiments using the repetition priming task with visually presented Hebrew materials, primes that were formed from the same base morpheme and were morphologically-related to a target facilitated target recognition. Moreover, morphologically-related prime and target pairs that contained a disruption to the shared orthographic pattern showed the same pattern of facilitation as did nondisrupted pairs. That is, there was no effect over successive prime and target presentations, of disrupting the sequence of letters that constitutes the base morpheme or root. In addition, facilitation was similar across derivational, inflectional and identical primes. The conclusion of the present study is that morphological effects in word recognition are distinct from the effects of shared structure.     

The effect of functional morphemes on word segmentation in preverbal infants

This study examines the role of functional morphemes in the earliest stage of lexical development. Recent research showed that prelinguistic infants can perceive functional morphemes. We inquire whether infants use frequent functors to segment potential word forms. French-learning 8-month-olds were familiarized to two utterance types: a novel noun following a functor, and another novel noun following a prosodically matched nonsense functor. After familiarization, infants' segmentation of the two nouns was assessed in a test phase presenting the nouns in isolation. Infants in Experiment 1 showed evidence of using both frequent functors des and mes (as opposed to the nonsense functor kes) to segment the nouns, suggesting also that they had specific representations of the functors. The infrequent functor vos in Experiment 2 did not facilitate segmentation. Frequency is thus a crucial factor. Our findings demonstrate that frequent functors can bootstrap infants into early lexical learning. Furthermore, the effect of functors for initial word segmentation is likely universal.     

Sexual orientation and childhood gender nonconformity: evidence from home videos

Homosexual adults tend to be more gender nonconforming than heterosexual adults in some of their behaviors, feelings, and interests. Retrospective studies have also shown large differences in childhood gender nonconformity, but these studies have been criticized for possible memory biases. The authors studied an indicator of childhood gender nonconformity not subject to such biases: childhood home videos. They recruited homosexual and heterosexual men and women (targets) with videos from their childhood and subsequently asked heterosexual and homosexual raters to judge the gender nonconformity of the targets from both the childhood videos and adult videos made for the study. Prehomosexual children were judged more gender nonconforming, on average, than preheterosexual children, and this pattern obtained for both men and women. This difference emerged early, carried into adulthood, and was consistent with self-report. In addition, targets who were more gender nonconforming tended to recall more childhood rejection.     

Feature binding and episodic retrieval in blindness for congruent stimuli: evidence from analyses of sequential congruency

Targets are identified more poorly when presented during a congruent cued response than during an incongruent cued response (blindness effect). The authors investigated sequential trial dependencies in the blindness effect. The results show that the size of the blindness effect depends both on the previous cued response-target congruency relationship and on repetition of events from the preceding trial. This finding suggests that cued responses and targets become linked together in a single episodic trace; repeating one of these events from the preceding trial activates the other. Depending on whether the activated representation matches or conflicts with events on the current trial, target identification performance is either facilitated or impaired. Implications for action planning and feature binding are discussed.     

The congruency sequence effect emerges when the distracter precedes the target

The congruency effect in distracter interference tasks is typically smaller when the previous trial was incongruent as compared to congruent, suggesting the operation of a control process that minimizes the influence of irrelevant stimuli on behavior. However, both the conditions under which this congruency sequence effect (CSE) can be most easily observed without the typical learning and memory confounds, and the control process underlying it, remain controversial. We therefore tested a recent hypothesis that the CSE is most easily observed without the typical confounds when the distracter is processed before the target. In line with this “distracter head start” hypothesis, in Experiments 1 and 2 the CSE was larger when the distracter appeared before, relative to with, the target. Further, in Experiment 3, we observed a negative congruency effect after incongruent trials when a long interval separated the distracter from the target, consistent with a modulation of the response engendered by the distracter but not with a shift of attention toward the target. These findings reveal an important determinant of CSE magnitude when the typical learning and memory confounds are absent and new insights into the nature of control processes that contribute to this phenomenon.     

The hot-hand fallacy in cognitive control: Repetition expectancy modulates the congruency sequence effect

In this study, the role of expectancies in cognitive control was tested. On the basis of the original interpretation of the congruency sequence effect (Gratton, Coles, & Donchin, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 121:480–506, 1992), we sought evidence for a repetition bias steering attentional control. In a series of four Stroop experiments, we investigated how participants’ explicit predictions about the upcoming (in)congruency proactively influenced subsequent Stroop performance. Similar to the fallacious “hot-hand” belief in gambling, repeating stimulus events were overpredicted, as participants consistently expected more repetitions of the congruency level than the actual presented number of congruency-level repetitions (50 %). Moreover, behavioral adjustments (i.e., a congruency sequence effect) were only found when participants anticipated a congruency-level repetition, whereas no modulation of the Stroop effect was found following alternation predictions. We propose that proactive control processes in general, and repetition expectancy in particular, should be given more attention in current theorizing and modeling of cognitive control, which is characterized by an emphasis on reactive, conflict-induced control adjustments.     

情境特异比例一致变化对冲突效应的影响

采用Hedge和Marsh任务与比例一致性操纵相结合,分别以刺激的空间位置和形状作为比例一致操纵的情境线索,考察刺激-反应联结学习与注意调节在比例一致效应中的作用。结果发现,在情境比例一致操纵下,冲突效应的效应量受到比例一致操纵的影响产生反转。表明刺激-反应联结学习在情境特异比例一致效应中起到主要作用。