Mechanisms of aural encoding: VII. Differences in consonant and vowel recall in a Peterson and Peterson short-term memory paradigm

Ss either saw or heard lists of three syllables which differed by their initial consonant phoneme or their final vowel phoneme. After 5 or 15 sec of mental arithmetic, Ss were required to recall the syllables. Following auditory presentation, vowels were recalled more accurately than consonants in all serial positions and at both delays. In addition, spoken consonants and vowels showed primacy and recency effects. Following visual presentation, consonants and vowels were recalled with equal accuracy at both delays, and no recency effects were observed. These data suggest that superior recall of vowels over consonants results from differential decay of these stimuli in an acoustic storage. These data are consistent with previous experiments showing that, during serial recall, the final vowels in a sequence are recalled more accurately than the final consonants.     

A critical analysis of students' teacher ratings

Analysis of data obtained from 258 second-year undergraduate students revealed that sex differences are not associated with differences in students' teacher ratings. Significant differences in ratings were found to be associated with differences in academic performance and with differences in preference for anonymity when submitting ratings. These findings suggest that students' ratings of teaching performance suffer from significant validity problems and that such ‘performance indicators’ are likely to provide misleading information.     

Multidimensional normative ratings for the International Affective Picture System

The purpose of the present investigation was to replicate and extend the International Affective Picture System norms (Ito, Cacioppo, & Lang, 1998; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1999). These norms were developed to provide researchers with photographic slides that varied in emotional evocation, especially arousal and valence. In addition to collecting rating data on the dimensions of arousal and valence, we collected data on the dimensions of consequentiality, meaningfulness, familiarity, distinctiveness, and memorability. Furthermore, we collected ratings on the primary emotions of happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust, and fear. A total of 1,302 participants were tested in small groups. The participants in each group rated a subset of 18 slides on 14 dimensions. Ratings were obtained on 703 slides. The means and standard deviations for all of the ratings are provided. We found our valence ratings to be similar to the previous norms. In contrast, our participants were more likely to rate the slides as less arousing than in the previous norms. The mean ratings on the remaining 12 dimensions were all below the midpoint of the 9-point Likert scale. However, sufficient variability in ratings across the slides indicates that selecting slides on the basis of these variables is feasible. Overall, the present ratings should allow investigators to use these norms for research purposes, especially in research dealing with the interrelationships among emotion and cognition. The means and standard deviations for emotions may be downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet from www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Age-of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words

We present age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings for 30,121 English content words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). For data collection, this megastudy used the Web-based crowdsourcing technology offered by the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Our data indicate that the ratings collected in this way are as valid and reliable as those collected in laboratory conditions (the correlation between our ratings and those collected in the lab from U.S. students reached .93 for a subsample of 2,500 monosyllabic words). We also show that our AoA ratings explain a substantial percentage of the variance in the lexical-decision data of the English Lexicon Project, over and above the effects of log frequency, word length, and similarity to other words. This is true not only for the lemmas used in our rating study, but also for their inflected forms. We further discuss the relationships of AoA with other predictors of word recognition and illustrate the utility of AoA ratings for research on vocabulary growth.     

Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words.

Imageability ratings made on a 1-7 scale and reaction times for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 31 participants. Analyses comparing these ratings to 1,153 common words from Toglia and Battig (1978) indicate that these ratings are valid. Reliability was assessed (alpha = .95). The information obtained in this study adds to that of other normative studies and is useful to researchers interested in manipulating or controlling imageability in word recognition and memory studies. These norms can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Subjective frequency and imageability ratings for 3,600 French nouns

Subjective frequency and imageability estimates for a sample of 3,600 French nouns were collected from two independent groups of 72 young adults each. Both groups received standard instructions and provided their ratings on a 7-point scale. The timing, sequencing, presentation of lexical stimuli, and recording of responses were controlled by a computer. All estimates of internal consistency and test—retest reliability (≥.98) confirm the high level of precision and reliability of the ratings. Correlations with ratings drawn from similar studies were found to be positive and significant for subjective frequency (r ≥ .85) and for imageability (r ≥ .69). Subjective frequency was positively and significantly correlated with objective frequency estimates drawn from 10 different sources (r ≥ .42). Subjective frequency and imageability were significantly correlated (r=.26), a relationship that was driven primarily by a sudden drop in imageability ratings for words with a subjective frequency rating below 2.5. The methodological implications of these findings are discussed. The ratings can be downloaded as supplemental materials from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

The role of duration and rapid temporal processing on the lateral perception of consonants and vowels

This study explored the extent to which rapid temporal processing and duration contribute to the right-ear advantage (REA) and presumably left-hemisphere processing for stop consonants and the lack of clear-cut laterality effects for vowels. Three sets of synthetic stimuli were constructed: consonant vowel stimuli [ba da ga bi di gi bu du gu] of 300 msec duration (full stimuli) and two shortened stimuli consisting either of a noise burst and 40-msec transitions (40-msec stimuli), or a noise burst and 20-msec transitions (20-msec stimuli). Stimuli were presented dichotically for consonant, vowel, and syllable identification. Results indicated a significant REA for consonants in the full and 40-msec conditions and a non-significant REA in the 20-msec condition. Nevertheless, the magnitude of laterality did not change across the three conditions. These results suggest that although transition information including duration contributes to lateralization for stop consonants, it is the presence of abrupt onsets which crucially determines lateralized processing. For vowels, there was a significant REA only in the full stimulus condition, and a significant decrement in the magnitude of the laterality effect in the two shortened stimulus conditions. These results suggest that for vowel perception, it is the nature of the acoustic cue used for phonetic identification and not duration that seems to be the critical determinant of lateralization effects.     

Imageability ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words

Imageability ratings made on a 1–7 scale and reaction times for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 31 participants. Analyses comparing these ratings to 1,153 common words from Toglia and Battig (1978) indicate that these ratings are valid. Reliability was assessed (α = .95). The information obtained in this study adds to that of other normative studies and is useful to researchers interested in manipulating or controlling imageability in word recognition and memory studies. These norms can be downloaded fromwww.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

The representation of ontological category concepts as affected by healthy aging: normative data and theoretical implications

Attributes associated with concept representations, such as familiarity, typicality, and age of acquisition, have been shown to be important influences on lexical-semantic processing. In most previous studies of healthy and pathological aging, these attributes are not equated for younger and older adults separately on the stimuli used. In this study, normative data were collected to test whether there exist any age differences in these attributes. The results demonstrate that the ratings given by younger and older adults on natural and manmade category items correlated positively. However, age differences were also apparent, whereby older adults provided higher ratings overall than younger adults. Suggestions and hypotheses are presented to explain this pattern of age differences, which relate to how category concepts may be represented by healthy younger and older adults. Also, the possible implications for these differential age ratings on lexical-semantic processing are discussed. The age differences apparent in this study demonstrate the need to consider age-appropriate normative ratings in the selection of stimuli for use in lexical-semantic processing studies of aging, and the normative data presented provide a means of equating category stimuli. The complete list of all the means is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Negative priming reduces affective ratings

The mere exposure effect is the commonly observed increase in pleasantness ratings of stimuli that have been given prior exposure. According to the fluency attribution account of the mere exposure effect, repeated presentations of a stimulus lead to increased ease of processing, which in turn is attributed to pleasantness. If so, processing fluency manipulated by means other than repetition should influence liking. In the present experiment, processing fluency was manipulated using a negative priming procedure, and its influence on affective judgement was examined. Previously ignored stimuli were responded to slower (negative priming) and were rated as less pleasant than controls. It was concluded that decreased processing fluency decreases liking of previously ignored stimuli.     

The joint analysis of direct ratings,pairwise preferences,and dissimilarities

In studies involving judgments of similarity or dissimilarity, a variety of other variables may also be measured. Examples might be direct ratings of the stimuli, pairwise preference judgments, and physical measurements of the stimuli with respect to various properties. In such cases, there are important advantages to joint analyses of the dissimilarity and collateral variables. A variety of models are described for relating these and algorithms described for fitting these to data. A number of hypothesis tests are developed and an example offered.The research reported here was supported by grant number APA 320 to the author by the National Research Council of Canada.     

Age of acquisition ratings for 3,000 monosyllabic words

Age of acquisition (AoA) ratings made on a 1-7 scale for 3,000 monosyllabic words were obtained from 32 participants across four blocks of 750 trials (two blocks of 750 trials were completed in each of 2 days). These results, as well as those of the regression analyses and reliability and validity measures that were originally reported in Cortese and Khanna (2007), are summarized here. Here, we also report high interblock correlations across items, indicating that participants were consistent in their ratings across blocks. The norms for the 3,000 words are important for researchers interested in word processing and may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Norms, Stimuli, and Data archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Norms of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words

Word processing studies increasingly make use of regression analyses based on large numbers of stimuli (the so-called megastudy approach) rather than experimental designs based on small factorial designs. This requires the availability of word features for many words. Following similar studies in English, we present and validate ratings of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words. These include nearly all lemmas language researchers are likely to be interested in. The ratings are freely available for research purposes.     

Similarity relations among synesthetic stimuli and their attributes

Four experiments examined the similarity relations that exist among bimodal attributes that correspond synesthetically (e.g., white color and high pitch) and among stimuli formed by combining these attributes either congruently (e.g., white/high, black/low) or incongruently (e.g., white/low, black/high). Previous research suggests two hypotheses: (a) Synesthetic stimuli are compared as wholes on the basis of their overall similarity, and (b) nonidentical congruent stimuli are more dissimilar than nonidentical incongruent stimuli. In these four experiments, similarity among either individual attributes (Experiments 1 and 4) or bimodal stimuli (Experiments 2 and 3) was measured by either ratings or response latencies; similarity judgments were scaled with an individual differences scaling procedure (SINDSCAL). Stimulus comparisons were fit well by a Euclidean but not a city-block metric, supporting the overall similarity hypothesis. However, there was little evidence that subjects perceived congruity/incongruity among stimulus wholes, even though subjects were sensitive to correspondence/noncorrespondence among attributes. These results were replicated in four additional experiments using larger stimulus sets. A two-process account is proposed in which stimulus formation (intersensory processing) occurs independently of the abstraction of cross-sensory meaning (figurative processing).     

Sensory experience ratings for over 5,000 mono- and disyllabic words

Sensory experience ratings (SERs) reflect the extent to which a word evokes a sensory and/or perceptual experience in the mind of the reader. Juhasz, Yap, Dicke, Taylor, and Gullick (Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 64:1683–1691, 2011) demonstrated that SERs predict a significant amount of variance in lexical-decision response times in two megastudies of lexical processing when a large number of established psycholinguistic variables are controlled for. Here we provide the SERs for the 2,857 monosyllabic words used in the Juhasz et al. study, as well as newly collected ratings on 3,000 disyllabic words. New analyses with the combined set of words confirmed that SERs predict a reliable amount of variance in the lexical-decision response times and naming times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota, Yap, Cortese, Hutchison, Kessler, Loftus, & Treiman, Behavior Research Methods 39:445–459, 2007) when a large number of surface, lexical, and semantic variables are statistically controlled for. The results suggest that the relative availability of sensory/perceptual information associated with a word contributes to lexical–semantic processing.     

Rated age-of-acquisition norms for over 3,200 German words

Words that have been learned early in life are responded to faster than words that have been acquired later. Subjective ratings of acquisition ages have been successfully employed to study the effect of age of acquisition (AoA). Although a large number of norms exist in many languages, fewer are available for German. Therefore, subjective AoA ratings for 3,259 German words were collected online, including 2,363 nouns and 473 verbs. These words were presented in lists of 140 words, and participants rated the age in years at which they had first learned each word. A split-half correlation testified to a high internal reliability. There were also high correlations with rated AoA values for subsets of the items that had been collected in previous studies, in both German and English. Age and gender were found to influence the ratings very weakly, in that older and male participants tended to give slightly higher age ratings. Education, multilingualism, and frequent usage of languages other than German did not exert an influence on the rating values. These new ratings will extend the currently existing norms available for language and reading research across languages and will provide researchers with a wider choice of word stimuli. The ratings are available expressed in two measurements: age in years, and AoA rated on a 7-point Likert scale.     

PsychoPro 2.0: Using multidimensional scaling to examine the perceptual categorization of race

Recently, researchers examining cognitive mechanisms involved in the detection of racial markers have been using psychophysics to examine perceptual thresholds delineating race using a program called PsychoPro (MacLin, MacLin, Peterson, Chowdhry, & Joshi, 2009). PsychoPro allows researchers to collect data using facial stimuli morphed along a racial continuum with psychophysical methodology. PsychoPro 2.0 was updated so researchers could collect paired-comparison data that can then be analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS). MDS allows researchers to examine the perceptions of racial boundaries along perceptual dimensions not bounded by the stimulus continuum, by having the observer make paired comparisons to racial stimuli based on their perceived similarity. Results indicate that ratings were made on the basis of at least six different racial dimensions that suggest the emergence of a third race not represented by the original morph starting images. Details of the software, the new paired-comparison feature and its relevance in psychophysical studies in general and racial categorization in particular are presented.