On French listeners’ ability to use stress during spoken word processing

Previous studies have suggested that French listeners experience difficulties when they have to discriminate between words that differ in stress. A limitation is that these studies used stress patterns that do not respect the rules of stress placement in French. In this study, three stress patterns were tested on bisyllabic words (1) the legal stress pattern in French, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), (2) an illegal stress location pattern, namely words that bore primary stress on their first syllable compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/’?u?i/-/?u’?i/) and (3) an illegal pattern that involves an unstressed word, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their first syllable (/?u?i/-/’?u?i/). In an ABX task, participants heard three items produced by three different speakers and had to indicate whether X was identical to A or B. The stimuli A and B varied in stress (/?u’?i/-/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), in one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u’???/-/?u’?i/) or in both stress and one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u???/-/?u’?i/). The results showed that French listeners are fully able to discriminate between two words differing in stress provided that the stress pattern included an unstressed word. More importantly, they suggest that the French listeners’ difficulties mainly reside in locating stress within words.     

Lexical competition is enhanced in the left hemisphere: evidence from different types of orthographic neighbors

Two divided visual field lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the role of the cerebral hemispheres in orthographic neighborhood effects. In Experiment 1, we employed two types of words: words with many substitution neighbors (high-N) and words with few substitution neighbors (low-N). Results showed a facilitative effect of N in the left visual field (i.e., right hemisphere) and an inhibitory effect of N in the right visual field (left hemisphere). In Experiment 2, we examined whether the inhibitory effect of the higher frequency neighbors increases in the left hemisphere as compared to the right hemisphere. To go beyond the usual N-metrics, we selected words with (or without) higher frequency neighbors (addition, deletion, or transposition neighbors). Results showed that the inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency is enhanced in the right visual field. We examine the implications of these findings for the orthographic coding schemes employed by the models of visual word recognition.     

Random word generation reveals spatial encoding of syllabic word length

Existing random number generation studies demonstrate the presence of an embodied attentional bias in spontaneous number production corresponding to the horizontal Mental Number Line: Larger numbers are produced on right-hand turns and smaller numbers on left-hand turns (Loetscher et al.,2008, Curr. Biol., 18, R60). Furthermore, other concepts were also shown to rely on horizontal attentional displacement (Di Bono and Zorzi, 2013, Quart. J. Exp. Psychol., 66, 2348). In two experiments, we used a novel random word generation paradigm combined with two different ways to orient attention in horizontal space: Participants randomly generated words on left and right head turns (Experiment 1) or following left and right key presses (Experiment 2). In both studies, syllabically longer words were generated on right-hand head turns and following right key strokes. Importantly, variables related to semantic magnitude or cardinality (whether the generated words were plural-marked, referred to uncountable concepts, or were associated with largeness) were not affected by lateral manipulations. We discuss our data in terms of the ATOM (Walsh, 2015, The Oxford handbook of numerical cognition, 552) which suggests a general magnitude mechanism shared by different conceptual domains.     

Shared spatial representations for physical locations and location words in bilinguals’ primary language

For monolinguals, the Simon effect is eliminated when Simon task trials are intermixed with ones in which participants respond to the words left and right with incompatibly mapped keypresses. For bilingual Dutch/ French speakers, this result has been shown to occur when the words are in Dutch (their first and primary language), but not when they are in French. To dissociate the influence of order in which the languages were learned from whether the language was the primary one currently being used, we tested bilinguals who learned Spanish or Vietnamese as their first language but for whom English became their primary language. For both groups, the incompatible location-word mapping influenced performance of the Simon task when the words were in English but not when they were in the first language. These findings indicate that the strength of language, not order of acquisition, is the critical factor.     

The lay distinction between primary and secondary emotions: A spontaneous categorization?

In line with the psychological essentialism perspective, Leyens et al. ( 13 2000) have hypothesized that people attribute different essences to groups and that they attribute more uniquely human characteristics to their own group than to out‐groups. Leyens et al. have focused on two types of emotions, which in Roman languages have specific labels, such as sentimientos and emociones in Spanish. A cross‐cultural study showed that sentimientos (or secondary emotions) are considered uniquely human emotions whereas emociones (or primary emotions) are perceived as nonuniquely human emotions. The present study focuses on whether this categorization into primary and secondary emotions is a spontaneous distinction that people use in their everyday lives, or whether, on the contrary, it is the result of experimental demands. The paradigm “Who says what to whom” was used to test this question. Geometrical shapes of different colours were systematically associated with different stimuli that varied in meaningfulness. In a first condition, shapes were associated with small or large items of furniture (meaningful categories) and with primary and secondary emotions. In a second condition, the items of furniture were replaced by words ending with a vowel or a consonant (meaningless categories). Subsequently, participants had to recognize which shape was associated with each stimulus. Intra‐category errors were significantly more numerous than inter‐category errors, except for the words ending with a vowel or a consonant. Stated otherwise, types of emotions were recognized like the meaningful difference between items of furniture. These results show that the distinction between primary and secondary emotions is an implicit one that people use spontaneously, and not as a result of task demands. The findings are discussed from the perspective of psychological essentialism and inter‐group relations.     

Segregation of study items in memory determines the magnitude and direction of directed forgetting

When words at study are divided into to‐be‐remembered and to‐be‐forgotten ones, people recall more of the former than of the latter in a surprise memory test for all words. In this study, we also tapped memory for word identity at study (forget or remember) by asking participants to reproduce in memory selected portions of the original words. We found word identity to be parasitic on word reproduction. As a result, there is a noted tendency to recall forget‐words from study as remember‐words in the memory test more than vice versa.     

A factorial study of fluency in writing

A factorial study of fluency was undertaken to test an hypothesis that at least two fluency abilities would be measured by a battery composed both of word fluency tests used by Thurstone and tests of fluency described by several British investigators. Twenty-eight tests, including ten reference tests for five primary mental abilities, were administered to 181 high-school seniors. Ten centroid factors were extracted, a simple structure was found, and eight factors were interpreted. Five factors defined were the following reference abilities: memory (M), number (N), reasoning (R), verbal comprehension (V), and perceptual speed (P), the last one being somewhat tentatively identified. The main finding is the analysis of fluency into two factors: word fluency (W) and ideational fluency (F). Word fluency is defined as a facility in producing single, isolated words that contain one or more formal restrictions, without reference to the meaning of the words. Ideational fluency is described as a facility in expressing ideas by the use of words and their meanings. Another verbal ability indicated is tentatively interpreted as verbal versatility, the ability to express essentially the same idea by means of several different words or combinations of words.The writer wishes to express his appreciation to Dr. L. L. Thurstone for his guidance throughout the study and for providing facilities and materials needed; to Miss Jessie LaSalle and the Washington, D. C., high schools for providing the subjects; to Ledyard Tucker, Frank Medland, and Mrs. Virginia Brown for computational assistance; and to others who gave aid during the study.     

Directed forgetting in direct and indirect tests of memory: Seeking evidence of retrieval inhibition using electrophysiological measures

We investigated whether directed forgetting as elicited by the item-cueing method results solely from differential rehearsal of to-be-remembered vs. to-be-forgotten words or, additionally, from inhibitory processes that actively impair retrieval of to-be-forgotten words. During study, participants (N = 24) were instructed to remember half of a series of presented words (TBR) and to forget the other half (TBF), as indicated by an instruction cue shown shortly after each word. During test, accuracy and reaction time measures from lexical decisions (indirect memory test) followed by recognition-memory judgements (direct memory test) were supplemented with event-related potential (ERP) recordings. Results from the behavioural measures revealed directed forgetting in the recognition-memory test but not the lexical-decision test. ERPs obtained during recognition indicated that TBR words elicited a larger parietal old/new effect than TBF words overall, suggesting that remember/forget instructions impaired conscious recollection processes more severely than familiarity processes. Moreover, TBF words that were successfully forgotten elicited less parietal activity than correctly rejected new words (the reversed old/new effect; Nowicka, A., Jednorórog, K., Wypych, M., & Marchewka, A. (2009). Reversed old/new effect for intentionally forgotten words: An ERP study of directed forgetting. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 71, 97–102). This was taken to implicate that inhibitory processes likely affected these items. Enhanced negativities for successfully forgotten TBF words relative to new words were observed in the lexical-decision task at early (150–250 ms) and late (800–1000 ms) time windows, suggesting that inhibitory influences disrupt more than just conscious recollection when memory retrieval is tested indirectly.     

Competition dynamics of second-language listening

Spoken-word recognition in a nonnative language is particularly difficult where it depends on discrimination between confusable phonemes. Four experiments here examine whether this difficulty is in part due to phantom competition from “near-words” in speech. Dutch listeners confuse English /æ/ and /?/, which could lead to the sequence daf being interpreted as deaf, or lemp being interpreted as lamp. In auditory lexical decision, Dutch listeners indeed accepted such near-words as real English words more often than English listeners did. In cross-modal priming, near-words extracted from word or phrase contexts (daf from DAFfodil, lemp from eviL EMPire) induced activation of corresponding real words (deaf; lamp) for Dutch, but again not for English, listeners. Finally, by the end of untruncated carrier words containing embedded words or near-words (definite; daffodil) no activation of the real embedded forms (deaf in definite) remained for English or Dutch listeners, but activation of embedded near-words (deaf in daffodil) did still remain, for Dutch listeners only. Misinterpretation of the initial vowel here favoured the phantom competitor and disfavoured the carrier (lexically represented as containing a different vowel). Thus, near-words compete for recognition and continue competing for longer than actually embedded words; nonnative listening indeed involves phantom competition.     

Orthographic vs. phonologic syllables in handwriting production

French children program the words they write syllable by syllable. We examined whether the syllable the children use to segment words is determined phonologically (i.e., is derived from speech production processes) or orthographically. Third, 4th and 5th graders wrote on a digitiser words that were mono-syllables phonologically (e.g. barque = [baRk]) but bi-syllables orthographically (e.g. barque = bar.que). These words were matched to words that were bi-syllables both phonologically and orthographically (e.g. balcon = [bal.kõ] and bal.con). The results on letter stroke duration and fluency yielded significant peaks at the syllable boundary for both types of words, indicating that the children use orthographic rather than phonological syllables as processing units to program the words they write.     

Life,Joy, and Love: Together towards Life in Dialogue with Evangelii Gaudium and The Cape Town Commitment

This article offers reflections on key themes and missiological significances of the WCC's Together towards Life in dialogue with the other evangelical and Roman Catholic documents, specifically, Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium and the Lausanne Movement's Cape Town Commitment. Organizing his reflections around the significant words in each document – life, joy, and love – as well as other meaningful and powerful words that arise in analysis, the author finds that these three new mission statements cover much of the same ground and are quite complementary, with concern for the poor, the oppressed, the marginalized, and the forgotten and disregarded playing a central role in all of them. The article concludes that it is important to study these three documents together, as each has the potential to be a friendly yet challenging ecumenical dialogue partner to the others.     

Category length produces an inverted-U discriminability function in episodic recognition memory

Four experiments used signal detection analyses to assess recognition memory for lists of words consisting of differing numbers of exemplars from different semantic categories. The results showed that recognition memory performance, measured by d _a , (a) increased as category length (CL, the number of study-list items selected from the same semantic category) increased from 1 to 8 but then decreased as CL further increased from 8 to 14, (b) was greater when 2 studied items from the same category occurred back to back, rather than being separated by 5–11 items from other categories, and (c) was greater for the first studied 2 exemplars than for the last studied 2 exemplars from blocked categories with CLs of 8 or 14. For all CLs, all z-coordinate receiver operating characteristic (z-ROC) functions were linear with slopes significantly less than 1.0, and none had a significant quadratic component. These results pose a challenge for three major classes of recognition memory models: item-noise, context-noise, and dual-process models.     

Deaf signers and serial recall in the visual modality: Memory for signs,fingerspelling, and print

This study investigated serial recall by congenitally, profoundly deaf signers for visually specified linguistic information presented in their primary language, American Sign Language (ASL), and in printed or fingerspelled English. There were three main findings. First, differences in the serial-position curves across these conditions distinguished the changing-state stimuli from the static stimuli. These differences were a recency advantage and a primacy disadvantage for the ASL signs and fingerspelled English words, relative to the printed English words. Second, the deaf subjects, who were college students and graduates, used a sign-based code to recall ASL signs, but not to recall English words; this result suggests that well-educated deaf signers do not translate into their primary language when the information to be recalled is in English. Finally, mean recall of the deaf subjects for ordered lists of ASL signs and fingerspelled and printed English words was significantly less than that of hearing control subjects for the printed words; this difference may be explained by the particular efficacy of a speech-based code used by hearing individuals for retention of ordered linguistic information and by the relatively limited speech experience of congenitally, profoundly deaf individuals.     

Lexical Representation of Gender: A Quasiregular Domain

The relationship between gender and word ending in French is a quasiregular one (e.g., most words ending in -ette are feminine, but not all). As such, the gender of low-frequency irregular forms (e.g., squelette, which is masculine) should take longer to classify than low-frequency regular forms according to neural network models. A regularity effect was found in Experiment 1, but it did not interact with word frequency. It was further revealed that there was difficulty in making gender decisions (Experiment 2) and gender verification responses (Experiment 3) to words whose endings were highly informative of gender, but whose associated article was not. These words were place names beginning with a vowel, like Australie, which do not take an indefinite article and whose definite article is ambiguous (1'). How a neural network might handle these results is discussed, and an alternative account is considered whereby there are two potential sources of gender information, lexical and nonlexical, with the latter being used to confirm the former.     

The syntax of English idioms: Can the dog be put on?

An idiom is a collection of words whose meaning as a whole cannot be determined from the meanings of the individual words. As such, idioms pose a problem for the psychological process of interpretation, but psychologists have shown interpretation of idioms to be fast. A hallmark of idioms is their resistance to syntactic variation, and some idioms are more resistant than others. Idioms that are low in resistance are termedflexible, and they tend to be more familiar to users of the language, combinedr=.401, combinedp=.02. Some syntactic variations are moredisruptive than others are, and the disruptiveness of variations agrees well with a prediction by Fraser (1970), combinedr=.897,p<.01. Furthermore, 86% of the judgments of the acceptability of 41 idioms in 7 to 8 syntactic variations by 103 Harvard undergraduates agree with a strong proposal by Fraser (1970) that if a particular syntactic variation of an idiom is acceptable, then all relevant variations equally or more disruptive are also acceptable. The localization of the 14% disagreement in either competence or performance will have considerable implications for cognitive psychology and linguistics.This research was funded in part by a graduate student research fund provided by the Department of Psychology, Harvard University. The article is a short version of the author's doctoral thesis with the same title. I am sincerely grateful to Keith Holyoak, Donna Jo Napoli, Miriam Schustack, and Roger Brown for their advice on various stages of experimental design. I am also grateful to Roger Brown, Monica Harris, Robert C. Crowder, Peter C. Gordon, Eliott Mordkowitz, and Elizabeth Weiss for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Douwe Yntema, Robert Rosenthal, and Don Rubin graciously provided helpful suggestions on data analysis for which I am also grateful.     

The Levels Hypothesis and the Study of Stimulus Value of Projective Test Items

Summary

Anagrams and semantic differential (S-D) test responses of Ss for whom words were “loaded” on a free association test were compared with those of Ss for whom the words were neutral. No differences in rate of word building or mean productivity of the two groups on the anagrams test were found. Mean S-D scale values similarly failed to differentiate between the two groups. However, when numbers of neutral (0) and extreme (+3 and ?3) responses were compared, “loaded” Ss were found on the whole to rate words more neutrally or more positively. The conclusion was that the stimulus value of the words in the associative condition could not be directly determined from responses in other conditions. The strategy of studying stimulus value of projective test items by using those items as stimuli on tests eliciting different levels of response was, therefore, questioned. Several other related experimental strategies which may mix response levels were also discussed and more appropriate techniques were suggested.     

LEXIN: A lexical database from Spanish kindergarten and first-grade readers

The LEXIN database offers psycholinguistic indexes of the 13,184 different words (types) computed from 178,839 occurrences of these words (tokens) contained in a corpus of 134 beginning readers widely used in Spain. This database provides four statistical indicators: F (overall word frequency), D (index of dispersion across selected readers), U (estimated frequency per million words), and SFI (standard frequency index). It also gives information about the number of letters, syntactic category, and syllabic structure of the words included. To facilitate comparisons, LEXIN provides data from LEXESP’s (Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Cuetos, & Carreiras, 2000), Alameda and Cuetos’s (1995), and Martínez and García’s (2004) Spanish adult psycholinguistic frequency databases. Access to the LEXIN database is facilitated by a computer program. The LEXIN program allows for the creation of word lists by letting the user specify searching criteria. LEXIN can be useful for researchers in cognitive psychology, particularly in the areas of psycholinguistics and education.     

Stuttering, cluttering, and phonological complexity: case studies

The phonological complexity of dysfluencies in those who clutter and/or stutter may help us better understand phonetic factors in these two types of fluency disorders. In this preliminary investigation, cases were three 14-year-old males, diagnosed as a Stutterer, a Clutterer, and a Stutterer–Clutterer. Spontaneous speech samples were transcribed, coded for dysfluent words which were then matched to fluent words on grammatical class (i.e., function vs. content), number of syllables and word familiarity. An Index of Phonological Complexity was determined per word, and word frequency, density and phonological neighborhood frequency were derived from an online database. Results showed that compared to fluent words, dysfluent words were more phonologically complex and ‘sparser’, implying that they have fewer phonological neighbors or words in which a single phoneme is added, deleted or substituted. Interpretations and future directions for research regarding phonological complexity in stuttering and cluttering are offered.Educational objectives: 1. The reader can list three key symptoms of cluttering. 2. The reader will define phonological neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency. 3. The reader can calculate the Index of Phonological Complexity (IPC) for a given word. 4. The reader can state two findings from the current study and how each relates to other studies of phonological complexity and fluency disorders.     

MANULEX: A grade-level lexical database from French elementary school readers

This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3-5), and all grades (G1-5). The frequencies were computed following the methods describedby Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) and Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, and Duwuri (1995), with four statistics at each level (F, overall word frequency;D, index of dispersion across the selectedreaders;U, estimated frequencyper million words; andSFI, standard frequency index). The database also provides the number of letters in the word and syntactic category information. MANULEX is intended to be a useful tool for studying language development through the selection of stimuli based on precise frequency norms. Researchers in artificial intelligence can also use it as a source of information on natural language processing to simulate written language acquisition in children. Finally, it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists.     

The Mahabharata

Through the study of both Eastern and Western spiritual and psychological traditions, we can experience an integrated sense of ourselves, culturally as well as individually, rather than the fragmentation of feeling that we have to choose between the two. Those who are receptive recognize that the discovery of India and all that its mythic symbolism has to offer is still a work in progress. This article explores key stories from the Indian epic Mahabharata from a Jungian standpoint to expand on specific ideas and explicate main features and teachings of the epic. Since the epic of the Mahabharata is so complex—and believed to be the longest epic ever composed—only selected themes are amplified: lineage and birth stories, exile, and war, as well as the women in the Mahabharata and attitudes towards them. A primary focus is on the relationship between Arjuna and Krishna as symbols of the bond between ego and Self.