社会建构论与心理学理论的未来发展

社会建构论是当代西方心理学中的一股重要学术思潮。它认为知识不是一种科学发现,而是一种社会建构。知识的生产过程不是个体理性决定的,而是一种文化历史的过程,是社会协商和互动的结果。有关心理现象的分类、心理活动的形式方面的知识都是一定文化历史条件的产物。从社会建构论的视角看心理学的研究成果会有许多新的收获。从社会建构论的观点来看,理论不是经验事实的概括和抽象,而是一种社会建构。理论先于经验观察,也高于经验观察,这种观点将理论建构置于经验工作之首,为心理学理论的未来发展开辟了全新的视角。     

“Icing the shooter” in basketball: The unintended consequences of time-out management when the game is on the line

While the sport of basketball is usually characterized by a non-segmented and mostly uninterrupted play, the stoppage of the time due to time-outs (TOs) is widespread when the game is on the line. In the current investigation, we studied the effects of TOs on free-throw performance when NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) games were close and time was winding down (n = 99,026 combined sample). We generally found that time extension before execution undermined performance but not in the last minute of play when performance deteriorated altogether. In line, traditional icing when TOs were called by opposing coaches specifically to undermine performance in the last minute of play failed to exact the intended goal of lowering free-throw performance.     

Shared and separate systems in bilingual language processing: converging evidence from eyetracking and brain imaging

The neurological and cognitive aspects of bilingual language processing were examined in late Russian-English bilinguals using headband-mounted eyetracking and functional neuroimaging. A series of three eyetracking studies suggested that, at early stages of word recognition, bilinguals can activate both languages in parallel, even when direct linguistic input is in one language only. A functional neuroimaging study suggested that, although the same general structures are active for both languages, differences within these general structures are present across languages and across levels of processing. For example, different centers of activation were associated with first versus second language processing within the left Inferior Frontal Gyrus, but not within the Superior Temporal Gyrus. We suggest that parallel activation (as found with eyetracking) and shared cortical structures (as found with fMRI) may be characteristic of early stages of language processing (such as phonetic processing), but the two languages may be using separate structures at later stages of processing (such as lexical processing).     

Punishment of SΔ responding of humans in conditional matching to sample by time-out

Human subjects were intermittently reinforced with money for performing correctly on a conditional matching-to-sample task. The matching performance was examined as a function of a) the duration of Time-Outs (TOs) which followed every incorrect response and b) the frequency (FR value) with which TOs followed incorrect responses. The matching accuracy increased with longer TOs and decreased with less frequent presentation of TOs.     

汉、英句法结构相似性与第二语言的熟练度对第二语言句法加工的影响

采用事件相关电位（ERP）技术,考察了汉、英句法结构相似性与第二语言（英语）熟练度对第二语言句法加工的影响。实验材料包含与汉语句法结构相似和不同的两种英语句法结构违反的句子。结果发现：与正确句子相比,相似句法违反句在高熟练组被试中,引发正向的ERP波形偏转（150-800ms）,而在低熟练组被试中,只引发了降低的N400（300-550ms）效应;对于不同句法违反句,无论高低熟悉程度的被试,均未出现显著的ERP效应。研究结果表明,第二语言句法与母语的相似性越高,加工起来更容易;第二语言熟练度水平对第二语言句法加工具有一定的促进作用,但受到两种语言句法结构相似性的影响,相似性越高,熟练度的促进作用越大。     

Verb argument information used in a prodrop language: An experimental study in Japanese

Japanese is an SOV, head-final language with phonologically null arguments. Due to these characteristics, any (or all) of the arguments classified by a verb may be null. Consequently, verb argument information which Japanese readers/listeners receive overtly is sometimes incomplete. Furthermore, the arguments in a string may or may not belong to the same clause, and the disambiguating verb argument information does not become available until the end of a clause. These characteristics pose a question of whether or not verb argument information is a useful source of information for on-line syntactic processing in Japanese. An experiment using three types of complex NPs was designed specifically to examine whether Japanese readers use the argument structure information, or alternatively, they simply use minimal attachment in on-line processing of syntactically ambiguous structures. The reading times of three types of complex NPs suggest that native speakers of Japanese indeed utilize verb argument information, and they do so immediately. This finding supports the hypothesis that the Japanese language is processed in the similar way to English in that verb argument information functions as an important source of information in on-line processing. The difference between processing English and processing Japanese is that the former has a mechanism which keeps track of null arguments as well as overt ones.This research was supported in part by a grant to Mineharu Nakayama by the College of Humanitiesm The Ohio State University. A portion of this paper was presented at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (1992). I would like to thank Paul G. Gorrell, Julie E. Boland, Laurie A. Stowe, Mineharu Nakayama, and Jerry Packard for their useful comments and discussions.     

Induction of augmented transition networks

LAS is a program that acquires augmented transition network (ATN) grammars. It requires as data sentences of the language and semantic network representatives of their meaning. In acquiring the ATN grammars, it induces the word classes of the language, the rules of formation for sentences, and the rules mapping sentences onto meaning. The induced ATN grammar can be used both for sentence generation and sentence comprehension. Critical to the performance of the program are assumptions that it makes about the relation between sentence structure and surface structure (the graph deformation condition), about when word classes may be formed and when ATN networks may be merged, and about the structure of noun phrases. These assumptions seem to be good heuristics which are largely true for natural languages although they would not be true for many nonnatural languages. Provided these assumptions are satisfied LAS seems capable of learning any context-free language.     

Apple slide tachistoscope

We outline a BASIC program and subsidiary machine language timing routines that enable the Apple II series of computers to be employed as control devices for the tachistoscopic presentation of 35-mm slides and the collection of response latencies. The program is functional for experiments that require pictorial stimuli to be presented in up to three separate fields, with precise display times, precise interstimulus and intertriai intervals, and the collection of manual or vocal reaction times with millisecond accuracy. The major advantages of this system are that initial setup costs are substantially lower than those for other similar systems (e.g., Loftus, Gillispie. Tigre, & Nelson, 1984) and that user customization of the program may be accomplished by anyone possessing rudimentary knowledge of the BASIC programming language.     

Gender and prestige preference in language

A literature in sociolinguistics asserts that women tend to adopt and use the speech of richer people more readily than men where the difference between the speech of rich and poor is a variant/variant, a standard language/dialect, or a standard language/creole difference. This generalization is not found to be true of second language learning. Learning a second language differs from learning a variant of one's own or a very closely related form in that it requires more exposure and motivation. If these factors are controlled for, the effect predicted by the Gender and Prestige Preference Theory ought to appear. It does not. Whatever female preference there may be for the language of the rich, it is very small.The authors thank Penelope Eckert and Robbins Burling for their comments, and Tom Wilkinson for programming assistance. A version of this paper was presented at the 1976 American Sociological Association meetings.     

The standard ontological framework of cognitive neuroscience: Some lessons from Broca’s area

Since cognitive neuroscience aims at giving an integrated account of mind and brain, its ontology should include both neural and cognitive entities and specify their relations. According to what we call the standard ontological framework of cognitive neuroscience (SOFCN), the aim of cognitive neuroscience should be to establish one-to-one mappings between neural and cognitive entities. Where such entities do not yet closely align, this can be achieved by reforming the cognitive ontology, the neural ontology, or both. In order to assess the limits and the possibilities of the SOFCN, we will examine a paradigmatic case study: the concept of Broca’s area, which indicates an alleged mapping between the left inferofrontal gyrus and the production of language. We review evidence showing that such a mapping does not hold, thus calling into question either the status of Broca’s area or the validity of the SOFCN. We then propose some strategies for addressing the issue and suggest that it may be solved within the SOFCN by adopting both of the following strategies: first, more accurately defining the relevant neural structures and second, switching the focus of neural ontology from structures to events, individuated by a where (neural structures) conjoint with a how (oscillatiory frequency).     

Parental language mixing in bilingual families

An important question about early bilingualism that concerns both parents and researchers is the degree to which one language may interfere with another. This question rests on an implicit assumption that learning more than one language must always produce confusion and/or interference between (or among) the languages. Although many naturalistic studies have addressed this issue, no firm answers are yet available from the conflicting results obtained. Several factors appear to be responsible for the contradictory evidence, including the small numbers of subjects in each study, the large number of different language combinations of varying similarity that have been examined, and the variety of linguistic input situations (e.g., sequential bilingualism, language separation between home and school, parent/language separation), that have been observed. There is a consensus that children's language mixing can be eliminated if parents adhere strictly to the principle of one parent/one language enunciated by Grammont (Ronjat, 1913). However, this claim has not been directly examined. The primary goal of the present study is to characterize the linguistic input available to a child growing up with two languages. Analyses of the data show that a large proportion of parents, even those firmly committed to maintaining a strict separation of language by parent, model linguistically mixed utterances for their children. This finding suggests that children's early language mixing does not reflect interlinguistic confusion. Rather, it suggests that the child is formulating hypotheses about language based on the data available, i.e., that using the language of both father and mother in a single utterance is acceptable.     

Raising Suspicions with the Food and Drug Administration: Detecting Misconduct

The clinical Bioresearch Monitoring (BIMO) oversight program of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) assesses the quality and integrity of data submitted to the FDA for new product approvals and human subjects protection during clinical studies. A comprehensive program of on-site inspections and data verification, the BIMO program routinely performs random inspections to verify studies submitted to the FDA to support a marketing application. On occasion the FDA will conduct a directed inspection of a specific site or study to look for problems that may have previously been identified. The inspection of a clinical study sometimes uncovers evidence of research fraud or misconduct and it must be decided how to deal with the investigator and the suspect data. The prevention of [or] decreasing the incidence of fraud and misconduct through monitoring by the sponsor is one way to manage compliance issues and can help prevent misconduct. A training program is another way to manage compliance issues in clinical research. While training does not guarantee quality, it does help to ensure that all individuals involved understand the rules and the consequences of research misconduct.     

A computer interview language: Programming the on-line interactive computer

Seven computer interview and two disk file commands are executed by a computer program to display multiple-choice questions on a CRT video screen, to record clients’ answers, and to branch to various sets of questions. The program interpreting these commands uses little computer memory and does not require change each time the interview is altered or expanded. It can be written in almost any general-purpose programming language.     

LANGAGE ET PENSÉE

This paper is devoted to some issues which are to be first examined in order to approach the problem of the relations between language and thought in a positive way. The term “thought” arouses distrust in the psychologists who are attached to the scientific method, because it evokes philosophical presuppositions. However, when the problem is posed in terms of what does happen in the subject or what sort of cultural reality does correspond to a system of concepts, an objective analysis is possible and has been realized in some well-known works. Then, the author emphasizes the fact that any attempt at defiring the influence of language on the development of thought, for instance, demands that both terms should not be dealt with as global entities. Discussing the priority of thought over language, or vice versa, is greatly sterilized as long as these terms are treated so. For instance, intelligence does not necessarily correspond to the same abilities before language — or independently from it — as after language — or when intelligence is informed by it. All the same, language is not a whole: a subject who has low abilities in mere grammatical forms can nevertheless use language in an efficient way. Deaf children offer great opportunities for the study of the role of language in mental development, because, by studying them, one avoids wrong explanations based only on correlations which result from the studies in normal children. The collaboration between linguists and psychologists is discussed. The difficulties which psychologists sometimes meet with the works of linguists are outlined; the author eventually suggests some issues on which the cooperation of the linguist could particularly help the psychologist.     

The Resilience of Structure Built Around the Predicate: Homesign Gesture Systems in Turkish and American Deaf Children

Deaf children whose hearing losses prevent them from accessing spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language develop gesture systems, called homesigns, which have many of the properties of natural language—the so-called resilient properties of language. We explored the resilience of structure built around the predicate—in particular, how manner and path are mapped onto the verb—in homesign systems developed by deaf children in Turkey and the United States. We also asked whether the Turkish homesigners exhibit sentence-level structures previously identified as resilient in American and Chinese homesigners. We found that the Turkish and American deaf children used not only the same production probability and ordering patterns to indicate who does what to whom, but also used the same segmentation and conflation patterns to package manner and path. The gestures that the hearing parents produced did not, for the most part, display the patterns found in the children's gestures. Although cospeech gesture may provide the building blocks for homesign, it does not provide the blueprint for these resilient properties of language.     

A new look at “the hard problem” of bilingual lexical access: evidence for language-switch costs with univalent stimuli

Considerable work has used language-switching tasks to investigate how bilinguals manage competition between languages. Language-switching costs have been argued to reflect persisting inhibition or persisting activation of a non-target language. However, these costs might instead reflect the use of bivalent stimuli (i.e. pictures or digits that can be responded to in either language). That is, language-switching costs may simply reflect a cost of selecting the task-appropriate response for a given item and so may not be reflective of bilingual lexical access [Finkbeiner, M., Almeida, J., Janssen, N., & Carramaza, A. (2006). Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32(5), 1075–1089]. The present study addresses this concern by having Chinese/English bilinguals switch between languages in response to inherently univalent stimuli (English words and Chinese Characters) as well as lexically univalent, but orthographically bivalent, stimuli (English words and Chinese Pinyin). Speakers showed switch costs when naming both univalent and orthographically bivalent stimuli, showing that switch costs can be found even with inherently univalent stimuli.     

Temporal aspects of retrieval in short-term serial retention

In three experiments, temporal properties of memory retrieval are studied. Latency of positionally probed recall of a single item is measured as a function of its serial position (SP) in a serial list. The requested SP is indicated by a positional probe, presented immediately after the list. For two organizational structures of the list (i.e., grouped vs. ungrouped lists) the experiments study the effects of precueing the probe position briefly before probe presentation, the cue signal indicating the SPs relevant for recall. The problem of confounded effects on latency of requested SP and of probe-signal location is also investigated. A bow-shaped SP-curve is found for ungrouped lists; precueing reduces RT but does not affect the bowed shape. This argues against selective confounding effects of spatial probe position and also suggests that precueing preactivates memory access. Grouping the items into two sublists eliminates precueing effects for items around the group boundary. Furthermore, precueing is detrimental when SPs at opposite ends of the list are precued. This suggests that the available points of memory access can only be utilized one at a time, so that precueing is not beneficial when the item cannot be reached via the preactivated point. Although the notion of single access to memory is in accord with both positional cueing theory and non-associative hierarchical theories (e.g., Estes 1972), various details of the results are in favor of the first type of explanation.     

Concurrent Cognitive Processes in Rat Serial Pattern Learning: Item Memory, Serial Position, and Pattern Structure

Three experiments examined the processes mediating rat serial pattern learning for rule-consistent versus rule-violating pattern elements (“violation elements”). In all three experiments, rats were trained to press retractable levers in a circular array in a specific sequence for brain-stimulation reward (BSR). Experiment 1 examined the role of lever location (L) and element serial position (SP) cues in rats’ ability to learn to anticipate a violation element positioned at the end of a 24-element serial pattern. Rats with L cues either alone or in combination with SP cues learned to anticipate the violation element, whereas those with SP cues alone did not. Rats in groups L and L + SP underwent a series of transfers designed to remove various cues that might have controlled their performance on the violation element. Results indicated that intra-chamber lever location cues mediated performance on the violation element whereas performance on rule-consistent elements within pattern chunks was mediated by an internal mnemonic representation that was insensitive to changes in lever location cues. Experiment 2 examined whether rats could learn to use SP cues alone to anticipate a violation element if it was positioned earlier in a serial pattern. Rats learned to anticipate the violation element based on SP cues alone when it was located in SP6 in a 24-element pattern, but not when it was in SP12. Experiment 3 examined whether or not rats spontaneously encode information about chunk length and the serial position of phrasing cues in serial patterns. Rats were trained to a high criterion on the serial pattern used in Experiment 1, then were challenged with three probe patterns that manipulated both chunk length and overall pattern length. Results indicated that rats spontaneously encoded information regarding the serial position of phrasing cues in relation to chunk length. Thus, rats appear to use at least three cognitive processes concurrently in serial pattern learning tasks, namely, item memory involving external discriminative cues, counting- or timing-like processes for encoding serial position, and rule abstraction for encoding an internal representation of pattern structure.     

Limitations on Embedding in Coordinate Structures

Coordinate structures have traditionally been analyzed as having no internal structure other than the sequencing of their members. In particular, the possibility that the members of coordinate structures may themselves be coordinate structures has not been widely recognized. Those who have recognized the possibility of such embedding of coordinate structures have assumed that there are no limits on the depth of such embedding, just as there are no limits on the depth of embedding in subordinate structures. However, coordinate-structure embedding in English occurs only in order to prevent coordinate structures from containing distinct connectives (e.g., and and or), distinct junctures (breaks) between members, and sequences of members in which the first is introduced by a connective while the second is not. In order to prevent these conditions from arising, the depth of coordinate-structure embedding does not have to exceed 2. This limitation on coordinate-structure embedding must be dealt with by the grammars of natural languages; it is not simply a performance limitation. Standard generative mechanisms (finite-state, phrase-structure, and transformational grammars, including recently proposed analyses of coordinate structures based on the minimalist program) do not provide an adequate account of this limitation. On the other hand, a theory of constraint satisfaction such as optimality theory, in which ranked constraints select the optimally structured outputs for given inputs made up of members, connectives, and junctures, does do so. A detailed optimality theoretic analysis of coordinate structures in English is proposed which accounts for the limitation on coordinate-structure embedding, as well as several other properties of those structures, and of their interactions with subordinate constructions.