Aspectual Coercion in Eye Movements

Comprehension includes interpreting sentences in terms of aspectual categories such as processes (Harry climbed) and culminations (Harry reached the top). Adding a verbal modifier such as for many years to a culmination coerces its interpretation from one to many culminations. Previous studies have found that coercion increases lexical decision and meaning judgment time, but not eye fixation time. This study recorded eye movements as participants read sentences in which a coercive adverb increased the interpretation of multiple events. Adverbs appeared at the end of a clause and line; the post-adverb region appeared at the beginning of the next line; follow-up questions occasionally asked about aspectual meaning; and clause type varied systematically. Coercive adverbs increased eye fixation time in the post-adverb region and in the adverb and post-adverb regions combined. Factors that influence the appearance of aspectual coercion may include world knowledge, follow-up questions, and the location and ambiguity of adverbs.     

Time-Course of Semantic Composition: The Case of Aspectual Coercion

We examine the time-course of semantic structure formation during real-time sentence comprehension. We do this through the lens of aspectual coercion, a semantic combinatorial operation that lacks morpho-syntactic reflections, yet is indispensable for sentence interpretation. We describe two experiments. Experiment 1 replicates the results of a previously published study (Piñango, Zurif, & Jackendoff, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28(4), 395–414 1999) showing that the cost of implementing aspectual coercion is detectable as late as 250 ms after the operation is licensed. Experiment 2 expands the window of observation by revealing that the implementation of aspectual coercion is not detectable immediately upon its being licensed, that is, at the point at which the syntactic representation is assumed to be fully formed. These findings suggest a dissociation in the integration of information, in which semantic composition—even mandatory and automatic semantic composition—takes time to develop after it is syntactically licensed to do so.The research reported here was supported by NIH Grant DC 03660.     

Processing events: behavioral and neuromagnetic correlates of Aspectual Coercion

Much recent psycho- and neuro-linguistic work has aimed to elucidate the mechanisms by which sentence meanings are composed by investigating the processing of semantic mismatch. One controversial case for theories of semantic composition is expressions such as the clown jumped for ten minutes, in which the aspectual properties of a punctual verb clash with those of a durative modifier. Such sentences have been proposed to involve a coercion operation which shifts the punctual meaning of the verb to an iterative one. However, processing studies addressing this hypothesis have yielded mixed results. In this study, we tested four hypotheses of how aspectual mismatch is resolved with self-paced reading and magnetoencephalography. Using a set of verbs normed for punctuality, we identified an immediate behavioral cost of mismatch. The neural correlates of this processing were found to match effects in midline prefrontal regions previously implicated in the resolution of complement coercion. We also identified earlier effects in right-lateral frontal and temporal sites. We suggest that of the representational hypotheses currently in the literature, these data are most consistent with an account where aspectual mismatch initially involves the composition of an anomalous meaning that is later repaired via coercion.     

Aspectual Constraints in the Mental Lexicon

This study addresses the question of whether constraints on aspectual semantics play a role in lexical processing. Two universal cognitive constraints are identified: states cannot be delimited and telic predicates cannot be further telicized. The study investigates how these are obeyed in the productive process of perfective preverb and stem combination in Bulgarian. An off-line task ascertains that Bulgarian native speakers have a default semantic interpretation for the preverbs under investigation. A visual lexical decision task shows clear legality effects in nonwords composed of existing preverbs and stems, thereby supporting decompositional approaches. It is argued that, after the process of morpheme search, there must be a process of checking for combinatory felicity of the morphemes activated in the lexical access.     

Self‐Presentational Effects in the Implicit Association Test

Two studies rely on Schlenker and Leary 's (1982) conceptual framework to investigate self‐presentational biases in the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Study 1 shows that under specific conditions, the IAT is indeed sensitive to self‐presentation, especially for high self‐monitors. Study 2 suggests that participants can fake the IAT to appear in a favorable light. Possible process mechanisms are discussed and directions are provided for future research in consumer psychology.     

Self‐Presentational Cognitions for Exercise in Female Adolescents

The study's main purpose was to clarify the role of a range of self‐presentational cognitions in the relationship between social physique anxiety and exercise behavior. Female participants (N= 331; M age = 14.5 years) reported their exercise frequency and completed measures of self‐presentation. Exercise frequency was positively predicted by self‐presentational efficacy expectations (SPEE) and self‐presentational outcome value (SPOV). Moreover, SPEE moderated the relationship between social physique anxiety (SPA) and exercise frequency. SPA was negatively related to exercise frequency when SPEE was high, but positively related to exercise frequency when SPEE was low. Therefore, interventions designed to increase exercise frequency among adolescent girls should include strategies that both reduce SPA and enhance SPEE and SPOV.     

Aspectual asymmetries in the mental representation of events: Role of lexical and grammatical aspect

Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often processed more quickly than imperfective ones (e.g., Chan, Yap, Shirai, & Matthews, 2004; Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Yap et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2006). However, these studies used only accomplishment verbs (i.e., verbs with an inherent endpoint, such as bake a cake). The present study on the processing of Cantonese includes activity verbs (i.e., durative verbs with no inherent endpoint, such as play the piano), and the results indicate a strong interaction between lexical aspect (i.e., verb type) and grammatical aspect. That is, perfective sentences were processed more quickly with accomplishment verbs, consistent with previous findings, but imperfective sentences were processed more quickly with activity verbs. We suggest that these different aspectual asymmetries emerge as a result of the inherent associations between accomplishment verbs and the bounded features of perfective aspect and between activity verbs and the unbounded features of imperfective aspect. The sentence stimuli from this study may be downloaded from mc.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Seeing structure: Shape skeletons modulate perceived similarity

An intrinsic part of seeing objects is seeing how similar or different they are relative to one another. This experience requires that objects be mentally represented in a common format over which such comparisons can be carried out. What is that representational format? Objects could be compared in terms of their superficial features (e.g., degree of pixel-by-pixel overlap), but a more intriguing possibility is that they are compared on the basis of a deeper structure. One especially promising candidate that has enjoyed success in the computer vision literature is the shape skeleton—a geometric transformation that represents objects according to their inferred underlying organization. Despite several hints that shape skeletons are computed in human vision, it remains unclear how much they actually matter for subsequent performance. Here, we explore the possibility that shape skeletons help mediate the ability to extract visual similarity. Observers completed a same/different task in which two shapes could vary either in their skeletal structure (without changing superficial features such as size, orientation, and internal angular separation) or in large surface-level ways (without changing overall skeletal organization). Discrimination was better for skeletally dissimilar shapes: observers had difficulty appreciating even surprisingly large differences when those differences did not reorganize the underlying skeletons. This pattern also generalized beyond line drawings to 3-D volumes whose skeletons were less readily inferable from the shapes’ visible contours. These results show how shape skeletons may influence the perception of similarity—and more generally, how they have important consequences for downstream visual processing.

     

A Conceptual Overview of the Self‐Presentational Concerns and Response Tendencies of Focus Group Participants

Focus group respondents are often requested to perform tasks that require them to convey information about themselves. However, despite the potential for respondents to have self‐presentational concerns, research on focus group productivity has virtually ignored extant scholarship on impression management. This shortcoming is addressed by presenting a conceptual overview of the effects of self‐presentational concerns on focus group participation. A product of this overview is a conceptual model that posits that the amount and nature of information that people convey about themselves to others is a function of their eagerness to make desired impressions and their subjective probabilities of doing so. According to the model, when focus group participants are highly motivated to make desired impressions, they may be reluctant to present unbiased images of themselves. However, they are not likely to deceive unless they are confident in their abilities to ascertain and enact desired images. Those who are motivated to make desired impressions but are doubtful of doing so are likely to protect themselves by concealing self‐relevant information or avoiding self‐relevant issues. Implications of this model for research and practice are discussed.     

Shape from shadows

The colors, textures, and shapes of shadows are physically constrained in several ways in natural scenes. The visual system appears to ignore these constraints, however, and to accept many patterns as shadows even though they could not occur naturally. In the stimuli that we have studied, the only requirements for the perception of depth due to shadows were that shadow regions be darker than the surrounding, nonshadow regions and that there be consistent contrast polarity along the shadow border. Three-dimensional shape due to shadows was perceived when shadow areas were filled with colors or textures that could not occur in natural scenes, when shadow and nonshadow regions had textures that moved in different directions, or when they were presented on different depth planes. The results suggest that the interpretation of shadows begins with the identification of acceptable shadow borders by a cooperative process that requires consistent contrast polarity across a range of scales at each point along the border. Finally, we discuss how the identification of a shadow region can help the visual system to patch together areas that are separated by shadow boundaries, to identify directions of surface curvature, and to select a preferred three-dimensional interpretation while rejecting others.     

Weight and Shape Ideals: Thin Is Dangerously In

Thinness as an ideal of feminine beauty is nowhere more evident than in the popular media. The trend toward an increasingly thinner standard and a more tubular body shape has been documented in Playboy centerfolds from the 1960s to the 1980s. The present study provides information about body standards into the 1990s. Body measurements of two groups of models were compared: contemporary Playboy centerfolds and ready-towear and commercial print models advertising on the Intemet. Results revealed that thinness is increasing for centerfolds, many of whom meet weight criteria for anorexia. Results also showed unhealthy levels of thinness in the Internet models. Body shape for both cohorts is curvaceous, results which do not support prior research indicating an increase in the tubular body. Discussion focuses on the role that both the media and the health industry play in contributing to Western culture's adoption of an unhealthy body ideal.