Detection errors on the wordthe: Evidence for the acquisition of reading levels

The Rockefeller University, New York, New York 10021 The pattern of detection errors on the wordthe made by groups of school children and adults searching four 25-word passages for instances of the target letter t was found to depend on the subjects’ reading ability as well as on the orthographic, syntactic, and semantic con-straints of the search passages. The conditional percentage of errors on the wordthe made by children reading at first-grade level was no different from that expected on the basis of chance for any of the four passages. Disproportionately more errors onthe were made on the prose and scrambled-word passages by children reading at second-grade level and above and by adults, with the difference between the prose and scrambled-word passages being significant only for the most fluent readers. These results are consistent with a multilevel model of reading, and are taken to support the hypothesis that reading-processing skills at various levels are acquired at different rates.     

On the origins of age‐of‐acquisition effects in the perception of printed words

Children from different grades were tested in a lexical decision task. Word‐stimuli consisted of words acquired in their respective grades, and in grades previous to their own. The results showed that the proportion of errors for newly acquired words increased steadily with grade (i.e. first graders made fewer errors with words of grade one than fifth graders with words of grade five). However, the proportion of errors for words acquired in a given grade remained constant throughout the following grades (fifth graders made as many errors with words acquired in grade one as first graders did). These results indicate that the strong impact that age‐ or order‐of‐acquisition of words has on the way words will be recognized is in place at a very young age.     

The different types of limb apraxia errors made by patients with left vs. right hemisphere damage

Limb apraxia errors were compared among normal controls and right- or left-hemisphere-damaged patients as they imitated gestures with the ipsilateral hand. Both brain-damaged groups made similar errors on nonrepresentative and representative/intransitive movements. In contrast for pretended object use movements (transitive), the left-hemisphere-damaged group made more arm position and classical body-part-as-object errors while the right hemisphere group made as many partial errors and more less-primitive, body-part-as-object errors than the left-hemisphere-damaged group. These results help explain why a certain percentage of right-hemisphere-damaged patients are labeled apraxic, but also suggest that the left hemisphere is more important for integrating intrapersonal space and the “representation” of extrapersonal space.     

Variability in the semantic errors produced by brain-injured patients

One of the most common types of errors produced by aphasic patients during oral word production is semantic errors. However, although aphasia semantic errors are often treated as a single homogenous group, there are, in fact, several subtypes defined by the nature of the error-target relationship: paradigmatic, if the two words are category coordinates; syntagmatic, if they are associatively related but from different semantic categories; and superordinate, if the meaning of the error is broader than the meaning of the target. The goal of this study was to investigate whether or not these various subtypes of semantic errors have a similar processing origin. With this objective, we compared the patterns of semantic errors made by a group of Alzheimer patients in a picture-naming task with those made by a group of aphasic patients. We examined the percentages of the different error types, the degree of association between target and error, and the frequency values both of errors and targets. The results suggest that the three subtypes of semantic errors have different origins: the superordinate appear to arise at the semantic level, the syntagmatic at the lexical level, and the paradigmatic at both levels of processing.     

Phonetically inaccurate spelling among learning-disabled, head-injured, and nondisabled young adults

We applied the Boder and Jarrico (1982, The Boder Test of Reading-Spelling Patterns, New York: Grune & Stratton) criteria to the WRAT spelling list and examined the phonetically inaccurate spelling error patterns of learning-disabled (LD), head-injured (HI), and nondisabled young adults. Phonetically inaccurate (PI) errors were reliably rated (interrater r = .94) and were correlated significantly more strongly with dysphasic errors (r = .33) than with dyscopia (r = .16). ANOVA showed that LD and HI, which did not differ, made significantly more PI errors than both nondisabled and HI. These results indicate that PI errors reflect an underlying language disorder. The results also suggest that PI errors are more frequent in brain-related disorders. Finally, when group differences in cognitive ability are statistically controlled, PI errors are more common only among LD persons.     

Errors and error detection in typing

The errors and error detections made by qualified and trainee typists were examined, when they were given a passage of prose that included pseudo-words and words made up of random consonants. It was shown that trainees make more and detect relatively fewer errors. For all typists errors are made more often per letter in long or degraded words and are relatively less likely to be detected.     

Dissociation of inflectional and derivational morphology

A patient is described who makes morphological errors in spontaneous sentence production and in repetition of single words. The great majority of these errors were substitutions of inflectional affixes. The patient did make some derivational errors in repeating derived words but almost never made such errors for nonderived words. The inflectional errors for adjectives and nouns occurred mostly on the plural forms for nouns and adjectives and on the feminine form for adjectives. For verbs, inflectional errors were produced for all tense, aspect, and mood forms. There were no indications that these latter verb features constrained the form of inflectional errors produced. The results are interpreted as support for the thesis that morphological processes are located in the lexicon but that inflectional and derivational processes constitute autonomous subcomponents of the lexicon.     

Infants' search for visible objects: implications for the interpretation of early search errors

This study examined the error patterns of 9-month-old infants searching for hidden objects and objects that were visible within a container. Although errors occurred in both conditions, there were important differences between them. When the object was hidden, infants showed significant perseveration in that they searched more often at the object's previous hiding place than at a control location. When the object was visible, however, they made fewer errors and the errors they did make were as likely to be to the control location as to the previous hiding place. These results suggest that infants' errors in searching for a visible object reflect lapses of attention rather than systematic misunderstandings of objects or space and so are not incompatible with an information-processing account of early search.     

The selective impairment of phonological processing in speech production

We report the naming performance of a patient (DM) with a fluent progressive aphasia who made phonological errors in all language production tasks. The pattern of errors in naming was strikingly clear: DM made very many phonological errors that resulted almost always in nonword responses. The complete absence of semantic errors and the very low ratio of formal errors relative to nonword errors (1.6:30.3) in DM's performance are discussed in the context of recent claims about the nature of naming deficits in fluent aphasics. We argue that DM's performance makes highly improbable the claim that fluent aphasia results from global lesions affecting all levels of the lexical access system equally.     

Comprehension of sentence structure in anomic and conduction aphasia

Picture-pointing auditory and reading comprehension tests were administered to anomic and conduction aphasics. Subjects responded to active sentences of the present progressive form. The possible errors which a subject could make on these experimental tasks included failure to correctly interpret noun order, number, or lexical meaning. Both groups made significantly more correct responses than error responses. Of their error responses, noun-order errors significantly exceeded number and lexical errors for which no differences were observed. When compared with results previously obtained for agrammatic Broca's aphasics, no differences in the pattern of errors were identified. These results are discussed relative to current theories of syntactic processing and for the mechanisms which account for these syntactic comprehension deficits following aphasia.     

False memories of having said the unsaid: on the importance of a prior intention to speak

Previous research found that adults who participated in a mock debate often later reported having made a point that they had not. In an extension of that study, the present research not only replicated that finding but also investigated the possibility that such errors were the result of the subjects having been induced into intending to make the unmade point. Specifically, the present results show that the occurrence of the inducing stimulus probably did produce such intentions and that the stimulus was also important to the production of subsequent memory errors. Finally, it is argued that the latter errors are most parsimoniously understood as being caused by distorted memories of the intentions demonstrated by the former result.     

Processing a display even after you make a response to it. How perceptual errors can be corrected

We know that when people make responses which they did not intend they can discover this by monitoring kinaesthetic and visual feedback. It is less clear whether they can also correct perceptual errors which occur when they mistake one signal for another. It was argued that, if they can sometimes do this, extra errors which occur when discriminations become more difficult may be detected and corrected. Experiment I compared the ability of young fit subjects to detect errors made during easy and during difficult discriminations between tone signals. There was no evidence that any additional errors made to difficult discriminations were detected. Fast errors were detected, slower errors were not. The results were consistent with the idea that subjects can detect fast motor errors by monitoring feedback, but that they cannot detect perceptual mistakes.

In Experiment II subjects made easy and difficult line length discriminations. Displays lasted for 100 ms, 200 ms or 500 ms and were followed by random masks. In this case, fast errors were again corrected more frequently than slow errors but eight aspects of the data suggest that subjects could, and did, correct perceptual as well as motor mistakes and that they managed to do this by continuing to process a display after the moment at which they may have initiated an impulsive response to it. The data are interpreted in terms of a “Committee Decision” model for extended perceptual processing previously applied to other, similar data by Rabbitt and Rodgers (1977) and Rabbitt, Cumming and Vyas (1978).     

Visual and haptic matching of perceived orientations of lines

In this study we investigated the perception and production of line orientations in a vertical plane. Previous studies have shown that systematic errors are made when participants have to match oblique orientations visually and haptically. Differences in the setup for visual and haptic matching did not allow for a quantitative comparison of the errors. To investigate whether matching errors are the same for different modalities, we asked participants to match a visually presented orientation visually, haptically with visual feedback, and haptically without visual feedback. The matching errors were the same in all three matching conditions. Horizontal and vertical orientations were matched correctly, but systematic errors were made for the oblique orientations. The errors depended on the viewing position from which the stimuli were seen, and on the distance of the stimulus from the observer.     

Information processing and reasoning with premises that are empirically false: Interference,working memory,and processing speed

In this study, we looked at the contributions of individual differences in susceptibility to interference and working memory to logical reasoning with premises that were empirically false (i.e., not necessarily true). A total of 97 university students were given a sentence completion task for which a subset of stimuli was designed to generate inappropriate semantic activation that interfered with the correct response, a measure of working memory capacity, and a series of logical reasoning tasks with premises that were not always true. The results indicate that susceptibility to interference, as measured by the error rate on the relevant subset of the sentence completion task, and working memory independently account for variation in reasoning performance. The participants who made more errors in the relevant portion of the sentence completion task also showed more empirical intrusions in the deductive reasoning task, even when the effects of working memory were partialed out. Working memory capacity was more clearly related to processes involved in generating uncertainty responses to inferences for which there was no certain conclusion. A comparison of the results of this study with studies of children's reasoning suggests that adults are capable of more selective executive processes than are children. An analysis of latency measures on the sentence completion task indicated that high working memory participants who made no errors on the sentence completion task used a strategy that involved slower processing speed, as compared with participants with similar levels of working memory who did make errors. In contrast, low working memory participants who made no errors on the sentence completion task had relatively shorter reaction times than did comparable participants who did make errors.     

汉语双字词的心理词典存储—来自发展性阅读障碍个案的证据

研究探讨了发展性阅读障碍个案S汉字命名过程选择性错误的产生机制。汉字命名、词汇判断和组词实验有三个主要发现,个案S在汉字命名过程中产生大量的选择性错误,选择性错误在复合词中发生的前后位置没有显著差异;S在词汇判断过程中,混淆词汇中两个词素的先后顺序;S对产生选择性错误的汉字组词的数量显著少于控制组,且其产生选择性错误的复合词的频率显著高于他组出的其他词汇频率。研究以Zhou&Marslen-Wilson(2000)的复合词的多水平平行结构心理词典模型为基础讨论了这些发现的理论意义,并着重分析了汉字命名过程中词素频率和词汇意义结构之间的交互作用。     

Self-schematic representation of the type A and B behavior patterns

Past research has established clear behavioral differences between Type A and B individuals. The purpose of our research was to examine how these behavioral differences are represented in the self-definitions of Type As and Bs. We investigated the existence of Type A and B self-schemata by using two tasks designed to measure the influence of these hypothetical structures on speed of processing and memory interference. During an initial task, Type As and Bs made self-relevant decisions (like me, not like me) in response to trait adjectives previously scaled as Type A, Type B, or neutral in content. Reaction times for the decisions were measured, and results indicated that both Type As and Bs made faster decisions for schema-compatible responses than for schema-incompatible responses. On a second task, Type As and Bs were tested for recognition memory after they attempted to memorize half of the aforementioned trait list. Memory errors were examined and indicated that Type As and Bs made more errors that were compatible with their respective self-schemata. Taken together, these results indicate that a Type A and B distinction forms a reliable organizing framework for the self-definitions of Type As and Bs. The existence of stable cognitive structures that parallel the behavioral differences between Type As and Bs has important implications for both theory and application.     

Discriminability and identifiability of the human hand based on its quantified complexity.

Photographs of human hands were quantified according to a method suggested by Attneave (1954). The over-all complexity of the hands' contours did not affect the accuracy with which pairs and non-pairs of hands could be discriminiated. However, significantly more errors were made in identifying the mates of hands whose thumb regions were relatively complex. These results suggest that the contours of nonlaboratory forms are quantifiable and amenable to parametric investigation.     

Routes through the face recognition system

Two experiments are reported which seek to examine the proposition first put forward by Hay and Young (1982), that recognition of a known person after seeing his or her face proceeds through a series of sequentially organized stages. In both experiments subjects were shown a selection of famous and unfamiliar faces and required to state whether each face was familiar. They were then asked to recall semantic information and the person's name. Of all the possible response types, only some are predicted by models derived from Hay and Young (1982), and only these responses were observed in Experiment 1. In order to give as complete an account as possible of the slips and errors made by subjects, they were interrogated some days after completing the testing phase in Experiment 2. As in the first experiment, the results supported the view that distinct but successive stages are involved in everyday face recognition. The method developed here provides an extension of the “diary” type of study of everyday recognition errors into laboratory conditions, which confirms the findings of studies of everyday errors and provides strong support for sequential models.     

Tense and syntactic processes in agrammatic speech

This study focuses on inflectional errors in a group of eight, English-speaking people with agrammatism. Subjects were required to provide inflected verbs in declarative sentences and construct negative sentences. The errors made by these speakers are considered in terms of whether they resemble the errors made by children at the Optional Infinitive Stage. Results confirm that the errors differ from those made by children and that a different explanation is required. Explanations offered by Borer and Rohrbacher (1997) and by Friedmann and Grodzinsky (2000) are discussed but are considered inadequate to deal with our data. It is proposed that agrammatic speakers have problems with the implementation of grammar and particularly with syntactic processes such as feature-checking.