Some Aspects of the Motor Organization of the Oculomotor System

Oculomotor responses in looking to visual targets were examined for motor coordination parallel to that found in manual pointing. Ocular responses did not show any evidence of speed-accuracy tradeoff when the correlation of latency (reaction time) and accuracy was assessed. The oculomotor system did show a range effect, hidden under a general undershoot of target position and present only when no visual feedback about target position was available to allow correction during the movement. Cues to allow predictive timing of the response seemed very important for oculomotor reaction time. Processing of timing of movement may be handled differently for oculomotor than for manual orienting, and calculation of position in space may be processed in common, leading to both similarities and differences for the two motor systems.     

Sentence Comprehension Is Mediated by Content-Addressable Memory Structures

Studies of working memory demonstrate that some forms of information are retrieved by a content-addressable mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1989; McElree, 1996, 1998), whereas others require a slower search-based mechanism (McElree & Dosher, 1993). Measures of the speed and accuracy of processing sentences with filler-gap dependencies demonstrate that the probability of maintaining a representation of a filler item decreases as additional material is processed, but that the speed with which a preserved representation is accessed is unaffected by the amount of interpolated material. These results suggest that basic binding operations in sentence comprehension are mediated by a content-addressable memory system.     

The Concomitant Effects of Phrase Length and Informational Content in Sentence Comprehension

Recent evidence suggests that phrase length plays a crucial role in modification ambiguities. Using a self-paced reading task, we extended these results by examining the additional pragmatic effects that length manipulations may exert. The results demonstrate that length not only modulates modification preferences directly, but that it also necessarily changes the informational content of a sentence, which itself affects modification preferences. Our findings suggest that the same length manipulation affects multiple sources of constraints, both structural and pragmatic, which can each exert differing effects on processing.     

The On-line Study of Sentence Comprehension: An Examination of Dual Task Paradigms

This paper presents three studies which examine the susceptibility of sentence comprehension to intrusion by extra-sentential probe words in two on-line dual-task techniques commonly used to study sentence processing: the cross-modal lexical priming paradigm and the unimodal all-visual lexical priming paradigm. It provides both a general review and a direct empirical examination of the effects of task-demand in the on-line study of sentence comprehension. In all three studies, sentential materials were presented to participants together with a target probe word which constituted either a better or a worse continuation of the sentence at a point at which it was presented. Materials were identical for all three studies. The manner of presentation of the sentence materials was, however, manipulated; presentation was either visual, auditory (normal rate) or auditory (slow rate). The results demonstrate that a technique in which a visual target probe interrupts ongoing sentence processing (such as occurs in unimodal visual presentation and in very slow auditory sentence presentation) encourages the integration of the probe word into the on-going sentence. Thus, when using such ‘sentence interrupting’ techniques, additional care to equate probes is necessary. Importantly, however, the results provide strong evidence that the standard use of fluent cross-modality sentence investigation methods are immune from such external probe word intrusions into ongoing sentence processing and are thus accurately reflect underlying comprehension processes.     

Bilinguals Show Weaker Lexical Access During Spoken Sentence Comprehension

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German bilinguals, German-English bilinguals and English monolinguals listened for target words in spoken English sentences while their eye-movements were recorded. Bilinguals’ eye-movements reflected weaker lexical access relative to monolinguals; furthermore, the effect of semantic constraint differed across first versus second language processing. Specifically, English-native bilinguals showed fewer overall looks to target items, regardless of sentence constraint; German-native bilinguals activated target items more slowly and maintained target activation over a longer period of time in the low-constraint condition compared with monolinguals. No eye movements to cross-linguistic competitors were observed, suggesting that these lexical access disadvantages were present during bilingual spoken sentence comprehension even in the absence of overt interlingual competition.     

句子理解的心理机制研究进展及其存在的问题

在回顾传统的反应时范式下的句子理解的研究发现及其问题的基础上,探讨了各种研究范式的优劣,进一步阐述了ERP研究范式下的新发现与新的理论分歧,检讨了ERP研究范式存在的问题及其解决方法。     

Sentence Comprehension Deficits in Alzheimer''s Disease: A Comparison of Off-Line vs. On-Line Sentence Processing

Two studies explored whether sentence comprehension impairments in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are due to deficits in syntactic processing or memory. Study 1 used a picture-pointing sentence comprehension task to measure the final outcome of comprehension in an off-line fashion. It showed the comprehension of 30 patients with AD to be impaired, but suggested that the deficits could not be attributed solely to syntactic impairments. Study 2 investigated the effects of memory on sentence comprehension by comparing off-line (grammaticality judgment) with on-line (cross-modal naming) language processing in 11 AD and 9 control subjects. The results revealed impaired performance in the off-line task but normal performance in the on-line task using the same sentences. Performance on the off-line task correlated with independent measures of verbal working memory. These data are used to argue that sentence comprehension impairments are related to verbal working memory deficits in AD.     

句子理解中抑制不同性质干扰信息的眼动

该研究采用眼动追踪技术和分心阅读范式考察了句子理解中的抑制过程,以及外在干扰信息的性质如何影响阅读中的抑制效率。研究结果发现语义相关干扰词比语义无关干扰词的阅读时间、注视时间更长,注视次数更多。语义无关干扰词比无意义字符串的注视时间更长、注视次数更多。该结果说明阅读过程中干扰信息越有意义,与目标句语义联系越紧密,则越容易被激活,抑制效率也就越低,符合Hasher等人提出的一般认知过程中抑制加工的原理。     

Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Interacts with Ambiguity During Sentence Comprehension

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Conventional opinion about using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) for examining sentence comprehension maintains that RSVP taxes working memory (WM),...     

Binding Out of Relative Clauses in Native and Non-native Sentence Comprehension

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - Pronouns can sometimes covary with a non c-commanding quantifier phrase (QP). To obtain such 'telescoping' readings, a semantic representation must be...     

句法歧义消解与句子理解研究综述

０引言 句法分析是句子理解的一个基本过程,它操作的速度非常快,操作的结果只能瞬间保留,因此,直接观察有一定困难。然而,研究者可以通过探讨句法歧义消解机制间接研究句法分析过程［１］。近年来,句法歧义消解已经逐渐成为探讨句子加工的一个非常活跃的研究领域［２－９］。本文首先对当前几种典型的有关句法歧义消解与句子加工的理论进行评述,然后简要回顾一下有关的实验证据。１句法歧义消解的理论 在过去的二十年里,句子理解研究主要集中在两个基本的实验发现上,第一,即使句子的结构暂时有歧义,人们也能立即作出一个特定的分…     

The Quantification of Some Aspects of Social Psychology

Abstract

Mayer, A., et al., in collaboration with M. Marriott and R. L. Park, with a Foreword by Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, Home Ministry, Government of India, Pilot Project, India. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1958. Pp. 367. Reviewed by Lois Barclay Murphy and Gardner Murphy.     

Working Memory and On-Line Sentence Comprehension in Patients with Alzheimer's Disease

We examined the ability of patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and normal controls to perform a sentence acceptability judgment task that required determining the referent for a reflexive pronoun. Performance on three different sentence types that differed in terms of syntactic complexity was assessed. Subjects performed the task alone and under two different dual-task conditions which required continuous, externally paced responses. DAT patients were more affected than controls by the dual-task conditions, but were not disproportionately impaired on the more complex sentence types. The failure of DAT patients to he disproportionately affected on the most complex sentence types in the dual-task conditions provides evidence for the separation of the processing resources that are used in sentence comprehension from those involved in other tasks.     

Consequences of a Motor Programming Deficit for Rehearsal and Written Sentence Comprehension

The role of central motor processes in rehearsal was investigated by studying a braindamaged patient with a severe articulatory impairment. Evidence is presented that his articulatory impairment is due to a disruption of motor programming rather than to peripheral muscle weakness. Despite his motor programming deficit, the patient showed normal auditory span and evidence of rehearsal for auditorily presented sequences of words. For visual presentation, span was reduced and there was no evidence of rehearsal. Also, the patient showed excellent sentence comprehension for syntactically complex sentences for both auditory and visual presentation. The results imply that central motor processes are not critical for normal short-term memory, at least for auditory presentation, and that reading comprehension does not depend on inner rehearsal.     

N400 and P600 or the Role of the ERP Correlates in Sentence Comprehension: Some Applications to the Italian Language

In the present study, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were applied to the study of language comprehension in the Italian language. The ERPs were recorded from 10 electrodes while the participants read (Experiment 1) or listened (Experiment 2) to sentences containing semantic or syntactic anomalies. Final words that were inconsistent with the sentence context elicited a negative wave at about 400 ms poststimulus that was more concentrated in the posterior sites of the scalp, whereas final words that were incongruous with the grammatical structure (subject-verb nonagreement) elicited a positive wave at about 600 ms poststimulus that was homogeneously distributed on the scalp. The authors found no differences based on the perceptual modality of the stimulus (visual or auditory), nor did they find different ERP correlates as a function of task relevance (explicit-implicit task induction). The available evidence indicated that the ERP response to semantic anomalies was at least partially distinct from the ERP response to syntactic anomalies, and that a syntactic parser is a plausible process included in sentence comprehension. The two semantic and syntactic effects appear as automatic processes of the decoding of the anomalies and also modality-independent processes. Cross-linguistic applications are considered in the general discussion.     

Some Aspects of Group Dynamics

The authors examine the nature of the relationship between the group members and the group therapist and discuss the reasons underlying therapeutic frame failure. It is argued that competing viewpoints concerning the nature of the therapeutic relationship in group therapy have eventuated in problems in articulating a generally accepted frame definition. The authors propose a formulation of the frame for long-term groups that embraces therapist anonymity, total confidentiality, and neutrality. Finally, instances of frame violation are viewed as stemming from the therapist's need for objects, the attempt to forestall various types of transference, and the need to provide an avenue for the therapist's narcissism. Clinical material is used to illustrate group members' responses to therapist-induced frame failures.