The Development of Strategic Processing of Ambiguous Words: Riddles Versus Neutral Context

Children in Grades 4 and 6 read isolated target words following the auditory presentation of an ambiguous word (e.g., deck). The ambiguous word occurred as the last word in either a neutral sentence (e.g., “There is the deck”) or as the last word in a riddle (“Why couldn't anybody play poker on the ark? Because Noah sat on the deck). Related target words were consistent with either the dominant meaning (e.g., porch) or the subordinate meaning (cards) of the ambiguous word. In the neutral context, Grade 4 children showed equivalent facilitation for dominant and subordinate targets relative to unrelated target words; Grade 6 children showed facilitation only for the dominant targets. In the riddle context, both groups of children showed equivalent facilitation for the two types of related targets. The neutral context results supported the hypothesis that the two bases of context effects—automatic lexical access and selective access—develop at different rates (Simpson &; Foster, 1986). The results obtained from the riddles suggest that the selective process is strategic (Ceci, 1989).     

The effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity,with and without negative mood induction

Is there an effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity? Are depressed individuals biased to interpret ambiguous information in a negative manner? We used a cross-modal semantic priming task to look for evidence of a negative interpretative bias. Participants listened to ambiguous prime sentences (e.g., Joan was stunned by her final exam mark) and made lexical decisions to target words presented immediately after the sentence offset or after a delay of 1000 ms or 2000 ms. For the semantically related targets, the target was negatively related (distress), positively related (success), or neutrally related (grades) to the ambiguous prime. The experiment was conducted with and without a negative mood induction. The expectation was that depressed participants would be more likely to consider the negative interpretations of the ambiguous primes and would therefore experience larger priming effects for negatively related targets. Although there were large priming effects for all semantically related targets, there was no evidence of a negative interpretative bias.     

Constraints on the range of context-independent priming from ambiguous words

The semantic priming technique was used to explore the semantic information activated by the contextually irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words in sentence contexts. The nature of the relationship between prime and target was systematically manipulated. Evidence of priming was obtained when the target was an approximate synonym of the prime (e.g., coach-bus), and when the target was a category coordinate of low similarity, but high category typicality (e.g., raincoat jumper, in Italian). No priming was obtained when the target was event related to the prime (coach-driver), nor when it was a highly similar category co-ordinate (raincoat overcoat, in Italian). However, in these latter cases, robust priming effects were obtained when the prime was presented out of context. The results are discussed in terms of the different kinds of semantic-retrieval operations that may be performed, depending upon whether or not the subjects attend to the meaning of the prime.     

The development of morphological representations in young readers: a cross‐modal priming study

The way children organize words in their memory has intrigued many researchers in the past 20 years. Given the large number of morphologically complex words in many languages, the influence of morphemes on this organization is being increasingly examined. The aim of this study was to understand how morphemic information influences English‐speaking children's word recognition. Children in grades 3 and 5 were asked to complete a lexical decision priming task. Prime‐target pairs varied in semantic similarity, with low (e.g., belly‐bell), moderate (e.g., lately‐late), and high similarity relations (e.g., boldly‐bold). There were also word pairs similar in form only (e.g., spinach‐spin) and in semantics only (e.g., garbage‐trash). Primes were auditory and targets were presented visually. Analyses of children's lexical decision times revealed graded priming effects as a function of the convergence of form and meaning. These results indicate that developing readers do not necessarily need to lexicalize morphological units to facilitate word recognition. Their ability to process the morphological structure of words depends on their ability to develop connections between form and meaning.     

The Heuristic Power Of Oppositionality In An Incidental-Memory Task: In Support Of The Construing Process

From a personal construct view, construing is a top-down process in which wider meanings predicate narrower, targeted meanings. Predicate contexts are invariably oppositional, as Kelly's (1955) theory reflects. Two memory experiments using college subjects are presented. Subjects were asked to focus on a series of 30 target words to determine if they were similar in meaning to a predicating word (e.g., friendly). Ten of these target words were relevant (e.g., congenial), 10 were opposite (e.g., impolite), and 10 were irrelevant (e.g., abstract) in meaning to the predicating word. Subjects were then (unexpectedly) asked to recall as many words as possible. In line with experimental instructions, the majority of these recalled words were relevant to the predicating word. However, as predicted, in both experiments significantly more opposite than irrelevant words were recalled (p < .001). The results are in support of a personal construct view of human cognition.     

The contribution of prefixes to morphological processing of Spanish words

Three series of priming experiments were conducted to probe the morphological and phonological contributions to visual word recognition in Spanish. Prefixed, e.g., INCAPAZ (incapable), and pseudoprefixed, e.g., INDUSTRIA (industry) target words were presented for recognition following a prefixed, e.g., infeliz (unhappy), or pseudoprefixed, e.g., insulto (insult), prime starting with the same syllable as the target, at masked short or long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). At long SOAs the recognition of prefixed targets was facilitated by prefixed primes and inhibited by pseudoprefixed ones, whereas both prefixed and pseudoprefixed primes facilitated the recognition at short SOAs. In contrast, the recognition of pseudoprefixed targets was unaffected by the kind of prime presented, even when we used pairs of words overlapping in syllables that cannot be prefixes in Spanish. These results support a special status for morphological elements in access to meaning in reading.     

Monitoring memory errors: The influence of the veracity of retrieved information on the accuracy of judgements of learning

The current study examined the degree to which predictions of memory performance made immediately or at a delay are sensitive to confidently held memory illusions. Participants studied unrelated pairs of words and made judgements of learning (JOLs) for each item, either immediately or after a delay. Half of the unrelated pairs (deceptive items; e.g., nurse–dollar) had a semantically related competitor (e.g., doctor) that was easily accessible when given a test cue (e.g., nurse–do_ _ _r) and half had no semantically related competitor (control items; e.g., subject–dollar). Following the study phase, participants were administered a cued recall test. Results from Experiment 1 showed that memory performance was less accurate for deceptive compared with control items. In addition, delaying judgement improved the relative accuracy of JOLs for control items but not for deceptive items. Subsequent experiments explored the degree to which the relative accuracy of delayed JOLs for deceptive items improved as a result of a warning to ensure that retrieved memories were accurate (Experiment 2) and corrective feedback regarding the veracity of information retrieved prior to making a JOL (Experiment 3). In all, these data suggest that delayed JOLs may be largely insensitive to memory errors unless participants are provided with feedback regarding memory accuracy.     

Is "Change Blindness" Attenuated by Domain-specific Expertise? An Expert-Novices Comparison of Change Detection in Football Images

When an aspect of a visual image is altered, observers often fail to notice the change. Recent studies suggest that successful change detection requires the observer to attend to and effortfully encode the changing aspect between the images. In this study we addressed the question of whether individual characteristics of the observer, namely expertise in a domain, selectively influence the ability to detect changes in images from that domain. A total of 48 individuals, half of whom were experts in the sport of American football and half of whom were American football novices, were presented alternating sequences of football-related and unrelated images. Our results indicate that expertise in a specific domain increases observers' sensitivity to semantic changes of domain-related images. Implications for the development of diagnostic tools are briefly addressed.     

Resolving syntactic category ambiguity: An eye-movement analysis

In two experiments, participants' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing biased syntactic category ambiguous words with either distinct (e.g., duck) or related (e.g., burn) meanings or unambiguous control words. In Experiment 1, prior context was consistent with either the dominant or subordinate interpretation of the ambiguous word. The subordinate bias effect was absent for the ambiguous words in gaze duration measures. However, effects of ambiguity did emerge in other measures for the ambiguous words preceded by context supporting the subordinate interpretation. In Experiment 2, context preceding the target words was neutral. Ambiguity effects only arose when posttarget context was consistent with the subordinate interpretation of the ambiguous words, indicating that readers initially selected the dominant interpretation. Results support immediate theories of syntactic category ambiguity resolution, but also suggest that recovery from misanalysis of syntactic category ambiguity is more difficult than for lexical-semantic ambiguity in which alternate interpretations do not cross syntactic category.     

Working memory predicts the rejection of false memories

The relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and false memories in the memory conjunction paradigm was explored. Previous research using other paradigms has shown that individuals high in WMC are not as likely to experience false memories as low-WMC individuals, the explanation being that high-WMC individuals are better able to engage in source monitoring. In the memory conjunction paradigm participants are presented at study with parent words (e.g., eyeglasses, whiplash). At test, in addition to being presented with targets and foils, participants are presented with lures that are composed of previously studied features (e.g., eyelash). It was found that high-WMC individuals had lower levels of false recognition than low-WMC individuals. Furthermore, recall-to-reject responses were analysed (e.g., “I know I didn't see eyelash because I remember seeing eyeglasses”) and it was found that high-WMC individuals were more likely to utilise this memory editing strategy, providing direct evidence that one reason that high-WMC individuals are not as prone to false memories is because they are better able to engage in source monitoring.     

Tracking recognition of spoken words by tracking looks to printed words

Eye movements of Dutch participants were tracked as they looked at arrays of four words on a computer screen and followed spoken instructions (e.g., “Klik op het woord buffel”: Click on the word buffalo). The arrays included the target (e.g., buffel), a phonological competitor (e.g., buffer, buffer), and two unrelated distractors. Targets were monosyllabic or bisyllabic, and competitors mismatched targets only on either their onset or offset phoneme and only by one distinctive feature. Participants looked at competitors more than at distractors, but this effect was much stronger for offset-mismatch than onset-mismatch competitors. Fixations to competitors started to decrease as soon as phonetic evidence disfavouring those competitors could influence behaviour. These results confirm that listeners continuously update their interpretation of words as the evidence in the speech signal unfolds and hence establish the viability of the methodology of using eye movements to arrays of printed words to track spoken-word recognition.     

Automatic access of the meanings of ambiguous words in context: Some limitations of knowledge-based processing

Five experiments are described on the processing of ambiguous words in sentences. Two classes of ambiguous words (noun-noun and noun-verb) and two types of context (priming and nonpriming) were investigated using a variable stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) priming paradigm. Noun-noun ambiguities have two semantically unrelated readings that are nouns (e.g., PEN, ORGAN); noun-verb ambiguities have both noun and verb readings that are unrelated (e.g., TIRE, WATCH). Priming contexts contain a word highly semantically or associatively related to one meaning of the ambiguous word; nonpriming contexts favor one meaning of the word through other types of information (e.g., syntactic or pragmatic). In nonpriming contexts, subjects consistently access multiple meanings of words and select one reading within 200 msec. Lexical priming differentially affects the processing of subsequent noun-noun and noun-verb ambiguities, yielding selective access of meaning only in the former case. The results suggest that meaning access is an automatic process which is unaffected by knowledge-based (“top-down”) processing. Whether selective or multiple access of meaning is observed largely depends on the structure of the ambiguous word, not the nature of the context.     

The influence of linguistic labels on source‐monitoring decisions

Three studies explored the extent to which people use various object features, including linguistic label, shape, and category membership, to make decisions about the source of their memories. To isolate the influence of each feature, we used items that were related in the following four ways: as synonyms, as similar in shape and category membership, as homographs, or as unrelated. Participants read sentences and either saw or imagined a picture of the critical word's referent. Experiment 1 showed that participants committed more source errors for synonyms (e.g., rabbit and bunny) than for objects that were conceptually and perceptually similar (e.g., doughnut and bagel), which produced more errors than unrelated items. However, there was no effect of label, as people did not have more errors for homographs (e.g., baseball bat and flying bat) than unrelated items. In Experiment 2, presenting the critical word at study was not sufficient to lead people to use an item's label to make source decisions. However, Experiment 3 showed more source errors for homographs than unrelated pairs when semantic context was minimised at study, suggesting that people can use linguistic labels to make source decisions when other information is unavailable.     

Dissociative effects of phonological vs. semantic associates on recognition memory in the Deese/Roediger-McDermott paradigm

Using a variation of the Deese/Roediger–McDermott paradigm in four experiments, we examined hit rate, false alarm rate, and memory discriminability (d′) for critical items (e.g., sleep) after their semantic associates (e.g., dream, rest, and awake), phonological associates (e.g., bleep, sheep, and cheap) or unrelated items were studied. Replicating previous research (e.g., Neely & Tse, 2007), d′ was lower for critical items than for yoked associates in semantic lists. However, d′ was higher for critical items than for yoked associates in phonological lists, even when the same critical items were used for these two list types. The memory discriminability of critical items was enhanced by phonological lists via a larger increase in their hit rates than in their false alarm rates, relative to the same critical items in lists of unrelated words. These findings (a) could not be fully accounted for by the activation-based theories proposed in the false memory literature, and (b) may suggest that the memory discriminabilities of semantic and phonological lists are modulated by two distinct activation mechanisms.     

Emotion effects during reading: Influence of an emotion target word on eye movements and processing

Recently, Scott, O'Donnell and Sereno reported that words of high valence and arousal are processed with greater ease than neutral words during sentence reading. However, this study unsystematically intermixed emotion (label a state of mind, e.g., terrified or happy) and emotion-laden words (refer to a concept that is associated with an emotional state, e.g., debt or marriage). We compared the eye-movement record while participants read sentences that contained a neutral target word (e.g., chair) or an emotion word (no emotion-laden words were included). Readers were able to process both positive (e.g., happy) and negative emotion words (e.g., distressed) faster than neutral words. This was true across a wide range of early (e.g., first fixation durations) and late (e.g., total times on the post-target region) measures. Additional analyses revealed that State Trait Anxiety Inventory scores interacted with the emotion effect and that the emotion effect was not due to arousal alone.     

Knowing Who Knows: Laypersons' Capabilities to Judge Experts' Pertinence for Science Topics

Because modern societies are built on elaborate divisions of cognitive labor, individuals remain laypersons in most knowledge domains. Hence, they have to rely on others' expertise when deciding on many science‐related issues in private and public life. Even children already locate and discern expertise in the minds of others (e.g., Danovitch & Keil, 2004). This study examines how far university students accurately judge experts' pertinence for science topics even when they lack proficient knowledge of the domain. Participants judged the pertinence of experts from diverse disciplines based on the experts' assumed contributions to texts adapted from original articles from Science and Nature. Subjective pertinence judgments were calibrated by comparing them with bibliometrics of the original articles. Furthermore, participants' general science knowledge was controlled. Results showed that participants made well‐calibrated pertinence judgments regardless of their level of general science knowledge.     

Processing homonymy and polysemy: effects of sentential context and time-course following unilateral brain damage

The present study investigated the abilities of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD), and normal control individuals to access, in sentential biasing contexts, the multiple meanings of three types of ambiguous words, namely homonyms (e.g., "punch"), metonymies (e.g., "rabbit"), and metaphors (e.g., "star"). Furthermore, the predictions of the "suppression deficit" and "coarse semantic coding" hypotheses, which have been proposed to account for RH language function/dysfunction, were tested. Using an auditory semantic priming paradigm, ambiguous words were incorporated in dominant- or subordinate-biasing sentence-primes followed after a short (100 ms) or long (1,000 ms) interstimulus interval (ISI) by dominant-meaning-related, subordinate-meaning-related or unrelated target words. For all three types of ambiguous words, both the effects of context and ISI were obvious in the performance of normal control subjects, who showed multiple meaning activation at the short ISI, but eventually, at the long ISI, contextually appropriate meaning selection. Largely similar performance was exhibited by the LHD non-fluent aphasic patients as well. In contrast, RHD patients showed limited effects of context, and no effects of the time-course of processing. In addition, although homonymous and metonymous words showed similar patterns of activation (i.e., both meanings were activated at both ISIs), RHD patients had difficulties activating the subordinate meanings of metaphors, suggesting a selective problem with figurative meanings. Although the present findings do not provide strong support for either the "coarse semantic coding" or the "suppression deficit" hypotheses, they are viewed as being more consistent with the latter, according to which RH damage leads to deficits suppressing alternative meanings of ambiguous words that become incompatible with the context.     

Unilateral brain damage effects on processing homonymous and polysemous words

Using an auditory semantic priming paradigm, the present study investigated the abilities of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and normal control individuals to access, out of context, the multiple meanings of three types of ambiguous words, namely homonyms (e.g., "punch"), metonymies (e.g., "rabbit"), and metaphors (e.g., "star"). In addition, the study tested certain predictions of the "suppression deficit" and "coarse semantic coding" hypotheses that have been proposed to account for the linguistic deficits typically observed after RH damage. Homonymous, metonymous, and metaphorical words were used as primes followed after a short (100 ms) or a long (1000 ms) inter-stimulus interval (ISI) by dominant-meaning-related, subordinate-meaning-related or unrelated target words. No significant group effects were found, and for both ISIs, dominant- and subordinate-related targets were facilitated relative to unrelated control targets for the homonymy and metonymy conditions. In contrast, for the metaphor condition, only targets related to the dominant meaning were facilitated. These findings provide only partial support for the "suppression deficit" hypothesis and no support for the "coarse semantic coding" hypothesis (as interpreted herein) indicating that patients with focal LH or RH damage can access the multiple meanings of ambiguous words and exhibit processing abilities comparable to those of older normal control subjects, at least at the single-word level.     

Strategic reliance on phonological mediation in lexical access

The present study investigated strategic variation in reliance on phonological mediation in visual word recognition. In Experiment 1, semantically related or unrelated word primes preceded word, pseudohomophone (e.g.,trane), or nonpseudohomophone (e.g.,trank) targets in a lexical decision task. Semantic priming effects were found for words, and response latencies to pseudohomophones were longer in related than in unrelated prime conditions. In Experiment 2, related or unrelated word primes preceded word or pseudohomophone targets. A relatedness effect was found for words, although it was significant at a 600-msec prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and not at a 200-msec SOA. There was no relatedness effect for pseudohomophones. Experiment 3 was a replication of Experiment 2, except that pseudohomophones were replaced by nonpseudohomophonic orthographic controls. Facilitation effects for related target words were greater in Experiment 3 than in Experiment 2. The results reflect apparent variations in the expectation that a related prime reliably indicates that a target is a word. Although reliance on phonological mediation might be strategically contingent, there could be a brief time period in which phonologically mediated lexical access occurs automatically. Whether phonological information is maintained or suppressed subsequently depends on its overall usefulness for the task.     

Spatial Simon effects with nonspatial responses

Recent studies have shown that spatial Simon effects can be modulated by short-term associations that are set up as a result of task instructions. I examined whether spatial Simon effects can also be produced by short-term associations even when the responses are unrelated to spatial position. Participants were to say “cale” or “cole” on the basis of the direction of arrows (i.e., left or right), the meaning of words (i.e.,left orright), and the color of squares presented left or right of the screen center. Responses to squares were faster when the correct response was associated with the same position as the irrelevant position of the square (e.g., say “cale” to a square on the left when “cale” was assigned to the wordleft and the left arrow). This new type of stimulus-response compatibility effect provides the first evidence for short-term associations that involve mode-independent representations.