Part of speech and phonological form implied in written-word comprehension: Evidence from homograph disambiguation by normal and aphasic subjects

A sentence construction experiment examining the effect of part of speech and phonological form in written-word comprehension is reported. Normal and aphasic subjects had to write sentences incorporating a given word pair, one word was a homograph (e.g., “bank”) whose meaning was context-biased by the other (e.g., “money”/“river”). The effect of three psycholinguistic factors on subjects' performance was questioned: (i) The relative frequency of one meaning of the homograph as compared to the other meaning; (ii) The lexical/syntactic ambiguity (“ball”/“can”); (iii) The same/different phonological forms of the two meanings (“fair”/“bass”). The results are discussed in the framework of a model in which multiple special-purpose procedures are involved in normal processing, some of them being differentially impaired by brain disease in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics.     

Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect

A psycholinguistically based conception of the relation among context, categorization, and memory is tested by examining what happens to people's memory of an object when the object is initially categorized in terms of the context in which it appears, but, when the object is later recalled, this context is no longer salient. Subjects read about the sentencing decisions of a target trial judge in the context of other trial judges who consistently gave either higher sentences or lower sentences than the target judge. As predicted, subjects tended to categorize the target judge as “lenient” in the former, harsh context condition, and as “harsh” in the latter, lenient context condition. A week later, subjects read about the sentencing decisions of some additional judges, and then recalled the sentencing decisions of the target judge they had read about the week before. Across the two sessions, either a harsh, moderate, or lenient category norm for judges' sentencing decisions was established by having subjects read about decisions that involved either high, medium, or low sentences, respectively. The results indicated that subjects recalled the target judge's decisions by interpreting their prior categorization of his behavior in terms of the category norm established across the two sessions rather than the original context. Thus, subjects who were exposed to the same target in the same circumstances, and initially categorized the target in the same way, nevertheless remembered his behavior differently if their category norm was different at the moment of recall. Other types of “change of standard” and their implications for human judgment and memory are discussed.     

Phonological encoding and ideographic reading by the disconnected right hemisphere: Two case studies

The mute disconnected right hemispheres (RHs) of two commissurotomy patients are able to understand spoken words and read printed words by matching them with pictures of the objects named. In this paper we report the results of five experiments. The RH of one patient could “evoke the sound image” of a word to the extent of matching two pictures with homonymous names (experiment 1) or with rhyming names (experiment 2) without being able to name either one. This transformation of picture to covert sound does not depend on orthographic similarity of word ends as a clue to homonymy or rhyme, nor does it improve with short-term learning. Yet neither RH can translate print into sound by matching a spelled word with a picture that has a rhyming name (experiment 3) or by matching two orthographically dissimilar rhymes, be they meaningful (experiment 4) or nonsense words (experiment 5). We suggest that these RHs read “ideographically,” recognizing words directly as visual gestalts without intermediate phonetic recoding or grapheme-to-phoneme translation.     

Read but not write “Idea”: Evidence for a third reading mechanism

Most information processing accounts of reading incorporate either two or three mechanisms by which oral reading may be accomplished. The existence of a “third” mechanism by which words may be read lexically but without semantic mediation remains controversial. We report data from a patient (W.T.) with an infarction involving Wernicke's area who was unable to write, repeat, or comprehend words of low imageability yet read these and other words reliably; the patient could not, however, read nonwords. As the patient was unable to read on the basis of sublexical print-to-sound correspondences and, at least for words of low imageability, was unable to read by means of a semantically mediated process, the data from this patient are most readily accommodated by models of reading incorporating three mechanisms.     

Multivariate relationships between measures of learning style and memory

Three self-report instruments assessing “learning style” were administered to 106 undergraduate students: the Inventory of Learning Processes, the Study Behavior Questionnaire, and the Learning Style Inventory. Performance measures on word list and prose learning tasks were also obtained using both immediate and delayed retention tests. Canonical correlation analysis of the pairs of learning style instruments indicated that there was a small to moderate amount of overlapped variance. Inspection of the canonical variates revealed that what overlap existed was generally due to a common factor related to the depth of processing conception of memory. No significant canonical correlations were obtained between any of the learning style instruments and word list retention measures. However, the Inventory of Learning Processes and the Learning Style Inventory each obtained one significant canonical correlation with the set of prose retention measures. There was little overlap between sets of retention measures derived separately from prose and word list tasks. The findings have implications concerning (a) the validity and equivalency of available self-report instruments assessing learning style, (b) the role of the learning task in studying individual differences in learning and memory processes, and (c) the assessment of “depth of processing” at the level of individual differences.     

Through the looking glass: Sex differences in memory for self-facial poses

This study investigated recognition memory of photographs of the subject's own face. Male and female subjects were photographed as they projected sociable faces, trustworthy faces, and intelligent faces. After deciding which face of 10 best represented each characteristic, and judging which photograph best represented their “real self,” a recognition memory test of poses was given. Half of each sex were tested under intentional learning conditions and the remainder were tested under incidental learning conditions. Females demonstrated superior recognition memory of their own facial projections and, in particular, recalled photographs of their “real self” and “most sociable” self most easily. No differences were found between the two learning conditions. Subjects' recognition performance was not related to their confidence of judgments. The results were discussed in terms of sex differences and the role of self in memory.     

Event-related potentials in phonological matching tasks

Two experiments investigated Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) in matching tasks. In Experiment 1 subjects judged, in separate conditions, whether two words rhymed or were written in the same case. The CNV developing between the two words was larger in the latter task compared to the former at the right temporal site. In the rhyme judgment task, an increased late negativity differentiated the ERPs to nonrhyming words from those that rhymed with the previously presented word. This difference was maximal at the midline and over the right hemisphere. Experiment 2 further investigated ERPs in the rhyme judgment task, increasing memory demands with an extended interstimulus interval (ISI) and varying the number of items subjects had to hold in memory during this period (one vs. three). Irrespective of memory load, CNVs during the ISI were more negative from the left hemisphere, and the ERPs to the rhyming and nonrhyming words showed the same differences as in Experiment 1. The CNV asymmetries are interpreted as being associated with the engagement of lateralized short-term memory processes. The rhyme/nonrhyme differences are possibly related to the “N400” component elicited by semantically incongruous words. Possible reasons for their scalp distribution are discussed.     

Memory for emotionally provocative words in alexithymia: A role for stimulus relevance

Alexithymia is associated with emotion processing deficits, particularly for negative emotional information. However, also common are a high prevalence of somatic symptoms and the perception of somatic sensations as distressing. Although little research has yet been conducted on memory in alexithymia, we hypothesized a paradoxical effect of alexithymia on memory. Specifically, recall of negative emotional words was expected to be reduced in alexithymia, while memory for illness words was expected to be enhanced in alexithymia.Eighty-five high or low alexithymia participants viewed and rated arousing illness-related (“pain”), emotionally positive (“thrill”), negative (“hatred”), and neutral words (“horse”). Recall was assessed 45 min later.High alexithymia participants recalled significantly fewer negative emotion words but also more illness-related words than low alexithymia participants. The results suggest that personal relevance can shape cognitive processing of stimuli, even to enhance retention of a subclass of stimuli whose retention is generally impaired in alexithymia.     

ERP evidence for telicity effects on syntactic processing in garden-path sentences

Verbs contain multifaceted information about both the semantics of an action, and potential argument structures. Linguistic theory classifies verbs according to whether the denoted action has an inherent (telic) end-point (fall, awaken), or whether it is considered homogenous, or atelic (read, worship). The aim of our study was to examine how this distinction influences on-line sentence processing, investigating the effects of verbal telicity on the ease of syntactic re-analysis of Object reduced relative clauses. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 22 English speakers as they read sentences in which the main verb was either telic or atelic, e.g., “The actress awakened/worshipped by the writer left in a hurry”. ERPs elicited by telic and atelic verbs, the preposition “by” introducing the second argument (Agent), and the second argument itself, e.g., “writer”, were compared. Additionally, participants were grouped according to receptive syntactic proficiency: normal (NP) or high (HP). ERPs from the NP group first diverged at the second argument, with the atelic condition eliciting larger amplitude negativity at the N100, and continuing to the P200 interval. In contrast, ERPs from the HP group first diverged earlier in the sentence, on the word “by”. ERPs elicited by “by” in the atelic condition were also characterized by increased negativity, in this case significant at P200 and Anterior Negativity between 320 and 500 ms post stimulus onset. Our results support the postulated conceptual/semantic distinction underlying the two verb categories, and demonstrate that world-knowledge about actions designated by verbs and syntactic proficiency are reflected in on-line processing of sentence structure.     

A bird is a bird is a bird: Making reference within and without superordinate categories

Adults with localized cerebral insult often err in their use of a word to refer to an object or an idea. It is important to assess, then, the patients' appreciation of what a word can refer to, and the way in which they may violate the borders around a referential field. Nonfluent aphasics, fluent aphasics, and nonaphasic patients with insult to the right hemisphere were asked to provide names of items which could be referred to by familiar superordinate terms like “bird.” The principal results revealed that the nonfluent aphasics are anchored to the central portions of a superordinate's referential field (naming items like “robin” and “sparrow,” for instance). While fluent aphasics often violate the borders around a referential field (e.g., providing “beaver” in response to “birds”), it was nevertheless possible to characterize some limits to their choice of a superordinate's referents. These findings were independent both of the absolute number of responses provided and the frequency of occurrence of the response. Further, the patients with insult to the left hemisphere produce few consecutive items whose referents hold attributes in common. When these clusters are produced by aphasics, they consist primarily of subordinates whose referents exhibit many overlapping features (e.g., “bald eagle, black eagle, golden eagle” in response to “bird”). The right-hemisphere-damaged subjects, in contrast, produce many clusters of related items. These consist of less central, basic object level words whose referents hold less obvious features in common (e.g., “albatross, crane, gull” in response to “bird”). Aphasics, then, may be limited in their ability to analyze referents for critical features. Taken together, these data contribute to a more precise characterization of the nonfluent aphasics' and the fluent aphasics' referential deficits, and lend support specifically to the notion that neither group of aphasics relies on definition-like features to determine what a word can refer to.     

Heart rate variability and respiratory concomitants of visual and nonvisual “imagery” and cognitive style

Attention to visual and nonvisual imagery, elicited by an imagery questionnaire, was studied using both within and between subjects analyses of cardiac and respiratory parameters. Visual imagery was accompanied by more regular interbeat heart rate (HR) and shorter, more stable respiratory cycles than nonvisual imagery. “Visually-oriented” thinkers (visualizers), identified by a word association test, manifested less overall variability in HR than “verbally-oriented” thinkers (verbalizers), as well as less variable HR and respiratory period during visual imagery. Visual and nonvisual imagery differed in HR variability for verbalizers and in respiration period for visualizers. The results are discussed in terms of the concepts of attention deployment, “mental load”, cerebral asymmetry, and stylistic personality differences in cognitive functioning.     

Cerebral organization in bilinguals : I. Lateralization

There were no differences in lateral dominance indices between first and second languages in English-Hebrew bilinguals tested with a dichotic word test. Lateral dominance was the same for both languages regardless of when the second language was learned, how long it had been used, or how well it was known (according to a self-rating scale). In addition, the “traditional” sex differences were found where females had a significantly better overall recall performance but a significantly smaller difference in performance between the right and left ears.     

Some bodies are easier to read: The effect of consistency and regularity on children's reading

Patterson and Morton (1985) proposed a model for the skilled reading of words and non-words that accommodates two non-lexical routines. One is the grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence system which utilizes the regularity of letter to sound correspondences for single letters and digraphs. The other is a system of “bodies”--the vowel and terminal letters of a monomorphemic, monosyllabic word. The idea of the body segment, as Patterson and Morton use it, is to capture consistency effects in reading aloud--that is, the fact that the spelling-sound pattern of words with similar written endings to the target affects the speed and accuracy of its reading.

In this study consistency and regularity are examined as separate factors in children's reading, by devising stimuli in accordance with the different types of three-letter ending that are proposed within the body sub-system.

A group of 87 children aged seven to nine (reading age range: 6;6 to 13;7) was sub-divided according to reading ability and given words and non-words to read aloud. In all the children, performance was affected by body type for both words and non-words, but the better readers were most affected. The implications of these results for a radical distributed model of reading acquisition (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) are considered.     

Metaphoric comprehension: Studies in reminding and resembling

The theoretical problems posed by metaphoric comprehension are discussed in the context of experiments on prompted recall. Listeners heard sentences of the form “Topic is (like) Vehicle.” In most cases, a statement of the implicit resemblance (the “ground”) was very effective in prompting recall of its related metaphor. This result could not be attributed to the activation, transfer, or additive combination of pre-existing properties of the topic and vehicle terms or to pre-existing associations between grounds and sentence terms. It is argued that the vehicle domain guides a novel schematization of the topic domain, that the perceived resemblance is a higher-order relation among entities (both explicit and implicit) in each domain, and that this abstract relation constitutes the “functional memory unit.” Prompted recall may begin with recognition of this previously experienced relation.     

Picture Naming Deficits in Developmental Dyslexia: The Phonological Representations Hypothesis

The picture and word naming performance of developmental dyslexics was compared to the picture and word naming performance of non-dyslexic (“garden variety”) poor readers, reading age, and chronological age-matched controls. The stimulus list used for both tasks was systematically manipulated for word length and word frequency. In order to examine picture naming errors in more depth, an object name recognition test assessed each subject's vocabulary knowledge of those names which they were unable to spontaneously label in the picture naming task. Findings indicated that the dyslexic and the garden variety poor readers exhibited a picture naming deficit relative to both chronological and reading age-matched controls. Findings also indicated that both groups of impaired readers obtained superior scores in the word naming task than in the picture naming task, while both groups of controls showed no difference in performance across tasks. The dyslexics' picture naming errors, but not those of the garden variety poor readers, were particularly marked on polysyllabic and/or low frequency words, indicating a possible phonological basis to the picture naming deficit of the dyslexic children. These children also recognized significantly more unnamed target words than all comparison groups, suggesting a particular difficulty inretrievingthe phonological codes of known picture names rather than a vocabulary deficit. Results are discussed in terms of dyslexics' difficulty in encoding full segmental phonological representations of names in long-term memory and/or in processing these representations in order to generate required names on demand.     

Surface dyslexia: A case report and some theoretical implications to reading models

This paper reports on the psycholinguistic investigation of a surface dyslexic aphasic patient's abilities to handle written material. The analysis of paralexic errors produced in reading aloud single words and nonwords classically suggested that the patient was using an analytical strategy parsing the letter string stimulus, from left to right, into graphemes, and assigning phonemic values to graphemes. The patient's results were found to be sensitive to irregularities in correspondence between graphemes and phonemes not only in reading aloud but in lexical decisions, writing on dictation, rhyming, and written-word comprehension. Moreover, the patient's linguistic behavior brought out the reverse pattern observed in deep-dyslexic performances within word/nonword and content/function word dimensions. It was found that some semantic information about written words could be retrieved from both phonological and nonphonological processes presumably operating concurrently and both providing converging or conflicting pieces of meaning to the understanding of written words. Some considerations derived from the observation of this pathological reading behavior are discussed, contributing to a psycholinguistic model of normal reading.     

阅读方式和学习次数对中文词汇的产生效应影响的发展研究

产生效应指朗读单词的记忆成绩要好于默读单词的记忆成绩。采用“学习-再认”的实验范式,以小学三年级、小学五年级、初一、初二和大学生为被试,采用2（阅读方式：朗读,默读）×2（学习次数：1次,3次）×5（年级：三年级,五年级,初一,初二,大学）的混合设计,探讨中文词汇产生效应的发展特点。结果发现：（1）年级的主效应显著,大学生的记忆成绩显著高于三年级、五年级和初一学生的;五年级、初一和初二学生的记忆成绩显著高于三年级学生的;（2）阅读方式的主效应显著,朗读的记忆成绩显著高于默读的;（3）学习次数的主效应显著,3次的记忆成绩显著高于1次的;（4）阅读方式和年级的交互作用显著,在朗读的记忆成绩上,小学三年级的与大学生的差异显著,但小学五年级、初一、初二学生的和大学生的差异均不显著,说明朗读的记忆成绩在小学五年级趋于成熟;在默读的记忆成绩上,小学三年级、五年级、初一学生的均与大学生的差异显著,初二学生的与大学生的无显著差异,表明默读的记忆成绩在初二年级趋于成熟。初一学生的产生效应大小与大学生的无差异。研究结果支持产生效应的特异观。     

Word form access dyslexia: understanding the basis of visual reading errors

We report the case of a patient V.E.M. who exhibits the infrequently described syndrome of visual dyslexia. V.E.M. read many single words accurately and rapidly; however, when words were read inaccurately, the majority of responses were alternate real words bearing a strong visual relationship to the target items. A series of observational and experimental investigations of her reading skills revealed that response accuracy was strongly affected by word frequency and mildly affected by concreteness but not influenced by word length, orthographic neighbourhood size, or semantic priming. It is argued that V.E.M.'s visual dyslexia results from a deficit of the visual word form system. More specifically, we propose that this deficit has an “access” quality, with visual word form representations remaining relatively intact despite an impairment in the processes by which these representations are activated. Taking the results of this study together with previous reports of dyslexic patients who make a high proportion of visual paralexic errors, we also suggest that visual dyslexia represents a multicomponent dyslexic syndrome for which phonological impairment and not semantic impairment may be a necessary condition.     

Field articulation and working memory

This experiment assessed the proposal that performance differences associated with field independence/field articulation reflect differential efficiency in the use of a limited capacity information-processing system termed working memory. Extreme scores on a group-administered version of the embedded figures test were used to identify subjects “high” and “low” in degree of field articulation. The task required that a subject retain a series of digits for subsequent report while performing a semantic modification of a target phrase. Concurrent information load on working memory was varied in two ways: by increasing memory load from 3 to 6 digits, and by increasing the complexity of the semantic processing required. In low information load conditions no differences were found between high FA and low FA groups. In high information load conditions low FA subjects made more errors in digit recall and took longer to perform the difficult semantic modification.