Familiarity changes as a function of perceptual shifts

This experiment compares the yes-no and forced recognition tests as methods of measuring familiarity. Participants faced a phase of 3 study-test recognition trials in which they studied words using all the letters of the alphabet (overlapping condition, O), and an additional phase in which targets and lures did not share any letters (non-overlapping condition, NO). Finally, subjects performed a forced-choice task in which they had to choose one of two new words, each from one of the subsets (Parkin et al., 2001). Results in the NO condition were better than in the O condition in the yes-no recognition test, while the forced-choice rate was significantly higher than .50, showing their sensitivity to familiarity. When the letter set of the words for study in the third list of the NO condition was switched, the difference between NO and O conditions disappeared in yes-no test, while the force-choice rate was not higher than .50. We conclude that both the yes-no test and the forced-choice test are valid and equivalent measures of familiarity under the right conditions.     

How “Regular” Is Sentence Comprehension in Broca's Aphasia? It Depends on How You Select the Patients

Grodzinsky, Piñango, Zurif, and Drai (1999) argue that a statistical analysis of pooled sentence comprehension data from published studies of Broca's aphasic patients supports the dominance of a differential pattern of performance on active and passive voice structures. They argue that these results counter a previous study in which individual patient data from published studies were analyzed. However, Grodzinsky et al. have not carried out a true test of their hypothesis, but have biased the outcome by selecting samples for analysis that support their claims.     

Orthographic structure and deaf spelling errors: Syllables, letter frequency, and speech

Syllable structure influences hearing students' reading and spelling (e.g., Badecker, 1996; Caramazza & Miceli, 1990; Prinzmetal, Treiman, & Rho, 1986; Rapp, 1992; Treiman & Zukowski, 1988). This may seem unsurprising since hearers closely associate written and spoken words. We analysed a corpus of spelling errors made by deaf students. They would have learned English orthography with an attenuated experience of speech. Wefound that the majority of their errors were phonologically implausible but orthographically legal. A tendency to replace uncommon letter sequences with common sequences could not account for this pattern, nor could residual influence from speech. Since syllabically defined constraints are required to keep sequences orthographically legal, the deaf data are marked by an influence of syllable structure. Two main conclusions follow: (1) Our results contribute to evidence that abstract constraints, not derived from peripheral speech or hearing mechanisms, govern the organization of linguistic knowledge; and (2) statistical redundancy could not explain the deaf results. It does not offer a general alternative to suprasegmental structure.     

Introduction

Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body, by Riane Eisler. Harper San Francisco, 495 pages. $15.00, 1996 paperback edition, ISBN 0–06–250283–2; $25.00, 1995 cloth edition, ISBN 0–06–250293‐x.     

Syntactic processing in the human brain: what we know, what we don't know, and a suggestion for how to proceed

For every claim in the neuroimaging literature about a particular brain region supporting syntactic processing, there exist other claims implicating the target region in different linguistic processes, and, in many cases, in non-linguistic cognitive processes (e.g., Blumstein, 2009). We argue that traditional group analysis methods in neuroimaging may obscure functional specificity because of inter-subject anatomical variability (Fedorenko & Kanwisher, 2009). In Fedorenko, Hsieh, Nieto-Castanon, Whitfield-Gabrieli, and Kanwisher (2010) we presented a functional localizer that allows quick and reliable identification of key language-sensitive regions in each individual brain. This approach enables pooling data from corresponding functional regions across subjects rather than from the same locations in stereotaxic space that may differ functionally due to inter-subject anatomical variability. In the current paper we demonstrate that the individual-subjects functional localization approach is superior to the traditional methods in its ability to distinguish among conditions in a brain region’s response. This ability is at the core of all neuroimaging research and is critical for answering questions of functional specialization (e.g., does a brain region specialize for processing syntactic aspects of the linguistic signal), which is in turn essential for making inferences about the precise computations conducted in each brain region. Based on our results, we argue that supplementing existing methods with an individual-subjects functional localization approach may lead to a clearer picture of the neural basis of syntactic processing, as it has in some other domains, such as high-level vision (e.g., Kanwisher, 2010) and social cognition (e.g., Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003).     

The absence of a gender congruency effect in romance languages: a matter of stimulus onset asynchrony?

Using the picture-word interference paradigm, H. Schriefers and E. Teruel (2000) found that in German the grammatical gender of the distractor word affects the production of phrases composed of article+picture name: Latencies were longer for picture-word pairs of different genders. However, the effect was found only at positive stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs; i.e., when pictures were presented 75 or 150 ms earlier than word distractors). This gender congruency effect is not obtained in Romance languages. The present article examines whether in these languages, as in German, the effect appears at positive SOAs. No effect was observed in Italian and Spanish at positive SOAs. An account is proposed to explain why the gender congruency effect is obtained in Germanic (Dutch and German) but not in Romance languages.     

Displacement activities as a behavioral measure of stress in nonhuman primates and human subjects

Traditionally, research on human stress has relied mostly on physiological and psychological measures with a relatively minor emphasis on the behavioral aspects of the phenomenon. Such an approach makes it difficult to develop valid animal models of the human stress syndrome. A promising approach to the study of the behavioral correlates of stress is to analyze those behavior patterns that ethologists have named displacement activities and that, in primates, consist mostly of self-directed behaviors. In both nonhuman primates and human subjects, displacement behavior appears in situations characterized by social tension and is likely to reflect increased autonomic arousal. Pharmacological studies of nonhuman primates have shown that the frequency of occurrence of displacement behavior is increased by anxiogenic compounds and decreased by anxiolytic drugs. Ethological studies of healthy persons and psychiatric patients during interviews have found that increased displacement behavior not only correlates with a subjective feeling state of anxiety and negative affect but also gives more veridical information about the subject's emotional state than verbal statements and facial expression. The measurement of displacement activities may be a useful complement to the physiological and psychological studies aimed at analyzing the correlates and consequences of stress.     

Naive beliefs in “sophisticated” subjects: misconceptions about trajectories of objects

University students were asked to solve simple problems about the trajectories of falling objects. A majority of the students revealed a variety of misconceptions about motion. However, the few basic patterns of responses produced by the subjects suggest considerable commonality in the types of naive physical “laws” people develop on the basis of everyday experience with the world.     

Does Respect for Embryos Entail Respect for Gametes?

Respect for human embryos is often defended on the basis of the potentiality argument: embryos deserve respect because they already possess potentially the features that in adults are fully actualized. Opponents of this argument challenge it by claiming that if embryos should be respected because they are potentially adults, then gametes should be respected because they are potentially embryos. This article rejects this reductio ad absurdum argument by showing that there are two different types of potentiality involved so that the transitivity of potentiality does not hold up in this case. Respect for embryos does not logically entail respect for gametes.     

Foreperiod and stuttering severity effects on acoustic laryngeal reaction time

An earlier paper presented a model of the laryngeal reaction time (LRT) paradigm that included several factors that appeared to affect LRT values. The present study assesses the effects of two of these factors: foreperiod and stuttering severity. The former was assessed by the use of 13 foreperiod durations. The latter was assessed by classifying experimental subjects as either mild or severe stutterers. Both factors significantly affected LRT values. More importantly, these factors demonstrated a composite effect on group LRT differences. Specifically, mild stutterers' LRT values approached normal values as foreperiod increased, whereas severe stutterers' LRT values remained significantly greater than normal values at all foreperiods. Results are discussed in terms of differential posturing and/or vibration initiation deficits underlying stutterers' delayed LRT values. We caution that acoustic measurements alone are insufficient to specify fully the nature of the underlying deficits.