Processing of Syllables in Production and Recognition Tasks

Empirical evidence for a functional role of syllables in visual word processing is abundant, however it remains rather heterogeneous. The present study aims to further specify the role of syllables and the cognitive accessibility of syllabic information in word processing. The first experiment compared performance across naming and lexical decision tasks by manipulating the number of syllables in words and non-words. Results showed a syllable number effect in both the naming task and the lexical decision task. The second experiment introduced a stimulus set consisting of isolated syllabic and non-syllabic trigrams. Syllable frequency was manipulated in a naming and in a decision task requiring participants to decide on the syllabic status of letter strings. Results showed faster responses for syllables than for non-syllables in both tasks. Syllable frequency effects were observed in the decision task. In summary, the results from these manipulations of different types of syllable information confirm an important role of syllabic units in both recognition and production.     

The person-situation debate: A critical multiplist perspective

Critical multiplism is an approach to question and method choice predicated on the only partial validity of most current social science practices In the first part of this paper, the approach is described, and note is made of many of its advantages but also of two of its limitations Critical multiplism is then applied to the person-situation debate The analysis reveals that major protagonists in the debate have often discussed different versions of what appears to be the same question, and they usually agree when they define the questions similarly The major real difference concerns predictions about the extent of cross-situational consistency in behaviors This entails at least two subquestions (1) how consistent is the same molecular behavior across situations? and (2) how crosssituationally stable are different molecular behaviors presumed to indicate the same latent trait? Data from Peake (1982) reported in Mischel and Peake (1982) are then reanalyzed For molecular behaviors within the trait of conscientiousness, the central tendency of the cross-situational correlation is between 30 and 50, while for the nine different behaviors measured as most prototypical of the latent trait of conscientiousness it is in the 30 to 40 range While these values are higher than those of Mischel and Peake (1982), comparable analyses of their friendliness data failed to replicate the results for conscientiousness, cautioning us not to overgeneralize estimates of cross-situational consistency from any of the analyses currently available     

The relationship between daily events and mood: The mood measure may matter

Measures of daily mood have been used as immediate indicators of the effects of the psychosocial environment, the latter concept often measured by daily events. We examined the prediction of two measures of daily mood, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) and Nowlis Mood Adjective Checklist (MACL), by daily desirable and undesirable events and by day of the week. Unlike prior studies, the event assessment and type of subjects studied (community residents) were the same in both studies, allowing an attribution of differential associations between the two mood scales and either daily events or day of the week to the different mood measures. The mood measures had similar and expected associations with daily events, although the MACL scale generally had stronger associations with events. Surprisingly, the pattern of day of the week effects for positive, yet not negative, mood were different for the two mood measures. Consistent with the weekend's increase in desirable daily events, MACL positive affectincreased on weekends, relative to weekdays, whereas PANAS positive mooddecreased on weekends. Also, for both positive and negative affect scales, the MACL scales had stronger associations with day of week than the PANAS scales. These results suggest caution in the choice of mood measure to use in studies of daily events and pose questions about the meaning of these mood measures.This work was supported, in part, by grant MH39234 from NIMH. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Structural alignment in similarity and difference judgments

Similarity is a central construct in models of cognitive processing, and as such has been the focus of psychological inquiry. This work has revealed that similarity and difference judgments are not always inverses. One explanation for this effect is that similarity judgments focus on matching relations between the items, while difference judgments focus on the mismatching attributes. A second explanation is that both similarity and difference judgments involve a process of structural alignment, and that they use the output of this process differently. These views are contrasted by using the one-shot mapping technique that places attribute similarity and relational similarity in competition. The results suggest that similarity and difference judgments both involve structural alignment.