The scope of linguistic generalizations: evidence from Hebrew word formation

Does the productive use of language stem from the manipulation of mental variables (e.g. "noun", "any consonant")? If linguistic constraints appeal to variables, rather than instances (e.g. "dog", "m"), then they should generalize to any representable novel instance, including instances that fall beyond the phonological space of a language. We test this prediction by investigating a constraint on the structure of Hebrew roots. Hebrew frequently exhibits geminates (e.g. ss) in its roots, but it strictly constraints their location: geminates are frequent at the end of the root (e.g. mss), but rare at its beginning (e.g. ssm). Symbolic accounts capture the ban on root-initial geminates as *XXY, where X and Y are variables that stand for any two distinct consonants. If the constraint on root structure appeals to the identity of abstract variables, then speakers should be able to extend it to root geminates with foreign phonemes, including phonemes with foreign feature values. We present findings from three experiments supporting this prediction. These results suggest that a complete account of linguistic processing must incorporate mechanisms for generalization outside the representational space of trained items. Mentally-represented variables would allow speakers to make such generalizations.     

Attitude importance and the accumulation of attitude-relevant knowledge in memory

People who attach personal importance to an attitude are especially knowledgeable about the attitude object. This article tests an explanation for this relation: that importance causes the accumulation of knowledge by inspiring selective exposure to and selective elaboration of relevant information. Nine studies showed that (a) after watching televised debates between presidential candidates, viewers were better able to remember the statements made on policy issues on which they had more personally important attitudes; (b) importance motivated selective exposure and selective elaboration: Greater personal importance was associated with better memory for relevant information encountered under controlled laboratory conditions, and manipulations eliminating opportunities for selective exposure and selective elaboration eliminated the importance-memory accuracy relation; and (c) people do not use perceptions of their knowledge volume to infer how important an attitude is to them, but importance does cause knowledge accumulation.     

The syntactic priming effect: Evoked response evidence for a prelexical locus

Twenty subjects made lexical decisions in a syntactic priming paradigm. Target stimuli (nouns, verbs, abiguous noun--verb words, and nonsense words) were immediately preceded on each trial by a function word syntactic prime, creating appropriate or inappropriate syntactic contexts for the real word targets. Evoked responses to the targets were recorded from left and right frontal, temporal, and temporoparietal sites. Principal components analysis revealed a component peaking at 140 msec which discriminated words in appropriate contexts from words in inappropriate contexts, independent of lexical syntactic class, with maximal discrimination at temporoparietal sites. Evidence for the identification of the syntactic class of target items was not observed in the evoked response until 80 msec after this syntactic priming effect occurred. These results suggest a prelexical locus for the syntactic priming effect. The implications of these results for current conceptions of the modularity of the mental lexicon are discussed.     

The effect of shared structure and content on reading nonwords: evidence for a CV skeleton

Four experiments examined the effect of shared skeletal structure versus content overlap on naming printed nonwords. Experiments 1-2 compared priming among nonwords sharing either skeletal structure and content (e.g., dus-DUS) or structure alone (e.g., pid-BAF) with controls that differed from the target in the number of skeleton slots (e.g., pid-BAF vs. plid-BAF). Conversely, in Experiments 3-4, same-versus different-structure primes contrasted only in the ordering of CV skeletal slots (e.g., fap-DUS vs. ift-DUS). Priming effects were modulated by shared content and skeletal similarity. The sensitivity of skeletal priming to the abstract arrangement of consonants and vowels suggests that skeletal representations assign distinct slots for consonants and vowels. Readers' sensitivity to skeletal structure in nonword identification indicates that assembled phonological representations are constrained by linguistic knowledge.