Lexical effects on compensation for coarticulation: the ghost of Christmash past

The question of when and how bottom‐up input is integrated with top‐down knowledge has been debated extensively within cognition and perception, and particularly within language processing. A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken‐word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception through feedback, or post‐perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the following phoneme, supporting models with feedback from lexical to phonemic representations. Subsequently, several authors have argued that these results can be fully accounted for by diphone transitional probabilities in a feedforward system (Cairns et al., 1995; Pitt & McQueen, 1998). We report results strongly favoring the original lexical feedback explanation: lexical effects were present even when transitional probability biases were opposite to those of lexical biases.     

Our Obligation to the Dead

Can we have a real obligation to the dead, just as we do to the living, or is such a notion merely sentimental or metaphorical? Starting with the example of making a promise, I try to show that we can, since the dead, as well as the living, can have interests, not least because the notion of a person is, in part, a moral construction. ‘The dead’, then, are not merely dead, but particular dead persons, members of something like the sort of ‘transgenerational community’ proposed by Avner de–Shalit. More generally, I argue, we have an obligation to the dead that goes beyond the particularities of promise–making, on account of their role in having made us who we are. I then suggest, though only embryonically, that such obligations may appropriately be discharged by remembering the dead, who they were and what they did. Finally, I consider some possible objections.     

Macintosh analogue of the rotary pursuit task

Pursuit tracking, a perceptual motor-skill task, has had wide application in many areas of psychology. The task is usually administered with a mechanical device in which subjects try to maintain a contact between a stylus and a disk on a rotating platter. A pursuit-tracking task that can be administered on a Macintosh computer is described. Subjects try to keep a crosshair cursor on top of a moving circular target. The cursor can be controlled by commonly used Macintosh ADB devices such as a joystick. The computer version has several important advantages: it offers more task flexibility and more accurate dependent measures of performance, and it is inexpensive.     

Response-to-stimulus interval does not affect implicit motor sequence learning, but does affect performance

Nissen and Bullemer (1987) reported that implicit motor sequence learning was disrupted by the addition of a secondary task. They suggested that this effect was due to the attentional load that the secondary task adds. Recently it has been suggested that the attentional load is not critical, but rather that the secondary task affects timing, either by lengthening or by making inconsistent the response-tostimulus interval (RSI)-that is, the delay between when a subject makes a response and when the next stimulus appears. In six experiments we manipulated the RSI and found no support for these two hypotheses. An inconsistent RSI did not adversely affect implicit motor sequence learning. A long RSI did not affect learning, although under some conditions subjects did not express learning if the RSI was long. These results are interpreted as reflecting the effects of attention.     

Religion,Strain and Suicidality among Chinese Young Adults

Journal of Religion and Health - This study examined the mediating effects of psychological strain (Strain Theory) as a possible explanation for the relationship between religiosity and suicidality...     

When “All the Five Circles” are Four: New Exercises in Domain Restriction

The domain of a quantifier is determined by a variety of factors, which broadly speaking fall into two types. On the one hand, the context of utterance plays a role: if the focus of attention is on a particular collection of kangaroos, for example, then “Q kangaroos” is likely to range over the individuals in that set. On the other hand, the utterance itself will help to establish the quantificational domain, inter alia through presuppositions triggered within the sentence. In this paper, we concentrate our attention on constructions like the following, in which “the square to which ... ” is the critical presupposition trigger:

1. (i)
   Q circles ...
    
2. (ii)
   Q of these circles ...
    
3. (iii)
   Q of these five circles ... ... have the same colour as the square to which they are connected.
    

Many theories predict that all instances of these schemata will give rise to the presupposition that every circle is connected to a square. We present an analysis which predicts that these sentences should generally be accepted in a context in which not all the circles are connected to a square, with one exception only: if a quantified sentence is of type (iii) and Q is non-intersective, then the sentence should be more likely to be rejected. Furthermore, we predict that manipulating the context so as to make the connected circles more or less salient should have an effect on statements with non-intersective quantifiers only. These predictions were tested in a series of experiments.     

A solution to the many attitudes problem

Philosophical Studies - According to noncognitivism, normative beliefs are just desire-like attitudes. While noncognitivists have devoted great effort to explaining the nature of normative belief,...