Processing resource capacity and the comprehension of garden path sentences

Three experiments explored the relationship between verbal working memory capacity and the comprehension of garden path sentences. In Experiment 1, subjects with high, medium, and low working memory spans made acceptability judgments about garden path and control sentences under whole sentence and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) conditions. There were no significant differences between subjects with different working memory spans in the comprehension of garden path sentences in either condition. In Experiments 2A and 2B, subjects with high and low working memory spans were tested on the same materials at three RSVP rates. There were no significant differences between subjects with different working memory spans in the magnitude of the effect of garden path sentences at any presentation rate. The results suggest that working memory capacity, as measured by the Daneman and Carpenter (1980) reading span task, is not a major determinant of individual differences in the processing of garden path sentences.     

The role of phonology in reading comprehension: Implications of the effects of homophones on processing sentences with referentially dependent categories

Two experiments investigated whether phonological representations are activated in the processing of anaphors in reading, and if they are, whether they play a role in the initial (first-pass) processing of the sentence or in review (second-pass) processes. Subjects made sentence acceptability judgements for sentences that contained either verb-gaps or indefinite and personal pronouns (overt anaphors). All sentences contained homophones. Half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically plausible if the homophones were inserted in the gap (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in cold blood) or used as the referent of the pronoun (e.g. There is a sale on at the store and I have one at the boat). The other half of the semantically unacceptable sentences were phonologically implausible. In both experiments, half of the subjects saw the sentences under normal viewing conditions (whole sentence condition); for the other half of the subjects the words of each sentence were presented sequentially in the centre of the video screen at the rate of 250 msec/word (RSVP condition). A large proportion of the phonologically implausible sentences in the first experiment contained phrases in the second clause which resulted in semantic “oddities” (e.g. The children sleighed in the winter, and the murderer in the jar); the sentences in Experiment 2 did not contain such oddities. In Experiment 1 subjects made more errors on the phonologically plausible than implausible unacceptable sentences with both verb-gaps and pronouns in the whole sentence but not in the RSVP condition. There was no effect of phonological plausibility in Experiment 2. As the effect of phonological plausibility was only seen in the whole sentence condition, and only when the sentences contained semantic oddities, these data suggest that phonological information was not used in the first-pass analysis of the sentence, but rather when the subject re-read the sentence to find the referent.     

Institutional Approaches to Research Integrity in Ghana

Science and Engineering Ethics - Research misconduct (RM) remains an important problem in health research despite decades of local, national, regional, and international efforts to eliminate it....     

Soames’s new conception of propositions

In this paper, I argue that, when it comes to explaining what can be described as “representational” properties of propositions, Soames’s new conception of propositions—on which the proposition that Seattle is sunny is the act of predicating the property being sunny of Seattle and to entertain that proposition is to perform that act—does not have an advantage over traditional ones.     

Verbal working memory and sentence comprehension

This target article discusses the verbal working memory system used in sentence comprehension. We review the concept of working memory as a short-duration system in which small amounts of information are simultaneously stored and manipulated in the service of accomplishing a task. We summarize the argument that syntactic processing in sentence comprehension requires such a storage and computational system. We then ask whether the working memory system used in syntactic processing is the same as that used in verbally mediated tasks that involve conscious controlled processing. Evidence is brought to bear from various sources: the relationship between individual differences in working memory and individual differences in the efficiency of syntactic processing; the effect of concurrent verbal memory load on syntactic processing; and syntactic processing in patients with poor short-term memory, patients with poor working memory, and patients with aphasia. Experimental results from these normal subjects and patients with various brain lesions converge on the conclusion that there is a specialization in the verbal working memory system for assigning the syntactic structure of a sentence and using that structure in determining sentence meaning that is separate from the working memory system underlying the use of sentence meaning to accomplish other functions. We present a theory of the divisions of the verbal working memory system and suggestions regarding its neural basis.     

The effects of syntactic structure on discourse comprehension in patients with parsing impairments.

Syntactic complexity was systematically manipulated in sentence and discourse comprehension tasks. Aphasic patients, but not normal controls, showed effects of syntactic structure in the sentence comprehension task. Neither aphasic nor control subjects showed significant differences between the comprehension of syntactically simple and complex stories. This pattern confirms the clinical impression that some discourses can be understood by patients who cannot utilize syntactically based sentence comprehension mechanisms.     

Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits: reduced availability of syntactic structures and/or of grammatical morphemes? A case study

A French-speaking patient with Broca's aphasia--following a left-hemisphere lesion involving the sylvian region but sparing Broca's area--is presented. Like G. Miceli, A. Mazzuchi, L. Menn, and H. Goodglass's (1983, Brain and Language, 19, 65-97) case 2, this patient produces agrammatic speech in the absence of any comprehension deficit. Unlike Miceli's patient, though, agrammatic speech can be observed in all sentence production tasks (from spontaneous speech to repetition, oral reading, and writing) whereas production of individual words--be they open class or closed class--is almost always intact. On the basis of extensive (psycho)linguistic testing, it is argued that this patient's deficit is not central and not crucially syntactic (at least) at the level of knowledge but seems to disrupt specifically those (automatic?) processes responsible for both retrieval and production of free-standing grammatical morphemes whenever they have to be inserted into phrases and sentences.     

Cognitive influences on perceived change in social support,motivation, and symptoms of depression

In settings ranging from informal conversation to medical interviews and surveys, people are often asked to judge changes in subjective states that are important to them, such as perceived social support, motivation to cope with a negative life event, and symptoms of depression. How accurate are such reports, and are there theories of cognitive processes that can predict the most likely types of misperception? To address these questions, self-report survey data were collected from 224 recently unemployed adults. The measures assessed current subjective states of self and social environment at two times, separated by 4 months. Among the results, persons with high self-esteem were particularly likely to underestimate changes for the worse between the two survey waves–evidence of an optimistic response bias. When the dimension being judged was unstable and ambiguous, people were more likely to overestimate improvement–evidence of an optimistic response style. The findings were evaluated in terms of alternate theories of cognitive bias and in terms of implications for subsequent studies and application.     

Relations among loneliness, social anxiety, and problematic Internet use.

The model of problematic Internet use advanced and tested in the current study proposes that individuals' psychosocial well-being, along with their beliefs about interpersonal communication (both face-to-face and online) are important cognitive predictors of negative outcomes arising from Internet use. The study examined the extent to which social anxiety explains results previously attributed to loneliness as a predictor of preference for online social interaction and problematic Internet use. The results support the hypothesis that the relationship between loneliness and preference for online social interaction is spurious, and that social anxiety is the confounding variable.