Strategic effects in associative priming with words,homophones, and pseudohomophones

G. Lukatela and M. T. Turvey (1994a) showed that at a 57-ms prime-presentation duration, the naming of a visually presented target word (frog) is primed not only by an associate word (toad) but also by a homophone (towed) and a pseudohomophone (tode) of the associate. At a 250-ms prime presentation, priming with the homophone was no longer observed. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated these priming effects in the Dutch language. Next, the authors extended the priming paradigm to a word/legal-nonword lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) and a word/pseudohomophone decision task (Experiment 4). Phonologically mediated associative priming was observed in all conditions with pseudohomophonic primes but not with homophonic primes. The latter did not prime at a 250-ms prime-presentation time and at 57 ms in the word/pseudohomophone task.     

A case study of mediated learning, delayed auditory feedback, and motor repatterning to reduce stuttering

A case study of DW, an 11-yr. old monolingual, English-speaking boy who exhibits stuttering, language delay, and ADHD is presented. DW experienced only limited improvement during stuttering therapy received in public schools, according to parents and the public school clinician. The purpose of this case study was to assess whether fluency treatment which incorporated Mediated Learning, Delayed Auditory Feedback, and Speech Motor Repatterning would enhance progress. Therapy was delivered in two treatments, with each treatment being 5 wk. of intense therapy, separated by one year. Treatment 1 of combined Mediated Learning and Delayed Auditory Feedback yielded improvement in fluency, judged by parents and the teacher to be clinically significant. The improved fluency was maintained for one year when DW was pretested for participation in Treatment 2, which combined Mediated Learning, Delayed Auditory Feedback, and Speech Motor Repatterning Exercises. As no conclusions are possible, further study is needed.     

Eye movements and word skipping during reading revisited

The authors examined word skipping in reading in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, skipping rates were higher for a preview of a predictable word than for a visually similar nonword, indicating there is full recognition in parafoveal vision. In Experiment 2, foveal load was manipulated by varying the frequency of the word preceding either a 3-letter target word or a misspelled preview. There was again a higher skipping rate for a correct preview and a lower skipping rate when there was a high foveal load, but there was no interaction, and the pattern of effects in fixation times was the same as in the skipping data. Experiment 2 also showed significant skipping of nonwords similar to the target word, indicating skipping based on partial information.     

Merging race models and adaptive networks: A parallel race network

This article presents a generalization of race models involving multiple channels. The major contribution of this article is the implementation of a learning rule that enables networks based on such a parallel race model to learn stimulus—response associations. This model is called aparallel race network. Surprisingly, with a two-layer architecture, a parallel race network learns the XOR problem without the benefit of hidden units. The model described here can be seen as a reduction-of-information system (Haider & Frensch, 1996). An emergent property of this model is seriality: In some conditions, responses are performed with a fixed order, although the system is parallel. The mere existence of this supervised network demonstrates that networks can perform cognitive processes without the weighted sum metric that characterizes strength-based networks.     

On the representation of Portuguese gender-inflected words in the mental lexicon

This study aims at verifying whether Portuguese gender-inflected nouns and adjectives are represented as full forms as suggested by Spanish data (Dominguez, Cuetos, & Segui, 1999). A series of lexical decision experiments is reported. Grammatical gender, frequency dominance, and grammatical category are manipulated and cumulative frequency is controlled. The results do not provide support for a full form representation of gender-inflected words. They suggest that grammatical category, or the nature of the inflectional process involved (lexical or syntactic), affects the way words are represented and accessed. Shorter recognition latencies were obtained for nouns drawn from Feminine dominant gender-inflected pairs than from Masculine dominant pairs whereas a tendency in the opposite direction was observed in adjectives. The effect of frequency dominance appears, nevertheless, to be restricted to feminine nouns. The data are compatible with the view that masculine nouns and adjectives are represented as gender-unmarked forms. These results are discussed in relation to current dual-access models of word recognition and to the notion of "interpretability" of lexico-syntactic features, as put forward in the Minimalist Program of Generative Linguistics.     

The "what" and "where" of object representations in infancy

Four-month-olds' memory for surface feature and location information was tested following brief occlusions. When the target objects were images of female faces or monochromatic asterisks infants showed increased looking times following a change in identity or color but not following a change in location or combinations of feature and location information. When the target objects were images of manipulable toys, the infants showed increased looking times following a change in location but not identity or the binding of location and identity information. This evidence is consistent with the idea that young infants are unable to maintain the information processed separately in both the dorsal and ventral visual streams during occlusions. Our results suggest that it is the target's affordance for action that determines whether the dorsal or ventral information is selectively maintained during occlusion.     

Basic-level category discriminations by 7- and 9-month-olds in an object examination task

This study examines 7- and 9-month-olds' ability to categorize cats as separate from dogs, and dogs as separate from cats in an object examination task. In Experiment 1, 7- and 9-month-olds (N = 30) familiarized with toy cat replicas were found to form a category of cat that included novel cats but excluded a dog and an eagle. In Experiment 2, 7- and 9-month-olds (N = 30) familiarized with toy dog replicas were found to form a category of dog that included a novel dogs and a novel cat but excluded an eagle. These results mirror those of 3- to 4-month-olds tested with visual preference methods and stand in contrast to previously reported object examination results. Analyses of the distribution of features in the exemplars used to familiarize infants suggest that, like the 3- to 4-month-olds, the 7- and 9-month-olds in these studies form categories within the task, and on the basis of feature distributions.     

Constructing a short form of the Smoking Consequences Questionnaire with adolescents and young adults

The goal of the present studies was to construct and validate a short form of the 50-item Smoking Consequences Questionnaire (SCQ; T.H. Brandon & T. B. Baker, 1991), a measure of smoking outcome expectancies. In Study 1, a 21-item short form (S-SCQ) was derived from a sample of 107 young adults previously treated for substance abuse. In Study 2, the measure was cross-validated on 125 adolescents in treatment for substance abuse. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed good model fit and factorial invariance for the 4 S-SCQ subscales across both samples. Validation analyses on each sample found that subscale scores generally correlated significantly with smoking-related variables. The present studies provide initial evidence for the utility of the S-SCQ when used with young adults and adolescents.     

What the Liar Taught Achilles

Zeno's paradoxes of motion and the semantic paradoxes of the Liar have long been thought to have metaphorical affinities. There are, in fact, isomorphisms between variations of Zeno's paradoxes and variations of the Liar paradox in infinite-valued logic. Representing these paradoxes in dynamical systems theory reveals fractal images and provides other geometric ways of visualizing and conceptualizing the paradoxes.