Achievement and Power Motives, Performance Feedback, and Creativity

Undergraduate students in engineering and science completed the Thematic Apperception Test, which was scored for achievement motivation and also for power motivation. They later participated in an experiment in which they first provided a solution to an engineering problem. The experimenter then gave them preprogrammed, written feedback on how well they performed in two conditions of the experiment (positive or negative feedback) and no feedback in a third condition. Feedback was couched in the language of both achievement and power imagery. Last, students rendered solutions to a second engineering problem—the water-for-Tonya problem. Two students who had completed a course in the psychology of creativity performed ratings of each solution on dimensions designated as creativity and complexity. Ratings for the two dimensions moderately correlated with one another (r = .62) and therefore were combined and summed across the two evaluators to form a single overall Creativity score. Achievement motivation correlated positively with Creativity score in the positive- and negative-feedback conditions (rs = .43 and .38) but not significantly in the no-feedback condition (r = .10). Power motivation correlated positively with Creativity in the positive-feedback condition (r = .32), and negatively in the negative-feedback condition (r = −.25), but not significantly in the no-feedback condition (r = .17). Multiple regression/correlation analysis lent further support to these findings. A major conclusion that these data suggest is a differential response to negative feedback. Achievement-motivated people appear to benefit from it, whereas power-motivated people do not.     

Learning To Parse?

A strong claim about human sentence comprehension is that the processing mechanism is fully innate and applies differently to different languages only to the extent that their grammars differ. If so, there is hope for an explanatory project which attributes all parsing strategies to fundamental design characteristics of the parsing device. However, the whole explanatory program is in peril because of the discovery (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988) that Late Closure is not universal: Spanish, and also Dutch and other languages, favor Early Closure (high attachment) where English favors Late Closure flow attachment). I argue that the universal parser can weather this storm. Exceptions to Late Closure in Spanish and other languages are observed only in one construction (a relative clause attaching into a complex noun phrase [NP]), which is borderline in English too. For other constructions, low attachment is preferred in all languages tested. I propose that what differentiates the complex NP construction is the heaviness of the attachee compared to that of the host configuration. A relative clause is a heavy attachee, and the lower NP alone is small as a host; the relative is therefore better balanced if the whole complex NP is its host. A wide range of facts is accounted for by the principle that a constituent likes to have a sister of its own size. Light constituents will tend to attach low, and heavy ones to attach high, since larger constituents are dominated by higher nodes. A preference for balanced weight is familiar from work on prosodic phrasing. I suggest, therefore, that prosodic processing occurs in parallel with syntactic processing (even in reading) and influences structural ambiguity resolution. Height of attachment ambiguities are resolved by the prosodically motivated same-size-sister constraint. The exceptional behavior of English may be due to its prosodic packaging of a relative pronoun with the adjacent noun, overriding the balance tendency. If this explanation is correct, it is possible that all cross-language variations in parsing preferences are due to cross-language variations in the prosodic component of the competence grammar.     

Syntactic Features in Reanalysis: Positive and Negative Symptoms

Meng and Bader have presented evidence that a Case conflict is a more effective cue for garden-path reanalysis than a number conflict is, for German wh-sentences with subject–object ambiguities. The preferred first-pass analysis has the wh-trace in subject position, although object position is correct. In a speeded grammaticality judgment task, perceivers accepted Case-disambiguated examples more often and more rapidly than number-disambiguated examples, although comprehension questions indicated that both were eventually understood correctly. For ungrammatical sentences, a Case mismatch error resulted in more false positive grammaticality judgments than a number mismatch error. We offer an explanation for why Case and number features differ in these two ways in their effects on sentence processing. We propose, within the Diagnosis Model of garden-path processing, that reanalysis triggered by a Case mismatch guides the parser more effectively toward the correct structure. Case is a positive symptom, which carries information about the new structure that must be built. By contrast, a number mismatch is a negative symptom; it invalidates the incorrect structure without showing how to rebuild it. This difference in the transparency of garden-path repair can also account for the greater overacceptance of Case-disambiguated ungrammatical sentences. The speeded grammaticality judgment task is designed to encourage hasty responses. Usually, these are hasty rejections of garden path sentences that, on calmer reflection, the parser would find acceptable. Conversely, over-hasty acceptance could occur if some initial progress is made in resolving a grammatical problem. Thus, a higher rate of false positives on ungrammaticals is to be expected where reanalysis proceeds successfully for a while before blocking.     

Connectionism and the problem of systematicity: why Smolensky's solution doesn't work

In two recent papers, Paul Smolensky responds to a challenge Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn posed for connectionist theories of cognition: to explain the existence of systematic relations among cognitive capacities without assuming that mental processes are causally sensitive to the constituent structure of mental representations. Smolensky thinks connectionists can explain systematicity if they avail themselves of "distributed" mental representation. In facts, Smolensky offers two accounts of distributed mental representation, corresponding to his notions of "weak" and "strong" compositional structure. We argue that weak compositional structure is irrelevant to the systematicity problem and of dubious internal coherence. We then argue that strong compositional (tensor product) representations fail to explain systematicity because they fail to exhibit the sort of constituents that can provide domains for structure sensitive mental processes.