Size judgment: The presence of a standard increases the exponent of the power law

Ss judged the size of circles by the methods of magnitude estimation and magnitude production, with or without a standard figure present. The presence of the standard raised the exponent of the power law. The effect was largely independent of the position of the standard in the range of stimuli. It is argued that the standard’s effect was not mediated by a difference in apparent size between perceived and remembered standards, a change in Ss’ response strategies, a decrease in sequential dependencies, or other previously identified bias effects.     

Release from PI: An analysis and a model

Recall decreases across a series of subspan immediate-recall trials but rebounds if the semantic category of the words is changed, an example of release from proactive interference (RPI). The size of the rebound depends on the semantic categories used and ranges from 0% to 95%. We used a corpus of novels to create vectors representing the meaning of about 40,000 words using the BEAGLE algorithm. The distance between categories and spread within categories jointly predicted the size of the RPI. We used a holographic model for recall equipped with a lexicon of BEAGLE vectors representing the meaning of words. The model captured RPI using a hologram as an interface to bridge information from episodic and semantic memory; it is the first account of RPI to capture release at the level of individual words in categorized lists.     

The influence of linguistic labels on source-monitoring decisions

Three studies explored the extent to which people use various object features, including linguistic label, shape, and category membership, to make decisions about the source of their memories. To isolate the influence of each feature, we used items that were related in the following four ways: as synonyms, as similar in shape and category membership, as homographs, or as unrelated. Participants read sentences and either saw or imagined a picture of the critical word's referent. Experiment 1 showed that participants committed more source errors for synonyms (e.g., rabbit and bunny) than for objects that were conceptually and perceptually similar (e.g., doughnut and bagel), which produced more errors than unrelated items. However, there was no effect of label, as people did not have more errors for homographs (e.g., baseball bat and flying bat) than unrelated items. In Experiment 2, presenting the critical word at study was not sufficient to lead people to use an item's label to make source decisions. However, Experiment 3 showed more source errors for homographs than unrelated pairs when semantic context was minimised at study, suggesting that people can use linguistic labels to make source decisions when other information is unavailable.     

Variation among developmental dyslexics: evidence from a printed-word-learning task

A word-learning task was used to investigate variation among developmental dyslexics classified as phonological and surface dyslexics. Dyslexic children and chronological age (CA)- and reading level (RL)-matched normal readers were taught to pronounce novel nonsense words such as veep. Words were assigned either a regular (e.g., "veep") or an irregular (e.g., "vip") pronunciation. Phonological dyslexics learned both regular and exception words more slowly than the normal readers and, unlike the other groups, did not show a regular-word advantage. Surface dyslexics also learned regular and exception words more slowly than the CA group, consistent with a specific problem in mastering arbitrary item-specific pronunciations, but their performance resembled that of the RL group. The results parallel earlier findings from Manis, Seidenberg, Doi, McBride-Chang, & Petersen [Cognition 58 (1996) 157-195] indicating that surface dyslexics and phonological dyslexics have a different profile of reading deficits, with surface dyslexics resembling younger normal readers and phonological dyslexics showing a specific phonological deficit. Models of reading and reading disability need to account for the heterogeneity in reading processes among dyslexic children.     

Persistent structural priming from language comprehension to language production

To examine the relationship between syntactic processes in language comprehension and language production, we compared structural persistence from sentence primes that speakers heard to persistence from primes that speakers produced. [Bock, J. K., & Griffin, Z. M. (2000). The persistence of structural priming: transient activation or implicit learning? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 177-192.] showed that the production of target priming structures increased the probability of spontaneously using the same structures to describe events in subsequent pictures that were semantically unrelated to the primes. These priming effects persisted across as many as ten intervening filler trials. The present studies replicated these results using auditorily presented primes to which participants only listened. The results indicated persistence of priming across all lags, with relative magnitudes of priming as large as those observed by Bock and Griffin. The implication is that structural priming is persistent regardless of the modality in which language structures are experienced, underscoring the power of priming as an implicit learning mechanism.