The interplay of meaning,sound, and syntax in sentence production

A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors' 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of information in the system is strictly unidirectional. On the basis of the reviewed evidence, they conclude that both assumptions have to be revised. Their 2nd goal was to propose an altemative framework that does not assume strict encapsulation but that maintains multiple levels of integration for production.     

Auditory abnormalities in autism: toward functional distinctions among findings

Recently, findings on a wide range of auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism have been reported. To date, functional distinctions among these varied findings are poorly established. Such distinctions should be of interest to clinicians and researchers alike given their potential therapeutic and experimental applications. This review suggests three general trends among these findings as a starting point for future analyses. First, studies of auditory perception of linguistic and social auditory stimuli among individuals with autism generally have found impaired perception versus normal controls. Such findings may correlate with impaired language and communication skills and social isolation observed among individuals with autism. Second, studies of auditory perception of pitch and music among individuals with autism generally have found enhanced perception versus normal controls. These findings may correlate with the restrictive and highly focused behaviors observed among individuals with autism. Third, findings on the auditory perception of non-linguistic, non-musical stimuli among autism patients resist any generalized conclusions. Ultimately, as some researchers have already suggested, the distinction between impaired global processing and enhanced local processing may prove useful in making sense of apparently discordant findings on auditory abnormalities among individuals with autism.     

Medical Students’ Creation of Original Poetry,Comics, and Masks to Explore Professional Identity Formation

Introduction. This study examines differences in students’ perceived value of three artmaking modalities (poetry, comics, masks) and whether the resulting creative projects offer similar or different insights into medical students’ professional identity formation. Methods. Mixed-methods design using a student survey, student narrative comments and qualitative analysis of students’ original work. Results. Poetry and comics stimulated insight, but masks were more enjoyable and stress-reducing. All three art modalities expressed tension between personal and professional identities. Discussion. Regardless of type of artmaking, students express concern about encroachments of training on personal identity but hoped that personal and professional selves could be integrated.

     

Can Virtual Reality Increase the Realism of Role Plays Used to Teach College Women Sexual Coercion and Rape-Resistance Skills?

The present study evaluated whether virtual reality (VR) can enhance the realism of role plays designed to help college women resist sexual attacks. Sixty-two female undergraduate students were randomly assigned to either the Role Play (RP) or Virtual Role Play (VRP) conditions, which were differentiated only by the use of VR technology in the VRP condition. A multimethod assessment strategy was used to evaluate the effects of VR on the experienced realism of sexually threatening role plays. Realism was assessed by participant self-reports of negative affect and perceptions of realism, direct observation of participants' verbal displays of negative affect during the role plays, and measurements of participant heart rate during the role plays. Results indicated that VR can indeed heighten the realism of sexually threatening role plays. Discussion focuses on issues regarding the use of VR-enhanced role plays for helping college women resist sexual attacks.     

Effects of emotion-induced self-focused attention on item and source memory

Motivation and Emotion - Affective states are closely linked to attention to internal aspects of the self (i.e., self-focused attention). We investigated how self-focused attention induced by...     

Making Sense of the Hands and Mouth: The Role of “Secondary” Cues to Meaning in British Sign Language and English

Successful face-to-face communication involves multiple channels, notably hand gestures in addition to speech for spoken language, and mouth patterns in addition to manual signs for sign language. In four experiments, we assess the extent to which comprehenders of British Sign Language (BSL) and English rely, respectively, on cues from the hands and the mouth in accessing meaning. We created congruent and incongruent combinations of BSL manual signs and mouthings and English speech and gesture by video manipulation and asked participants to carry out a picture-matching task. When participants were instructed to pay attention only to the primary channel, incongruent “secondary” cues still affected performance, showing that these are reliably used for comprehension. When both cues were relevant, the languages diverged: Hand gestures continued to be used in English, but mouth movements did not in BSL. Moreover, non-fluent speakers and signers varied in the use of these cues: Gestures were found to be more important for non-native than native speakers; mouth movements were found to be less important for non-fluent signers. We discuss the results in terms of the information provided by different communicative channels, which combine to provide meaningful information.     

Constructing Semantic Models From Words,Images, and Emojis

A number of recent models of semantics combine linguistic information, derived from text corpora, and visual information, derived from image collections, demonstrating that the resulting multimodal models are better than either of their unimodal counterparts, in accounting for behavioral data. Empirical work on semantic processing has shown that emotion also plays an important role especially in abstract concepts; however, models integrating emotion along with linguistic and visual information are lacking. Here, we first improve on visual and affective representations, derived from state-of-the-art existing models, by choosing models that best fit available human semantic data and extending the number of concepts they cover. Crucially then, we assess whether adding affective representations (obtained from a neural network model designed to predict emojis from co-occurring text) improves the model's ability to fit semantic similarity/relatedness judgments from a purely linguistic and linguistic–visual model. We find that, given specific weights assigned to the models, adding both visual and affective representations improves performance, with visual representations providing an improvement especially for more concrete words, and affective representations improving especially the fit for more abstract words.     

Memory in dreams1

In this paper the author discusses a specific type of dreams encountered in her clinical experience, which in her view provide an opportunity of reconstructing the traumatic emotional events of the patient’s past. In 1900, Freud described a category of dreams – which he called ‘biographical dreams’– that reflect historical infantile experience without the typical defensive function. Many authors agree that some traumatic dreams perform a function of recovery and working through. Bion contributed to the amplification of dream theory by linking it to the theory of thought and emphasizing the element of communication in dreams as well as their defensive aspect. The central hypothesis of this paper is that the predominant aspect of such dreams is the communication of an experience which the dreamer has in the dream but does not understand. It is often possible to reconstruct, and to help the patient to comprehend and make sense of, the emotional truth of the patient’s internal world, which stems from past emotional experience with primary objects. The author includes some clinical examples and references to various psychoanalytic and neuroscientific conceptions of trauma and memory. She discusses a particular clinical approach to such dreams and how the analyst should listen to them.     

Emotion words, regardless of polarity, have a processing advantage over neutral words

Despite increasing interest in the interface between emotion and cognition, the role of emotion in cognitive tasks is unclear. According to one hypothesis, negative valence is more relevant for survival and is associated with a general slowdown of the processing of stimuli, due to a defense mechanism that freezes activity in the face of threat. According to a different hypothesis which does not posit a privileged role for the aversive system, valence, regardless of polarity, facilitates processing due to the relevance of both negative and positive stimuli for survival and for the attainment of goals. Here, we present evidence that emotional valence has an overall facilitatory role in the processing of verbal stimuli, providing support for the latter hypothesis. We found no asymmetry between negative and positive words and suggest that previous findings of such an asymmetry can be attributed to failure to control for a number of critical lexical variables and to a sampling bias.