Connectionist Models of Language Production: Lexical Access and Grammatical Encoding

Theories of language production have long been expressed as connectionist models. We outline the issues and challenges that must be addressed by connectionist models of lexical access and grammatical encoding, and review three recent models. The models illustrate the value of an interactive activation approach to lexical access in production, the need for sequential output in both phonological and grammatical encoding, and the potential for accounting for structural effects on errors and structural priming from learning.     

Ethnicity-Related Sources of Stress and Their Effects on Well-Being

Early research on ethnicity focused on the stereotyped thinking, prejudiced attitudes, and discriminatory actions of Euro-Americans. Minority-group members were viewed largely as passive targets of these negative reactions, with low self-esteem studied as the main psychological outcome. By contrast, recent research has increasingly made explicit use of stress theory in emphasizing the perspectives and experiences of minority-group members. Several ethnicity-related stressors have been identified, and it has been found that individuals cope with these threats in an active, purposeful manner. In this article, we focus on ethnicity-related stress stemming from discrimination, from stereotypes, and from conformity pressure arising from one's own ethnic group. We discuss theory and review research in which examination of ethnicity-related outcomes has extended beyond self-esteem to include psychological and physical well-being.     

Pabiku and Ga Ti Ga: Two Mechanisms Infants Use to Learn About the World

Some of the things that adults learn about language, and about the world, are very specific, whereas others are more abstract or rulelike. This article reviews evidence showing that infants, too, can very rapidly acquire both specific and abstract information, and considers the mechanisms that infants might use in doing so.     

The reality of qualia

This paper argues for the reality of qualia as aspects of phenomenal experience. The argument focuses on color vision and develops a dispositionalist, subjectivist account of what it is for an object to be colored. I consider objections to dispositionalism on epistemological, metaphysical, and ‚ordinary’ grounds. I␣distinguish my representative realism from sense-data theories and from recent ‚representational’ or ‚intentional’ theories, and I argue that there is no good reason to adopt a physicalist stance that denies the reality of qualia as phenomenally available intentional contents in Brentano’s original sense of ‚intentionality’.     

Visual identity and uncertainty in repetition blindness

Repetition blindness (RB) was investigated in 6 experiments. In the first 3 experiments participants detected vowel targets in 11-letter sequences. When all letters were uppercase, detection was poorer for same (e.g., AA) than for different (e.g., AO) targets. However, when one target was uppercase and the other lowercase, RB was found only for targets visually identical except for size (e.g., Oo), not for visually different pairs (e.g., Aa). Experiment 4 found RB for visually identical versus different consonant-vowel-consonant words. Experiments 5 and 6 replicated Kanwisher's (1987) experiment in which RB was insensitive to word case but revealed these effects to be artifacts of poor recognition of 5-letter words coupled with a biased guessing strategy. Overall, these experiments found RB only at a low level of visual information processing.     

Self‐Construals,Motivation, and Feedback‐Seeking Behaviors

The current study explores the relations between individualism, motivation, and feedback‐seeking behaviors. Specifically, we examined how three motivational factors (i.e., status‐striving, achievement‐striving, and affiliation‐striving) mediated or moderated the relations between individualism and feedback‐seeking behaviors. Data were collected from 154 Singaporean undergraduate students across two time periods. Results indicated that only status motivation mediates the individualism–feedback‐seeking relation. Affiliation was found to moderate that same relation but only for a specific subset of feedback‐seeking behaviors. The implications of these findings for performance management and development are discussed.     

Understanding emotional display rules at work and outside of work: The effects of country and gender

This study examined the long-held, but empirically untested assumption that emotional display rules at work are different from more general display rules. We examined whether the effect of context (work vs. non-work) on display rules depended on rater gender, rater country (i.e., Singapore, United States), and discrete emotion (anger, contempt, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness). Results revealed that display rules at work involved less expressivity of emotion than did display rules outside of work for all six emotions. Further, display rules in Singapore involved less expressivity of anger, sadness, and fear than display rules in the US, with no country differences being observed for the emotions of happiness, contempt, and disgust. These results were qualified by significant country-by-gender interactions for anger, contempt, and disgust, a significant country-by-context interaction for fear, and a three-way interaction (i.e., country-by-gender-by-context) for sadness.     

Prenatal maternal stress: Differential effects upon male and female offspring responses to restraint stress as adults

Pregnant primiparous rats were subjected to four days of light restraint stress on postconception days 7 through 10, inclusive, coincident with the development of the fetal gastrointestinal system. Twenty male and twenty female offspring from prenatally stressed and nonstressed rats were then subjected to two hours of supine cold-restraint as adults. Eighty percent of nonprenatally stressed offspring developed gastric lesions, while 47.5% of offspring of prenatally stressed mothers displayed lesions. A significant sex-stress interaction was detected, indicating that male offspring from prenatally stressed mothers display less severe gastric lesions in response to restraint stress as adults than do male offspring from nonprenatally stressed mothers. Female offspring from both prenatal stress conditions showed similar levels of stress-induced lesions.