Perceptual distinctiveness and proactive interference in the primacy effect

When subjects monitor a list of verbal items for one item which is to be selected and remembered, they are more likely to recall the critical item if it is the first member of the list than if it is presented towards the centre of the list. The present experiment examined the possibility that this primacy results from an accumulation of proactive interference from incidentally processed early members of the list which would cause a decrement in the recall of later members. By changing the semantic category of the list members before presentation of the critical item any accumulated interference would have been released, but this procedure produced no weakening of the primacy effect and so the interference theory of primacy was not supported. An alternative explanation of the effect was discussed in which it is assumed that the first member of a series is perceptually distinct from central members.     

General software for an on-line eye-movement recording system

A general on-line eye-movement recording system is described which consists basically of (a) some on-line instrument capable of displaying a visual scene, (b) a device to measure eye position and output position information in the form of electrical signals (c) an analogue-to-digital converter, and (d) a computer. General software for such a system is discussed with emphasis on subroutines which perform calibration and which continuously monitor eye position.     

Automatic phonological coding of unattended printed words

A lexical decision response to an attended printed word can be slowed when the word is accompanied by an unattended word that is semantically related. Does this hold for an unattended word that is not related to the target word but sounds as if it is? The homophone WASTE can be shown to affect the lexical decision response to RUBBISH, but how does the incongruently related homophone WAIST affect RUBBISH? If incongruent homophones of words related to the attended word can influence processing when they are not being attended to, then it must be through automatic processing into a phonological code, either before or after lexical access. Experiment 1 reports such an effect, and it is concluded that a phonological representation is generated preattentively and influences the semantic processing of the attended word after generation of that representation. Experiment 2 confirms the effect and investigates the possibility that the effect exists because of the strategic use of phonological encoding of attended words. To discourage the use of a phonological strategy for lexical access, all nonwords were pseudohomophones. The influence persisted, however, with attended words still being affected by the presence of incongruent homophones of related words.     

Language lateralization and handedness: Estimates based on clinical data

The suggestion that the cerebral representation of language is bilateral in at least some left handers relies on using the proportion of aphasics found in available clinical samples of sufferers of unilateral brain damage as a valid estimate of the probability that aphasia will occur following unilateral brain damage. This results in an overestimate of this probability since the clinical sample includes only cases with both unilateral brain damage and clinical symptoms and excludes cases with unilateral brain damage without clinical symptoms. With adjustment for this overestimate the clinical data are consistent with unilateral cerebral representation of language in left handers.     

Orthographic vs. phonological irregularity in lexical decision

This experiment investigates whether the influence of spelling-to-sound correspondence on lexical decision may be due to the visual characteristics of irregular words rather than to irregularities in their phonological correspondence. Lexical decision times to three types of word were measured: words with both irregular orthography and spelling-to-sound correspondence (e.g., GHOUL, CHAOS), words with regular orthography but irregular spelling-to-sound correspondence (e.g., GROSS, LEVER), and words regular in both respects (e.g., SHACK, PLUG). Items were presented in upper- and lowercase in order to examine the influence of “word shape” on any irregularity effects obtained. The results showed that irregular words with regular orthographies were identified more slowly than regular words in both upper- and lowercase. Words that are both orthographically and phonologically irregular were identified much more slowly with lowercase presentation. However, with uppercase, the lexical decision time for these items did not differ significantly from those of regular words. These data indicate that previous demonstrations of the regularity effect in lexical decision were not due to the unusual visual characteristics of some of the words sampled. In addition, the data emphasize the role of word shape in word recognition and also suggest that words with unique orthographies may be processed differently from those whose orthography is similar to other words.     

JEAB AND JABA ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB: A REPORT TO READERS

The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis (JABA) have both established home pages on the World Wide Web. Their addresses are:

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