The relationship between the frequency and the processing complexity of linguistic structure

In this paper the relative frequencies of the possible resolutions of ambiguities involving noun phrase attachment sites are compared to the results of off-line psycholinguistic measurements of syntactic complexity. A lack of correlation between the two is observed. It is therefore argued that the comprehension system is distinct from what is driving the frequencies in the corpora. A production heuristic separate from the comprehension system is proposed to account for the observed frequencies.We would like to thank Susanne Tunstall for providing linguistic judgments in the corpus analyses reported in Sec. 3.3. We also wish to thank the following people for helpful, comments and discussions on earlier presentations of this paper: the audience at the Eighth Human Sentence Processing Conference, in Tucson Arizona, Maria Babyonyshev, Tom Bever, Martin Corley, Danny Fox, Don Mitchell, Edson Miyamoto, Janet Nicol, Colin Phillips, Gregg Solomon, Michael Spivey-Knowlton, James Thomas, and Tom Wasow. All remaining errors are our own. The second author was supported by the Research Training Grant Language: Acquisition and Computation awarded by the National Science Foundation (U.S.) to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (DIR 9113607), and by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Compound fracture: the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness

This paper explores the role of semantic transparency in the representation and processing of English compounds. We focus on the question of whether semantic transparency is best viewed as a property of the entire multimorphemic string or as a property of constituent morphemes. Accordingly, we investigated the processing of English compound nouns that were categorized in terms of the semantic transparency of each of their constituents. Fully transparent such as bedroom are those in which the meanings of each of the constituents are transparently represented in the meaning of the compound as a whole. These compounds were contrasted with compounds such as strawberry, in which only the second constituent is semantically transparent, jailbird, in which only the first constituent is transparent, and hogwash, in which neither constituent is semantically transparent. We propose that significant insights can be achieved through such analysis of the transparency of individual morphemes. The two experiments that we report present evidence that both semantically transparent compounds and semantically opaque compounds show morphological constituency. The semantic transparency of the morphological head (the second constituent in a morphologically right-headed language such as English) was found to play a significant role in overall lexical decision latencies, in patterns of decomposition, and in the effects of stimulus repetition within the experiment.     

Attribution of personal characteristics as a function of the degree of touch on initial contact and sex

The current study was designed to measure the effects of degree of touch on initial contact on interpersonal judgment. Subjects (60 male and 60 female) reporting for an experiment on interpersonal judgment were met by the experimenter and another subject. The second subject was in fact a confederate. As the subjects were introduced, the confederate responded in one of three ways: a nod of the head (no touch); a firm handshake; or a firm handshake accompanied by a squeeze on the subject's right upper arm by the confederate's left hand. Half of the subjects met a male and half met a female confederate. Subjects were then placed in separate cubicles and asked to complete the Byrne interpersonal judgment questionnaire about the person they had just briefly met. This scale has six items (intelligence, knowledge of current events, morality, personal feelings, participation in experiments, and adjustment) for same-sex pairs and four additional items for opposite-sex pairs (dating, marriage, physical and sexual attraction). The results indicated that the variations in the type of initial contact between subject and confederate resulted in several significantly different interpersonal judgments. Of particular interest was the finding that a male confederate greeting a female subject was viewed as a more acceptable marriage partner the more touch was invoved in the initial contact. A female confederate greeting a male subject was viewed as a less acceptable marriage partner the more touch that was involved. The degree of touch also affected judgments of knowledge of current events, adjustment, dating, and physical attraction. Typically, the more touch, the higher the rating for the male confederate, whereas the female confederate was typically rated highest on the nod or handshake plus the additional touch to the arm, and least when she simply shook hands. The relevance of these findings to first impressions and role stereotyping are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Western Psychological Convention, Sacramento, 1975.This study was supported in part by a faculty research grant from the University of San Francisco.     

Priming guesses on a forced-recall test

The forced-recall paradigm requires participants to fill all spaces on the memory test even if they cannot remember all the list words. In the present study, the authors used that paradigm to examine the influence of implicit memory on guessing--when participants fill remaining spaces after they cannot remember list items. They measured explicit memory as the percentage of targets that participants designated as remembered from the list and implicit memory as the percentage of targets they wrote but did not designate as remembered (beyond chance level). The authors examined implicit memory on guessing with forced recall (Experiment 1), forced cued recall with younger and older adults (Experiment 2), and forced free and cued recall under a depth-of-processing manipulation (Experiment 3). They conclude that implicit memory influences guesses of targets in the forced-recall paradigm.     

Tests for cognitive mapping in Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana)

In these experiments, the authors examined the nature of the spatial information that Clark's nutcrackers (Nucifraga columbiana) use during navigation and whether this information is represented in the form of a cognitive map. In Experiment 1, nutcrackers were able to use distal cues to locate a small hidden goal. In Experiments 2 and 3, nutcrackers were given the opportunity to develop a map of a room by viewing local subsets of the landmarks in the room at a goal during training. During transfer tests, nutcrackers were presented with a landmark panorama that was not previously seen at the goal. Of 3 nutcrackers that had learned the relationship between distal cues and the goal, 3 were able to locate the goal during transfer, indicating they may have developed a cognitive map. Experiments 4 and 5 suggest that the simpler mechanism of vector integration may have been used by some nutcrackers during the transfer tests.     

Unmasking the component-general and component-specific aspects of primary and secondary memory in the immediate free recall task

The immediate free recall (IFR) task has been commonly used to estimate the capacities of the primary memory (PM) and secondary memory (SM) components of working memory (WM). Using this method, the correlation between estimates of the PM and SM components has hovered around zero, suggesting that PM and SM represent fully distinct and dissociable components of WM. However, this conclusion has conflicted with more recent studies that have observed moderately strong, positive correlations between PM and SM when separate attention and retrieval tasks are used to estimate these capacities, suggesting that PM and SM represent at least some related capacities. The present study attempted to resolve this empirical discrepancy by investigating the extent to which the relation between estimates of PM and SM might be suppressed by a third variable that operates during the recall portion of the IFR task. This third variable was termed “strength of recency” (SOR) in the present study as it reflected differences in the extent to which individuals used the same experimentally-induced recency recall initiation strategy. As predicted, the present findings showed that the positive correlation between estimates of PM and SM grew from small to medium when the indirect effect of SOR was controlled across two separate sets of studies. This finding is important because it provides stronger support for the distinction between “component-general” and “component-specific” aspects of PM and SM; furthermore, a proof is presented that demonstrates a limitation of using regression techniques to differentiate general and specific aspects of these components.     

When Empathy is Not Enough: a Reflection on the Self-Experience of Black Boys in Public Spaces

This project explores the self-experiences of Black boys in public spaces, primarily in Chicago. Given the plethora of negative media attention placed on violence in the city and on violent encounters with law enforcement, this project asks how Black boys can experience themselves in a life-giving way when so many negative images and stereotypes denigrate their humanity. The author introduces the concepts of group-level racial delusion and demonic transference. The former term suggests a psychological split occurring at the societal level that historically has allowed emotional and physical violence to be disproportionately and callously inflicted on Black boys in public spaces, which society has internalized as normative while simultaneously extolling democratic and Christian values central to Western identity formation. The latter term suggests the interpersonal or group transference that occurs just prior to the infliction of emotional or physical harm on Black boys—a transference that is propped up by abject images and stereotypes of Black males. The article concludes first with reflections on a qualitative interview conducted with two groups of Black boys in Chicago pertaining to their self-experiences in public spaces and then with thoughts on future work.