Distinguishing Serial and Parallel Parsing

This paper discusses ways of determining whether the human parser is serial maintaining at most, one structural interpretation at each parse state, or whether it is parallel, maintaining more than one structural interpretation in at least some circumstances. We make four points. The first two counterclaims made by Lewis (2000): (1) that the availability of alternative structures should not vary as a function of the disambiguating material in some ranked parallel models; and (2) that parallel models predict a slow down during the ambiguous region for more syntactically ambiguous structures. Our other points concern potential methods for seeking experimental evidence relevant to the serial/parallel question. We discuss effects of the plausibility of a secondary structure in the ambiguous region (Pearlmutter & Mendelsohn, 1999) and suggest examining the distribution of reaction times in the disambiguating region.     

Modality-specificity effects in priming of visual and auditory word-fragment completion

In this study, the researchers examined modality-specificity effects in priming of visual and auditory word-fragment completion by the presentation of visual or auditory primes. In 2 experiments, within-modality priming and cross-modality priming were observed, with greater priming observed in the within-modality conditions. The prime was presented in a word list in Experiment 1 and either presented or inferred in priming sentences in Experiment 2. Inferring a target that was not actually presented in the sentences resulted in priming of fragment completion but not in modality specificity. These results, coupled with comparisons to explicit cued fragment completion, support the interpretation that priming of word-fragment completion is owing to both a perceptual and a nonperceptual component. This latter component may be different than the conceptual processes used for explicit memory, which did show modality specificity for inferred targets.     

Variation in cue duration reveals top-down modulation of involuntary orienting to uninformative symbolic cues

This article reports three experiments in which the effects of cue duration on involuntary orienting to uninformative symbolic cues (arrows presented at fixation) were investigated. Experiment 1 showed that symbolic cues had less effect on involuntary orienting when they were presented for only 25 msec than when they were presented for 200 msec across a range of stimulus onset asynchronies. Experiment 2 suggested that the effect of cue duration on involuntary orienting was due primarily to top-down strategic factors, rather than to bottom-up stimulus factors, and Experiment 3 suggested that these strategic factors may involve differences in how the cue is processed. Altogether, the present findings are important because they emphasize the distinction between cue processing and the putative involuntary orienting that results from such processing in the symbolic-cuing paradigm. In so doing, the present results help resolve discrepant findings that have been reported across previous studies.     

Optimism, pessimism, and gambling: the downside of optimism

Three studies examined the relation between dispositional optimism and gambling. In Study 1, optimists were more likely than pessimists to have positive gambling expectations and report maintaining these expectations following losses. They also were more likely to indicate that winning money was a primary motivation for their gambling. Study 2 demonstrated that pessimists but not optimists reduce their betting and expectations after poor gaming performance. Study 3 replicated this effect using a more controlled experiment and showed that after losing, optimists report remembering more near wins than do pessimists. Thus, all three studies suggest that optimists, more than pessimists, maintain positive expectations and continue gambling after experiencing negative gaming outcomes. The authors suggest that despite optimism's many benefits, there are common situations in which the pessimistic tendency to disengage is beneficial.     

Processing relative clauses in Chinese

This paper reports results from a self-paced reading study in Chinese that demonstrates that object-extracted relative clause structures are less complex than corresponding subject-extracted structures. These results contrast with results from processing other Subject-Verb-Object languages like English, in which object-extracted structures are more complex than subject-extracted structures. A key word-order difference between Chinese and other Subject-Verb-Object languages is that Chinese relative clauses precede their head nouns. Because of this word order difference, the results follow from a resource-based theory of sentence complexity, according to which there is a storage cost associated with predicting syntactic heads in order to form a grammatical sentence. The results are also consistent with a theory according to which people have less difficulty processing embedded clauses whose word order matches the word order in main clauses. Some corpus analyses of Chinese texts provide results that constrain the classes of possible frequency-based theories. Critically, these results demonstrate that there is nothing intrinsically easy about extracting from subject position: depending on the word order in the main clause and in a relative clause, extraction from object position can be easier to process in some circumstances.     

Book reviews

The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History. Rodney Stark, 1996 Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press xiv + 247 pp., US$24.95, £16.95 ISBN 0–691–02749–8

Church Watch: Christianity in the Countryside. Leslie J. Francis, 1996 London: SPCK 248 pp., £9.99 ISBN 0–281–04951–3

Strategic Church Leadership. Robin Gill & Derek Burke, 1996 London: SPCK vii + 96 pp., £9.99 ISBN 0–281–04901–7

’Nice When They Are Young’: Contemporary Christianity in Families and Schools. Mairi Levitt, 1996 Aldershot: Avebury viii +171 pp., £32.50 ISBN 1–85972–388–8

Die Sekten‐Kinder. Kurt‐Helmuth Eimuth, 1996 Freiburg: Herder Verlag 239 pp., DM 19.80 (pb) ISBN 3–451–04397–1

The Good Heart: His Holiness the Dalai Lama Explores the Heart of Christianity—and of Humanity. H.H. The Dalai Lama, 1997. London: Rider xiv + 207pp., £9.99 (pb) ISBN 0–7126–7275–3

Scientists as Theologians: A Comparison of the Writings of Ian Barbour, Arthur Peacocke & John Polkinghome. John Polkinghorne, 1996 London: SPCK 95 pp., £9.99 ISBN 0–281–04945–9

Psychiatry and Religion: Context, Consensus and Controversies. Dinesh Bhugra, ed., 1996 London, New York: Routledge 236 pp., £50.00, US$65.00 ISBN 0–415–08955–7 (hb)

Ethical Issues in Six Religious Traditions. Peggy Morgan & Clive Lawton, eds, 1996 Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 278 pp., £14.95 (pb) ISBN 0–7486–0709–9

Religious Institutions and Women's Leadership: New Roles Inside the Mainstream. Catherine Wessinger, ed., 1996 Columbia: University of South Carolina Press x +434 pp., US$24.95 ISBN 1–57003–073–1

Traveller in Space: In Search of Female Identity in Tibetan Buddhism. June Campbell, 1996 London: Athlone Press 225 pp., £17.95 ISBN 0–485–11494–1

Forbidden Revolutions: Pentecostalism in Latin America, Catholicism in Eastern Europe. David Martin, 1996 London: SPCK 96 pp., £7.99 ISBN 0–281–04999–8

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and the Soviet State (1939–1950) Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, 1996 Edmonton, Toronto: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press 310 pp., Ca$39.95(hb) ISBN 1–895571–12‐X

Qur'an, Liberation & Pluralism: An Islamic Perspective of Interreligious Solidarity against Oppression. Farid Esack, 1997 Oxford: Oneworld Publications xii + 288 pp., 3 Appendices + Glossary + Bibliography; £14.99, US$22.95 ISBN 1–85168–121–3

A Sociological Analysis of the Theology of Quakers: The Silent Revolution Studies in Religion and Society Volume 34 Pink Dandelion, 1996 Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press xxxiv +417 pp., £59.95 ISBN 0–7734–8807–3

Counting the Days to Armageddon: The Jehovah's Witnesses and The Second Presence of Christ Robert Crompton, 1996 Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. 160 pp., £22.50 ISBN 0–2276–7939

Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft. James R. Lewis, ed., 1996 Albany, NY: State of New York University Press vi + 423 pp., US$19.95 (pb) ISBN 0–7914–2890–7

The Divine Versus The Asurian: An Interpretation of Indo‐European Cult and Myth. Michael York, 1995 Bethesda, MD: International Scholars Publications 635 pp., US$94.95 ISBN 1–57309–029–8     

Processing empty categories: A parallel approach

In many current theories of human sentence processing, the mechanisms and principles proposed to account for data related to processing (1) long-distance dependencies and (2) structural ambiguities, such as garden-path sentences, are independent, despite the fact that deciding whether or not to posit a gap is just a special case of ambiguity resolution. In this paper we demonstrate how the parallel parsing theory proposed by Gibson (1991, in press)—which was developed to account for nongap ambiguity resolution data—also explains a number of gap-positing facts, without additional strategies. In particular, we show how this theory correctly explains filled-object-gap effects and the lack of filled-subject-gap effects in English, as well as certain gap-processing effects in Dutch.     

MUST FIGURE-GROUND ORGANIZATION PRECEDE OBJECT RECOGNITION?

The assumption that figure-ground segmentation must precede object or shape recognition has been central to theories of visual perception We showed that assumption to be incorrect in an experiment in which observers reported the first perceived figure–ground organization of briefly exposed stimuli depicting two regions sharing a figure–ground border We manipulated the symmetry of the two regions and their orientation-dependent denotivity (roughly, their meaningfulness), and measured how each of these variables influenced figure–ground reports when the stimuli were exposed for 14, 28, 57, 86, or 100 ms, and followed immediately by a mask Influences on figure–ground organization from both symmetry and orientation-dependent object recognition processes were found, both were observed first in the 28-ms condition Object recognition inputs did not dominate symmetry inputs We suggest that object recognition processes may operate simultaneously on both sides of edges detected before figure–ground relationships are determined