LEXIN: A lexical database from Spanish kindergarten and first-grade readers

The LEXIN database offers psycholinguistic indexes of the 13,184 different words (types) computed from 178,839 occurrences of these words (tokens) contained in a corpus of 134 beginning readers widely used in Spain. This database provides four statistical indicators: F (overall word frequency), D (index of dispersion across selected readers), U (estimated frequency per million words), and SFI (standard frequency index). It also gives information about the number of letters, syntactic category, and syllabic structure of the words included. To facilitate comparisons, LEXIN provides data from LEXESP’s (Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Cuetos, & Carreiras, 2000), Alameda and Cuetos’s (1995), and Martínez and García’s (2004) Spanish adult psycholinguistic frequency databases. Access to the LEXIN database is facilitated by a computer program. The LEXIN program allows for the creation of word lists by letting the user specify searching criteria. LEXIN can be useful for researchers in cognitive psychology, particularly in the areas of psycholinguistics and education.     

当代大学生对竞争认识的调查研究

以天津市和广州市532名大学生为被试,采用半开放式问卷,采用团体测试的方式,研究了他们对竞争的认识,并对这种认识进行了理论分析。研究结果发现：（1）大学生由竞争一词最易联想到“激烈”、“残酷”、“公平或不公平”、“压力或动力”等内容;（2）大学生认为竞争存在的领域从高到低依次是商业与市场经济、就业与工作、比赛与体育运动、学习与考试、国家与社会等;（3）大学生认为竞争是“激烈”、“残酷”、“对抗”等;（4）大学生认为竞争的主要作用是动力、压力和机遇或挑战;（5）大学生对竞争性质的认识存在显著的性别差异和地区差异。     

MONITORING CONSCIOUS RECOLLECTION VIA THE ELECTRICAL ACTIVITY OF THE BRAIN

Abstract— Although another person's experience of recollection cannot be observed directly, we have found that the underlying operations can be monitored using noninvasive electrophysiological techniques. Results from two experiments showed that brain potentials elicited 500 to 900 ms after the onset of visually presented words vary systematically in amplitude with manipulations that influence the extent to which subjects engage in recollective processing. These brain potentials can thus be construed as correlates of the subjective experience of recollection     

The Well-being of Salvadoran Refugees

Recently arrived and settled Salvadoran refugees and Anglo-Canadians in London, Ontario were compared with respect to psychological distress, quality of life, and life satisfaction. A matched sample of 60 participants in each group completed a demographic questionnaire, the Brief Symptom Inventory, a shortened version of the Quality of Life Questionnaire, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale in either English or Spanish. Significant group differences were obtained on measures of quality of life and life satisfaction, but not of psychological distress. The results are discussed in relation to findings with other refugee groups.     

Interactions between sentence context and word frequencyinevent-related brainpotentials

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as subjects silently read a set of unrelated sentences. The ERP responses elicited by open-class words were sorted according to word frequency and the ordinal position of the eliciting word within its sentence. We observed a strong inverse correlation between sentence position and the amplitude of the N400 component of the ERP. In addition, we found that less frequent words were associated with larger N400s than were more frequent words, but only if the eliciting words occurred early in their respective sentences. We take this interaction between sentence position and word frequency as evidence that frequency does not play a mandatory role in word recognition, but can be superseded by the contextual constraint provided by a sentence.     

Differentiation of retinal and nonretinal contributions to averaged evoked responses obtained with electrodes placed near the eyes

Recent visual evoked potential (VEP) studies suggest that during sustained voluntary attention, irrelevant or unattended visual stimuli may be filtered precortically. Testing of this hypothesis in humans requires knowledge of the origin of specific components of the VEP that are affected by selective attention. This study describes techniques and procedures for distinguishing between retinal and nonretinal components of VEPs recorded from electrodes placed strategically around the eyes and on the forehead. By visually stimulating one eye at a time while recording simultaneously from both, and by stimulating a given retinal area with the eyes fixated on the target at different angular deviations from the normal line of regard, components of the VEPs around the eyes can be distinguished as of retinal or nonretinal origin. The results are discussed in terms of volume conduction theory.     

Reading between the lines: Event-related brain potentials during natural sentence processing

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from subjects as they silently read 160 different seven-word sentences, presented one word at a time. Each sentence was in itself a natural, meaningful phrase. Substantial intersubject variability was observed in the ERP waveshapes following the words. More than half of the subjects generated P3 components to word stimuli, but those who did showed similar responses to repeated control presentations of a single word. In addition, it was found that all but the first word in the sentence elicited an ERP with a significant left-greater-than-right asymmetry in the late positivity over temporo-parietal regions. The ERPs to the last words were associated with more late positivity than those to the preceding words. One quarter of the sentences, at random, ended with a word printed in a typeface that was different from that of the preceding words. This infrequent change in typeface elicited a complex ERP having three consistent late positive components.