Semantic and phonological influences on the processing of words and pseudohomophones

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between semantics and phonology in the lexical decision task. In the first experiment, lexical decisions to words with large semantic neighborhoods were faster than those to words with sparse semantic neighborhoods. Conversely, this effect of semantic neighborhood was reversed for pseudohomophones (e.g., nale). That is, pseudohomophones based on words with large semantic neighborhoods took longer to reject than did those based on words with sparse semantic neighborhoods. In the second experiment, we found the magnitude of the semantic neighborhood effect for words to be a function of nonword foil type. Taken together, these results indicate that semantic neighborhood size affects processing of both words and pseudohomophones, and that the effect of semantic neighborhood size for words is more pronounced when pseudohomophone foils are employed. These effects are discussed in terms of a model in which the orthographic, phonological, and semantic systems are fully interactive.     

Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology as Non-Conventionally Utopian

This essay takes up the claim made recently by Simon Critchley in The Companion to Continental Philosophy that a feature common to many philosophers in the Continental tradition is the utopian demand that things be otherwise. The general question I pursue has to do with whether or not such a claim includes movements within Continental philosophy that do not self-identify with the utopian (like critical theory). The particular question has to do with whether or not the movement of phenomenology is utopian or does it, because of its other commitments, view the utopian as the antithesis to its orientation, which makes that claim that phenomenology is utopian seem strange. My thesis is that phenomenology can be seen as a utopian tradition but that some account must be given that demonstrates this connection to the utopian. In particular, I argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology provides an understanding of the utopian, which I call a non-conventional view, that is vastly different from the one assumed by most when they see or hear the word utopian, which I label conventional. I show that such a non-conventional understanding can be developed in a way that neither requires us to view the utopian solely as opposed to finitude and contingency, nor a form of thought and action from which we necessarily need to dissociate ourselves. It is this non-conventional view of the utopian that in the end enables us to understand how Continental philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular are important bearers of the utopian demand that things be otherwise.     

Personality dimensions and domains of service performance: A field investigation

Although recent meta-analytic studies have investigated the validity of the Big Five domains of personality by classifying pre-existing personality measures into the five dimensions, published validity studies incorporating explicit measures of the five broad traits are rare. This concurrent validity study examines relationships between direct measures of Big Five traits and job performance for a sample of 105 service workers. Analyses specifically examine relationships between three personality dimensions and factorally independent domains of service performance. Both conscientiousness and extraversion are found to correlate with specific performance dimensions. Contrary to our expectation, the extraversion-performance relationship is, however, negative.     

A dimensional analysis of claustrophobia

The present study investigated whether situational and cognitive dimensions of claustrophobia exist. To this end, the Claustrophobia Situations Questionnaire (CSQ) and the Claustrophobia General Cognitions Questionnaire (CGCQ) were developed and exploratory factor analyses were performed on these scales. Two-factor solutions for both the anxiety and the avoidance ratings on the CSQ were obtained, accounting for 40.1% and 34.2% of the variance, respectively. Two subscales were created from the two-factor solution of the anxiety section of the CSQ: (1) Fear of Entrapment and (2) Fear of Physical Confinement. Two subscales were also created from the two-factor solution of the avoidance section of the CSQ: (1) Avoidance of Crowds and (2) Avoidance of Physical Confinement. A three-factor solution was obtained for the CGCQ, accounting for 54.4% of the variance, from which the following three subscales were created: (1) Fear of Loss of Control, (2) Fear of Suffocation, and (3) Fear of Inability to Escape. Cronbach alphas for all subscales ranged from .84 to .94. Exploratory correlational analyses were conducted between the situational and the cognitive dimensions.     

Sensitivity to Levels of Importance in the Logical Memory Subtest

The performance of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and neuropsychiatric patients was examined using the Logical Memory (LM) subtest of the WMS-R, utilizing a levels of importance methodology described by Haut et al. (1990). Although patient groups were matched for dementia severity, we found the expected differences between groups in terms of absolute level of performance. There was considerable variability, however, in the AD patients' performance. AD patients' recall and sensitivity to levels of importance depended on the story (Anna or Robert), and when the passages were recalled (immediate or delayed recalls). Results suggested that AD patients were able to utilize semantic information in their immediate recall, though this was dependent on individual story characteristics. AD patient's delayed recall was essentially absent. Thus, no conclusions could be drawn with respect to the level of importance factor. NP patient's recall performance was similar to patterns observed in other clinical samples for both immediate and delayed memory.     

Indonesia's Nurcholish Madjid and Abdurrahman Wahid as intellectual Ulama: The meeting of Islamic traditionalism and modernism in neo‐modernist thought

This paper examines two of Indonesia's leading Islamic intellectuals, Abdurrahman Wahid and Nurcholish Madjid, and the movement of thought with which they are associated, neo‐Modernism, a new movement in Islamic thought in Indonesia that emerged amidst much controversy in the early 1970s and has since been of considerable influence in the development of Islamic thought, particularly amongst younger Muslim intellectuals. The paper argues that this new movement of thought represents the coming together of Islamic traditionalism, Modernism and Western education in the persons of a generation of thinkers from traditionalist backgrounds, who as youths obtained a pesantren (traditional religious boarding school) religious education and then went on to undertake modern Western‐style, higher education. In doing this it focuses on the life experiences of two of the most outstanding thinkers to emerge from this generation: Nurcholish Madjid, a respected scholar and public figure and one of Indonesia's leading Islamic intellectuals, and Abdurrahman Wahid, currently serving his third term as chairman of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the leading traditionalist organization (and with a claimed support base of 35 million, Indonesia's largest Islamic organization).     

Sex Differences in Visual Recognition Memory: Support for a Sex-Related Difference in Attention in Adults and Children

The selectivity hypothesis of Meyers-Levy (1989) proposes that cognitive sex differences reflect underlying differences in information processing between males and females. Males are considered to be more likely to organize information in a self-related manner, whereas females are more likely to adopt a comprehensive approach to information processing. We tested this hypothesis in children (10–15 years) and adults using recognition memory tasks. Tests were devised which employed male-oriented objects, female oriented objects, or random objects. In both the child and adult samples, females performed significantly better than males on tests using random and female-oriented objects. Males performed at the level of females only when tested for recognition of male-oriented objects. These results demonstrate that this sex difference is present prior to puberty and support the concept of sex differences in information processing.     

Coping with Person-Environment Incongruence1

Students' psychosocial functioning during their transition to university was examined in terms of person-environment incongruence and the flexibility of individuals' construction processes in coping with this incongruence. Using content analysis scaling methodology it was found that the experience of person-environment incongruence was mediated by size of university environment and students' stage of life and education. Mature age students experienced more person-environment incongruence, and less interpretive and core anxiety and satisfaction in a larger university environment. Students who were recent school leavers experienced more person-environment incongruence, interpretive anxiety, and less satisfaction in a smaller environment. In the smaller environment, students who had participated in an intervention maintained higher levels of inflexibility and expressed less social hostility than nonintervention students. These effects of the intervention did not hold in the larger environment where both intervention and nonintervention students experienced a significant decrease in inflexibility over time.     

Levels of representation in the interpretation of anaphoric reference and instrument inference

The level of representation accessed when inferences are made during sentence comprehension was examined. The inferences investigated included antecedent assignment for both definite noun phrase anaphors and pronouns and also instrument inferences. In making these inferences, a listener must access the inferred element, whether an antecedent or an instrument, in either a linguistic form representation or a discourse model. The level of representation involved in these inferences was determined by exploiting differences in the lexical-decision and naming tasks, which were argued to exhibit differential sensitivity to representational levels. In three experiments, the priming of antecedent and instrument targets in the lexical decision task was compared with priming of the same targets in the naming task. Differences in the patterns of activation across the two tasks indicated that all three types of inferences required-accessing-elements in a discourse model. Three control experiments ruled out simple context or congruity checking as an explanation for our results. The following conclusions were also supported by these studies: (1) Antecedent assignment occurs immediately after processing an anaphor; (2) antecedent assignment involves inhibition for the inappropriate antecedent rather than facilitation for the appropriate antecedent; (3) although subjects do not make instrument inferences-when they hear isolated sentences containing verbs that strongly imply certain instruments, the inferences are made when sentences are preceded by a context that mentions the instrument.     

False recognition of static and dynamic object properties by preschool children

A false recognition task was used to compare preschool children's use of static and dynamic properties of objects in semantic processing. Four, five, and six year old children heard a list of object names, and then were tested for recognition of these words with a recognition test list that included distractor words that were static or dynamic properties of the objects on the first list. False recognition scores of dynamic properties were higher than those for static, for 4 and 5 year old children, with no differences for 6 year old children. The results argue for a functional basis for the encoding of referential terms in memory, and are discussed in terms of two models of semantic development.This research was partially supported by Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Research Service Award HD 07066 and U.S. Public Health Service Grant HD 00870 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to the Kansas Center for Mental Retardation and Human Development.