That’s the way the cookie bounces: Syntactic and semantic components of experimentally elicited idiom blendsß

Idioms are sometimes viewed as unitized phrases with interpretations that are independent of the literal meanings of their individual words. In three experiments, the nature of idiom representation was explored with a speech-error elicitation task. In the task, speakers briefly viewed paired idioms. After a short delay they were probed to produce one of the two idioms, and their production latencies and blend errors were assessed. The first experiment showed greater interference between idioms with the same syntactic structure, demonstrating that idiom representations contain syntactic information. The second experiment indicated that the literal meaning of an idiom is active during production. These syntactic and literal-semantic effects on idiom errors argue against a representation of idioms as noncomponential lexicalized phrases. In the final experiment, no differences were found between decomposable and nondecomposable idioms, suggesting that the lexical representation of these two types of idioms is the same.     

How the eye measures reality and virtual reality

If virtual reality systems are to make good on their name, designers must know how people perceive space in natural environments, in photographs, and in cinema. Perceivers understand the layout of a cluttered natural environment through the use of nine or more sources of information, each based on different assumptions—occlusion, height in the visual field, relative size, relative density, aerial perspective, binocular disparities, accommodation, convergence, and motion perspective. The relative utility of these sources at different distances is compared, using their ordinal depth-threshold functions. From these, three classes of space around a moving observer are postulated: personal space, action space, and vista space. Within each, a smaller number of sources act in consort, with different relative strengths. Given the general ordinality of the sources, these spaces are likely to be affine in character, stretching and collapsing with viewing conditions. One of these conditions is controlled by lens length in photography and cinematography or by field-of-view commands in computer graphics. These have striking effects on many of these sources of information and, consequently, on how the layout of a scene is perceived.     

Plucks and bows are categorically perceived,sometimes

Cutting and Rosner (Perception & Psychophysics, 1974,16, 564–570) reported that sawtooth wavetrains were perceived categorically when an array was varied in linear rise time increments. That is, rapid rise time stimuli were identified as plucked strings and slower rise time stimuli as bowed strings, and pluck-bow comparisons were relatively easy to discriminate but pluck-pluck and bow-bow comparisons were not. Such results indicate the general equivalence of identification and discrimination tasks. Rosen and Howell (Perception & Psychophysics, 1981,30, 156–168), however, report that categorical perception does not occur for these sounds for two reasons. First, the original stimuli did not have the rise times reported by Cutting and Rosner. Second, the perception of these stimuli more closely follows a prediction from a Weber fraction. Acknowledging the first fact to be true, in part due to difficulties in digital-to-analog conversion, I set out to replicate and extend the results of Rosen and Howell. In Experiment 1, I found that stimuli with equal linear increments of rise time are not perceived categorically; but they are not perceived to follow closely a logarithmic relation either. In Experiment 2, I found that stimuli with equal logarithmic increments of rise time were generally perceived categorically. Experiment 3 replicated the results of both experiments. Thus, plucked and bowed music-like sounds can sometimes be found to be perceived in a categorical manner. However, categorical perception is not found with stimuli generated in the manner of Cutting and Rosner (1974) or Rosen and Howell (1981), and the phenomenon generally seems subject to rather stringent, if not curious, stimulus conditions. Moreover, and more deeply, categorical perception seems hardly the bedrock phenomenon it once appeared to be, whether in speech or in any other domain.     

Comparing effects of the horizontal-vertical illusion on grip scaling and judgment: relative versus absolute, not perception versus action

The discovery that the prehension component of an open-loop, two-fingered reach is largely immune to certain salient pictorial illusions has been used to suggest that humans possess 2 distinct visual systems, 1 that subserves perceptual judgment and 1 that mediates visually controlled action. In this article, the authors present evidence that suggests that the critical distinction is not that of reaching and judgment but of relative and absolute perception. Experiment 1 extends the findings of S. Aglioti, J. F. X. DeSouza, and M. A. Goodale (1995) and suggests that the manual prehension component of open-loop reaching is affected by the horizontal-vertical illusion to a much smaller degree than perceptual size judgments. In Experiments 2 and 3, however, when perceptual size judgment is directed at a single element of the display, this difference vanishes. Experiment 4 demonstrates that grip scaling is strongly affected by the illusion when a single reach is scaled to both the horizontal and vertical components of a triangular figure.     

Semantic and phonological information flow in the production lexicon

When speakers produce words, lexical access proceeds through semantic and phonological levels of processing. If phonological processing begins based on partial semantic information, processing is cascaded; otherwise, it is discrete. In standard models of lexical access, semantically processed words exert phonological effects only if processing is cascaded. In 3 experiments, speakers named pictures of objects with homophone names (ball), while auditory distractor words were heard beginning 150 ms prior to picture onset. Distractors speeded picture naming (compared with controls) only when related to the nondepicted meaning of the picture (e.g., dance), exhibiting an early phonological effect, thereby supporting the cascaded prediction. Distractors slowed picture naming when categorically (e.g., frisbee) related to the depicted picture meaning, but not when associatively (e.g., game) related to it. An interactive activation model is presented.     

Where We Go With a Little Good Information

Abstract—When observers move through an environment, they are immersed in a sea of motions that guide their further movements. The horizontal relative motions of all possible pairs of stationary objects fall into three classes: They converge, diverge and slow down, or diverge with increasing velocity. Conjoined with ordinal depth information, the first two motions reveal nominal invariants, constraining heading to one side of the visual field. When two object pairs yield invariants on opposing sides of the heading, they can constrain judgments to a narrow region. Distributional analyses of responses in an experiment involving simulated observer movement suggest that observers follow these constraints.     

Categories and boundaries in speech and music*

Perceptual categories and boundaries arise when Ss respond to continuous variation on a physical dimension in a discontinuous fashion. It is more difficult to discriminate between members of the same category than to discriminate between members of different categories, even though the amount of physical difference between both pairs is the same. Speech stimuli have been the sole class of auditory signals to yield such perception; for example, each different consonant phoneme serves as a category label. Experiment I demonstrates that categories and boundaries occur for both speechand nonspeech stimuli differing in rise time. Experiment II shows that rise time cues categorical differences in both complex and simple nonspeech waveforms. Taken together, these results suggest that certain aspects of speech perception are intimately related to processes and mechanisms exploited in other domains. The many categories in speech may be based on categories that occur elsewhere in auditory perception.     

Discrimination of intensity differences carried on formant transitions varying in extent and duration

Dorman (1974) found that small-intensity differences carried on the initial portions of consonantvowel syllables were not discriminable. Similar differences carried on steady-state vowels and on isolated formant transitions, however, were readily discriminable. He interpreted the difference between the first and latter conditions as a phonetic effect. Yet Pastore, Ahroon, Wolz, Puleo, and Berger (1975) found similar results using sine-wave analogs to Dorman’s stimuli. They concluded that the effect is not phonetic, and that it is attributable to simple backward masking. The present studies observed the discriminability of intensity differences carried on formant transitions varying in extent and duration. Results support the conclusion of Pastore et al. to the extent that the effect is clearly not phonetic. However, these results and others suggest that simple peripheral backward masking is not a likely cause; instead, recognition masking may be involved. Moreover, the finding that phonetic-like processes occur elsewhere in audition does not necessarily impugn the existence of a speech processor; phonemic and phonological processes remain, as yet, unmatched.     

Recognizing the sex of a walker from a dynamic point-light display

The sex of human walkers can be recognized without familiarity cues from displays of pointlight sources mounted on major joints. Static versions of these abstract displays do not permit accurate recognition of sex. Variation in the degree of armswing or in walking speed generally interferes with recognition, except that faster speeds are associated somewhat with improved recognition of females. Lights on upper-body joints permit more accurate guesses than do Lights on lower-body joints, but identification is possible even from minimal displays, with lights placed only on the ankles. No feedback was given to observers. Confidence judgments of sex relate to the accuracy of responses in a manner that suggests that viewers know what they are doing.