The active use of grammar in speech perception

Judgments of the location of short bursts of noise in sentences were used to reveal perceptual segmentation of sentences. It was assumed that segmentation would correspond to major constituent boundaries. In order to control for correlated variables of pitch and intonation, identical acoustic material was provided with alternate constituent structures. It was found that differences in response to identical strings were predicted by the points of variation in constituent structure.     

Source variability and recall of auditory material 1

Recall of auditory narrative material was measured under three conditions of presentation. These were a single source condition with material from one speaker, a four source fixed sequence condition with material from four speakers in a fixed sequence of 3-sec. lengths, and a four source random condition with material from four speakers in a random sequence of 3-sec. lengths. Recall was better for the single source condition than for the four source conditions. No significant difference was found between the fixed and random sequential presentations. Results are discussed in terms of the attentional behaviors involved in the tasks.     

Binocular summation in the perception of form at brief durations

Visual form identification at brief durations was studied under: (a) monocular presentation; (b) dichopic presentation where the same form was presented successively on noncorresponding areas; and (c) dichopic presentation where the same form was presented on corresponding areas simultaneously and successively. Form identification for noncorresponding area dichopic presentation was at the level to be expected from 2independent chances to perceive. Both simultaneous and successive dichopic presentation on corresponding areas gave identification accuracy significantly above the level predicted by the assumption of independence. However, the binocular summation was not complete. When the same amount of energy entering the visual system in a binocular presentation was given in a monocular stimulation, the latter condition gave significantly better identification.     

Soviet writings on atheism and religion: Supplement

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Soviet writings on atheism and religion: Supplement

     

Disruption of proofreading by irrelevant speech: Effects of attention,arousal or memory?

A series of five experiments examined the effects of irrelevant speech on proofreading and memory. Four of the experiments used a proofreading task and showed that the deleterious effects of irrelevant speech: (1) depend on the speech being meaningful, (2) are only present when the burden on short-term memory is low and (3) are manifested in a lower detection rate for non-contextual as opposed to contextual errors. Neither the spatial location of the speech (either in terms of spatial dispersion of sources or spatial movement of a single source) nor the intensity of the speech (in a range bounded by 50 dB(A) and 70 dB(A)) had any effect on proofreading. Late selection models of attention are favoured by the results in preference to models having arousal, short-term memory or early selection in attention as their basis. A final experiment showed serial recall for visual lists to be impaired by the presence of any speech-like sound (including reversed speech and speech in an unfamiliar language) which suggests a set of phenomena qualitatively different from those associated with proofreading. Throughout the article the practical consequences of the findings are emphasized.     

Dyadic decisions with numerical and verbal probabilities

The goal of the research was to compare decisions under risk in a situation in which forecasters (F) communicate to decision makers (DM) either numerically (e.g., .70) or verbally (e.g., likely) about the chances that a binary event will occur. Following each forecast, the DM bid for a winning or losing lottery based on the event. In Experiment 1 Fs and DMs also provided numerical translations of each verbal forecast after the DMs' bid. In Experiment 2 the DMs provided membership functions over the [0, 1] interval for each phrase used by the Fs. The primary results were: (a) extreme similarity in the DM's bids and rates of bidding under the two modes of communication; (b) greater variability in bids to specific verbal than numerical forecasts; (c) a pattern of bids, in which DMs demonstrated risk seeking for gains and risk neutrality for losses; (d) DMs' numerical translations in Experiment 1 were closer to .50 than were those of Fs; and (e) phrases selected by Fs had high membership values to DMs for the probabilities the Fs were attempting to describe. Points (a), (b), (d), and (e) are consistent with the ν-μ model which assumes that the vague meaning of a probability phrase can be represented by a membership function over the [0, 1] interval, and that in reaching a decision the DM focuses on a range of probabilities with sufficiently high membership. Point (c) is speculatively attributed to social aspects of the dyadic situation, and requires further investigation.     

Negative priming insame-different matching: Further evidence for a central locus of inhibition

Responses to recently ignored information may be slower or less accurate than responses to information not recently encountered. Such negative priming effects imply that the mechanism of selective attention operates on unattended, as well as attended, information. In the present experiment, subjects judged the second and fourth letters of five-letter strings (e.g., BABAB) as “same” or “different.” Responses were slower when a target letter was identical to the distractors presented in the immediately preceding trial. This effect did not depend on which response was required on the current or preceding trial. The results suggest that ignored information is functionally disconnected from the response system as a whole, rather than from a specific response.