Age-related influences on lexical selection and orthographic encoding during homophone spelling

Two experiments investigated age differences in how semantic, syntactic, and orthographic factors influence the production of homophone spelling errors in sentence contexts. Younger and older adults typed auditorily presented sentences containing homophone targets (e.g., blew) that were categorized as having a regular spelling (EW) or an irregular spelling (UE). In Experiment 1, homophones were preceded by an unrelated word, a semantic prime that was congruent with the target's meaning in the sentence (e.g., wind), or a semantic prime incongruent with the target's meaning (e.g., sky) and instead related to the competitor homophone. Experiment 2 manipulated the target's part of speech, where target and competitor homophones shared or differed in part of speech. For both age groups, significant semantic priming occurred, where homophone errors decreased following congruent semantic primes and increased following incongruent primes. However, priming only occurred when homophones shared part of speech. Further, both age groups made more errors on homophones with an irregular than a regular spelling, and this regularity effect was smaller for older adults when homophones shared part of speech. Contrary to many spoken production tasks, older adults made fewer errors overall than younger adults. These findings demonstrate age preservation in lexical selection but age differences in orthographic encoding, resulting in older adults producing fewer errors because of reduced activation to competitor homophones. These findings also illustrate that syntactic factors, such as part of speech, can influence the spellings of individual words.     

Are precues effective in proactively controlling taboo interference during speech production?

ABSTRACT

This research investigated whether precues engage proactive control to reduce emotional interference during speech production. A picture-word interference task required participants to name target pictures accompanied by taboo, negative, or neutral distractors. Proactive control was manipulated by presenting precues that signalled the type of distractor that would appear on the next trial. Experiment 1 included one block of trials with precues and one without, whereas Experiment 2 mixed precued and uncued trials. Consistent with previous research, picture naming was slowed in both experiments when distractors were taboo or negative compared to neutral, with the greatest slowing effect when distractors were taboo. Evidence that precues engaged proactive control to reduce interference from taboo (but not negative) distractors was found in Experiment 1. In contrast, mixing precued trials in Experiment 2 resulted in no taboo cueing benefit. These results suggest that item-level proactive control can be engaged under certain conditions to reduce taboo interference during speech production, findings that help to refine a role for cognitive control of distraction during speech production.     

Generation,intentionality of processing at encoding and retrieval,and age-related associative deficits

This research tested age-related differences in the retrieval of self-generated new associations under conditions that required intentional or incidental processing. Under intentional or incidental encoding conditions, young and older adults generated new associations by producing a response to a two-letter stem paired with a cue/prime word (e.g., throne–mo_____). Memory for these new associations was tested under intentional or incidental retrieval conditions by pairing the word stem with the previous cue/prime word, its homophone partner, or a prime/cue not previously presented. Results indicated equivalent priming and cueing effects for both age groups in all conditions. These results suggest that generation of new associations can eliminate age-related associative deficits, even under intentional encoding and retrieval conditions that typically disadvantage older adults.     

Development and Validation of a Brief Self-Report Measure of Agitation: The Brief Agitation Measure

Emerging evidence indicates that agitation is an ominous precursor to imminent death by suicide, yet measures of it are few, and to our knowledge, no self-report measure of agitation exists. To fill this gap, we have developed the Brief Agitation Measure (BAM), which is designed as a brief measure to assess agitation. In this article, we provide preliminary evidence from 2 studies examining the reliability and validity of the BAM in an undergraduate sample as well as a clinical sample. We close with a discussion of the limitations of the studies and implications of our findings.     

Spontaneous and Reflexive Cognitions Related to Spousal Abuse: The Role of Experiences of Violence

The aim of this study was to investigate the recognition of violent behaviors, assessment of their severity, and reaction time in recognizing violent behaviors among individuals (91 men, 122 women) who have been exposed to spousal abuse, either as victim or aggressor, and those who have not reported such experiences. Results indicate a relation between the rapidity with which participants recognized a behavior, number of behaviors recognized, and assessment of the severity of such behaviors. Moreover, participants recognized physical violence more readily than psychological violence, and rated physical violence more severely. Finally, the experience of violence in a couple, as perpetrator or as victim, was linked to reaction time for each type of violence.     

No pain,no change: Reductions in prior negative affect following physical pain

In general, organisms are motivated to avoid stimuli that induce pain. However, some individuals intentionally inflict pain on themselves (e.g., nonsuicidal self-injury) and report doing so for the perceived emotional benefits following the experience of pain. Two controlled laboratory studies sought to expand upon the relatively limited literature on the effects of pain on emotion. In Study 1, participants provided momentary affect ratings immediately before and after experiencing physical pain. Results demonstrated that both positive affect and negative affect (NA) decreased following the experience of pain. In the Study 2, we examined the effect that individual differences in emotional reactivity had on affective reactions to pain. Individuals high in emotional reactivity experienced larger decreases in NA following the experience of pain than individuals who were low in emotional reactivity. Our findings may potentially explain why some individuals intentionally seek out the experience of pain.     

Understanding conditional promises and threats

Conditional promises and threats are speech acts that are used to manipulate other people's behaviour. Studies on human reasoning typically use propositional logic to analyse what people infer from such inducements. While this approach is sufficient to uncover conceptual features of inducements, it fails to explain them. To overcome this limitation, we propose a multilevel analysis integrating motivational, linguistic, deontic, behavioural, and emotional aspects. Commonalities and differences between conditional promises and threats on various levels were examined in two experiments. The first shows that both types of inducements are understood as being complementary on the linguistic level, but not reversible, due to the specific temporal order of their actions. In addition, it gives a first assessment of emotional reactions. The second experiment investigated the novel question of whether complementary promises and threats, despite semantic differences, both imply an obligation to cooperate on the deontic level. The data corroborate this hypothesis, and they support various appraisal-theoretical assumptions on the elicitation of emotions. They also reveal that content affects not only the attribution of emotions, but also the deontic interpretation.     

A Developmental Explanation For Children’s Motor behavior

Two experiments were conducted to test the application of Pascual-Leone’s (1970) neo-Piagetian theory for explaining children’s acquisition of skill in a curvilinear positioning task. Two groups of children (late pre-operational 6 yr olds and early concrete 8 yr olds) were identified and from each group 10 low M-processors and 10 high M-processors were selected (total n=40) through use of the Children’s Embedded Figures Test. The 6 yr olds were administered 2-and 3-scheme curvilinear positioning tasks while the 8 yr olds performed 3-and 4-scheme tasks. The difference between the two experiments was the nature of the positioning tasks, i.e., one task allowed visual processing of information, while the other did not. Both experiments supported the neo-Piagetian predictions of structural mental space as explaining the developmental nature of motor skill acquisition, and functional mental space as explaining individual differences within stages in children’s performance.     

Free associations and dominance ratings of homophones for young and older adults.

Homophones are words that share phonology but differ in meaning and spelling (e.g., beach, beech). This article presents the results of normative surveys that asked young and older adults to free associate to and rate the dominance of 197 homophones. Although norms exist for young adults on word familiarity and frequency for homophones, these results supplement the literature by (1) reporting the four most frequent responses to visually presented homophones for both young and older adults, and (2) reporting young and older adults' ratings of homophone dominance. Results indicated that young and older adults gave the same first response to 67% of the homophones and rated homophone dominance similarly on 60% of the homophone sets. These results identify a subset of homophones that are preferable for research with young and older adults because of age-related equivalence in free association and dominance ratings. These norms can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Web archive, www.psychonomic.org/archive/.