Deaf readers’ response to syntactic complexity: Evidence from self-paced reading

This study was designed to determine the feasibility of using self-paced reading methods to study deaf readers and to assess how deaf readers respond to two syntactic manipulations. Three groups of participants read the test sentences: deaf readers, hearing monolingual English readers, and hearing bilingual readers whose second language was English. In Experiment 1, the participants read sentences containing subject-relative or object-relative clauses. The test sentences contained semantic information that would influence online processing outcomes (Traxler, Morris, & Seely Journal of Memory and Language 47: 69–90, 2002; Traxler, Williams, Blozis, & Morris Journal of Memory and Language 53: 204–224, 2005). All of the participant groups had greater difficulty processing sentences containing object-relative clauses. This difficulty was reduced when helpful semantic cues were present. In Experiment 2, participants read active-voice and passive-voice sentences. The sentences were processed similarly by all three groups. Comprehension accuracy was higher in hearing readers than in deaf readers. Within deaf readers, native signers read the sentences faster and comprehended them to a higher degree than did nonnative signers. These results indicate that self-paced reading is a useful method for studying sentence interpretation among deaf readers.     

Fool Me Twice: The Consequences of Reading (and Rereading) Inaccurate Information

Readers frequently encounter inaccuracies in texts that contradict what they should know to be true. The current project examined readers' moment‐by‐moment processing of inaccuracies and whether any difficulty with such material is reduced when readers are already familiar with accurate versions of that content. In two experiments, participants read stories that either accurately or inaccurately described the outcome of a well‐known historic event. Preceding story contexts supported accurate outcomes or introduced suspense to create uncertainty about outcome likelihoods. During initial readings, participants took longer to read inaccurate than accurate outcomes. But this difficulty was substantially reduced when suspenseful contexts called into question the likelihood of well‐known outcomes. Similar reading patterns emerged when participants read the exact same material after week‐long and 5‐minute delays. These results indicate that biasing contexts can influence readers' processing of inaccuracies for even familiar events. Rereading proves insufficient for encouraging reliance on accurate prior knowledge. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mechanisms of motivation–cognition interaction: challenges and opportunities

Recent years have seen a rejuvenation of interest in studies of motivation–cognition interactions arising from many different areas of psychology and neuroscience. The present issue of Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience provides a sampling of some of the latest research from a number of these different areas. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the current state of the field, in terms of key research developments and candidate neural mechanisms receiving focused investigation as potential sources of motivation–cognition interaction. However, our primary goal is conceptual: to highlight the distinct perspectives taken by different research areas, in terms of how motivation is defined, the relevant dimensions and dissociations that are emphasized, and the theoretical questions being targeted. Together, these distinctions present both challenges and opportunities for efforts aiming toward a more unified and cross-disciplinary approach. We identify a set of pressing research questions calling for this sort of cross-disciplinary approach, with the explicit goal of encouraging integrative and collaborative investigations directed toward them.     

Approaching Nature, ‘Sustainability’ and Ecological Crises from a Critical Social Psychological Perspective

This article considers the potential contribution of critical social psychology to the study of the relationship between humans and nature, particularly in terms of the role of human activities in ecological degradation. That human behaviour is having a profound impact on global climate and related phenomena has garnered broad scientific consensus and is communicated to the public in increasingly sophisticated ways. Psychology has been increasingly drawn upon by policy makers, pressure groups and related institutions in this context, in the hope of understanding, predicting and shaping behaviour and lifestyles towards more sustainable ends. In the past few decades, cognitive behaviourist models have dominated research and policy agendas concerned with identifying barriers to, and/or promoting ‘environmentally sustainable’ or ‘pro‐environmental’ behaviour. Yet despite the emergence of critical work, to date, there has been very little work in this field explicitly under the banner of critical social psychology. In this article, a brief outline of some of the tenets of critical social psychology is followed by a consideration of how these principles have been taken up in existing cross‐disciplinary critical approaches to the interrelated issues of environment, sustainability and human behaviour and the potential contribution of critical social psychology in these areas.     

The Normativity of Meaning: Guidance and Justification

Abstract

The thesis that meaning is normative has come under much scrutiny of late. However, there are aspects of the view that have received comparatively little critical attention which centre on meaning’s capacity to guide and justify linguistic action. Call such a view ‘justification normativity’ (JN). I outline Zalabardo’s (1997) account of JN and his corresponding argument against reductive-naturalistic meaning-factualism and argue that the argument presents a genuine challenge to account for the guiding role of meaning in linguistic action. I then present a proposal regarding how this challenge may be met. This proposal is then compared to recent work by Ginsborg (2011; 2012), who has outlined an alternative view of the normativity of meaning that explicitly rejects the idea that meanings guide and justify linguistic use. I outline how Ginsborg utilises this notion of normativity in order to provide a positive account of what it is to mean something by an expression which is intended to serve as a response to Kripke’s semantic sceptic. Finally, I argue that Ginsborg’s response to the sceptic is unsatisfactory, and that, insofar as it is able to preserve our intuitive view of meaning’s capacity to guide linguistic action, my proposal is to be preferred.     

Resistance to extinction versus extinction as discrimination

The hypothesis that response strength might be measured by persistence of responding in the face of extinction was discredited in the 1960s because experiments showed that responding persists longer following intermittent reinforcers than following continuous reinforcers. Instead, researchers proposed that the longer persistence following intermittent reinforcers arises because intermittent reinforcement more closely resembles extinction—a discrimination theory. Attention to resistance to extinction revived because one observation seemed to support the persistence hypothesis: Following training on a multiple schedule with unequal components, responding usually persisted longer in the formerly richer component than in the formerly lean component. This observation represents an anomaly, however, because results with single schedules and concurrent schedules contradict it. We suggest that the difference in results arises because the multiple-schedule procedure, while including extensive training on stimulus discrimination, includes no training on discrimination between food available and food unavailable, whereas comparable single- and concurrent-schedule procedures include such training with repeated extinction. In Experiment 1, we replicated the original result, and in Experiment 2 showed that when the multiple-schedule procedure includes training on food/no-food discrimination, extinction following multiple schedules contradicts behavioral momentum theory and agrees with the discrimination theory and research with single and concurrent schedules.