The contribution of orthography to spoken word production: Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

A recent debate in the language production literature concerns the influence of a word’s orthographic information on spoken word production and the extent to which this influence is modulated by task context. In the present study, Mandarin Chinese participants produced sets of words that shared orthography (O+P−), phonology (O−P+), or orthography and phonology (O+P+), or were unrelated (O−P−), in the context of a reading, associative naming, or picture naming task. Shared phonology yielded facilitation effects in all three tasks, but only in the reading task was this phonological effect modulated by shared orthography. Shared orthography by itself (O+P−) revealed inhibitory effects in reading, but not in associative naming or in picture naming. These results suggest that a word’s orthography information influences spoken word production only in tasks that rely heavily on orthographic information.     

The role of support in psychoanalysis.

A two-factor theory of clinical psychoanalysis is proposed. In accordance with the predominant position of the structural-adaptational ("classical") approach in psychoanalytic theory, the power of interpretation and insight in clinical psychoanalysis has received ample attention in psychoanalytic literature. There seems, however, to be a growing awareness among analysts that not all the facts of an analytic treatment can be accounted for by this approach alone. A second factor is increasingly recognized: the power of adequate support provided by the analyst and resulting in a specific experience by the analysand. In the application of the developmental ("postclassical") approach of psychoanalytic theory, the importance of this support-experience factor in the treatment of ordinary neurosis by means of ordinary psychoanalysis is emphasized. The relative neglect of this aspect of clinical psychoanalysis may be indicative of the present-day dilemma of how to translate advances in theoretical knowledge of mental development into the therapeutic praxis of psychoanalysis. There may, however, be another important reason. Support and experience are phenomena often occurring on the nonverbal level. In contrast to interpretation and insight, they are usually not voiced, let alone distinctly and loudly expressed. They are the silent power of psychoanalysis.     

Reading ability and disfluency in stuttering and nonstuttering elementary school children

This study was aimed at comparing the reading abilities of elementary school children who stutter with their nonstuttering peers. Forty-four stuttering children from four grade levels were matched with a group of normally fluent controls on the basis of age, sex, and grade level. Reading ability was assessed by means of three Dutch standardized tests yielding a total of six scores. Disfluency scores during oral reading were also obtained for each subject. Results indicated significant differences between the two groups on reading rate and reading errors, but not on reading comprehension. Analysis of reading errors did not show qualitative differences among subjects: stuttering and nonstuttering children made the same kinds of reading errors. Similarly, the two groups did not differ with respect to performances at different grade levels. Among both groups of subjects performances became better with increasing grade on four of the six measures. Correlational analyses indicated that the measures of reading ability used in this study were significantly associated with frequency of disfluency for the nonstuttering children. In contrast, no significant relationship was found between reading ability and disfluency in the stuttering group, except for reading rate. Results are discussed with respect to the possible interaction between verbal performance and linguistic competence in reading ability measures, particularly for the stuttering child.     

Why Friedman's non-monotonic reasoning defies Hempel's covering law model

In this paper we will show that Hempel's covering law model can't deal very well with explanations that are based on incomplete knowledge. In particular the symmetry thesis, which is an important aspect of the covering law model, turns out to be problematic for these explanations. We will discuss an example of an electric circuit, which clearly indicates that the symmetry of explanation and prediction does not always hold. It will be argued that an alternative logic for causal explanation is needed. And we will investigate to what extent non-monotonic epistemic logic can provide such an alternative logical framework. Finally we will show that our non-monotonic logical analysis of explanation is not only suitable for simple cases such as the electric circuit, but that it also sheds new light on more controversial causal explanations such as Milton Friedman's explanation of the business cycle.We gratefully acknowledge the helpful suggestions and critical comments of Johan van Benthem, Bert Hamminga, Kevin Hoover, Theo Kuipers, and Rick Looyen.     

Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression

The "hard problem" in bilingual lexical access arises when translation-equivalent lexical representations are activated to roughly equal levels and, thus, compete equally for lexical selection. The language suppression hypothesis (D. W. Green, 1998) solves this hard problem through the suppression of lexical representations in the nontarget language. Following from this proposal is the prediction that lexical selection should take longer on a language switch trial because the to-be-selected representation was just suppressed on the previous trial. Inconsistent with this prediction, participants took no longer to name pictures in their dominant language on language switch trials than they did on nonswitch trials. These findings indicate that nontarget lexical representations are not suppressed. The authors suggest that these results undermine the viability of the language suppression hypothesis as a possible solution to the hard problem in bilingual lexical access.     

Remembering the news: Modeling retention data from a study with 14,000 participants

A retention study is presented in which participants answered questions about news events, with a retention interval that varied within participants between 1 day and 2 years. The study involved more than 14,000 participants and around 500,000 data points. The data were analyzed separately for participants who answered questions in Dutch or in English, providing an opportunity for replication. We fitted models of varying complexity to the data in order to test several hypotheses concerning retention. Evidence for an asymptote in retention was found in only one data set, and participants with greater media exposure displayed a higher degree of learning but no difference in forgetting. Thus, forgetting was independent of initial learning. Older adults were found to have forgetting curves similar to those of younger adults.     

Psy-BaDo

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Verbal fluency and verbal comprehension abilities in synonym tasks

Generating different synonym candidates and evaluating these candidates with respect to their synonymy with the stimulus word are two components of solving an open synonym task, which requires giving synonyms for a given word (cf. Janssen, Hoskens, & De Boeck, 1993). Separate subtasks were designed to identify these components. It is shown in this study that the generation component ability is primarily related to verbal fluency abilities, whereas the evaluation component ability is primarily related to verbal comprehension abilities. Moreover, evidence is given that these two component abilities can account for the correlations of the open synonym task with other ability measures.     

The reminiscence bump in the temporal distribution of the best football players of all time: Pelé, Cruijff or Maradona?

The reminiscence bump is the tendency to recall more autobiographical memories from adolescence and early adulthood than from adjacent lifetime periods. In this online study, the robustness of the reminiscence bump was examined by looking at participants' judgements about the quality of football players. Dutch participants (N = 619) were asked who they thought the five best players of all time were. The participants could select the names from a list or enter the names when their favourite players were not on the list. Johan Cruijff, Pelé, and Diego Maradona were the three most often mentioned players. Participants frequently named football players who reached the midpoint of their career when the participants were adolescents (mode = 17). The results indicate that the reminiscence bump can also be identified outside the autobiographical memory domain.     

Aging and the speed of time

Correlational and experimental methods provide evidence relevant to seven theories of humans’ general impressions of the speed of time, including theories of the purported subjective acceleration of time with aging. A total of 1865 adults from two countries, ranging in age from 16 to 80, reported how fast time appears to pass over different spans of time. Other measures tapped the experience of life changes and time pressure, and experimental manipulations were used to test two models based on forward telescoping and difficulty of recall. Respondents of all ages reported that time seems to pass quickly. In contrast to widely held beliefs, age differences in reports of the subjective speed of time were very small, except for the question about how fast the last 10 years had passed. Findings support a theory based on the experience of time pressure.