Wherein Lies the Normative Dimension in Meaning and Mental Content?

Philosophical Studies -     

Looking and touching: what extant approaches reveal about the structure of early word knowledge

The goal of the current study is to assess the temporal dynamics of vision and action to evaluate the underlying word representations that guide infants' responses. Sixteen‐month‐old infants participated in a two‐alternative forced‐choice word–picture matching task. We conducted a moment‐by‐moment analysis of looking and reaching behaviors as they occurred in tandem to assess the speed with which a prompted word was processed (visual reaction time) as a function of the type of haptic response: Target, Distractor, or No Touch. Visual reaction times (visual RTs) were significantly slower during No Touches compared to Distractor and Target Touches, which were statistically indistinguishable. The finding that visual RTs were significantly faster during Distractor Touches compared to No Touches suggests that incorrect and absent haptic responses appear to index distinct knowledge states: incorrect responses are associated with partial knowledge whereas absent responses appear to reflect a true failure to map lexical items to their target referents. Further, we found that those children who were faster at processing words were also those children who exhibited better haptic performance. This research provides a methodological clarification on knowledge measured by the visual and haptic modalities and new evidence for a continuum of word knowledge in the second year of life.     

Thinking the voice: neural correlates of voice perception

The human voice is the carrier of speech, but also an "auditory face" that conveys important affective and identity information. Little is known about the neural bases of our abilities to perceive such paralinguistic information in voice. Results from recent neuroimaging studies suggest that the different types of vocal information could be processed in partially dissociated functional pathways, and support a neurocognitive model of voice perception largely similar to that proposed for face perception.     

Structure and function of auditory cortex: music and speech

We examine the evidence that speech and musical sounds exploit different acoustic cues: speech is highly dependent on rapidly changing broadband sounds, whereas tonal patterns tend to be slower, although small and precise changes in frequency are important. We argue that the auditory cortices in the two hemispheres are relatively specialized, such that temporal resolution is better in left auditory cortical areas and spectral resolution is better in right auditory cortical areas. We propose that cortical asymmetries might have developed as a general solution to the need to optimize processing of the acoustic environment in both temporal and frequency domains.     

Conditional reasoning and the Wason selection task: Biconditional interpretation instead of reasoning bias

Two experiments were conducted to show that the IF … THEN … rules used in the different versions of Wason's (1966 Wason, P. C. 1966. “Reasoning”. In New horizons in psychology I, Edited by: Foss, B. M. Harmondsworth, , UK: Penguin.  [Google Scholar]) selection task are not psychologically—though they are logically—equivalent. Some of these rules are considered by the participants as strict logical conditionals, whereas others are interpreted as expressing a biconditional relationship. A deductive task was used jointly with the selection task to show that the original abstract rule is quite ambiguous in this respect, contrary to deontic rules: the typical “error” made by most people may indeed be explained by the fact that they consider the abstract rule as a biconditional. Thus, there is no proper error or bias in the selection task as it is still argued, but a differential interpretation of the rule. The need for taking into account a pragmatic component in the process of reasoning is illustrated by the experiments.     

Speech Motor Skill and Stuttering

The authors review converging lines of evidence from behavioral, kinematic, and neuroimaging data that point to limitations in speech motor skills in people who stutter (PWS). From their review, they conclude that PWS differ from those who do not in terms of their ability to improve with practice and retain practiced changes in the long term, and that they are less efficient and less flexible in their adaptation to lower (motor) and higher (cognitive–linguistic) order requirements that impact on speech motor functions. These findings in general provide empirical support for the position that PWS may occupy the low end of the speech motor skill continuum as argued in the Speech Motor Skills approach (Van Lieshout, Hulstijn, & Peters, 2004).