The gender-marking effect in spoken word recognition

In this paper we examine whether the recognition of a spoken noun is affected by the gender marking—masculine or feminine—that is carried by a preceding word. In the first of two experiments, the gating paradigm was used to study the access of French nouns that were preceded by an appropriate gender marking, carried by an article, or preceded by no gender marking. In the second experiment, subjects were asked to make a lexical decision on the same material. A very strong facilitatory effect was found in both cases. The origin of the gender-marking effect is discussed, as well as the level of processing involved—lexical or syntactic.     

Family Therapy in France: A Brief Overview

The major issues in contemporary family therapy in France are described: Difficult beginnings, the practice of family therapy today, training and professionalisation, organization for family therapy, journals and publishing, and perspectives for family therapy in France.A psychiatrist, Head of Hospital Psychiatric and Mental Health Center near Paris (Ville Evrard. France 93330) and a family therapist     

Effects of attention manipulation on judgments of duration and of intensity in the visual modality

The “attentional model” of time estimation assumes that temporal judgments depend on the amount of attention allocated to the temporal processor (the timer). One of the main predictions of this model is that an interval will be judged shorter when attention is not allocated to the temporal parameters of the task. Previous studies combining temporal and nontemporal tasks (dual-task method) have suggested that the time spent processing the target duration might be a key factor: The less time devoted by the subject to the temporal task, the shorter the judged duration. In the two experiments presented here, subjects were asked to judge both the duration of a visual stimulus and an increment in intensity occurring at any time during this stimulus. In the second experiment, trials without intensity increments were added. The main result is that the judged duration was shorter when the increment occurred later in the stimulus or did not occur. In those cases, subjects had been expecting increment occurrence during most part of the stimulus and thus had focused for a shorter time on stimulus duration. We propose that attention shifts related to expectancy and to detection of the increment reduce subjective duration.     

Magnetic source images of human brain functions

The advent of large arrays of superconducting magnetic field sensors makes it possible to properly sample the topography of the magnetic field pattern across the human scalp with a temporal resolution of a few milliseconds. These capabilities can be exploited for computing a best estimate of the spatiotemporal evolution of electrical currents within coherently active neural populations distributed across the cerebral cortex. Data from 200 sensors can be interpreted by the method of singular value decomposition to compute a best estimate for the strengths of more than 9,000 current elements that define the magnetic source image moment by moment. Recently, an extension of this technique has been developed to characterize the cortical sources of alpha rhythm. This holds promise for providing a means of identifying the cortical regions that participate in cognitive functions such as mental imagery.     

Book reviews

Blue Dragon White Tiger. Michael Saso, 1990 Hawaii, University of Hawaii Press 215 pp., No price given

Chuang‐Tzu for Spiritual Transformation. Robert E. Allinson, 1989 Albany, State University of New York Press 203 pp., $39.50 hb, $14.95 pb

Japanese Martial Arts and American Sports. Cross‐Cultural Perspectives on Means to Personal Growth M. Kiyota & H. Kinoshita (Eds), 1990 Tokyo, Nihon University 247 pp., No price given

The Question of Rationality and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts. Hwa Yol Jung, 1989. IUJ Monograph 3, Nigata, International University of Japan ¥2000

The Arabic Linguistic Tradition. G. Bohas, J.‐P. Guillaume & D. E. Kouloughli, 1990 London and New York, Routledge 163+x pp., £30.00

The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind‐Body Theory. Yuasa Yasuo, edited by T. P. Kasulis and translated by Nagatomo Shigenori Albany, State University of New York Press $14.95 hb

Sainthood, Its Manifestations in World Religions. Richard Kieckerhefer & George D. Bond (Eds), 1990 University of California Press XII + 263 pp., $12.95 pb

East of Existentialism: The Tao of the West. Ray Billington, 1990 London, Unwin Hyman xviii+316 pp., No price given     

Shock intensity and signaled avoidance responding

Five rats were submitted to a signaled free-operant avoidance contingency. Throughout the experiment, shock intensity was varied from 0.1 to 8.0 mA, with shock duration constant at 200 milleseconds. Results indicate: (a) an all-or-none effect of shock intensity on response and shock rates, on percentage of shocks avoided, and on frequency of occurrence of responding during the preshock stimulus; and (b) no systematic effect of shock intensity on stimulus control, measured either by the percentage of stimulus presentations accompanied by a response or by the percentage of responses that occurred during those preshock stimuli. Such results indicate that for each subject there is a minimum shock intensity necessary to establish and maintain avoidance responding; intensities higher than this minimum value have little or no effect on responding (with an upper limit for those strong intensities with a general disruptive effect on behavior).     

Pauses and syntax in American sign language

Research on spoken languages has shown that the durations of silent pauses in a sentence are strongly related to the syntactic structure of the sentence. A similar analysis of the pauses (holds) in a passage in American Sign Language reveals that sequences of signs are also interspersed with holds of different lengths: long holds appear to indicate the ends of sentences; shorter holds, the break between two conjoined sentences; and the shortest holds, breaks between internal constituents. Thus, pausal analysis is a guide to parsing sentences in ASL.     

Local versus global processing of harmonic cadences in the solution of musical puzzles

The structure of Western musical pieces is delineated by several kinds of cadence. Half cadences in the main key indicate temporary endings; authentic cadences in the main key indicate definitive endings. Authentic cadences in the dominant key are of cognitive interest, since they mark a definitive ending at a local level but a temporary ending at a global level. This study investigated the local versus global processing of these cadences. Participants were presented with sections of 16-bar minuets displayed on a computer screen in the form of a musical jigsaw puzzle. The sections consisted of either the first or the second half of the minuet (8 bars each). The first section ended with either a half cadence in the main key (all experiments), an authentic cadence in the dominant key (all experiments), or an authentic cadence in the main key (Exp. 4). The second section always ended in an authentic cadence in the main key. Participants were asked either to join the two sections of each minuet in the most coherent order (Exps. 1, 2, 4) or to rate the perceived completion of each section (Exps. 3, 4). Numerous inversion errors were observed when the first section of the minuets ended with an authentic cadence in the dominant key. Completion judgments indicated that these cadences were perceived as marking a definitive ending. Both facts suggest that local processing of harmonic cadences prevails over global processing. This finding concurs with recent studies showing that listeners had great difficulties in perceiving the higher-order organization of musical form. Received: 30 September 1996 / Accepted: 20 August 1997