Semantic operations deficits in sentence comprehension

Summary The ability of aphasic patients to comprehend sentences involving the combination of two linguistic operations was tested in a sentence/picture matching task. Sentences included affirmative, negative, uncompared and comparative types. Aphasic patients had significantly greater difficulty in understanding negative-comparative constructions than sentence types involving only a single operation. Comparison of the responses of the aphasic patients with data obtained in a perceptual comparison task revealed that a subgroup of patients had marked difficulty in integrating information in both tasks. The results are interpreted as an indication that some aphasic patients are especially disturbed in their ability to combine several operations in the construction of semantic representations for sentences. It is further argued that this deficit may extend to an inability to integrate information in the perceptual/spatial domain, as suggested by Luria in his discussion of the syndrome of semantic aphasia.The research reported here was supported by NIH research grant 14099 to The Johns Hopkins University. We would like to thank Dr. Annamaria Basili, Chief, Department of Audiology and Speech Pathology, Fort Howard Veterans Administration Medical Center, for permission to test the patients. We are indebted to the entire staff of that department for their continued cooperation, and for their many useful comments on the research reported. We also thank Michael Giordano, Conrad Selnick, and Susan Baisley for their assistance in data analysis. A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of B.A.B.B.L.E., Niagara Falls, Canada, March, 1979     

Trait anxiety,stress, and learning a test of Saltz's hypothesis

Behavioral predictions from Saltz's, Spence's, and Spielberger's interpretations of trait anxiety were tested in a complex verbal learning task. Fifty-three high-anxious and 52 low-anxious male college students were randomly distributed to test conditions of failure-stress, pain-stress, or neutral instructions. The learning data revealed that high-anxious-failure and low-anxious-pain Ss were disrupted and supported Saltz's hypothesis; self-reported anxiety (A-State scale, STAI) was observed only in high-anxious-failure Ss and supported Spielberger's theory of the arousal of state anxiety as a function of trait anxiety. However, the contradiction between self-reported anxiety and learning behavior in low-anxious-pain Ss indicated that the verbal report of these Ss was an inaccurate or insensitive index of arousal.     

Convergent cortical representation of semantic processing in bilinguals

This study examined whether semantic processes in two languages (English and Spanish) are mediated by a common neural system in fluent bilinguals who acquired their second language years after acquiring their first language. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed while bilingual participants made semantic and nonsemantic decisions about words in Spanish and English. There was greater activation for semantic relative to nonsemantic decisions in left and right frontal regions, with greater left frontal activation. The locations of activations were similar for both languages, and no differences were found when semantic decisions for English and Spanish words were compared directly. These results demonstrate a shared frontal lobe system for semantic analysis of the languages and are consistent with cognitive research on bilingualism indicating that the two languages of a bilingual person access a common semantic system.     

Mood and fluency: The case of pronunciation ease,liking and trust

We explored the impact of mood on the judgemental consequences of word pronounceability in six Experiments (1 preregistered, total N = 1183). Positive and negative mood was induced via video clips (all but Experiment 4) and subliminal affective primes (Experiment 4). Additionally, participants were presented with easy- and difficult-to-pronounce letter strings. These were framed as target words to be judged for liking (Experiments 1–2), as names of eBay sellers to be judged for trustworthiness (Experiments 3–5), or as either seller names or passwords to provoke opposing interpretations of pronunciation fluency (Experiment 6). While pronounceability showed a robust effect across experiments, mood did not modulate the judgemental use of (Experiments 1–4), the correction for (Experiment 5) and the interpretation (Experiment 6) of word pronounceability. In conclusion, the judgemental effects of pronounceability persist despite the presence of more objective and task-pertinent cues, resist judgemental correction and remain unaffected by affective states.     

Well-Being Indicators and Convergence Across Italian Regions

This article studies convergence across Italian regions by means of two composite indicators of socio-economic progress reflecting the multidimensional nature of human well-being. The first composite indicator includes, other than household disposable income in Italy, two sub-indicators regarding health and education; the second composite indicator considers, in addition to those considered by the former, three further sub-indicators relating to the quality of the socio-institutional context, age and gender disparities in the labor market and regional competitiveness. The data base of the 17 variables or indexes used to construct the six abovementioned sub-indicators cover the period from 1998 to 2008. We assess the existence of both σ and γ- convergence; the latter computed by means of Kendall′s index. Consistent with the findings in other European countries that also use composite economic and quality of life indicators we find evidence of regional σ-convergence in well-being, but do not observe significant processes of intra-distributional mobility. In other words, while dispersion across Italian regions in terms of well-being levels declined in the period, the regional ranking remained substantially unchanged.     

Group status drives majority and minority integration preferences

This research examined preferences for national- and campus-level assimilative and pluralistic policies among Black and White students under different contexts, as majority- and minority-group members. We targeted attitudes at two universities, one where 85% of the student body is White, and another where 76% of students are Black. The results revealed that when a group constituted the majority, its members generally preferred assimilationist policies, and when a group constituted the minority, its members generally preferred pluralistic policies. The results support a functional perspective: Both majority and minority groups seek to protect and enhance their collective identities.