The Impact of L2 English Learners' Belief about an Interlocutor's English Proficiency on L2 Phonetic Accommodation

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research - The current study investigates the influence of L2 English learners’ belief about their interlocutor’s English proficiency on phonetic...     

Age-Related Differences in Memory Illusions: Revelation Effect

Older adults are often more susceptible to various illusions and distortions of memory than young adults. In the experiments reported here, we explored the question of whether normal aging was associated with a larger revelation effect, an illusion of memory in which items that are revealed gradually during a recognition test are more likely to be called old than unrevealed items that are shown in their entirety. Contrary to expectations, older adults were not susceptible to this memory illusion. A revelation effect occurred for young but not older adults, even when older adults were similar to young adults on measures of recognition and repetition priming. When data across experiments were combined, there was evidence for a negative revelation effect in older adults in which revealed items were less likely called old than unrevealed items. These results place boundary conditions on the claim that older adults are more susceptible than young adults to memory illusions, and imply that one or more mechanisms underlying the revelation effect are age sensitive.     

Guessing Strategies in Perceptual Identification: A Reply to McKoon and Ratcliff

Light and Kennison (this issue) found that bias effects in the forced-choice perceptual identification of words occurred only in a subset of participants, those who claimed on a strategy questionnaire to be deliberately guessing words they had studied previously. McKoon and Ratcliff (this issue) raised a number of objections to the proposal that bias effects are due to guessing strategies, citing difficulties in our statistical treatment of data, our use of subjective reports to classify participants, and our approach to the general problem of separating implicit from explicit influences on performance. This article responds to these objections.     

The effect of mortality salience on women's judgments of male faces

Previous research has shown that individuals who are reminded of their death exhibited a greater desire for offspring than those who were not reminded of their death. The present research investigated whether being reminded of mortality affects mate selection behaviors, such as facial preference judgments. Prior research has shown that women prefer more masculine faces when they are at the high versus low fertility phase of their menstrual cycles. We report an experiment in which women were tested either at their high or fertility phase. They were randomly assigned to either a mortality salience (MS) or control condition and then asked to judge faces ranging from extreme masculine to extreme feminine. The results showed that women's choice of the attractive male face was determined by an interaction between fertility phase and condition. In control conditions, high fertility phase women preferred a significantly more masculine face than women who were in a lower fertility phase of their menstrual cycles. In MS conditions, high fertility phase women preferred a significantly less masculine (i.e., more average) face than women who were in a low fertility phase. The results indicate that biological processes, such as fertility phase, involved in mate selection are sensitive to current environmental factors, such as death reminders. This sensitivity may serve as an adaptive compromise when choosing a mate in potentially adverse environmental conditions.     

Hemispheric Differences in the Processing of Words Learned Early Versus Later in Childhood

The research investigated whether there are hemispheric differences in processing for words acquired early in childhood (early AoA) and words acquired later in childhood (late AoA). We hypothesized that because of recent evidence suggesting that there is a right hemisphere dominance in early childhood, early AoA words would be represented in the right hemisphere, and late AoA words would be represented in the left hemisphere. This hypothesis differs from an early view that late AoA words would be represented in the left hemisphere, and early AoA words would be represented in both hemispheres (Gazzaniga, 1974). We report two experiments using the divided visual field (DVF) technique. The results showed that there was a right visual field (RVF)/left hemisphere (LH) advantage only for late AoA words. For early AoA words, there was a left visual field (LVF)/right hemisphere advantage (RH). Implications for theories of hemispheric differences in word processing are discussed.     

Evidence for a late-occurring effect of phoneme repetition during silent reading

Two reading experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of phoneme repetition during silent reading (also referred to as the visual tongue-twister effect, see McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982; Perfetti & McCutchen, 1982) in conjunction with end-of-clause and end-of-sentence wrap-up effects (Just & Carpenter, 1982; Rayner, Sereno, Morris, Schmauder, & Clifton, 1989). In both experiments, reading time was measured on sentences containing either six or zero words sharing the same initial phoneme. Sentences were presented in a phrase-by-phrase moving window, with each phrase either containing one word that involved a repeated phoneme or a matched word not involving a repeated phoneme. The sixth presentation region either contained or did not contain a comma (Experiment 1) or a period (Experiment 2). The results showed that the effect of phoneme repetition occurred relatively late during sentence processing, only after integration processing related to end-of-clause and end-of-sentence wrap-up occurred.     

The Use of Verb Information in Parsing: Different Statistical Analyses Lead to Contradictory Conclusions

The research investigated how comprehenders use verb information during syntactic parsing. Two reading experiments investigated the relationship between verb-specific variables and reading time. These experiments were close replications of prior work; however, two statistical techniques were used, rather than one. These were item-by-item correlations and participant-by-participant regression. In Experiment 1, reading time was measured using a self-paced moving window. In Experiment 2, eye movements were recorded during reading. The results of both experiments showed that the results of two types of statistical analyses support contradictory conclusions. The analyses involving participant-by-participant regression analyses provided no evidence for the early use of verb information in parsing and support syntax-first approaches to parsing. In contrast, the results of item-by-item correlation were consistent with the prior research, supporting the view that verb information can guide initial parsing decisions. Implications for theories of parsing are discussed. This research was financially supported by Grants HD-07327 and HD-18708 awarded to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and supported by a grant awarded to the author by the National Science Foundation (BCS 0446998).