Semantic determinants of pauses

Summary The following experiment presents evidence that variations in semantic context can produce changes in the rate and length of pauses in a situation in which syntactic and other variations are minimized. Each of 40 Ss read two paragraphs aloud and after each paragraph retold the story without further instructions. Each paragraph consisted of five sentences, each containing 23 syllables. The third sentence was either in accord with the story or an unusual occurrence (depending on exchange of subject and object). The most important experimental finding was that both number and length of unfilled pauses are more frequent throughout the unusual stories as compared with the usual ones. In the readings, the effect was limited to the critical sentence and the pauses immediately thereafter. The evidence supports the view of the authors that the role of semantic context has been underestimated in psycholiguistic research to date.

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Zusammenfassung Das folgende Experiment weist darauf hin, daß Variationen des semantischen Kontextes zu Veränderungen in der Anzahl und Länge von Pausen führen können, auch wenn syntaktische und andere Variationen kontrolliert werden. 40 Vpn lasen zwei Abschnitte laut vor und erzählten die Geschichte nach jedem Abschnitt ohne weitere Instruktion. Jeder Abschnitt bestand aus fünf Sätzen, jeder Satz enthielt 23 Silben. Der dritte Satz stimmte mit dem sonstigen Inhalt der Geschichte überein oder wich davon ab (durch Austausch von Subjekt und Objekt). Als wichtigster experimenteller Befund stellte sich heraus, daß bei den ungewöhnlichen Geschichten die Anzahl und Länge der ungefüllten Pausen größer waren als bei den normalen Geschichten. Bei den Lesungen trat dieser Effekt nur innerhalb des kritischen Satzes und unmittelbar danach auf. Die Ergebnisse unterstützen die Meinung der Autoren, daß die Rolle des semantischen Kontextes in der psycholinguistischen Forschung bisher vernachlässigt wurde.

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Abbreviations N Normal Sematic Context - A Abnormal Sematic Context - N_ Preceeded by Normal Sematic Context - A_ Preceeded by Anormal Sematic Context - S The Student Story - C The Child Story - UP Unfilled Pauses - FP Filled Pauses (e.g. uh) - UP_FP Unfilled Pauses accompanying FPs - R Repeats (e.g., the the) - FS False Starts (e.g., He went .... He came) - R₁ and R₂ First and Second Readings - S₁ and S₂ First and Second Stories - B UPs between Major Syntactic Units - W UPs within Major Syntactic Units The research reported in the following article has been supported partly by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and partly by the Psychological Institute of the Free University of Berlin. In addition, it was made possible through the generosity of Saint Louis University in granting a year's leave of absence to the first author for purposes of research.     

The effect of orientation on tactual braille recognition: Optimal touching positions

Subjects in five experiments matched tangible braille against a visible matching code. In Experiment 1, braille recognition suffered when entire lines of braille characters were tilted in varying amounts from the upright. Experiment 2 showed that tilt lowered performance for tangible, large embossed letters, as well as for braille. However, recognition was better for print letters than it was for braille. In Experiment 3, subjects attempted to match the upright array against embossed braille that was left/right reversed, inverted up/down, or rotated +180°. Performance was close to that for normal braille in the left/right reversal condition, and very low for the +180° rotation group. These results on braille tilt in the “picture plane” may reflect difficulty in manipulating the tangible “image.” Braille recognition performance was not lowered whenthe visible matching array was tilted ?45° or ?90° from the upright but the tangible stimuli were upright. In Experiment 4, recognition of left/right reversed braille that was physically horizontal (on the bottom of a shelf) was compared with that of braille left/right reversed due to its location on the back of a panel, in the vertical plane. Braille recognition accuracy was higher with braille located vertically. An additional experiment showed the beneficial effect of locating braille in the vertical, frontoparallel plane, obtained with +90° degree rotated braille. It is proposed that optimal tactual performance with tangible arrays might depend on touching position, and on the physical position of stimuli in space. Just as there are good and poor viewing positions, there may be optimal touching positions. The effects of tilt on braille identification were diminished for blind subjects, suggesting the importance of tactile experience and skill.     

Prevention Activities for Older Adults: Social Structures and Personal Competencies That Maintain Useful Social Roles

A conceptual reorientation for providing responsive psychological services to older adults is presented, focusing on the need to develop prevention programs for older adults that encourage the maintenance of useful social roles. Changes in social structures that encourage more active social engagement are discussed, with examples drawn from housing options, part-time employment, and ways to develop more supportive social ties for older adults faced with network losses. Counselors and other mental health specialists can play a useful role in helping the public understand the social dilemmas faced by older adults and the value of their continued integration as useful citizens.     

Support interventions for older adults: Confidante relationships,perceived family support,and meaningful role activity

The rationale and problems encountered in implementing a peer-support telephone intervention are described. The research conducted by Heller, Thompson, Trueba, Hogg, and Vlachos-Weber (1991) was based on epidemiological literature documenting the moral enhancing value of confidante relationships. However, that literature may be insufficiently precise to form the basis for an intervention without prior ethnographic study of the local target population. Furthermore, the positive effects of peer friendships may refer to long established relationships rather than to newly formed social ties. It is concluded that future support intervention research with older adults should concentrate on reinforcing meaningful role activities, and that greater attention should be given to strengthening indigenous ties before attempting to create new ones. While prior process research and formative evaluation are of value, we also emphasize the importance of well-controlled field studies in the ultimate test of intervention hypotheses.     

Object identification: The mental representation of physical and conceptual attributes

In two experiments, subjects indicated whether two pictures of familiar objects were equivalent. The picture pairs were identical, showed the same object in various perspectives and states, or showed different objects with varying degrees of conceptual relatedness. In Experiment 1, the equivalence criterion for judging the picture pairs was varied between subjects (identity of pictures; conceptual equivalence of objects at subordinate, basic, or superordinate level). The reaction times of the four subject groups suggest that a pictorial stimulus is not always mentally represented in the same way, and that the instructions given determine which attributes of the stimulus are represented. In Experiment 2, the visual similarity of the picture pairs was varied. The results indicate, at least with a basic-level equivalence instruction, that not only perceptual, but also non-perceptual, functional attributes are represented—namely, those that, according to Rosch et al. (1976), are common to the members of a superordinate category.     

Tactile retention: Reading with the skin

In four experiments, subjects were required to identify sequences of random digits, letters, or words drawn on the skin. The passive tactile digit span was determined to be three items when the digits were drawn with an interstimulus interval of 1 sec. Identification was significantly better for words than for random letter sequences. Slower rates of presentation produced better tactile retention. The deficiencies in passive retention were ascribed to two processes, the generation of aftersensations and a difficulty in the generation of a unitary percept. Perceptual activity may normally act to inhibit aftersensations and facilitate the construction of a unitary percept The results supported the notion that the tactile span of immediate memory is labile and may be limited by passivity.     

TEILHARD'S VISION OF THE WORLD AND MODERN COSMOLOGY

Abstract. Some physical aspects of Teilhard's synthesis are focused upon and confronted with the recent achievements of physics and cosmology. The stuff of the universe, according to modern physical theories, has become something more similar to a structure or form than to inert pieces of material substratum. Directedness of time and history no longer seems to be an ontological a priori of any existence, but rather an outcome of finely tuned initial conditions. And the growth of complexity is now regarded as a process emerging out of physical laws rather than a foreign element in the body of physics. The question is considered of how these results affect Teilhard de Chardin's vision of the world.     

Visual search for dimensionally redundant pop-out targets: Evidence for parallel-coactive processing of dimensions

In two visual search experiments, the detection of singleton feature targets redundantly defined on multiple dimensions was investigated. Targets differed from the distractors in orientation, color, or both (redundant targets). In Experiment 1, the various target types were presented either in separate blocks or in random order within blocks. Reaction times to redundant targets significantly violated therace model inequality (Miller, 1982), but only when there was constancy of the target-defining dimension(s) within trial blocks. In Experiment 2, there was dimensional variability within blocks. Consistent with Experiment 1, constancy of the target-defining dimension(s), but this time across successive trials (rather than within blocks), was critical for observing violations of the race model inequality. These results provide evidence for parallel-coactive processing of multiple dimensions, consistent with thedimension-weighting account of Müller, Heller, and Ziegler (1995).     

Lexically restricted utterances in Russian, german, and english child-directed speech

This study investigates the child-directed speech (CDS) of four Russian-, six German, and six English-speaking mothers to their 2-year-old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word-order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron-Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003 ) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages.