Infants learn phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience

Two experiments investigated whether novel phonotactic regularities, not present in English, could be acquired by 16.5-month-old infants from brief auditory experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant syllables in which particular consonants were artificially restricted to either initial or final position (e.g. /baep/ not /paeb/). In a later head-turn preference test, infants listened longer to new syllables that violated the experimental phonotactic constraints than to new syllables that honored them. Thus, infants rapidly learned phonotactic regularities from brief auditory experience and extended them to unstudied syllables, documenting the sensitivity of the infant's language processing system to abstractions over linguistic experience.     

Changes in personality pathology after pharmacotherapy and combined therapy for depressed patients

The central question addressed by this article is whether courses of treatment consisting of pharmacotherapy or pharmacotherapy combined with psychotherapy (combined therapy) produce different changes in personality pathology at follow-up after 40 weeks. We also examined whether recovery from depression has an influence on outcome. The study population consisted of 128 outpatients in whom personality pathology and severity of depression were determined at the start of the study. For 72 patients, personality pathology and severity of depression were determined again after 40 weeks. Of the group of 72 patients, 25 patients received only pharmacotherapy for 6 months, and 47 patients received combined treatment (pharmacotherapy and psychodynamic supportive psychotherapy). The antidepressant protocol provides for three successive steps in case of intolerance or inefficacy: fluoxetine, amitriptyline, and moclobemide. The combined therapy condition consisted of 16 sessions of Short Psychodynamic Supportive Psychotherapy in addition to pharmacotherapy. In the combined therapy condition there was a significant reduction in personality pathology in patients who recovered from depression but also in patients who had not. In the pharmacotherapy condition the significant decrease was restricted to patients who recovered from depression. The results were most striking for Cluster C psychopatology. Patients with cluster B pathology changed the least. Depressed patients with comorbid personality pathology appear to benefit most from a combination of pharmacotherapy and a form of short, psychodynamic, supportive psychotherapy.     

Dimensions of Picture Identification Test need associations

To find a simple and more general structure for need association matrices obtained from Picture Identification Test (PIT) results, PIT need association matrices of eight college student groups were analyzed by INDSCAL, a multidimensional scaling technique. A common three dimensional structure was found. Based on the scale locations of the 22 needs, the dimensions were labeled the Combative, the Personal, and the Competitive dimensions. The INDSCAL model was used as a target for six other comparison groups including male and female English college students, male addicts and controls, and male delinquents and controls. There was enough similarity between the dimensional structure of the need associations of the comparison and target groups to assume that all groups shared the same basic structure of need associations. There were enough differences, however, to suggest that personality characteristics of groups may be related to deviations in the associative structure of their motivation systems. Applications of the techniques to clinical and personality evaluations of groups and individuals were discussed.     

Exploring mechanisms that affect retrograde memory for public events in amnestic mild cognitive impairment: A longitudinal update

Here, we examined mechanisms that affect retrograde memory in amnestic mild cognitive impairment (a-MCI) as a function of longitudinal clinical outcome. 8 a-MCI who converted to Alzheimer's dementia (AD) during the subsequent 3-year follow-up (converter a-MCI) and 10 a-MCI who remained clinically stable during the same period (stable a-MCI) were compared at the baseline evaluation (i.e., when they were diagnosed as a-MCI) using a remote memory questionnaire for public events that allows disentangling the differential contribution of storage and retrieval mechanisms to performance accuracy. Results suggest that deficits in remote memory are primarily explained by impaired retrieval abilities in stable a-MCI and by impaired storage in converter-to-AD a-MCI. This distinction between retrograde amnesia due to defective trace utilisation in stable a-MCI and trace storage in converter a-MCI is consistent with the temporal unfolding of declining anterograde memory over the course of disease progression to AD.     

Monitoring the future: object and source memory for real and imagined events

In these experiments a memory‐monitoring decision is made, whereby subjects must decide not only whether or not to‐be‐learned stimuli will be remembered—the focus of all of the past research into the Judgement of Learning (JOL)—but also whether they will be able to assess the source of those stimuli, as assessed by a new measure, Judgement of Source (JOS). In Experiment 1 subjects had to judge whether they would remember the occurrence and the source of items that were either seen or imagined. Although seen items were better remembered and sourced than imagined, subjects were unable to predict this outcome: they underestimated their ability to recall seen items and overestimated their ability to recall imagined items. In Experiment 2 subjects had to discriminate between self‐performed or other‐performed enacted or imagined events. We expected that the motor cues associated with overt performance should provide more sensory information than had the visual input in Experiment 1, and this should help subjects to discriminate between real and imagined items. As predicted, JOL magnitude showed that subjects were now able to predict accurately that they would recall more enacted events than imagined events. JOS magnitude showed that subjects incorrectly predicted that self‐enactment would assist source memory compared to imagination. However, it was the source of other‐focused events which was more accurately remembered. The results are discussed in terms of Koriat's (1997) view about cue utility in making JOLs. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimating the quantitative relation between incongruent information and response time

In Eriksen's flanker paradigm, participants' responses are slower and more error-prone when task-relevant and simultaneously available task-irrelevant cues are incongruent. The influence of task-irrelevant information decreases as its distance from the task-relevant information increases. Here, we manipulated the quantity of task-irrelevant information while keeping the distance constant. We asked whether when the impact on response selection processes was stronger the more incongruent information was available, or whether the impact on response selection depended only on its presence or absence. We conducted an experiment, in which subjects had to discriminate the direction of motion of a central point-light-walker that was flanked by two, four, or eight point-light-walkers at an equal distance from the center. The experiment showed that reaction times increased with the number of incongruent walkers. This effect was modulated by the total number of walkers, showing that the effect of incongruent information saturates when the display is cluttered.     

Influence of attended repetition trials on negative priming in younger and older adults

A lengthened response time when a distractor becomes a target, called negative priming, is an undisputed phenomenon in selective attention, yet just what the underlying mechanism responsible for negative priming is has not been resolved. In this study, the proportion of attended repetition trials was manipulated in order to test the predictions of three theories that have been proposed for explaining spatial negative priming: distractor suppression (e.g., Tipper, 1985), episodic memory retrieval (e.g., Neill, Valdes, &; Terry, 1995), and novelty bias (e.g., Milliken, Tipper, Houghton, &; Lupiáñez, 2000). The results supported the proposal that a novelty bias, which is flexible and can be overridden, is the primary mechanism responsible for priming in spatial tasks. Memory retrieval obscured the novelty bias for target processing, was more selective in older adults, and did not affect distractor processing. Novelty bias and distractor suppression may share the same inhibitory attentional mechanism.     

Lexical representations of written nouns and verbs in Italian

This study investigates the differences in the input representations of verbs and nouns in the Italian mental lexicon. One visual lexical decision experiment in which the stem homograph effect (Laudanna, Badecker, and Caramazza, 1989) was evaluated on noun and verb targets is reported. Strong inhibitory effects on verb targets preceded by stem homographs relative to nonhomographic word pairs were found. The effects on verb targets were also much more reliable than the effects on noun targets. The pattern of results provides support for the hypothesis that noun and verbs are differently represented in the orthographic input lexicon.     

Learning phonotactic constraints from brief auditory experience

Three experiments asked whether phonotactic regularities not present in English could be acquired by adult English speakers from brief listening experience. Subjects listened to consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) syllables displaying restrictions on consonant position. Responses in a later speeded repetition task revealed rapid learning of (a) first-order regularities in which consonants were restricted to particular positions (e.g. [baep] not *[paeb]), and (b) second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on the adjacent vowel (e.g. [baep] or [pIb], not *[paeb] or *[bIp]). No evidence of learning was found for second-order regularities in which consonant position depended on speaker's voice. These results demonstrated that phonotactic constraints are rapidly learned from listening experience and that some types of contingencies (consonant-vowel) are more easily learned than others (consonant-voice).     

The octave illusion revisited: suppression or fusion between ears?

The octave illusion occurs when each ear receives a sequence of tones alternating by 1 octave but with the high and low tones in different ears. Most listeners perceive these stimuli as a high pitch in one ear alternating with a low pitch in the other ear. D. Deutsch and P. L. Roll (1976) interpreted this phenomenon as evidence for a what-where division of auditory processing caused by sequential interactions between the tones. They argued that the pitch follows the frequency presented to the dominant ear but is lateralized toward the higher frequency component. This model was examined in 4 experiments. Results indicate that the perceived pitch approximates the fundamental frequency and that the illusion does not depend on sequential interactions. The octave illusion may arise from an interaction between dichotic fusion and binaural diplacusis rather than from suppression as proposed by Deutsch.