Sentence frame contexts and lexical decisions: Sentence-acceptability and word-relatedness effects

Many studies have explored the effects of single-word contexts on visual word recognition, and several models have been proposed to account for the results obtained. However, relatively little is known about the effects of sentence contexts. In the experiment reported, the contexts consisted of sentences with the final word deleted, and subjects made word-nonword (lexical) decisions on target strings of letters. Norms were collected to determine the most common completion for each sentence frame. The experiment yielded three main findings: (1) Lexical decisions were fastest for words that were the most common completions; (2) among words not given as completions in the norming procedure, decisions were faster for words related to the most common completions than for words unrelated to the most common completions; t3t also among words that were not produced as completions, decisions were faster for words that formed acceptable completions than for words that did not. These relatedness and sentence-acceptability effects were independent, so that the relatedness effect held even when the target words formed anomalous sentence completions. In order to account for these results, a model combining two types of processes is required. In the model described, schematic knowledge (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977) operates upon a semantic network to activate particular nodes, and this activation spreads to related concepts as in the Collins and Loftus (1975) model.     

A developmental study of the role of word order in comprehending Hebrew

Monolingual Hebrew-speaking subjects, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 11 years old, as well as adults, were asked to interpret utterances consisting of two nouns and a verb. Some utterances included only word order cues while others included direct object marker and subject-verb gender agreement cues. Even though Hebrew word order is relatively free, when subjects used word order as an interpretive cue they generally assigned sentence relations according to the dominant SVO order of modern Hebrew. This trend was less strong for the interpretations of NNV utterances than of NVN and VNN utterances. There was no evidence of a developmental sequence for word order strategies. In addition, there was no evidence that word order, for any age group, was necessarily a dominant cue for assigning sentence relations when other linguistic information was available.     

Slow and steady: sustained effects of lexico-semantic associations can mediate referential impairments in schizophrenia

The present study investigated the contribution of lexico-semantic associations to impairments in establishing reference in schizophrenia. We examined event-related potentials as schizophrenia patients and healthy, demographically matched controls read five-sentence scenarios. Sentence 4 introduced a noun that referred back to three possible referents introduced in Sentences 1–3. These referents were contextually appropriate, contextually inappropriate but lexico-semantically associated, and contextually inappropriate and lexico-semantically nonassociated. In order to determine whether participants had correctly linked the anaphor to its referent, the final sentence reintroduced each referent, and participants indicated whether the last two sentences referred to the same entity. Results indicated that between 300 and 400 ms, patients, like healthy controls, used discourse context to link the noun with its preceding referent. However, between 400 and 500 ms, neural activity in patients was modulated only by lexico-semantic associations, rather than by discourse context. Moreover, patients were also more likely than controls to incorrectly link the noun with contextually inappropriate but lexico-semantically associated referents. These results suggest that at least some types of referential impairments may be driven by sustained activation of contextually inappropriate lexico-semantic associations.     

Non-conscious goal conflicts

The question raised in this paper is whether goal conflicts can occur outside of conscious awareness. Given the numerous and potentially conflicting goals people pursue, and the severe scarcity of mental resources, we offer a positive answer. Six experiments that employed a dissociation paradigm tested this hypothesis. Using three implicit behavioral markers of goal conflict (increased decision times, increased decision variance and heightened sensitivity to environmental information), and one physiological marker (increased arousal as measured by skin conductance level), these experiments document goal conflicts that do not reach conscious awareness.