Parental Influences on Memories of Parents and Friends

The authors evaluated the role parent–child relationship quality has on two types of memories, those of parents and those of friends. Participants were 198 Italian university students who recalled memories during 4 separate timed memory-fluency tasks about their preschool, elementary school, middle school, high school and university years. Half were instructed to recall memories involving parents and the remainder memories involving friends. Moreover, parent–child relationships were assessed by the Network of Relationships Inventory (NRI; W. Furman & D. Buhrmester, 1985) and Adolescents’ Report of Parental Monitoring (D. M. Capaldi & G. R. Patterson, 1989). Results showed that men with positive parent–son relationships had more memories of parents and more affectively positive memories of friends, supporting a consistency model positing similarity between parent–child relationships and memories of friends. Women with positive parental relationship quality had more affectively positive memories of parents but for friends, positive relationship quality only predicted positive memories when young. At older ages, especially middle school-aged children, negative parent–daughter relationships predicted more positive memories of friends, supporting a compensatory model. The gender of parent also mattered, with fathers having a more influential role on affect for memories of friends.     

The influence of argument structure on judgements of argument strength,function, and adequacy

The present study explored the extent to which lay adults consider aspects of argument structure in judging the strength and function of informal arguments and in constructing arguments to meet specific adequacy goals. Across two experiments, college students were presented with base (one-premise) arguments, which were then expanded into convergent, coordinate, and subordinate arguments closely matched in terms of content, believability, and strength. Coordinate arguments were associated with the greatest gains in argument strength via their construction and the greatest loss in strength when one of their premises was falsified. To some degree, the argument types were also judged to perform different functions and to serve different goals. The construction of convergent arguments was associated with building independent lines of support while the construction of subordinate arguments was associated with providing justification for premises. Expansion into a coordinate argument was seen as the best way to improve an argument's persuasiveness. The construction of both coordinate and subordinate arguments was associated with building relevance, explicating assumptions, and completing the meaning of a base argument. Results are discussed in terms of argumentation theory and research.     

Exploring the time course of semantic interference and associative priming in the picture–word interference task

The picture–word interference (PWI) task is a widely used technique for exploring effects of semantic context on lexical access. In this task, printed words are superimposed over pictures to be named, with the timing of the interfering word relative to the picture systematically manipulated. Two experiments (N = 24 adults in each) explored the time course of effects of associates (e.g., CARROT superimposed on a picture of a rabbit) versus coordinates (e.g., CHIPMUNK superimposed on a picture of a rabbit) on naming latencies. Associates led to faster picture naming than did unrelated words, with facilitative effects occurring at stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs, in ms) ranging from –450 to 0. Coordinates led to slower naming latencies, with the interference effect restricted to SOAs of –150 and 0. The overlapping time course of associative priming and coordinate interference provides important constraints on models of lexical access in speech production.     

Children's use of language context in lexical ambiguity resolution

Lexical ambiguity resolution was examined in children aged 7 to 10 years and adults. In Experiment 1, participants heard sentences supporting one (or neither) meaning of a balanced ambiguous word in a cross-modal naming paradigm. Naming latencies for context-congruent versus context-incongruent targets and judgements of the relatedness of targets to the sentence served as indices of appropriate context use. While younger children were faster to respond to related targets regardless of the sentence context, older children and adults showed priming only for context-appropriate targets. In Experiment 2, only a single-word context preceded the homophone, and in contrast to Experiment 1, all groups showed contextual sensitivity. Individual working-memory span and inhibition ability were also measured in Experiment 2, and more mature executive function abilities were associated with greater contextual sensitivity. These findings support a developmental model whereby sentential context use for lexical ambiguity resolution increases with age, cognitive processing capacity, and reading skill.     

Language nonselective access to phonological representations: Evidence from Chinese–English bilinguals

Four experiments with Chinese–English bilinguals were conducted in order to investigate the hypothesis of language nonselective access to an integrated lexicon for bilingual phonological representations. Results of a naming task (in Experiments 1 and 2) and a lexical decision task (in Experiments 3 and 4) showed homophone priming effects regardless of priming direction (English to Chinese, or Chinese to English) or English proficiency. Our findings are compatible with the BIA+ model of bilingual processing, provide further support for the hypothesis of language nonselective access to an integrated lexicon for bilingual phonological representations, and extend the hypothesis to language pairs with very different writing systems.     

Toddlers' language-mediated visual search: They need not have the words for it

Eye movements made by listeners during language-mediated visual search reveal a strong link between visual processing and conceptual processing. For example, upon hearing the word for a missing referent with a characteristic colour (e.g., “strawberry”), listeners tend to fixate a colour-matched distractor (e.g., a red plane) more than a colour-mismatched distractor (e.g., a yellow plane). We ask whether these shifts in visual attention are mediated by the retrieval of lexically stored colour labels. Do children who do not yet possess verbal labels for the colour attribute that spoken and viewed objects have in common exhibit language-mediated eye movements like those made by older children and adults? That is, do toddlers look at a red plane when hearing “strawberry”? We observed that 24-month-olds lacking colour term knowledge nonetheless recognized the perceptual–conceptual commonality between named and seen objects. This indicates that language-mediated visual search need not depend on stored labels for concepts.     

Can hearing puter activate pupil? Phonological competition and the processing of reduced spoken words in spontaneous conversations

In listeners' daily communicative exchanges, they most often hear casual speech, in which words are often produced with fewer segments, rather than the careful speech used in most psycholinguistic experiments. Three experiments examined phonological competition during the recognition of reduced forms such as [pjut?r] for computer using a target-absent variant of the visual world paradigm. Listeners' eye movements were tracked upon hearing canonical and reduced forms as they looked at displays of four printed words. One of the words was phonologically similar to the canonical pronunciation of the target word, one word was similar to the reduced pronunciation, and two words served as unrelated distractors. When spoken targets were presented in isolation (Experiment 1) and in sentential contexts (Experiment 2), competition was modulated as a function of the target word form. When reduced targets were presented in sentential contexts, listeners were probabilistically more likely to first fixate reduced-form competitors before shifting their eye gaze to canonical-form competitors. Experiment 3, in which the original /p/ from [pjut?r] was replaced with a “real” onset /p/, showed an effect of cross-splicing in the late time window. We conjecture that these results fit best with the notion that speech reductions initially activate competitors that are similar to the phonological surface form of the reduction, but that listeners nevertheless can exploit fine phonetic detail to reconstruct strongly reduced forms to their canonical counterparts.     

Phonological decoding or direct access? Regularity effects in lexical decisions of Grade 3 and 4 children

Learning to read fluently involves moving from an effortful phonological decoding strategy to automatic recognition of familiar words. However, little is known about the timing of this transition, or the extent to which children continue to be influenced by phonological factors when recognizing words even as they progress in reading. We explored this question by examining regularity effects in a lexical decision task, as opposed to the more traditionally used reading-aloud task. Children in Grades 3 and 4 made go/no-go lexical decisions on high- and low-frequency regular and irregular words that had been matched for consistency. The children showed regularity effects in their accuracy for low-frequency words, indicating that they were using phonological decoding strategies to recognize unfamiliar words. The size of this effect was correlated with measures of reading ability. However, we found no regularity effects on accuracy for high-frequency words or on response times for either word type, suggesting that even 8-year-old children are already relying predominantly on a direct lexical strategy in their silent reading of familiar words.     

The word frequency effect in first- and second-language word recognition: A lexical entrenchment account

We investigate the origin of differences in the word frequency effect between native speakers and second-language speakers. In a large-scale analysis of English word identification times we find that group-level differences are fully accounted for by the individual language proficiency scores. Furthermore, exactly the same quantitative relation between word frequency and proficiency is found for monolinguals and three different bilingual populations (Dutch–English, French–English, and German–English). We conclude that the larger frequency effects for second-language processing than for native-language processing can be explained by within-language characteristics and thus need not be the consequence of “being bilingual” (i.e., a qualitative difference). More specifically, we argue that language proficiency increases lexical entrenchment, which leads to a reduced frequency effect, irrespective of bilingualism, language dominance, and language similarity.     

Lexical availability and grammatical encoding scope during spoken sentence production

Three sentence production experiments investigate the relationship between lexical and structural processing scope. Speakers generated sentences with varying phrase structures in response to visual displays (e.g., The dog and the hat move above the fork and the tree/The dog moves above the hat and the fork and the tree). On half of the trials, one of the pictures in the arrays was previewed. Filler sentences varied preview position and sentence structure from trial to trial. When speakers could not anticipate the position of the previewed picture in the upcoming sentence (Experiment 1), preview benefit for pictures corresponding to the second noun to be produced was limited to pictures that fell within the sentence-initial phrase. When the linear position of the previewed picture was predictable, preview benefits were observed for the second noun to be produced, irrespective of phrase position (Experiment 2). However, no preview benefits were observed for the third noun to be produced (Experiment 3). In contrast, significant effects of initial phrase structure were observed in all experiments, with latencies increasing with initial phrase length. The results are consistent with speakers operating a phrasal scope for structural planning within which the scope of lexical access can vary.