Acquiescent Responding in Balanced Multidimensional Scales and Exploratory Factor Analysis

Personality tests often consist of a set of dichotomous or Likert items. These response formats are known to be susceptible to an agreeing-response bias called acquiescence. The common assumption in balanced scales is that the sum of appropriately reversed responses should be reasonably free of acquiescence. However, inter-item correlation (or covariance) matrices can still be affected by the presence of variance due to acquiescence. To analyse these correlation matrices, we propose a method that is based on an unrestricted factor analysis and can be applied to multidimensional scales. This method obtains a factor solution in which acquiescence response variance is isolated in an independent factor. It is therefore possible, without the potentially confounding effect of acquiescence, to: (a) examine the dominant factors related to content latent variables; and (b) estimate participants’ factor scores on content latent variables. This method, which is illustrated by two empirical data examples, has proved to be useful for improving the simplicity of the factor structure. This research was partially supported by a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (SEJ2005-09170-C04-04/PSIC), and a grant from the Catalan Ministry of Universities, the Research and Information Society (2005SGR00017). The authors are obliged to the team of reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Active control as evidence in favor of sense of ownership in the moving Virtual Hand Illusion

The sense of ownership, the feeling that our body belongs to ourselves, relies on multiple sources of sensory information. Among these sources, the contribution of visuomotor information is still debated. We tested the effect of active control in the sense of ownership in the moving Virtual Hand Illusion. Participants reported sense of ownership and sense of agency over a virtual arm in which we manipulated the morphological congruence of the hand and the visuomotor information. We found that congruent active control enhanced and maintained the reported sense of ownership over a hand that appeared detached from the body, but not in a morphological congruent limb. Also, incongruent active control, achieved by adding noise to the trajectory of the movement, decreased both reported sense of agency and ownership. Overall, our results are consistent with a framework in which active control acts as evidence for eliciting a sense of ownership.     

Lexicality, morphological structure, and semantic transparency in the processing of German ver-verbs: The complementarity of on-line and off-line evidence

Two types of experiments investigate the visual on-line and off-line processing of German ver-verbs (e.g., verbittern ‘to embitter'). In Experiments 1 and 2 (morphological priming), latency patterns revealed the existence of facilitation effects for the morphological conditions (BITTER-VERBITTERN and BITTERN-VERBITTERN) as compared to the neutral conditions (SAUBER-VERBITTERN and SÄUBERN-VERBITTERN). In Experiments 3 and 4 (rating tasks) participants had to judge whether the target (VERBITTERN) “comes from,” “contains a form of,” or “contains the meaning of” the root (BITTER) or the root+en substring (BITTERN). Taken together, these studies revealed the combined influence of the three factors of lexicality (real word status), morphological structure, and semantic transparency.     

Prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness in children’s reading

This study examined the relationships among prosodic sensitivity, morphological awareness, and reading ability in a sample of 104 8- to 13-year-olds. Using a task adapted from Carlisle (Applied Psycholinguistics, 9 (1988) 247-266), we measured children’s ability to produce morphological derivations with differing levels of phonological complexity between stem and derivation: No Change, Phonemic Change, Stress Change, and Both Phonemic and Stress Change. A 3 (Grade) × 4 (Derivation Type) analysis of variance showed that children perform significantly more poorly on both types of derivations that involve stress changes than on phonemic change and no change derivations. Regression analyses showed that both prosodic sensitivity and morphological awareness, especially in derivations that require manipulation of stress, are significant predictors of reading ability after controlling for age, verbal and nonverbal abilities, and phonological awareness.     

Grammatical Processing of Spoken Language in Child and Adult Language Learners

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated auditory language processing in children and late second-language (L2) learners using online methods such as event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-movement monitoring, or the cross-modal priming paradigm. Two grammatical phenomena are examined in detail, children’s and adults’ processing of German plural inflections (Lück et al. Brain Res 1077:144–152, 2006; Hahne et al. J Cognitive Neurosci 18:121–134, 2006; Clahsen et al. J Child Language 34:601–622, 2007) and language learners’ processing of filler-gap dependencies in English (Felser C, Roberts L Second Language Res 23:9–36, 2007; Roberts et al. J Psycholinguist Res 36:175–188, 2007). The results from these studies reveal clear differences between native and nonnative processing in both domains of grammar, suggesting that nonnative listeners rely less on grammatical parsing routines during processing than either child or adult native listeners. We also argue that factors such as slower processing speed or cognitive resource limitations only provide a partial account of our findings.     

Morphological Processing in Adult Dyslexia

This study employed the masked-priming paradigm [Forster and Davis (J Exp Psychol bearn Mem Cogn 10: 680–698, 1984).], along with traditional methods of evaluation of morphological awareness and phonological processing, to obtain a finer-grained picture of the relationship between morphological abilities and reading in adult dyslexic readers. Participants were 21 dyslexic and 21 normally reading native Hebrew-speaking male college students. The results with masked priming demonstrated almost normal status of morphological knowledge in adult dyslexic readers with the presence of characteristic processing slowness. Phonological processing and morphological awareness were also shown to contribute primarily to word decoding in the regular and dyslexic group alike. At the same time, the contribution of different phonological skills to morphological priming effects (for pattern and root) dropped to zero. The findings demonstrated that weakness of dyslexic readers in morphological awareness tasks cannot be explained either by hypotheses on the structural deficit of morphological knowledge in dyslexia or by phonological deficit hypotheses. The explanation for this phenomenon seems to lie in the specific deficit of morphological processing, or even, more generally, in metalinguistic processing deficiency in dyslexia.     

Is morphological decomposition limited to low-frequency words?

On the basis of data from masked priming experiments, it has been argued that an automatic process of decomposition is applied to all morphologically structured stimuli, irrespective of their lexical characteristics (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). So far, this claim has been tested only with respect to low-frequency primes and nonword primes. This is a limitation because some models of morphological processing postulate that only high-frequency complex words are recognized as whole forms. Thus, a more stringent test would be to determine whether high-frequency complex words also show evidence of masked priming. We report an experiment that compares masked-priming effects observed when the primes constitute morphologically structured nonwords (e.g., alarmer–ALARM), low-frequency words with a mean frequency of 2 per million (e.g., notional–NOTION), and high-frequency words with a mean frequency of 60 per million (e.g., national–NATION). These three conditions yielded significant and equivalent effects, lending strong support to the notion of a routine form of decomposition that is applied to all morphologically structured stimuli.     

Parallel processing of whole words and morphemes in visual word recognition

Models of morphological processing make different predictions about whether morphologically complex written words are initially decomposed and recognized on the basis of their morphemic subunits or whether they can directly be accessed as whole words and at what point semantics begin to influence morphological processing. In this study, we used unprimed and masked primed lexical decision to compare truly suffixed (darkest) and pseudosuffixed words (glossary) with within-boundary (d ra kest/g ol ssary) to across-boundary (dar ek st/glos as ry) letter transpositions. Significant transposed-letter similarity effects were found independently of the morphological position of the letter transposition, demonstrating that, in English, morphologically complex whole-word representations can be directly accessed at initial word processing stages. In a third masked primed lexical decision experiment, the same materials were used in the context of stem target priming, and it was found that truly suffixed primes facilitate the recognition of their stem-target (darkest–DARK) to the same extent as pseudosuffixed primes (glossary–GLOSS), which is consistent with theories of early morpho-orthographic decomposition. Taken together, our findings provide evidence for both whole-word access and morphological decomposition at initial stages of visual word recognition and are discussed in the context of a hybrid account.     

Letter transpositions within morphemes and across morpheme boundaries

Recent evidence has revealed conflicting results regarding the influence of letter transpositions during the recognition of morphologically complex words. While some studies suggest that the disruption of the morpheme boundary through across-boundary transpositions (e.g., darnkess) leads to the absence of masked transposed-letter (TL) priming, other studies have found that TL priming occurs independently of whether or not letters have been transposed across the boundary. We conducted three experiments to test whether the difference between TL- within and TL-across priming is modulated by (a) the transposition of internal versus external letters of the stem (Experiment 1), (b) the overall proportion of affixed trials (Experiment 2), or (c) the relative frequency between prime and target (Experiment 3). The results revealed equal TL-within and TL-across boundary priming across all three experiments, which adds to previous findings suggesting that across-boundary transpositions do not interfere with the recognition of morphologically complex words.