Bias for consonantal information over vocalic information in 30-month-olds: cross-linguistic evidence from French and English

Using a name-based categorization task, Nazzi found in 2005 that French-learning 20-month-olds can make use of one-feature consonantal contrasts between new labels but fail to do so with one-feature vocalic contrasts. This asymmetry was interpreted as developmental evidence for the proposal that consonants play a more important role than vowels at the lexical level. In the current study using the same task, we first show that by 30 months French-learning infants can make use of one-feature vocalic contrasts (e.g., /pize/–/pyze/). Second, we show that in a situation where infants must neglect either a consonantal one-feature change or a vocalic one-feature change (e.g., match a /pide/ with either a /tide/ or a /pyde/), both French- and English-learning 30-month-olds choose to neglect the vocalic change rather than the consonantal change. We argue that these results suggest that by 30 months of age, infants still give less weight to vocalic information than to consonantal information in a lexically related task even though they are able to process fine vocalic information.     

Dogs recall their owner's face upon hearing the owner's voice

We tested whether dogs have a cross-modal representation of human individuals. We presented domestic dogs with a photo of either the owner's or a stranger's face on the LCD monitor after playing back a voice of one of those persons. A voice and a face matched in half of the trials (Congruent condition) and mismatched in the other half (Incongruent condition). If our subjects activate visual images of the voice, their expectation would be contradicted in Incongruent condition. It would result in the subjects’ longer looking times in Incongruent condition than in Congruent condition. Our subject dogs looked longer at the visual stimulus in Incongruent condition than in Congruent condition. This suggests that dogs actively generate their internal representation of the owner's face when they hear the owner calling them. This is the first demonstration that nonhuman animals do not merely associate auditory and visual stimuli but also actively generate a visual image from auditory information. Furthermore, our subject also looked at the visual stimulus longer in Incongruent condition in which the owner's face followed an unfamiliar person's voice than in Congruent condition in which the owner's face followed the owner's voice. Generating a particular visual image in response to an unfamiliar voice should be difficult, and any expected images from the voice ought to be more obscure or less well defined than that of the owners. However, our subjects looked longer at the owner's face in Incongruent condition than in Congruent condition. This may indicate that dogs may have predicted that it should not be the owner when they heard the unfamiliar person's voice.     

Relevance and argumentation: How bald can you get

This paper is concerned with vagueness in language, its relation to logico-philosophical questions on the one hand, and to so-called syncategorematic terms and their linguistic use on the other hand. It attempts to show that it is not language itself which is vague but rather the way we use it.     

Internal objects' or ‘chimerical monsters’?: the demonic ‘third forms’ of the internal world

The concept of 'object' whether internal or external, is a hold-over from the Enlightenment and from the positivistic certainty of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century science, Its use in current psychoanalytic theory and practice is now obsolete because of the contributions of post-modernism and their emphasis on subjectivity and relativity. In plate of the word 'object', the author favors a return to pre-Enlightenment psychology in order to address the presence and clinical manifestation of what the term 'object' screened, i.e., demons, monsters, chimerae, ghosts, spirits, etc. In terms of external 'objects', he favors such terms as 'persons' or 'subjects', which also reflects an adjustment to the post-modem emphasis on the ineffability of the Other.     

Two arguments against lying

Kant and Sidgwick are at opposite extremes on whether we may tell paternalistic lies. I trace the extremism to their views about ethical concepts. Sidgwick thinks fundamental ethical concepts must be precise. Common Sense morality says we may tell paternalistic lies to children but not to sane adults. Because the distinction between a child and an adult is imprecise, Sidgwick thinks this principle cannot be fundamental, and must be based on the (precise) principle of utility, which often mandates paternalistic lies to adults. Kant thinks that ethical concepts are ideals of reason, which do not fit the world precisely because the world is imperfect. We lie to children and the insane because they are irrational, but no one is perfectly rational. We must treat all persons with the respect due to rational agents, so the pressure of the theory is toward not lying to anyone. Decisions about where to draw the line must be made pragmatically and to some extent arbitrary. But fear of this is not a good reason to abandon ethical ideals for utilitarianism.     

Object knowledge and the emergence of language

Infants' spontaneous play with objects was examined for evidence of developments in object knowledge in relation to the emergence of words and the single-word period in language development. Subjects were 7 girls and 7 boys, from different ethnic and economic backgrounds, who were studied longitudinally from 9 months to 26 months of age. Two types of displacements of objects in relation to one another were identified in the children's play: separations and constructions. The development of constructions was associated with the emergence of words, and constructions increased with age while separations decreased. The development of specific constructions, which account for knowledge of the particular properties of objects, was more strongly associated with a vocabulary spurt at the end of the single-word period than with chronological age. Despite the wide variation in the infants' ages when developments in language and play were reached, relations between achievements in the two domains were consistent among them, as confirmed with the Friedman test, p<.001. The results are discussed in terms of the cognitive developments required for play with objects and saying words.     

Scene congruency biases Binocular Rivalry

Contextual regularities, that is, objects’ tendency to appear with certain other objects, facilitate the processing of visual scenes and confer contextually incongruent objects with a special attentional status. This study was aimed at investigating the mechanisms underlying this attentional advantage using Binocular Rivalry (BR). In two experiments, congruent and incongruent images (e.g., a man drinking from a glass vs. a man “drinking” from a hairbrush) were pitted against each other, yielding a version of BR in which two objects rival within a given scene. Incongruent objects predominated in awareness longer than congruent ones. This effect stemmed from the fact that their dominance epochs lasted longer on the average than those of congruent objects, suggesting a difficulty to disengage attention from such objects. On the other hand, no support was found for the notion that incongruent objects also attract attention.     

The associated nontargets effect: Evidence of nontarget processing at and beyond the level of letter recognition

In four visual search tasks participants were asked to make a target response if either of two targets was present and to make a nontarget response if neither target was present. Some target-absent displays included only nontarget stimuli or features that never occurred in the same displays as targets, whereas other target-absent displays included nontarget stimuli or features that did sometimes occur with targets. Nontarget responses were reliably faster in the former case than in the latter. This “associated nontargets effect” indicates that nontargets are not simply classified as nontargets but in addition are discriminated from one another. Current visual search models may underestimate the degree to which nontargets are processed during search.     

Conflict in object affordance revealed by grip force

Viewing objects can result in automatic, partial activation of motor plans associated with them—“object affordance”. Here, we recorded grip force simultaneously from both hands in an object affordance task to investigate the effects of conflict between coactivated responses. Participants classified pictures of objects by squeezing force transducers with their left or right hand. Responses were faster on trials where the object afforded an action with the same hand that was required to make the response (congruent trials) compared to the opposite hand (incongruent trials). In addition, conflict between coactivated responses was reduced if it was experienced on the preceding trial, just like Gratton adaptation effects reported in “conflict” tasks (e.g., Eriksen flanker). This finding suggests that object affordance demonstrates conflict effects similar to those shown in other stimulus–response mapping tasks and thus could be integrated into the wider conceptual framework on overlearnt stimulus–response associations. Corrected erroneous responses occurred more frequently when there was conflict between the afforded response and the response required by the task, providing direct evidence that viewing an object activates motor plans appropriate for interacting with that object. Recording continuous grip force, as here, provides a sensitive way to measure coactivated responses in affordance tasks.     

Sustained attention in language production: An individual differences investigation

Whereas it has long been assumed that most linguistic processes underlying language production happen automatically, accumulating evidence suggests that these processes do require some form of attention. Here we investigated the contribution of sustained attention: the ability to maintain alertness over time. In Experiment 1, participants’ sustained attention ability was measured using auditory and visual continuous performance tasks. Subsequently, employing a dual-task procedure, participants described pictures using simple noun phrases and performed an arrow-discrimination task while their vocal and manual response times (RTs) and the durations of their gazes to the pictures were measured. Earlier research has demonstrated that gaze duration reflects language planning processes up to and including phonological encoding. The speakers’ sustained attention ability correlated with the magnitude of the tail of the vocal RT distribution, reflecting the proportion of very slow responses, but not with individual differences in gaze duration. This suggests that sustained attention was most important after phonological encoding. Experiment 2 showed that the involvement of sustained attention was significantly stronger in a dual-task situation (picture naming and arrow discrimination) than in simple naming. Thus, individual differences in maintaining attention on the production processes become especially apparent when a simultaneous second task also requires attentional resources.