Information Retrieval in Tip of the Tongue States: New Data and Methodological Advances

Research on Tip of the Tongue (ToT) states has been used to determine whether access to syntactic information precedes access to phonological information. This paper argues that previous studies have used insufficient analyses when investigating the nature of seriality of access. In the first part of this paper, these complex issues are discussed and suitable analyses proposed. In the second part, new experimental data are presented. In Experiment 1, English speakers were asked to give information about mass/count status and initial phoneme of nouns, when in a ToT state. In Experiment 2, German speakers were asked to report grammatical gender and initial phoneme of nouns, when in a ToT state. Evidence that syntactic and phonological information are accessed independently was obtained for both languages. Implications for models of language production and further methodological issues in ToT research are discussed.     

The development and effectiveness of memory strategies in kindergarten and elementary school: Findings from the Würzburg and Göttingen longitudinal memory studies

This article reports findings of the Würzburg and Göttingen Longitudinal Memory Studies, which focused on children's verbal memory development. The studies started with 102 (German) kindergarten children in Würzburg and 86 second-graders in Göttingen who were tested on various memory measures, including sort-recall, memory capacity, metamemory, and verbal IQ. Assessments were repeated nine times, with adjacent measurement points separated by 6-month time intervals. The main goals of the studies concerned the assessment of utilization deficiencies during the course of strategy development, the analysis of factors influencing the effectiveness of strategy use, and the occurrence of multiple strategy use. Findings confirmed the outcome of previous longitudinal studies in that semantic organization strategies were not always accompanied by superior recall, but utilization deficiency problems were comparably rare. Strategy effectiveness was shown as being affected mainly by memory capacity and by children's tendency to engage in multiple strategy use. However, children did not start to apply multiple strategies effectively until the end of Grade 2.     

Do individuals with autism process words in context? Evidence from language-mediated eye-movements

It is widely argued that people with autism have difficulty processing ambiguous linguistic information in context. To investigate this claim, we recorded the eye-movements of 24 adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and 24 language-matched peers as they monitored spoken sentences for words corresponding to objects on a computer display. Following a target word, participants looked more at a competitor object sharing the same onset than at phonologically unrelated objects. This effect was, however, mediated by the sentence context such that participants looked less at the phonological competitor if it was semantically incongruous with the preceding verb. Contrary to predictions, the two groups evidenced similar effects of context on eye-movements. Instead, across both groups, the effect of sentence context was reduced in individuals with relatively poor language skills. Implications for the weak central coherence account of autism are discussed.     

How young children judge whether a word is one they know: a dual criterion account

Word familiarity judgment may be important for word learning, yet little is known about how children make this judgment. We hypothesized that preschool-age children differ in the judgment criteria that they use and that this difference derives from individual differences in basic memory processes. Those who have superior phonological working memory, but who retrieve less semantic information than their peers, base the judgment on whether they recognize a word’s sound form. Those who show the opposite memory profile base the judgment on whether they retrieve a word’s meaning. The results of two studies of 3- and 4-year-olds were consistent with these claims. Among those performing poorly on one memory measure, judgment accuracy was directly related to performance on the other memory measure. These memory-judgment relations were also found to be highly specific. This is the first investigation to demonstrate the usefulness of an individual differences approach for identifying relations between linguistic judgment processes and basic memory processes during early childhood.     

Job search as goal-directed behavior: Objectives and methods

This study investigated the relationship between job search objectives (finding a new job/turnover, staying aware of job alternatives, developing a professional network, and obtaining leverage against an employer) and job search methods (looking at job ads, visiting job sites, networking, contacting employment agencies, contacting employers, and submitting applications). In a sample of 205 employed individuals from Belgium and Romania, job search objectives were significantly related to job search methods even after job satisfaction was controlled. Furthermore, particular objectives predicted specific methods. While the finding a new job/turnover objective predicted all search methods, staying aware of alternatives predicted using job ads and sites; the network objective predicted networking and contacting employers; and the leverage objective predicted contacting employers. Results suggest that search objectives are important for understanding job seekers’ search behavior and support the view that job search is a self-regulatory process that begins with objectives which activate search behavior.     

Qualitative differences in the representation of abstract versus concrete words: Evidence from the visual-world paradigm

In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different organizational principles for concrete and abstract words in semantic memory. Our results confirm the assumption of a primary organizational principle based on association for abstract words, different from the semantic similarity principle proposed for concrete words, and provide the first piece of evidence in support of this view obtained from healthy participants. The results shed light on the representational structure of abstract and concrete concepts.     

Is there something quantum-like about the human mental lexicon?

Following an early claim by Nelson and McEvoy suggesting that word associations can display ‘spooky action at a distance behaviour’, a serious investigation of the potentially quantum nature of such associations is currently underway. In this paper quantum theory is proposed as a framework suitable for modelling the human mental lexicon, specifically the results obtained from both intralist and extralist word association experiments. Some initial models exploring this hypothesis are discussed, and experiments capable of testing these models proposed.     

The enduring scandal of deduction

Deductive inference is usually regarded as being “tautological” or “analytical”: the information conveyed by the conclusion is contained in the information conveyed by the premises. This idea, however, clashes with the undecidability of first-order logic and with the (likely) intractability of Boolean logic. In this article, we address the problem both from the semantic and the proof-theoretical point of view. We propose a hierarchy of propositional logics that are all tractable (i.e. decidable in polynomial time), although by means of growing computational resources, and converge towards classical propositional logic. The underlying claim is that this hierarchy can be used to represent increasing levels of “depth” or “informativeness” of Boolean reasoning. Special attention is paid to the most basic logic in this hierarchy, the pure “intelim logic”, which satisfies all the requirements of a natural deduction system (allowing both introduction and elimination rules for each logical operator) while admitting of a feasible (quadratic) decision procedure. We argue that this logic is “analytic” in a particularly strict sense, in that it rules out any use of “virtual information”, which is chiefly responsible for the combinatorial explosion of standard classical systems. As a result, analyticity and tractability are reconciled and growing degrees of computational complexity are associated with the depth at which the use of virtual information is allowed.     

Brain oscillations during semantic evaluation of speech

Changes in oscillatory brain activity have been related to perceptual and cognitive processes such as selective attention and memory matching. Here we examined brain oscillations, measured with electroencephalography (EEG), during a semantic speech processing task that required both lexically mediated memory matching and selective attention. Participants listened to nouns spoken in male and female voices, and detected an animate target (p = 20%) in a train of inanimate standards or vice versa. For a control task, subjects listened to the same words and detected a target male voice in standards of a female voice or vice versa. The standard trials of the semantic task showed enhanced upper beta (25–30 Hz) and gamma band (GBA, 30–60 Hz) activity compared to the voice task. Upper beta and GBA enhancement was accompanied by a suppression of alpha (8–12 Hz) and lower to mid beta (13–20 Hz) activity mainly localized to posterior electrodes. Enhancement of phase-locked theta activity peaking near 275 ms also occurred over the midline electrodes. Theta, upper beta, and gamma band enhancement may reflect lexically mediated template matching in auditory memory, whereas the alpha and beta suppression likely indicate increased attentional processes and memory demands.     

Examining the hemispheric distribution of semantic information using lateralised priming of familiar faces

The way in which the semantic information associated with people is organised in the brain is still unclear. Most evidence suggests either bilateral or left hemisphere lateralisation. In this paper we use a lateralised semantic priming paradigm to further examine this neuropsychological organisation. A clear semantic priming effect was found with greater priming occurring when semantically related prime faces were presented to the left visual field than when presented to the right visual field. Possible explanations for this finding are discussed in terms of the bilateral distribution of different classes of semantic information, a possible role of associative processes within semantic priming and interhemispheric transfer.