Ruminative coping and post-event processing in social anxiety

Cognitive models of social anxiety implicate various factors in the initiation and maintenance of socially anxious states, including anticipatory processing, self-focused attention and post-event processing. The present study focused on post-event processing, which is a post-mortem analysis following a social event that is described as ruminative in nature and serves to maintain social anxiety. Participants (N=112; 64 women, 48 men) were presented with vignettes that involved making mistakes in public and were instructed to record their thoughts to allow for the examination of the content of post-event processing. Ruminative coping and distraction were assessed via self-report. Results indicated that participants high in social anxiety (n=55) were more likely to ruminate and less likely to distract when faced with socially anxious stressors compared to those low in social anxiety (n=57). Further, as hypothesized, participants high in social anxiety recorded more negative thoughts and more upward counterfactual thoughts ('if only' type thoughts on how things could have been better; associated with negative affect) compared to those low in social anxiety. These results are discussed in terms of cognitive models of social anxiety.     

Semantic similarity and grammatical class in naming actions

Italian speakers were asked to name pictures of actions (e.g. "bere", to drink). Pictures were presented at the same time as distracter words that were semantically related or unrelated to the picture names, and were of the same or different grammatical class (verbs or nouns). Half of the participants named the actions as verbs in citation form, the other half as verbs inflected for third person singular or plural. We found a reliable semantic interference effect. Crucially, we also observed a significant interaction between naming context and grammatical class: naming latencies were slower for verb distracters in the inflected form condition, but not in the citation form condition. The results are taken to provide evidence for the separability of semantics and grammatical class.     

Global processing speed as a mediator of developmental changes in children's auditory memory span

This study examined the role of global processing speed in mediating age increases in auditory memory span in 5- to 13-year-olds. Children were tested on measures of memory span, processing speed, single-word speech rate, phonological sensitivity, and vocabulary. Structural equation modeling supported a model in which age-associated increases in processing speed predicted the availability of long-term memory phonological representations for redintegration processes. The availability of long-term phonological representations, in turn, explained variance in memory span. Maximum speech rate did not predict independent variance in memory span.     

The relation between children's reading comprehension level and their comprehension of idioms

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the meanings of idioms in context than in isolation. The good and poor comprehenders did not differ in their abilities to interpret transparent idioms in context, but the poor comprehenders were significantly worse at using context to work out the meanings of opaque idioms. The explanation task revealed the source of information used by the children to derive nontarget interpretations. We discuss these findings in relation to idiom processing strategies and Levorato and Cacciari's global elaboration model.     

Antecedent reactivation by surface and deep anaphora in Norwegian

Anaphora are expressions in language that depend on other linguistic entities for their full meaning. They can furthermore be divided into two types according to the level of representation where they find their antecedents: Surface anaphora, which resolve their reference at the sentence representation level, and deep anaphora, which resolve their reference at the non-grammatical level of discourse representation. The linguistic theory of these two anaphor types, and recent findings about processing differences at these two levels, combine to predict that surface anaphora should show fast and immediate reactivation of their antecedents, whereas deep anaphora should have a slower time course of antecedent re-access. These predictions were confirmed with two lexical decision task experiments with Norwegian stimuli.     

Variability of the MAX and MIN Statistic: A Theory of the Quantile Spread as a Function of Sample Size

The maximum and minimum of a sample from a probability distribution are extremely important random variables in many areas of psychological theory, methodology, and statistics. For instance, the behavior of the mean of the maximum or minimum processing time, as a function of the number of component random processing times (n), has been studied extensively in an effort to identify the underlying processing architecture (e.g., Townsend & Ashby, 1983; Colonius & Vorberg, 1994). Little is known concerning how measures of variability of the maximum or minimum change with n. Here, a new measure of random variability, the quantile spread, is introduced, which possesses sufficient strength to define distributional orderings and derive a number of results concerning variability of the maximum and the minimum statistics. The quantile spread ordering may be useful in many venues. Several interesting open problems are pointed out. This work was supported by an NIH Grant R01 MH57717 to the first author. Some of the collaboration took place during the year 2000 while J.T. Townsend was a Fellow at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Study (HWK), sponsored by H. Colonius at Oldenburg University.     

Spoken Idiom Recognition: Meaning Retrieval and Word Expectancy

This study investigates recognition of spoken idioms occurring in neutral contexts. Experiment 1 showed that both predictable and non-predictable idiom meanings are available at string offset. Yet, only predictable idiom meanings are active halfway through a string and remain active after the string’s literal conclusion. Experiment 2 showed that the initial fragment of a predictable idiom inhibits recognition of a word providing a congruous, but literal, conclusion to the expression. No comparable effects were obtained with non-predictable idioms. These findings are consistent with the view that spoken idiom identification differs from word recognition and occurs word-by-word, just as with other familiar, multi-lexical phrases.The present study was supported by PRIN 2003–2004. We would like to thank Corrado Cavallero, Simona Collina, Melinda Tucker and Francesco Zardon for their valuable help.     

Processing coordinated structures: incrementality and connectedness

We recorded participants' eye movements while they read sentences containing verb-phrase coordination. Results showed evidence of immediate processing disruption when a reflexive pronoun embedded in the conjoined verb phrase mismatched the sentence subject. We argue that this result is incompatible with models of human parsing that employ only bottom-up parsing procedures, even when flexible constituency is employed. Models need to incorporate a mechanism similar to the adjoining operation in Tree-Adjoining Grammar, in which one structure is inserted into another.     

发展性阅读障碍者的快速命名缺陷

快速命名任务是一种需要命名多个高熟悉项目的认知任务,尤其适合用来对成因复杂的发展性阅读障碍进行研究。许多研究者使用不同类型的快速命名任务发现,发展性阅读障碍者的快速命名缺陷在眼动过程表现为中央凹和副中央凹的加工困难,在认知过程中表现为抑制能力较差等。未来的研究中应该注意到快速命名缺陷的复杂性,采用多种方法相结合的方式来探究快速命名缺陷的本质,从而建立系统性的假说。     

Changes in the structure of children's isometric force variability with practice

This study examined the effect of age and practice on the structure of children's force variability to test the information processing hypothesis that a reduction of sensorimotor system noise accounts in large part for age-related reductions in perceptual-motor performance variability. In the study, 6-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and young adults practiced on 5 consecutive days (15 trials/day), maintaining for 15-s trials a constant level of force (5 or 25% of maximum voluntary contraction) against an object using a pinch grip (thumb and index finger). With increasing age, the amount of force error and variability decreased, but the sequential structure of variability increased in irregularity. With practice, children reduced the amount of variability by changing the structure of the force output so as to be more similar to that of their older counterparts. The findings provide further evidence that practice-driven changes in the structure of force output, rather than a decline in the amount of white noise, largely account for age-related reductions in the amount of force variability.