Working memory affects older adults’ use of context in spoken-word recognition

Many older listeners report difficulties in understanding speech in noisy situations. Working memory and other cognitive skills may modulate older listeners’ ability to use context information to alleviate the effects of noise on spoken-word recognition. In the present study, we investigated whether verbal working memory predicts older adults’ ability to immediately use context information in the recognition of words embedded in sentences, presented in different listening conditions. In a phoneme-monitoring task, older adults were asked to detect as fast and as accurately as possible target phonemes in sentences spoken by a target speaker. Target speech was presented without noise, with fluctuating speech-shaped noise, or with competing speech from a single distractor speaker. The gradient measure of contextual probability (derived from a separate offline rating study) affected the speed of recognition. Contextual facilitation was modulated by older listeners’ verbal working memory (measured with a backward digit span task) and age across listening conditions. Working memory and age, as well as hearing loss, were also the most consistent predictors of overall listening performance. Older listeners’ immediate benefit from context in spoken-word recognition thus relates to their ability to keep and update a semantic representation of the sentence content in working memory.     

Priming word order by thematic roles: No evidence for an additional involvement of phrase structure

Three experiments are reported that studied the priming of word order in German. Experiment 1 demonstrated priming of the order of case-marked verb arguments. However, order of noun phrases and order of thematic roles were confounded. In Experiment 2, we therefore aimed at disentangling the impact of these two possible factors. By using primes that differed from targets in phrase structure but were parallel with regard to the order of thematic roles, we nevertheless found priming demonstrating the critical impact of thematic roles. Experiment 3 replicated the priming effects from Experiments 1 and 2 within participants and revealed no evidence for a modulation of priming by phrase structure. Consequently, our findings suggest that word order priming crucially depends on the structural outline of thematic roles rather than on the linearization of phrases.     

认知训练对不同类型考试焦虑的作用

以163名高中一年级学生为被试,采用现场实验法考察了认知训练对认知主导型考试焦虑(C型)、生理唤醒主导型考试焦虑(P型)和学习技能缺乏型考试焦虑(S型)的作用效果.结果表明:认知训练能显著地降低三种考试焦虑类型的状态考试焦虑,提高C型和P型的考试成绩.认知训练在降低考试焦虑和提高考试成绩两方面对C型考试焦虑者作用尤为明显.认知训练没有表明对S型考试焦虑者有提高考试成绩的作用.     

Solo status, stereotype threat, and performance expectancies: Their effects on women’s performance

Women working in male-dominated environments may find themselves to be the only woman present, and that negative stereotypes about women persist in the environment. This experiment tested women’s performance in solo status (SS: being the only woman present) and under stereotype threat (ST: when women are stereotyped as poor performers). White male and female participants (157) learned information, then tested on it in an opposite-gender (SS) or same-gender group (nonsolo). In addition, the information was described as being traditional math material (ST) or a type of math information impervious to gender stereotypes (no threat). Women performed more poorly in SS than nonsolos, and under ST than no threat. Experiencing both factors was more detrimental to women’s performance than experiencing one or the other. Men’s performance was the same across all conditions. Performance expectancies partially mediated the effect of SS, but not ST, on performance.     

On the Meaning of Words and Dinosaur Bones: Lexical Knowledge Without a Lexicon

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon.     

The Implicit Image of God: God as Reality and Psychological Well‐Being

Research has widely demonstrated that religiosity is related to psychological well‐being even in situations of severe illness. To assess religious beliefs, explicit measures have generally been used. In this study, we measured the belief that God is reality as opposed to myth or abstraction by using an implicit technique (the Single Category Implicit Association Test). The study was carried out in Italy, where a large majority of the population is Catholic, and the prevailing image of God is that of a compassionate and supportive father. Participants were cancer patients identifying themselves as believers. As expected, the automatic belief that God is reality (vs. abstraction) was related to beneficial outcomes: lower reported psychophysical anxiety symptoms and a weaker use of avoidance strategies to cope with stress. Thus, also, automatic religious beliefs may affect feelings and behaviors.     

Accommodating Presuppositions Is Inappropriate in Implausible Contexts

According to one view of linguistic information (Karttunen, 1974; Stalnaker, 1974), a speaker can convey contextually new information in one of two ways: (a) by asserting the content as new information; or (b) by presupposing the content as given information which would then have to be accommodated. This distinction predicts that it is conversationally more appropriate to assert implausible information rather than presuppose it (e.g., von Fintel, 2008; Heim, 1992; Stalnaker, 2002). A second view rejects the assumption that presuppositions are accommodated; instead, presuppositions are assimilated into asserted content and both are correspondingly open to challenge (e.g., Gazdar, 1979; van der Sandt, 1992). Under this view, we should not expect to find a difference in conversational appropriateness between asserting implausible information and presupposing it. To distinguish between these two views of linguistic information, we performed two self‐paced reading experiments with an on‐line stops‐making‐sense judgment. The results of the two experiments—using the presupposition triggers the and too—show that accommodation is inappropriate (makes less sense) relative to non‐presuppositional controls when the presupposed information is implausible but not when it is plausible. These results provide support for the first view of linguistic information: the contrast in implausible contexts can only be explained if there is a presupposition‐assertion distinction and accommodation is a mechanism dedicated to reasoning about presuppositions.     

A Computational Evaluation of Sentence Processing Deficits in Aphasia

Individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia experience difficulty when processing reversible non‐canonical sentences. Different accounts have been proposed to explain this phenomenon. The Trace Deletion account (Grodzinsky, 1995, 2000, 2006) attributes this deficit to an impairment in syntactic representations, whereas others (e.g., Caplan, Waters, Dede, Michaud, & Reddy, 2007; Haarmann, Just, & Carpenter, 1997) propose that the underlying structural representations are unimpaired, but sentence comprehension is affected by processing deficits, such as slow lexical activation, reduction in memory resources, slowed processing and/or intermittent deficiency, among others. We test the claims of two processing accounts, slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, and two versions of the Trace Deletion Hypothesis (TDH), in a computational framework for sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005) implemented in ACT‐R (Anderson, Byrne, Douglass, Lebiere, & Qin, 2004). The assumption of slowed processing is operationalized as slow procedural memory, so that each processing action is performed slower than normal, and intermittent deficiency as extra noise in the procedural memory, so that the parsing steps are more noisy than normal. We operationalize the TDH as an absence of trace information in the parse tree. To test the predictions of the models implementing these theories, we use the data from a German sentence—picture matching study reported in Hanne, Sekerina, Vasishth, Burchert, and De Bleser (2011). The data consist of offline (sentence‐picture matching accuracies and response times) and online (eye fixation proportions) measures. From among the models considered, the model assuming that both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency are present emerges as the best model of sentence processing difficulty in aphasia. The modeling of individual differences suggests that, if we assume that patients have both slowed processing and intermittent deficiency, they have them in differing degrees.     

Predicting Self‐Confident Behaviour with Implicit and Explicit Self‐Esteem Measures

The present research compared the validity of popular direct and indirect measures of self‐esteem in predicting self‐confident behaviour in different social situations. In line with behavioural dual‐process models, both implicit and explicit self‐esteem were hypothesized to be related to appearing self‐confident to unacquainted others. A total of 127 participants responded to the Rosenberg Self‐Esteem Scale, the Multidimensional Self‐Esteem Scale, and an adjective scale for measuring explicit self‐esteem (ESE). Participants' implicit self‐esteem (ISE) was assessed with four indirect measures: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the name‐letter task (NLT), and two variants of an affective priming task, the reaction‐time affective priming task (RT‐APT) and the error‐based affective priming task (EB‐APT). Self‐confident behaviour was observed in four different social situations: (i) self‐introduction to a group; (ii) an ostracism experience; (iii) an interview about the ostracism experience; and (iv) an interview about one's personal life. In general, appearing self‐confident to unknown others was independently predicted by ESE and ISE. The indirect measures of self‐esteem were, as expected, not correlated, and only the self‐esteem APTs—but not the self‐esteem IAT or the NLT—predicted self‐confident behaviours. It is important to note that in particular the predictive power of the self‐esteem EB‐APT pertained to all four criteria and was incremental to the ESE measures. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology