The weckud wetch of the wast: lexical adaptation to a novel accent

Two experiments investigated the mechanism by which listeners adjust their interpretation of accented speech that is similar to a regional dialect of American English. Only a subset of the vowels of English (the front vowels) were shifted during adaptation, which consisted of listening to a 20-min segment of the "Wizard of Oz." Compared to a baseline (unadapted) condition, listeners showed significant adaptation to the accented speech, as indexed by increased word judgments on a lexical decision task. Adaptation also generalized to test words that had not been presented in the accented passage but that contained the shifted vowels. A control experiment showed that the adaptation effect was specific to the direction of the shift in the vowel space and not to a general relaxation of the criterion for what constitutes a good exemplar of the accented vowel category. Taken together, these results provide evidence for a context-specific vowel adaptation mechanism that enables a listener to adjust to the dialect of a particular talker.     

Morphemes, spelling and development: Comments on “The timing and mechanisms of children's use of morphological information in spelling” by S. Pacton and H. Deacon

In our comments on Pacton and Deacon's discussion of children's spelling of morphemes we raise four issues: (1) whether the “timing” question should be about children's ages or about their psychological processes; (2) the crucial importance of individual differences in the study of the connections that people make between morphemes and spelling; (3) the conclusions that can be drawn from evidence for the use of non-morphemic spelling strategies; (4) the need to consider the results of intervention studies in any account of children's understanding and use of morphemic spelling rules.     

Preaching the Word in the Context of Increasing Perplexity and Hopelessness

Abstract :  This article highlights the complexity of preaching the word in the caste-ridden context of India. Preaching in India has been largely individualistic and emphasizes a personal approach to the Christian faith resulting in a church that is passive and ineffective, especially in its approach and response to issues in the social realm. What is needed is a reading of the Word that enables individuals and communities to recognize God active in creative and transformative struggle and thereby enables the participation of the community in the struggle for life in all its fullness. Unfortunately, tensions between the varied roles of the pastor, doctrinal misunderstandings, and a caste-ridden church have hindered pastors from preaching the Word that empowers people to seek their liberation and that of the community.     

ERP signatures of conscious and unconscious word and letter perception in an inattentional blindness paradigm

A three-phase inattentional blindness paradigm was combined with ERPs. While participants performed a distracter task, line segments in the background formed words or consonant-strings. Nearly half of the participants failed to notice these word-forms and were deemed inattentionally blind. All participants noticed the word-forms in phase 2 of the experiment while they performed the same distracter task. In the final phase, participants performed a task on the word-forms. In all phases, including during inattentional blindness, word-forms elicited distinct ERPs during early latencies (∼200–280 ms) suggesting unconscious orthographic processing. A subsequent ERP (∼320–380 ms) similar to the visual awareness negativity appeared only when subjects were aware of the word-forms, regardless of the task. Finally, word-forms elicited a P3b (∼400–550 ms) only when these stimuli were task-relevant. These results are consistent with previous inattentional blindness studies and help distinguish brain activity associated with pre- and post-perceptual processing from correlates of conscious perception.     

Evidence for the contribution of a threshold retrieval process to semantic memory

It is widely held that episodic retrieval can recruit two processes: a threshold context retrieval process (recollection) and a continuous signal strength process (familiarity). Conversely the processes recruited during semantic retrieval are less well specified. We developed a semantic task analogous to single-item episodic recognition to interrogate semantic recognition receiver-operating characteristics (ROCs) for a marker of a threshold retrieval process. We fitted observed ROC points to three signal detection models: two models typically used in episodic recognition (unequal variance and dual-process signal detection models) and a novel dual-process recollect-to-reject (DP-RR) signal detection model that allows a threshold recollection process to aid both target identification and lure rejection. Given the nature of most semantic questions, we anticipated the DP-RR model would best fit the semantic task data. Experiment 1 (506 participants) provided evidence for a threshold retrieval process in semantic memory, with overall best fits to the DP-RR model. Experiment 2 (316 participants) found within-subjects estimates of episodic and semantic threshold retrieval to be uncorrelated. Our findings add weight to the proposal that semantic and episodic memory are served by similar dual-process retrieval systems, though the relationship between the two threshold processes needs to be more fully elucidated.     

Rapid fast-mapping abilities in 2-year-olds

Learning a new word consists of two primary tasks that have often been conflated into a single process: referent selection, in which a child must determine the correct referent of a novel label, and referent retention, which is the ability to store this newly formed label-object mapping in memory for later use. In addition, children must be capable of performing these tasks rapidly and repeatedly as they are frequently exposed to novel words during the course of natural conversation. Here we used a preferential pointing task to investigate 2-year-olds’ (N = 72) ability to infer the referent of a novel noun from a single ambiguous exposure and their ability to retain this mapping over time. Children were asked to identify the referent of a novel label on six critical trials distributed throughout the course of a 10-min study involving many familiar and novel objects. On these critical trials, images of a known object and a novel object (e.g., a ball and a nameless artifact constructed in the laboratory) appeared on two computer screens and a voice asked children to “point at the _____ [e.g., glark].” Following label onset, children were allowed only 3 s during which to infer the correct referent, point at it, and potentially store this new word-object mapping. In a final posttest trial, all previously labeled novel objects appeared and children were asked to point to one of them (e.g., “Can you find the glark?”). To succeed, children needed to have initially mapped the novel labels correctly and retained these mappings over the course of the study. Despite the difficult demands of the current task, children successfully identified the target object on the retention trial. We conclude that 2-year-olds are able to fast map novel nouns during a brief single exposure under ambiguous labeling conditions.     

When deaf signers read English: do written words activate their sign translations?

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word pairs that were semantically related were judged more quickly when the form of the ASL translation was also similar whereas word pairs that were semantically unrelated were judged more slowly when the form of the ASL translation was similar. A control group of hearing bilinguals without any knowledge of ASL produced an entirely different pattern of results. Taken together, these results constitute the first demonstration that deaf readers activate the ASL translations of written words under conditions in which the translation is neither present perceptually nor required to perform the task.     

Cross‐Situational Learning: An Experimental Study of Word‐Learning Mechanisms

Cross‐situational learning is a mechanism for learning the meaning of words across multiple exposures, despite exposure‐by‐exposure uncertainty as to the word's true meaning. We present experimental evidence showing that humans learn words effectively using cross‐situational learning, even at high levels of referential uncertainty. Both overall success rates and the time taken to learn words are affected by the degree of referential uncertainty, with greater referential uncertainty leading to less reliable, slower learning. Words are also learned less successfully and more slowly if they are presented interleaved with occurrences of other words, although this effect is relatively weak. We present additional analyses of participants’ trial‐by‐trial behavior showing that participants make use of various cross‐situational learning strategies, depending on the difficulty of the word‐learning task. When referential uncertainty is low, participants generally apply a rigorous eliminative approach to cross‐situational learning. When referential uncertainty is high, or exposures to different words are interleaved, participants apply a frequentist approximation to this eliminative approach. We further suggest that these two ways of exploiting cross‐situational information reside on a continuum of learning strategies, underpinned by a single simple associative learning mechanism.