文字线索浏览方向、空间位置与移动光标对伪忽视的影响

采用线段平分任务,以无文字线索作为基线条件,考察文字线索的浏览方向、空间位置和移动光标对具有两种不同方向阅读经验的熟练双语者伪忽视的影响。结果发现,无文字线索条件下,光标从左往右方向移动时被试的判断偏向于线段中点的右侧,而从右往左移动时,偏向于线段中点的左侧。在有文字线索条件下发现,文字线索的浏览方向和空间位置的交互作用显著,简单效应检验显示文字线索的浏览方向和空间位置一致时伪忽视明显,不一致时伪忽视消失。结果表明,文字线索浏览方向、空间位置与移动光标能够影响伪忽视。伪忽视的存在和消失,不仅与眼球运动有关,还有与大脑两半球的激活水平有关。研究结果支持了视觉扫描假设和激活朝向假设。     

Odors are expressible in language,as long as you speak the right language

From Plato to Pinker there has been the common belief that the experience of a smell is impossible to put into words. Decades of studies have confirmed this observation. But the studies to date have focused on participants from urbanized Western societies. Cross-cultural research suggests that there may be other cultures where odors play a larger role. The Jahai of the Malay Peninsula are one such group. We tested whether Jahai speakers could name smells as easily as colors in comparison to a matched English group. Using a free naming task we show on three different measures that Jahai speakers find it as easy to name odors as colors, whereas English speakers struggle with odor naming. Our findings show that the long-held assumption that people are bad at naming smells is not universally true. Odors are expressible in language, as long as you speak the right language.     

Repetition priming of access to biographical information from faces

Two experiments examined repetition priming on tasks that require access to semantic (or biographical) information from faces. In the second stage of each experiment, participants made either a nationality or an occupation decision to faces of celebrities, and, in the first stage, they made either the same or a different decision to faces (in Experiment 1) or the same or a different decision to printed names (in Experiment 2). All combinations of priming and test tasks produced clear repetition effects, which occurred irrespective of whether the decisions made were positive or negative. Same-domain (face-to-face) repetition priming was larger than cross-domain (name-to-face) priming, and priming was larger when the two tasks were the same. It is discussed how these findings are more readily accommodated by the Burton, Bruce, and Johnston () model of face recognition than by episode-based accounts of repetition priming.     

The varying effects of age of acquisition

There are a number of theories that suggest that age of acquisition (AoA) effects are not uniform across different tasks. Catling and Johnston (2006a) found greater AoA effects within an object-naming task than in a semantic classification task. They explained these findings by suggesting that AoA effects might accumulate according to how many levels of representation a task necessitates access to. Brysbaert and Ghyselinck (2006) explain the difference in AoA effects by proposing two distinct types of AoA (frequency dependent and frequency independent), the first accounted for by a connectionist-type mechanism and the latter situated at the interface between semantics and word production. Moreover, Moore, Smith-Spark, and Valentine (2004) and Holmes and Ellis (2006) have suggested that there are two loci of AoA effects: at the phonological level and somewhere within the perceptual level of representation. Again, this could account for the varying degrees of AoA effects. This study sets about testing these ideas by assessing the effect size of AoA across a series of different tasks that necessitate access to various levels of representation. Experiments 1–4 demonstrate significant effects of AoA in a novel picture–picture verification task, an object classification task, a picture verification task, and an object-naming task. Experiment 5 showed no effects of initial phoneme on the naming of the critical objects used within Experiments 1–4. The implication of the varying AoA effect sizes found within Experiments 1–4 in relation to explanations of AoA are discussed.     

The effects of age of acquisition and frequency trajectory on object naming: Comments on Pérez (2007)

Pérez (2007) reported that objective age of acquisition (AoA) was a major determinant of adult object naming latencies when frequency trajectory and cumulative frequency were included in the same regression analysis. In this comment, we discuss several issues concerning the influence of frequency trajectory and AoA and argue that objective AoA is a behavioural outcome and a natural covariate of frequency trajectory. Bonin, Barry, Méot, and Chalard (2004) argued that the critical test of age-limited learning effects is finding an effect of frequency trajectory when AoA was not included as a factor. This critical test was lacking in Pérez's (2007) study, but several re-analyses of his data show that frequency trajectory is a reliable predictor of naming speed when objective AoA is not included in the regression. We conclude that frequency trajectory remains an important independent variable for the study of the effects of age-limited learning.     

Semantic relatedness among objects promotes the activation of multiple phonological codes during object naming

In a picture–word interference experiment the authors demonstrate that a semantic–categorical relation between a to-be-named target picture and a context picture promotes the phonological activation of the to-be-ignored context picture. No such phonological activation is observed if the objects are semantically unrelated. This finding gives further insight into the mechanisms that modulate the activation flow in the conceptual-lexical system during speech planning. In contrast to recent picture–picture interference studies, the results provide direct evidence that the phonological activation of a context object is dependent on its semantic processing.     

Sources of individual differences in the speed of naming objects and actions: The contribution of executive control

We examined the contribution of executive control to individual differences in response time (RT) for naming objects and actions. Following Miyake et al., executive control was assumed to include updating, shifting, and inhibiting abilities, which were assessed using operation span, task-switching, and stop-signal tasks, respectively. Experiment 1 showed that updating ability was significantly correlated with the mean RT of action naming, but not of object naming. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2 using a larger stimulus set. Inhibiting ability was significantly correlated with the mean RT of both action and object naming, whereas shifting ability was not correlated with the mean naming RTs. Ex-Gaussian analyses of the RT distributions revealed that updating ability was correlated with the distribution tail of both action and object naming, whereas inhibiting ability was correlated with the leading edge of the distribution for action naming and the tail for object naming. Shifting ability provided no independent contribution. These results indicate that the executive control abilities of updating and inhibiting contribute to the speed of naming objects and actions, although there are differences in the way and extent these abilities are involved.