Comprehending pronouns: a role for word-specific gender stereotype information

The research investigated how word-specific gender stereotype information can be used during language comprehension. In a rating study, the gender stereotypes for 405 noun and noun compounds were assessed. From these norms, 32 words strongly stereotyped to refer mostly to males and 32 words strongly stereotyped to refer mostly to females were selected and used in a reading experiment. Comprehenders read pairs of sentences. The subject of the first sentence was a gender stereotyped word (e.g., executive or secretary). The subject of the second sentence was either the pronoun he or she. Reading time was significantly longer when gender of the pronoun mismatched the gender stereotype of the antecedent than when the genders of pronoun and antecedent matched. This gender mismatch effect occurred on the two regions immediately following the region containing the pronoun. The results indicated that word-specific gender stereotypes can influence coreference resolution of pronouns.     

Effects of sentential context on the processing of unambiguous words by the two cerebral hemispheres

The effect of sentence context on the processing of different aspects of meaning of unambiguous nouns by the two cerebral hemispheres was examined. Participants performed a lexical decision task on target words following two primes, an unambiguous noun preceded by an incomplete sentence. Priming sentences were consistent with either the dominant or the subordinate aspect of meaning of their final unambiguous word. Short and long SOAs were used. A principal finding of this study was that, when compared to unrelated aspects of meaning, for both the short and the long SOAs, the dominant and subordinate aspects of meaning of the unambiguous words were activated regardless of context in both hemispheres. However, the activation of the subordinate aspect of meaning of unambiguous words appears to be more sensitive to sentential context, especially when the unambiguous word is being processed by the left hemisphere.     

Adult age differences in visual word identification: functional neuroanatomy by positron emission tomography

Adult age differences in the neural systems mediating semantic (context-independent) memory were investigated using positron emission tomography (PET). Younger (20-29 years) and older (62-70 years) participants performed lexical decision (word/nonword discrimination) and nonsemantic (simple visual search) baseline tasks during PET scanning. Within the lexical decision task, display duration and presentation rate were varied across scans. The behavioral data suggested that although an age-related slowing was evident in visual feature and response processing, the retrieval of semantic/lexical information was similar for younger and older adults. For both age groups, lexical-related activation occurred in inferior prefrontal and occipitotemporal regions of the left hemisphere. Differential activation, as a function of age group, was observed in the left occipitotemporal pathway as a result of older adults' maintaining higher levels of neural activity in striate cortex (during visual search) and in inferior temporal cortex (during lexical decision). The prefrontal activation was similar for the two age groups. Thus, although this form of semantic memory retrieval does not undergo significant age-related decline, an age-related change in the associated pattern of neural activation is evident. These findings differ from previous neuroimaging studies of episodic (context-dependent) memory retrieval, which have suggested that age-related compensatory mechanisms are expressed primarily by greater activation of prefrontal regions for older adults than for younger adults.     

Linking sight and sound: fMRI evidence of primary auditory cortex activation during visual word recognition

We describe two studies that used repetition priming paradigms to investigate brain activity during the reading of single words. Functional magnetic resonance images were collected during a visual lexical decision task in which nonword stimuli were manipulated with regard to phonological properties and compared to genuine English words. We observed a region in left-hemisphere primary auditory cortex linked to a repetition priming effect. The priming effect activity was observed only for stimuli that sound like known words; moreover, this region was sensitive to strategic task differences. Thus, a brain region involved in the most basic aspects of auditory processing appears to be engaged in reading even when there is no environmental oral or auditory component.     

Essential and Perceptual Attributes of Words in Reflective and On-line Processing

Access to essential and perceptual attributes of word meanings was investigated in a series of tasks. First, perceptual attributes of a number of natural kind concepts were determined by asking participants to generate the most salient features of those concepts; they were asked to assess the importance of both those features and features that fit criteria for essential attributes. Attributes fitting the criteria for essential attributes were found to be judged more important than perceptual attributes in identifying an object and to have more connections to other attributes of the concept. Semantic priming for both types of features was then investigated. Prime-target pairs consisting of the natural kind concept term and the perceptual or essential attribute were presented for lexical decision (Experiments 1a and 1b) or naming (Experiments 2a and 2b). Interstimulus intervals were either 0 or 200 ms. Both types of features were primed at a 200 ms interstimulus interval but only in the lexical decision task.     

The Declarative/Procedural Model of Lexicon and Grammar

Our use of language depends upon two capacities: a mental lexicon of memorized words and a mental grammar of rules that underlie the sequential and hierarchical composition of lexical forms into predictably structured larger words, phrases, and sentences. The declarative/procedural model posits that the lexicon/grammar distinction in language is tied to the distinction between two well-studied brain memory systems. On this view, the memorization and use of at least simple words (those with noncompositional, that is, arbitrary form-meaning pairings) depends upon an associative memory of distributed representations that is subserved by temporal-lobe circuits previously implicated in the learning and use of fact and event knowledge. This declarative memory system appears to be specialized for learning arbitrarily related information (i.e., for associative binding). In contrast, the acquisition and use of grammatical rules that underlie symbol manipulation is subserved by frontal/basal-ganglia circuits previously implicated in the implicit (nonconscious) learning and expression of motor and cognitive skills and habits (e.g., from simple motor acts to skilled game playing). This procedural system may be specialized for computing sequences. This novel view of lexicon and grammar offers an alternative to the two main competing theoretical frameworks. It shares the perspective of traditional dual-mechanism theories in positing that the mental lexicon and a symbol-manipulating mental grammar are subserved by distinct computational components that may be linked to distinct brain structures. However, it diverges from these theories where they assume components dedicated to each of the two language capacities (that is, domain-specific) and in their common assumption that lexical memory is a rote list of items. Conversely, while it shares with single-mechanism theories the perspective that the two capacities are subserved by domain-independent computational mechanisms, it diverges from them where they link both capacities to a single associative memory system with broad anatomic distribution. The declarative/procedural model, but neither traditional dual- nor single-mechanism models, predicts double dissociations between lexicon and grammar, with associations among associative memory properties, memorized words and facts, and temporal-lobe structures, and among symbol-manipulation properties, grammatical rule products, motor skills, and frontal/basal-ganglia structures. In order to contrast lexicon and grammar while holding other factors constant, we have focused our investigations of the declarative/procedural model on morphologically complex word forms. Morphological transformations that are (largely) unproductive (e.g., in go—went, solemn—solemnity) are hypothesized to depend upon declarative memory. These have been contrasted with morphological transformations that are fully productive (e.g., in walk—walked, happy—happiness), whose computation is posited to be solely dependent upon grammatical rules subserved by the procedural system. Here evidence is presented from studies that use a range of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches with children and adults. It is argued that converging evidence from these studies supports the declarative/procedural model of lexicon and grammar.     

Spurious Correlations In Psychology

Abstract

Mind and Conduct. By Henry R. Marshall. N. Y., Scribner, 1919. 236 p.

Natural Food and Care for Child and Mother. By Susan Harding Rummler. Chicago, Rand McNally, 1919. 298 p.

The Psychology and Pedagogy of Anger. By Roy Franklin Richardson. Baltimore, Warwick and York, 1918. 100 p.

The Blind. Their Condition and the Work Being Done for Them in the United States. By Harry Best. N. Y., MacMillan, 1919. 762 p.

Verse for Patriots. Comp. By Jean Broadhurst and Clara L. Rhodes. Phil., Lippincott, 1919. 367 p.

American Leaders. By Walter Lefferts. Phil., Lippincott, 1919. 329 p.

Christ as a Teacher. By John W. Wayland. Boston, The Stratford Co., 1919. 70 p.

Applied Economic Botany. By Melville Thurston Cook. Phil., Lippincott, 1919. 261 p.

Deficiency and Delinquency. An interpretation of mental testing. By James Burt Miner. Baltimore, Warwick and York, 1918. 355 p.

Education in Ancient Israel to 70 A. D. By Fletcher Harper Swift. Chicago, Open court, 1919. 134 p.

Hidden Treasure. By John T. Simpson. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1919. 303 p.

French Educational Ideals of Today. By Ferdinand Buisson &; F. E. Farrington. Yonkers-on-Hudson, World Book Co., 1919. 326 p.     

Differences Between Young and Old University Students on a Lexical Decision Task: Evidence Through an Ex-Gaussian Approach

This work compared two common variants of a lexical decision task (LDT) through two different analysis procedures: first, the classical ANOVA method, and second, by fitting the data to an ex-Gaussian distribution function. Two groups of participants (old and young university students) had to perform, blocks of go/no-go and yes/no tasks. Reaction times and error rates were much lower in the go/no-go task than in the yes/no task. Changes in the ex-Gaussian parameter related to attention were found with word frequency but not with the type of LDT tasks. These findings suggest that word frequency shows an attentional cost that is independent of age.     

Morphological constraints in children’s spoken language comprehension: A visual world study of plurals inside compounds in English

Many previous studies have shown that the human language processor is capable of rapidly integrating information from different sources during reading or listening. Yet, little is known about how this ability develops from child to adulthood. To gain insight into how children (in comparison to adults) handle different kinds of linguistic information during on-line language comprehension, the current study investigates a well-known morphological phenomenon that is subject to both structural and semantic constraints, the plurals-in-compounds effect, i.e. the dislike of plural (specifically regular plural) modifiers inside compounds (e.g. rats eater). We examined 96 seven-to-twelve-year-old children and a control group of 32 adults measuring their eye-gaze changes in response to compound-internal plural and singular forms. Our results indicate that children rely more upon structural properties of language (in the present case, morphological cues) early in development and that the ability to efficiently integrate information from multiple sources takes time for children to reach adult-like levels.     

名词具体性效应的眼动研究

通两个实验考察名词的具体性效应.实验一采用词汇判断法,考察名词的具体性效应.采用2（具体性：具体、抽象）×2（词频：高频、低频）的两因素被试内实验设计.结果表明：低频词存在具体性效应.实验二应用眼动技术,以EyelinkⅡ眼动仪为工具,考察在句子阅读中的名词具体性效应.实验为单因素被试内设计,自变量为句子中目标词的具体性.结果表明：在句子语境条件下,低频词也存在具体性效应,而且这种效应表现在低频词的晚期加工阶段.