合理性对汉语阅读中双字词语义预视效益的优势作用：眼动研究

语义预视效益(SPB)对于揭示阅读中读者能否从副中央凹提取高水平信息具有重要意义。关于SPB的产生机制仍然存在争议。本研究通过同时操控预视词的合理性和语义相关性考察了二者对汉语阅读中双字词SPB的影响。结果发现,合理性主效应显著,合理预视下目标词的注视时间显著短于不合理预视;语义相关性主效应不显著,未发现二者的交互作用。研究结果支持了语境匹配假说,进一步说明了汉语阅读中预视词的合理性对SPB的优势作用。     

The semantic structure of emotion words across languages is consistent with componential appraisal models of emotion

Appraisal theories of emotion, and particularly the Component Process Model, claim that the different components of the emotion process (action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences) are essentially driven by the results of cognitive appraisals and that the feeling component constitutes a central integration and representation of these processes. Given the complexity of the proposed architecture, comprehensive experimental tests of these predictions are difficult to perform and to date are lacking. Encouraged by the “lexical sedimentation” hypothesis, here we propose an indirect examination of the compatibility of the theoretical assumptions with the semantic structure of a set of major emotion words as measured in a cross-language and cross-cultural study. Specifically, we performed a secondary analysis of the large-scale data set with ratings of affective features covering all components of the emotion process for 24 emotion words in 27 countries, constituting profiles of emotion-specific appraisals, action tendencies, physiological reactions, expressions, and feeling experiences. The results of a series of hierarchical regression analyses to examine the prediction of the theoretical model are highly consistent with the claim that appraisal patterns determine the structure of the response components, which in turn predict central dimensions of the feeling component.     

形状-性别内隐联结及其对消费者形状偏好的影响

本文探讨了形状与性别之间的内隐联结及其对消费者形状偏好的影响。通过4个实验, 作者发现形状与性别之间存在内隐联结, 即圆润的形状与女性更相关, 而有棱角的形状与男性更相关。这一内隐联结被拓展到品牌感知上, 导致品牌的性别形象影响消费者对圆形或棱角形产品的偏好, 而感知匹配度在其中起中介作用。这些研究发现进一步丰富了现有关于形状偏好以及形状象征意义的文献, 并对视觉营销中的形状设计提供了重要的实践指导。     

语义和句法信息在副中央凹加工中的作用

读者能够从副中央凹中提取到什么类型的信息, 是当前阅读眼动研究领域关注的焦点问题.当前普遍认为低水平信息(如正字法信息)可以在副中央凹中得以加工, 但是高水平的信息(如语义和句法信息)能否从副中央凹中进行提取存在争议.本文总结了近年来高水平信息在副中央凹加工的研究进展, 包括拼音文字和非拼音文字(如中文)阅读过程中语义和句法预视效益的研究现状及影响因素, 当前眼动控制模型(如E-Z读者和SWIFT)对预视效益的解释和不足之处, 最后提出未来关于语义和句法预视加工的研究方向.     

Unique contribution of semantic representations to immediate memory: an individual-differences approach

Studies have reported dissociations between the contributions of semantic and phonological representations to immediate remembering, found through experimental manipulations as well as specific clinical cases. Also, some studies based on the analysis of individual differences reported that a semantic cued recall task has a variance unshared with the immediate memory tasks which tap the contribution of phonological representations. However, another study suggested that cued recall performance could reflect a wider ability to cluster information by category. Furthermore, no studies of individual differences have investigated the unique semantic contribution in the visual domain. Therefore, the present study used specific immediate recognition memory tasks that have been used to investigate the semantic contribution in the verbal and visual domains. The results demonstrate the unshared variance that reflects the semantic contribution in both the verbal and the visual domain, and some commonality in these variances across the domains.     

Semantic and visual relatedness of distractors impairs episodic retrieval of pictures in a divided attention paradigm

We used a divided attention (DA) paradigm to infer the representational codes needed to support episodic retrieval of pictures, by measuring susceptibility to memory interference from different distracting tasks. Participants made recognition memory decisions to semantically categorized sets of pictures while simultaneously making size judgments to a set of visually-presented distractor pictures. Recognition accuracy was worse and response times were slower under DA conditions relative to full attention (FA), regardless of semantic relatedness of distractors to targets (Experiment 1). Similarly, we found no differential memory interference under DA relative to FA when distractor pictures were either visually (but not semantically), semantically (but not visually), or unrelated to the targets (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, memory interference was significantly larger under DA at retrieval when distractors were both semantically and visually similar to the targets. Findings suggest episodic memory for pictures requires access to either visually- or semantically-based representations for optimal performance.     

Word recognition in Alzheimer's disease: Effects of semantic degeneration

Impairments of word recognition in Alzheimer's disease (AD) have been less widely investigated than impairments affecting word retrieval and production. In particular, we know little about what makes individual words easier or harder for patients with AD to recognize. We used a lexical selection task in which participants were shown sets of four items, each set consisting of one word and three non‐words. The task was simply to point to the word on each trial. Forty patients with mild‐to‐moderate AD were significantly impaired on this task relative to matched controls who made very few errors. The number of patients with AD able to recognize each word correctly was predicted by the frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability of the words, but not by their length or number of orthographic neighbours. Patient Mini‐Mental State Examination and phonological fluency scores also predicted the number of words recognized. We propose that progressive degradation of central semantic representations in AD differentially affects the ability to recognize low‐imageability, low‐frequency, late‐acquired words, with the same factors affecting word recognition as affecting word retrieval.     

Bilingualism and reading difficulties: an exploration in episodic and semantic memory

This study was designed to investigate the effect of bilingualism and reading difficulties (RD) on episodic and semantic memory. The subjects included 190 children (aged 9–12 years): 45 Iranian-Swedish bilinguals and 59 Swedish monolinguals with typically developed reading, along with 41 bilinguals and 45 monolinguals with RD. To measure episodic memory, subject-performed and verbal tasks were used for encoding, and both free and cued recall were used for retrieval. Letter and category fluency tasks were used to test semantic memory. In action memory, bilingual children with RD benefited less from enactment encoding form compared to children with typically developed reading. Additionally, bilingual with RD had lower rates of recollection in category fluency compared to their monolingual counterparts. However, in letter fluency, there was not found a difference between performances of bilinguals and monolinguals with RD. We discuss the involvement of long-term memory in both bilingualism and reading.     

‘For Beauty is nothing but the barely endurable onset of Terror’: Outline of a general psychoanalytic aesthetics

Even close to 80 years after Freud's words that psychoanalysis “has scarcely anything to say about beauty” (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21, p. 82) the question of a specific psychoanalytic aesthetic is still faced with a deficit in theory. Since aesthetics is related to Aisthesis, the Greek word for ‘perception’, a psychoanalytic aesthetic can solely emerge from a psychoanalysis of perceptive structures. The term ‘kinaesthetic semantic’ is introduced in order to exemplify via music how perceptive experiences must be structured for them to be experienced as beautiful. The basic mechanisms – repetition of form (rhythm, unification) and seduction (deviation, surprise) – are defined. With the help of these mechanisms an intensive contact between perceiving object and kinetic subject, the physical self, is established. The intensive relatedness is a requirement for the creative process in art and also for psychic growth on the subject's level. The described basic mechanisms of the aesthetic process in music can also be encountered in painting and poetry. By the means of a self‐portrait by Bacon it will be examined how, in art, terror and traumatization are represented via targeted disorganization of beauty endowing mechanisms, hence finding an enabling form of confrontation and integration of fended contents.     

Semantics and the sacred

ABSTRACT

This article looks at four different scholarly perspectives on ‘sacred’ – the ineffable sacred, the experienced sacred, the polarized sacred and the contextualized sacred – in order to draw out their implicit presuppositions about meaning. The first two stances presuppose that meaning depends on what bits of language are about (referentialism), and the other two stances presuppose that meaning depends on relations between bits of language (holism). The article concludes three things: these prominent views of ‘sacred’ rest on usually implicit or unrecognized assumptions about the nature of meaning; some of those assumptions explain why certain theories are contentious and problematic and others ground more promising and productive approaches.