工作记忆中汉语反词长效应机制

工作记忆中的反词长效应(reverse word-length effect)指在对长词和短词混合的词表进行即时序列回忆时, 独立长词回忆成绩优于独立短词的现象。以汉字词语为材料通过3个实验探讨反词长效应的机制。实验1采用纯粹词表和长短词混合词表, 既得到纯粹词词长效应, 也得到独立词反词长效应。实验2削弱了长短词之间的词长差异, 结果独立词反词长效应消失, 且独立词回忆成绩优于纯粹词。实验3设计了视觉延迟条件, 得到与实验1类似的结果, 只是独立词反词长效应有所削弱。三个实验的结果并不一致, 无法用现有的语音回路理论或SIMPLE理论进行很好地解释, 理论的整合与创新显得非常重要。因此, 提出多重编码以既相互竞争又相互补充方式进行平行加工的观点进行更完整地解释。     

语音在维——汉双语者汉字识别中的作用

采用语音启动技术,以第二语言为汉语的46名维吾尔族大学生为研究对象,考查了语音在维-汉双语者汉字识别中的作用.结果发现,维吾尔族被试在命名任务和词汇判断任务中都获得了语音启动效应,语义启动效应只出现在词汇判断任务中.结论:语音在维吾尔族大学生汉字识别中是自动激活的,而且语音的自动激活参与了语义通达.     

Acquiring variation in an artificial language: Children and adults are sensitive to socially conditioned linguistic variation

Languages exhibit sociolinguistic variation, such that adult native speakers condition the usage of linguistic variants on social context, gender, and ethnicity, among other cues. While the existence of this kind of socially conditioned variation is well-established, less is known about how it is acquired. Studies of naturalistic language use by children provide various examples where children’s production of sociolinguistic variants appears to be conditioned on similar factors to adults’ production, but it is difficult to determine whether this reflects knowledge of sociolinguistic conditioning or systematic differences in the input to children from different social groups. Furthermore, artificial language learning experiments have shown that children have a tendency to eliminate variation, a process which could potentially work against their acquisition of sociolinguistic variation. The current study used a semi-artificial language learning paradigm to investigate learning of the sociolinguistic cue of speaker identity in 6-year-olds and adults. Participants were trained and tested on an artificial language where nouns were obligatorily followed by one of two meaningless particles and were produced by one of two speakers (one male, one female). Particle usage was conditioned deterministically on speaker identity (Experiment 1), probabilistically (Experiment 2), or not at all (Experiment 3). Participants were given tests of production and comprehension. In Experiments 1 and 2, both children and adults successfully acquired the speaker identity cue, although the effect was stronger for adults and in Experiment 1. In addition, in all three experiments, there was evidence of regularization in participants’ productions, although the type of regularization differed with age: children showed regularization by boosting the frequency of one particle at the expense of the other, while adults regularized by conditioning particle usage on lexical items. Overall, results demonstrate that children and adults are sensitive to speaker identity cues, an ability which is fundamental to tracking sociolinguistic variation, and that children’s well-established tendency to regularize does not prevent them from learning sociolinguistically conditioned variation.     

In search of a learning model

While the four commentaries reflect a range of different perspectives on my target paper (Vihman, 2017), all basically accept the overall approach, which has been central to my research for 30 years. Each commentary proposes ways of deepening aspects of the ideas expressed or points out limitations and potential areas in which elaboration would be useful. This response takes up each commentary in turn.     

ASSESSMENT OF PREFERENCE FOR VARIED VERSUS CONSTANT REINFORCERS

One method that has been demonstrated to improve the effectiveness of reinforcement is stimulus (reinforcer) variation (Egel, 1980). Egel found that bar pressing increased and responding occurred more rapidly during varied reinforcement than during constant reinforcement when identical stimuli were used across phases for 10 individuals with autism. The purpose of the current investigation was to assess the preferences of 7 individuals for varied presentation of slightly lower quality stimuli relative to constant access to the highest quality stimulus. Varied presentation was preferred over constant reinforcer presentation with 4 participants, and the opposite was true for 2 participants. One participant did not demonstrate a preference. These results suggest that stimulus variation may allow less preferred reinforcers to compete effectively with a more highly preferred reinforcer for some individuals.     

Planning at the Phonological Level during Sentence Production

In two picture–word interference experiments we examined whether phrase boundaries affected how far in advance speakers plan the sounds of words during sentence production. Participants produced sentences of varying lengths (short determiner + noun + verb or long determiner + adjective + noun + verb) while ignoring phonologically related and unrelated words to the verb of the sentence. Response times to begin producing both types of sentences were faster in the presence of a related versus unrelated distractor. The results suggest that the activation of phonological properties of words outside the first phrase and first and second phonological word affect onset of articulation during sentence production. The results are discussed in the light of previous evidence of phonological planning during multi-word production. Implications for the phonological facilitation effect in the picture–word interference paradigm are also discussed.The research reported in this article served as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the PhD degree at Harvard University for Tatiana T. Schnur     

Masked phonological priming effects in English: are they real? Do they matter?

For over 15 years, masked phonological priming effects have been offered as evidence that phonology plays a leading role in visual word recognition. The existence of these effects-along with their theoretical implications-has, however, been disputed. The authors present three sources of evidence relevant to an assessment of the existence and implications of these effects. First, they present an exhaustive meta-analytic literature review, in which they evaluate the strength of the evidence for masked phonological priming effects on English visual word processing. Second, they present two original experiments that demonstrate a small but significant masked priming effect on English visual lexical decision, which persists in conditions that may discourage phonological recoding. Finally, they assess the theory of visual word recognition offered by the DRC model (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001) in the context of their empirical data. Through numerous simulations with this model, they argue that masked phonological priming effects might best be captured by a weak phonological (i.e., dual-access) theory in which lexical decisions are made on the basis of phonological information.     

Deficient implicit phonological representations in children with dyslexia

This study tested the segmentation hypothesis of dyslexia by measuring implicit phonological representations in reading-disabled 11- to 13-year-olds. Implicit measures included lexical gating, priming, and syllable similarity tasks designed to reduce metalinguistic demands. Children with dyslexia performed consistently worse than CA and RA controls when more segmental representations were required across all three tasks. Implicit phonological representations were correlated with measures of speech perception, phoneme awareness, and phonological short-term memory, but not rapid automatized naming, and accounted for unique variance in predicting reading ability. Results provide strong support for less mature implicit phonological representations in children with dyslexia.     

Effects of phonological awareness and morphological awareness on blind students' reading comprehension

The exploration of blind students' reading skills is needed not only for further understanding their reading development but also for providing targeted suggestions for practical education. This study aims to examine the relations among phonological awareness (PA), homograph awareness (HA), compounding awareness (CA) and reading comprehension (RC), and explore the mediating effect of listening comprehension (LC) in Chinese blind students from elementary school. A total of 148 blind and 302 sighted elementary school students completed assessments of PA, HA, CA, LC and RC. The results found that PA, HA and CA were important variables that predicted Chinese blind and sighted students' RC not only directly but also indirectly through LC, which varied across different grades. The findings suggest that there were many similarities that exist in the influencing mechanism of RC between Chinese blind and sighted students.