Assigning Grammatical Gender During Word Production

The present study was designed to examine the processes by which grammatical gender is assigned during word production. French words varied in strength of sublexical cues, based on whether the word ending was typical for one gender rather than neutral about gender, and lexical cues, derived from the associated definite article being uninformative about gender for words beginning with a vowel, but informative for words beginning with a consonant. In Experiment 1, when native French speakers classified the gender of mentally evoked names of pictures, no effects of these cues were obtained. Experiment 2 used an improved methodology, with participants classifying the gender of words translated from English. English-speaking learners of French were influenced strongly by lexical and sublexical cues, while French speakers showed a weaker influence. However, for both speaker groups, words whose gender was classified slowly during recognition were also classified slowly during production, and error rates were similarly correlated across tasks. The conclusion was that gender is not equally available for all words once the associated “lemma” is accessed. Current models of language production may have to incorporate mechanisms allowing differential speed of access to gender information depending on a word’s formal properties.     

Engaging God's Mission and Diakonia in Life of Public Spheres: Justification and Economic Justice

Abstract : This article approaches the theology of mission from the point of view of God's mission and diakonia, seeking a missional model of the grace of justification and economic justice in an age of World Christianity. The author engages a hermeneutical‐prophetic side of evangelization—viva vox evangelii—in the public sphere, and demonstrates the intrinsic connection between missio and diakonia Dei in Jesus Christ using a trinitarian‐hermeneutical perspective. The article shows that evangelization as God's mission occupies a central place by taking into account challenges from the postcolonial emancipation in the context of Empire.     

Semantic false memories in the form of derived relational intrusions following training

Contemporary behavior analytic research is making headway in characterizing memory phenomena that typically have been characterized by cognitive models, and the current study extends this development by producing "false memories" in the form of functional equivalence responding. A match-to-sample training procedure was administered in order to encourage participants to treat groups of unrelated English words as being interchangeable. Following training, participants were presented with a list of words from within one of the groups for a free recall test and a recognition test. Results showed that participants were more likely to falsely recall and recognize words that had been assigned to the same group as the list words during prior training, relative to words not assigned to the same group and relative to words that co-occurred with list words. These results indicate that semantic relatedness can be experimentally manipulated in order to produce specific false memories.     

首词和尾词频率对高熟悉度成语识别的影响

采用词汇判定法,考察首词频率和尾词频率对高熟悉度四字成语识别的影响。实验结果表明:(1)对高熟悉度成语的识别规律与多层聚类表征模型的观点比较吻合;(2)构成成语的成份词对成语表征有竞争和干扰作用,高频率成份词相对于低频率成份词,对成语表征的竞争和干扰作用较大。     

Incidental memory for colour word associates processed in colour naming and reading aloud tasks: is a blue ocean more memorable than a yellow one?

ABSTRACT

Congruency effects for colour word associates (e.g., ocean) have been reported in Stroop colour naming tasks. However, incidental memory for such words after word reading and colour naming tasks has not been examined. In the current study, participants incidentally recalled colour word associates (e.g., ocean) and neutral words (e.g., lawyer) immediately after naming their font colour (Experiment 1a) or reading them aloud (Experiment 1b). In both tasks, recall was better for congruent colour word associates (e.g., ocean appearing in blue) than incongruent colour word associates (e.g., ocean appearing in green) or neutral items (lawyer appearing in blue).

This outcome is consistent with the idea that co-activation of a semantic colour code and a lexical representation strengthens the episodic memory representation and makes it more accessible.     

Learning new vocabulary during childhood: Effects of semantic training on lexical consolidation and integration

Research suggests that word learning is an extended process, with offline consolidation crucial for the strengthening of new lexical representations and their integration with existing lexical knowledge (as measured by engagement in lexical competition). This supports a dual memory systems account, in which new information is initially sparsely encoded separately from existing knowledge and integrated with long-term memory over time. However, previous studies of this type exploited unnatural learning contexts, involving fictitious words in the absence of word meaning. In this study, 5- to 9-year-old children learned real science words (e.g., hippocampus) with or without semantic information. Children in both groups were slower to detect pauses in familiar competitor words (e.g., hippopotamus) relative to control words 24 h after training but not immediately, confirming that offline consolidation is required before new words are integrated with the lexicon and engage in lexical competition. Children recalled more new words 24 h after training than immediately (with similar improvements shown for the recall and recognition of new word meanings); however, children who were exposed to the meanings during training showed further improvements in recall after 1 week and outperformed children who were not exposed to meanings. These findings support the dual memory systems account of vocabulary acquisition and suggest that the association of a new phonological form with semantic information is critical for the development of stable lexical representations.     

The Hemispheric Lateralization for Processing Geometric Word/Shape Combinations: The Stroop-Shape Effect

The authors conducted 4 experiments to test whether hemispheric lateralization occurs for the processing of geometric word–shape combinations. In 3 experiments, participants responded to geometric shapes combined with geometric words (square, circle, triangle). In the 4th experiment, stimuli were combinations of geometric shapes and nongeometric words. The authors predicted that it would take longer to respond in incongruent conditions (e.g., the word “square” combined with the shape of a circle) than in congruent conditions. The authors found the strongest incongruency effects for the dominant hemisphere—that is, the left hemisphere for responding to words and the right hemisphere for responding to shapes. A Shape Interfering Properties hypothesis (SIP) is a possible explanation for these results.     

Development of the Shape Bias During the Second Year

ABSTRACT. The shape bias is an attentional preference children show for the shape of an object over other aspects of the object in a word-learning context. This bias, which aids in establishing a word-object pairing, was investigated in 12-, 18-, and 24-month-old children (n = 90) across noun, adjective, and no-label conditions. The present research presents evidence of development across this time span; there was a transition from a label reducing the chance of shape extensions to indiscriminate shape extensions to a label increasing the chance of shape extensions. This research supports the notion that children are focusing their extensions more toward shape during the course of development thereby developing a more mature and more specialized shape bias.     

Test anxiety and comprehension efficiency: The role of prior knowledge and working memory deficits

The hypotheses that test anxiety is associated with a deficit in prior knowledge and/or working memory capacity, that anxiety impairs comprehension efficiency, and that deficits in knowledge and capacity underlie the efficiency impairment, were tested. In Study 1, high-anxiety students were characterized by lower scores in several vocabulary measures, compared with low-anxiety students. In Study 2, high-anxiety individuals showed inferior working memory capacity to low-anxiety individuals under evaluative stress conditions, but not under non-stress conditions. In Study 3 high-anxiety subjects exhibited lower efficiency scores than low-anxiety subjects in expository texts without a summary: The former employed a greater amount of reading time than the latter to acquire an equivalent amount of information. In addition, the disadvantage in efficiency associated with anxiety was removed when differences in vocabulary knowledge were partialled out statistically. Instead, that disadvantage was only reduced, but not eliminated, when differences in transitory working memory capacity were partialled out. Therefore, the prior knowledge deficit hypothesis accounts for the impairment in reading efficiency associated with high anxiety better than the transitory working memory reduction hypothesis.     

Book Review

Repetition priming is one of the most robust phenomena in cognitive psychology, but participants vary substantially on the amount of priming that they produce. The current experiments assessed the reliability of repetition priming within individuals. The results suggest that observed differences in the size of the repetition priming effect across participants are largely reliable and result primarily from systematic processes. We conclude that the unreliability of semantic priming observed by Stolz, Besner, and Carr (2005) is specific to uncoordinated processes in semantic memory, and that this unreliability does not generalize to other processes in visual word recognition. We consider the implications of these results for theories of automatic and controlled processes that contribute to priming. Finally, we emphasize the importance of reliability for researchers who use similar paradigms to study individual and group differences in cognition.