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.     

A realist social ontology of religion

Jonathan Z. Smith famously pointed out that the concept of ‘religion’ is not universal but emerged only in the modern West. Several scholars have drawn from Smith the non-realist implication that the existence of religion apart from that concept is an illusion. The word ‘religion,’ they say, does not refer to something out there in the world. In this article, the author argues that Smith’s point is open to a realist interpretation according to which religion exists in the world, as a transhistorical and transcultural reality, even apart from the concept. To make this case, the author outlines and responds to non-realist positions that draw on genealogical, deconstructive, and linguistic arguments, as well as to the alternative proposal that ‘religion’ is simply a heuristic device. In short, the goal of this article is to argue that a realist social ontology provides the better understanding of the central theoretical term in our field.     

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments

Dual‐system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence‐arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind—manifested in low sympathetic activity—could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies. © 2016 The Authors Journal of Behavioral Decision Making Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

义符的类别一致性和家族大小影响形声字的语义加工

采用行为实验和眼动技术考察义符的类别一致性和家族大小对形声字语义加工的影响。结果发现：(1) 在一致性判断和视觉选择中均存在着字词水平的类别一致性效应, 义符同整字类别一致的字容易认知。(2) 义符的家族大小影响形声字的语义加工, 义符家族大, 汉语母语者对形声字的加工更容易采用形旁推理策略。(3) 义符家族的类别一致性影响形声字的语义加工。(4) 义符家族的类别一致性和家族大小效应受义符与整字的类别一致性调节。     

行动语义、客体背景和判断任务对客体动作承载性的影响

客体动作承载性指人们知觉客体时同时激活的针对客体的行动。当Gibson最初提出动作承载性概念时, 他认为客体的这种属性是可以自动激活的。然而近年来越来越多的证据显示, 在知觉和行动的关系中, 行动语义知识和客体所处背景对客体动作承载性具有调节作用, 表现在人们可以根据这些自上而下的信息选择针对客体的适当的行动。此外, 不同的判断任务在引发客体动作承载性效应上具有特异性, 表现在若判断任务仅需知觉客体表层属性时, 不能激活对客体的动作, 进而不能产生客体动作承载性; 若判断任务需要对客体进行深层加工时, 才会激活对客体的动作。未来研究还需要进一步探究行动语义知识和客体所处背景影响客体动作承载性发生的原因和机制, 以及不同判断任务中出现结果特异性的原因。     

中文词汇加工中的饱和现象

长时间注视一个字或词语后,感觉这个字词变得奇怪且陌生,这种现象称为饱和现象。本研究采用快速类别/词汇匹配范式,考察中文词汇加工中的饱和现象。实验1-3发现单纯的语义或字形的重复均未能引发饱和,只有类别标签在字形和语义上的同时重复才引发饱和,表明与英文饱和相似,中文饱和发生在字形加工和语义加工的联结阶段。实验4结果表明,中文饱和还能够由表义部件的重复引发,体现了中文饱和的特殊性。     

语音信息对不同水平中国英语学习者语义加工的影响

研究通过同音异义词对被试判断句子语义正误的干扰实验,来考查语音信息对不同英语水平的中国英语学习者语义加工的影响。实验结果发现,英语水平较高的中国被试所受到的同音异义词的干扰较大,而英语水平普通的被试受到的干扰很小。这一结果说明,英语学习者的水平越高,其语音信息的使用程度越高。