The contribution of frequency and semantic similarity to morphological processing

This research investigated the role of frequency and semantic factors in the processing of morphologically complex words. Unaffixed targets were immediately preceded by either inflected or derived primes that were either high or low in frequency. In Experiment 1, low-frequency inflections and derivations produced equivalent priming effects, whereas high-frequency inflections produced more priming than derivations. In Experiment 2, both semantic and morphological priming varied as a function of SOA (50, 150, and 250 ms). The difference in priming of inflections and derivations increased as SOA increased. Results suggest that frequency and semantic similarity interactively modulate the magnitude of morphological priming and, by inference, affect the processing of morphologically complex words. Dual-route and connectionist accounts are discussed.     

Music as Thinking/Thinking as Music: A Dialogue with Mukund Lath

International Journal of Hindu Studies - This article offers a dialogue with Mukund Lath. It is comprised of three parts: Part One introduces Lath’s body of work. The second and third parts...     

When scowling may be a good thing: The influence of anger expressions on credibility

Emotion displays do not only signal emotions but also have social signal value. A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that expressing anger when complaining may lead to positive outcomes for the complainant because anger signals goal obstruction and hence the presence of real harm. The results suggest that the social signal value of anger enhances the credibility of the complainant and hence leads to better compensation, but only when the complaint itself presents room for doubt. For highly justified complaints the additional expression of anger does not add information and is discounted. In contrast, showing an affiliative‐smiling demeanor was found to enhance credibility for both types of complaints. Overall, the present research confirmed the important role of emotion expressions as social signals. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Estimating the validity of the guilty knowledge test from simulated experiments: the external validity of mock crime studies

This experiment was designed to examine the external validity of the standard mock-crime procedure used extensively to evaluate the validity of polygraph tests. The authors manipulated the type of mock-crime procedure (standard vs. a more realistic version) and the time of test (immediate vs. delayed) and examined their effects on the validity of the Guilty Knowledge Test (GKT) and the recall rate of the relevant items. The results indicated that only the type of mock-crime affected the 2 outcome variables. The realistic procedure was associated with a lower recall rate and weaker detection efficiency than the standard procedure. However, these effects were mediated by the type of GKT questions used. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

On the process of recognizing inverted words: Does it rely only on orientation-invariant cues?

Following a demonstration by Parks (1983) of failure to notice the reflection of a letter of an inverted word, two experiments were conducted to test a hypothesis about the process of recognizing inverted words that is termed here invariant cues only (ICO)-a letter-by-letter identification process based only on orientation-invariant letter features. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with whole strings-words and nonwords, either upright or inverted-in which either all the letters were normal or one of the letters was reflected, and they were asked to make lexical decisions. In Experiment 2, subjects made a reflection judgment about an upright or inverted letter within a string immediately after they had been presented with the other, nonreflected string letters, again either upright or inverted. The results do not support the ICO hypothesis: Lexical decisions were greatly affected by the reflection of a letter in upright and inverted stimuli alike. Reflection judgments were considerably facilitated by word context in the upright and the inverted modes alike. The results are accommodated better by the notion that recognition of disoriented words requires some correction used to restore orientation-sensitive features.     

The influence of morphological regularities on the dynamics of a connectionist network.

The effects of morphological regularities on the behavior of connectionist networks were studied by training identical networks on orthographic-semantic mappings that either contained such regularities or did not. Morphological regularities had a substantial impact on both the amount of training needed to learn a mapping and the number of words that could be included in the training set. A variety of analyses demonstrated how morphological regularities structure the organization and componentiality of a network's internal representations.     

That in the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Martyā</Emphasis> Which is <Emphasis Type="Italic">Amṛta</Emphasis>: a Dialog with Ramchandra Gandhi

This philosophical meditation, which deals with death as question, presence, and even teacher, begins with Ramchandra Gandhi’s (RCG’s) penetrating essay ‘On Meriting Death.’ What does it mean ‘to merit’ death? To provide an answer, I travel through RCG’s corpus, in dialog with contemporary theorists such as Sri Aurobindo, Daya Krishna, and Mukund Lath. RCG implies that the question about ‘meriting’ death, and life, is not and cannot be ‘personal’ or ‘isolated’. For X to die, is for his close and distant samāj a matter of losing him and living without him. Hence meriting death, as also life, is a joint venture which involves deep understanding regarding non-isolation as the heart of the human situation. RCG’s creative thinking, or svarāj in ideas, reaches its peak when he dares to offer an answer of his own to the piercing question kim ā?caryam, ‘what is amazing?’ raised in the Yak?a-pra?na episode of the Mahābhārata. For RCG, the heart of the matter is not the ‘ungraspability’ of one’s unavoidable death, or the perennial search for ‘permanence’ in vain, but our failure to perceive ‘that in the martyā which is am?ta,’ i.e., a sense of solidarity in the face of death, connecting ‘I and Thou,’ which he derives from the icchā m?tyu of his grandfather, the famous Mahatma.     

Stress factors,social support,and violence in Israeli society: A quantitative analysis

In the present study violence in Israel for a period of 32 years (1950-1981) was analyzed, within a stress model according to which the probability of violence and agression as a reaction to stress will increase when social support systems fail or malfunction. Following this model, three types of variables were identified: 1. Measures of stress and social change: to the regular social stressors (i.e., inflation and unemployment), we added two measures of affluence (income per capita and rates of cars) as well as population density. 2. Measures of social support: rates of birth to unmarried mothers and marriage and divorce rates served as measures of the strength of the family. Another measure in this category was rates of psychiatric hospitalization. 3. Measures of violence: in addition to rates of homicide, robbery, and all offenses, inward directed aggression (suicide) was included in this category. At the first stage of the data analysis, Guttman's Smallest Space Analysis (SSA-1) was applied, providing a two-dimensional space diagram of the correlations between the variables. At the second stage, a multiple regression analysis was introduced. The findings indicate that the theoretical model received substantial support mainly from four stress measures (inflation, income per capita, cars, and population density) and one measure of social support (divorce). Unemployment contributed significantly (in the expected direction) only to homicide. Some theoretical implications of the findings, as well as their relevance to some developments in Israeli society are discussed, and suggestions are made for future research.