The processing and remembering of congruent and incongruent sentences

Complex sentences, withwhile, before, after, because, orin order to, and other presented clauses were to be conjoined together by using eitherand, orbut. Congruent cases, in which subjects were expected to respond withand, had shorter response latencies than incongruent cases, with expectedbut responses. This indicated a semantic incongruence effect. But the latter were remembered better, indicating a motivational salience effect due to contradiction of expectation. Whether the main clause preceded or followed the subordinate clause was not significant, in terms of either reponse latencies or sentence memory. Sentences withafter had faster response times than those withbefore, although identical constituent clauses were used.     

Cross-cultural componential analysis on affect attribution of emotion terms

One concern of studies of emotions is that of the underlying denotative components of the meanings of emotional terms, whether people are actually cognizant of them or not. In this study, we evaluated the characteristics of 10 emotional denotative components and their hierarchical ordering in attribution to 22 emotion concepts across 23 different human societies. Empirically, a quantitative model, developed by Tzeng and Osgood (1976), was used to link the relationship between affect measures of the emotion concepts and their characteristics on denotative components. It was found that the 10 denotative components functioned extremely well in predicting the affect for individual cultures and also for the 23 cultures as a whole. Cross-cultural comparisons revealed some significant differences among the components in predicting indigenous affect attributions for different cultures. Finally, the nature and dynamics of such intercultural differences were discussed in reference to the issue of independence between affect and cognition.This research was planned and carried out as a part of a cross-cultural research project of out laboratory. It was completed during Dr. Rumjahn Hoosain's visiting professorship at Purdue University School of Science at Indianapolis for his sabbatical leave from the University of Hong Kong. The authors wish to express their gratitude to our foreign colleagues who participated in the data collection for this study.     

Input/output switch in bilingual code switching

Chinese-English bilinguals were asked to read a passage with spontaneous bilingual code switchings, compared with a unilingual Chinese translation of the passage, a unilingual English translation, a translation with random switchings, and a translation with only nouns switched into English. There was no difference between the reading speed for the passage with natural switchings and the unilingual Chinese passage, thus questioning the need to postulate a bilingual imput/output switch. The speed for reading passages with artificial switchings was slower. In a translation task, the naturally switched items required less time in Chinese-to-English translations compared with English-to-Chinese translations. This indicates that in natural code switchings, the English lexical items produced were more available, even though English is generally the weaker language.     

Cerebral lateralization of bilingual functions after handedness switch in childhood

Chinese-English bilingual undergraduates who had been forced to switch their preferred hand from the left to the right during childhood were identified. In hemifield perception of Chinese and English words, ordinary left-handers and handedness-switch subjects showed a less strong left-hemisphere advantage when compared with right-handers. The latter showed a significant superiority in identifying words presented in the right visual field. Handedness switch during early childhood did not seem to affect lateralization of language functions, although other motor functions may be affected.     

Salience of the word as a unit in the perception of language

Seven interlocking experiments are reported in which both guessing and recognition thresholds for words are compared with those for other linguistic units both smaller than (nonword morphemes and trigrams) and larger than (nominal compounds, ordinary noun phrases, and nonsense compounds) the word. Thresholds were consistently lower for words than for morphemes or trigams (matched or even much higher in visual usage frequency) and lower for word-like nominal compounds (e.g.,stumbling block) than for ordinary noun phrases (copper block) or nonsense compounds (sympathy block). Prior exposure (through two correct recognitions) to ordinary noun phrases, nonsense compounds, and the constituent single words of nominal compounds significantly facilitated subsequent recognition of the single-word constituents, but prior exposure to nominal compounds had no effect whatsoever on subsequent recognition of their sin~e-word constituents. These results as a whole are interpreted as supporting the following conclusions: (1)that the word has special salience in the perception of language; (2)that the reason for this salience is the unique meaningfulness of the word (or the word-like nominal compound) as a whole; and (3) that the mechanism for this salience is the convergence of feedback from central mediational processes with feed-forward from peripheral sensory processes upon the integration of word-form percepts.     

Right hemisphere advantage in lexical decision with two-character Chinese words

It has been suggested that the right hemisphere advantage reported in the literature for single Chinese or kanji characters is the result of perceptual factors rather than unique linguistic features of the orthography. However, no similar right hemisphere advantage for two-character words has ever been found. This study reports on a right hemisphere advantage for high stroke number low frequency two-character Chinese words with short exposure time and low luminance. While there is support for the perceptual-factors explanation for some findings of right hemisphere advantage for Chinese, it is suggested that linguistic factors can still play a part.