Processing relative clauses varying on syntactic and semantic dimensions: An analysis with event-related potentials

Event-related potentials were used to study how parsing of German relative clauses is influenced by semantic information. Subjects read well-formed sentences containing either a subject or an object relative clause and answered questions concerning the thematic roles expressed in those sentences. Half of the sentences contained past participles that on grounds of semantic plausibility biased either a subject or an object relative reading; the other half contained past participles that provided no semantic information favoring either reading. The past participle elicited an N400 component, larger in amplitude for neutral than for semantically biased verbs, but this occurred only in the case of subject relative clauses. More specific effects were obtained only for a subgroup of subjects, when these were grouped into fast and slow comprehenders on the basis of their questionanswering reaction times. Fast comprehenders showed larger N400 amplitudes for neutral than for semantically biased past participles in general and larger N400s for the latter when there was a bias for an object relative reading as opposed to a subject relative reading. Syntactic ambiguity resolution, indicated by an auxiliary in sentence final position, was associated in this subgroup with a positive component (P345), larger in amplitude for auxiliaries indicating an object relative reading than for those indicating a subject relative reading. The latter component was independent of semantically biasing information given by a preceding past participle. Implications of these findings for models of language comprehension are considered.     

On Assumptions of, Relations between, and Evaluations of Some Process Dissociation Measurement Models

In this article, we analyze both M. J. Wainwright and E. M. Reingold's (1996) view of the process dissociation measurement models presented by A. Buchner, E. Erdfelder, and B. Vaterrodt-Plunnecke (1995) and their suggestions on that topic. This analysis reveals a number of problems in Wainwright and Reingold's approach. Some of these problems are more subtle than others, but they are nevertheless consequential. Thus, researchers working with the process dissociation procedure should be aware of these problems.     

PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A TWO-PERSON MEDITATION: FREE ASSOCIATION,MEDITATION AND BION

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis - This paper is based on the commonality between free association and the practice of Buddhist meditation in light of the surprising fact that both great...     

The Ideological Foundations of Economic Protectionism: Authoritarianism,Social Dominance Orientation,and the Moderating Role of Political Involvement

Even though economic globalization and foreign trade are major topics in the political discourse of most societies and negative attitudes toward international trade are prevalent, there is a lack of research investigating the ideological roots of protectionist preferences from a psychological perspective. In the present research, we examined the implications of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) for trade attitudes. Using data from two nationally representative samples from the United States (Study 1) and Germany (Study 2), we found that RWA predicted protectionist attitudes above and beyond economic self-interest. Furthermore, we found that the relationship between RWA and opposition to international trade was moderated by political involvement. The association of SDO with protectionist attitudes was inconsistent across the two studies and was not moderated by political involvement. Taken together, these results emphasize the importance of basic ideological orientations and the psychological dispositions they reflect in explaining public attitudes toward international trade.     

Precise Worlds for Certain Minds: An Ecological Perspective on the Relational Self in Autism

Topoi - Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) presents a challenge to social and relational accounts of the self, precisely because it is broadly seen as a disorder impacting social relationships. Many...     

Priming visual face-processing mechanisms: electrophysiological evidence

Accumulated evidence from electrophysiology and neuroimaging suggests that face perception involves extrastriate visual mechanisms specialized in processing physiognomic features and building a perceptual representation that is categorically distinct and can be identified by face-recognition units. In the present experiment, we recorded event-related brain potentials in order to explore possible contextual influences on the activity of this perceptual mechanism. Subjects were first exposed to pairs of small shapes, which did not elicit any face-specific brain activity. The same stimuli, however, elicited face-specific brain activity after subjects saw them embedded in schematic faces, which probably primed the subjects to interpret the shapes as schematic eyes. No face-specific activity was observed when objects rather than faces were used to form the context. We conclude that the activity of face-specific extrastriate perceptual mechanisms can be modulated by contextual constraints that determine the significance of the visual input.     

Functional asymmetry of human prefrontal cortex: encoding and retrieval of verbally and nonverbally coded information

There are several views about the organization of memory functions in the human prefrontal cortex. One view assumes a process-specific brain lateralization according to different memory subprocesses, that is, encoding and retrieval. An alternative view emphasizes content-specific lateralization of brain systems involved in memory processes. This study addresses this apparent inconsistency between process- and content-specific lateralization of brain activity by investigating the effects of verbal and nonverbal encoding on prefrontal activations during encoding and retrieval of environmental novel sounds using fMRI. An intentional memory task was applied in which subjects were required either to judge the sounds' loudness (nonverbal encoding task) or to indicate whether or not a sound can be verbally described (verbal encoding task). Retrieval processes were examined in a subsequent yes/no recognition test. In the study phase the right posterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) was activated in both tasks. During verbal encoding additional activation of the left dorsolateral PFC was obtained. Retrieval-related fMRI activity varied as a function of encoding task: For the nonverbal task we detected an activation focus in the right posterior dorsolateral PFC whereas an activation in the left dorsolateral PFC was observed for the verbal task. These findings indicate that the right dorsolateral PFC is engaged in encoding of auditory information irrespective of encoding task. The lateralization of PFC activity during retrieval was shown to depend on the availability of verbal codes, with left hemispheric involvement for verbally and right hemispheric activation for nonverbally coded information.     

Word frequency of irrelevant speech distractors affects serial recall

In this study, participants memorized frequent or rare target words in silence or while ignoring frequent or rare distractor words. Distractor words impaired recall performance, but low-frequency distractor words caused more impairment than did high-frequency distractor words. We demonstrate how to solve the identifiability problem for Schweickert's (1993) multinomial processing tree model of immediate recall, and then use this model to show that irrelevant speech affected both the probability with which intact target word representations were available for serial recall and the probability of successful reconstruction of item identities based on degraded short-term memory traces. However, the type of irrelevant speech--low-versus high-frequency words--selectively affected the probability of intact target word representations. These results are consistent with an explanation of the irrelevant speech effect within the framework proposed by Cowan (1995), and they pose problems for other explanations of the irrelevant speech effect. The analyses also confirm the validity of Schweickert's process model.     

The contribution of the insula to motor aspects of speech production: a review and a hypothesis

Based on clinical and functional imaging data, the left anterior insula has been assumed to support prearticulatory functions of speech motor control such as the "programming" of vocal tract gestures. In order to further elucidate this model, a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of our group (Riecker, Ackermann, Wildgruber, Dogil, & Grodd, 200) investigated both overt (aloud) and covert (silent) production of highly overlearned word strings ("automatic speech"), based on the suggestion that "inner speech" might provide a "window" into preparatory motor activities (Jeannerod, 1994). As a control condition, subjects were asked to reproduce a nonlyrical tune. In contrast to hemodynamic responses within motor cortex and cerebellum, activation of the intrasylvian cortex turned out to be bound to overt task performance. Rather than prearticulatory processes, these findings suggest the left insula to contribute to the actual coordination of the up to 100 muscles engaged in articulation and phonation. Conceivably, the association of speech production with intrasylvian cortex might have evolved within the framework of phylogenetically older connections between the insula and limbic structures, on the one hand, and nonspeech functions of the upper midline musculature such as swallowing, on the other. Whereas (overt) speech tasks predominantly elicit activation within left anterior insula, reproduction of a nonlyrical tune yielded an opposite response pattern. Conceivably, the opposite distributional pattern of speaking and singing at the level of intrasylvian cortex reflects operation of the two hemispheres across different time domains ("double filtering by frequency theory": left hemisphere=segmental information, right hemisphere=intonation contours of verbal utterances and musical melodies; ). In line with this suggestion, a further study of our group (Ackermann et al., 2001) provided first evidence that differential hemispheric filtering might be bound to insular cortex.