The nature of regularity and irregularity: evidence from Hebrew nominal inflection

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base's phonology (e.g., rat-rats), whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it (e.g., mouse-mice). The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that do not resemble existing nouns and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names (e.g., the Barak-Barakim), they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns (e.g., barak-brakim lightning), replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as regular or irregular different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.     

Center-of-pressure regularity as a marker for attentional investment in postural control: A comparison between sitting and standing postures

Postural control is a highly automatized basic activity that requires limited attentional investments. These investments have been shown to increase from balancing experts to controls, and from controls to persons with impaired postural control. Such between-subject comparisons led to a proposed direct relation between the regularity of center-of-pressure (COP) fluctuations and the amount of attention invested in posture. This study aims to expand this relation to a within-subject comparison of conditions that differ in balance demands. Specifically, more regular COP fluctuations were expected for standing than sitting, as stimulus-response reaction-time studies showed that the required attentional demands are lower for sitting than standing. COP registrations were made for fifteen healthy young adults in seated and standing postures. COP regularity was quantified with sample entropy. As expected, COP fluctuations were found to be more regular for standing than sitting, as evidenced by significantly lower sample entropy values. These findings expand the relation between COP regularity and the amount of attention invested in posture to postural tasks that vary in balance demands. An assessment of COP regularity may thus not only be instrumental in the examination of attentional investment in posture in between-subject designs, but also for different postures in within-subjects designs.     

Influenceability of Sex Differences under Conditions of Risk Taking

In an experiment on the effect of intensity accents on the perception of time intervals between tones. H. G. Tekman (2001) found that the regular placement of deviant time intervals in short sequences of tones reduced detection, especially if intensity accents marked the deviant time intervals. That was the opposite of what one wòuld have expected on the basis of the dynamic attending theory of M. R. Jones (1976). The effect might have occurred because temporally deviant tones create cumulative onset shifts that affect all the subsequent tones. If the deviations were randomly placed, then they could follow each other in close succession and change the local tempo. In the present study, the changes of local tempo, which might have acted as a cue for the detection of temporal deviations in the random sequences, were eliminated by compensating for deviant time intervals with equal deviations in the opposite direction in the interval that followed. That change in the stimuli eliminated the negative main effect of regularity, and the accenting interacted with regularity in favor of detection in the regular sequences. However, a simple advantage of regular over random sequences was not observed. The author discusses possible reasons for the lack of a facilitatory effect of regularity.     

道德信仰的演变及其规律性

道德信仰的演变既表现为共时态的亢进律、波动律、蜕变律,又表现为历时态的崇拜、服从、自由。两交织使道德信仰的演变呈现出复杂性。     

Regularity as a Form of Constraint

Regularity theories of causation are guided by the idea that causes are collectively sufficient for their effects. Following Mackie [1974], that idea is typically refined to distinguish collections that include redundant members from those that do not. Causes must be collectively sufficient for their effects without redundancy. While Mackie was surely right that the regularity theory must distinguish collections that are in some sense minimally sufficient for an effect from those that include unnecessary hangers-on, I believe that redundancy is the wrong mark of that distinction. I propose a way to develop the regularity theory without it. Instead of distinguishing minimal from mere sufficiency in terms of redundancy, we should look to the influence that events have in the world. Causes, so construed, must have just enough collective influence to ensure that an effect occurs. I argue that such an account provides a uniform solution to the problem of epiphenomena and to a pair of related problems that arise for prior iterations of the regularity theory.     

Spelling–stress regularity effects are intact in developmental dyslexia

The current experiment investigated conflicting predictions regarding the effects of spelling–stress regularity on the lexical decision performance of skilled adult readers and adults with developmental dyslexia. In both reading groups, lexical decision responses were significantly faster and significantly more accurate when the orthographic structure of a word ending was a reliable as opposed to an unreliable predictor of lexical stress assignment. Furthermore, the magnitude of this spelling–stress regularity effect was found to be equivalent across reading groups. These findings are consistent with intact phoneme-level regularity effects also observed in dyslexia. The paper discusses how findings of intact spelling–sound regularity effects at both prosodic and phonemic levels, as well as other similar results, can be reconciled with the obvious difficulties that people with dyslexia experience in other domains of phonological processing.     

学龄儿童汉语正字法意识发展的研究

该研究以小学一年级、三年级、五年级儿童及大学生为被试,让他们对左右、上下和半包围三种结构类型的９０个真字、假字和非字进行词汇判断,以探讨儿童正字法意识的发展,结构类型的相应影响,以及年龄对汉字识别中结构类型效应的作用。结果表明;（１）儿童正字法意识的形成是以识字为基础的逐步发展的过程。小学一年级儿童已萌发了正字法意识,但至五年级时才基本达到了成人水平。（２）只有小学一年级被试的真字识别受结构类型影响。汉字识别中是否存在结构类型效应可能与被试识字经验、材料熟悉性等因素有关．（３）年级内部正字法意识的萌发和年级之间正字法意识发展的差异不受结构类型的影响,但萌发之后各年级内部均是对左右结构汉字正字法意识优于上下结构和半包围结构。     

An examination of age-related changes in the control of lexical and sublexical pathways in mapping spelling to sound

The current study investigated the extent to which young and older adults are able to direct attention to distinct processes in mapping spelling onto sound. Young and older adults completed either a speeded pronunciation task (reading aloud words) or regularization task (pronouncing words based on spelling-to-sound correspondences, e.g., pronouncing PINT such that it rhymes with HINT) in order to bias processing of lexical, whole-word information, or sublexical, spelling-to-sound mapping, respectively. Both younger and older adults produced reduced word-frequency effects and lexicality effects in the regularization task compared to the normal pronunciation task. Importantly, compared to younger adults, older adults produced exaggerated effects of task (i.e., pronunciation vs. regularization) on the observed frequency and lexicality effects. These results highlight both the flexibility of the lexical processing system and changes in the influence of the underlying lexical route due to additional 50 years of reading experience and/or changes in attentional control.     

汉语形声字语音加工的前词汇通路

本文利用两个行为实验研究了汉语形声字语音加工的前词汇通路。实验-采用命名作业考察了规则性对汉字形声字语音加工的影响,发现在中、低频字中存在规则性效应;实验二考察了视觉对比度和规则性在形声字语音加工中的作用,发现二者存在显著的交互作用,表明汉字语音加工中也存在词汇前通路。作者还从双通道模型角度对实验结果进行了分析。     

汉字字形输出过程中儿童的汉字结构意识

本研究通过控制汉字声旁与形旁的结构特征,采用听写纸笔测验考察了小学四年级儿童在汉字字形输出过程中的汉字结构意识.结果发现汉字声旁的规则性与形旁语义透明度都直接影响听写的正确率与错误率;在这种任务条件下,声旁的规则性与形旁语义透明度相互作用;阅读水平低的儿童比阅读水平高的儿童产生更多的同音替代错误.文章从听写条件下汉字的加工与儿童词汇表征的角度探讨了这些结果的理论含义.