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The present study presents a standardized database of 348 affective in the Greek language, including pleasant and unpleasant nouns and adjectives, and neutral adjectives in Greek language. The norms are based on the ratings made by 229 native Greek speaking young adults on affective (emotionality, valence, arousal, dominance) and psycho-linguistic dimensions (ambiguity, abstraction, imageability, familiarity) of the words. The words were selected and translated from four different sources, including the Affective Norms for English words (Bradley, M. M., & Lang, P. J. (1999). Affective norms for English words (ANEW): Instruction manual and affective ratings. Technical report C-1, the center for research in psychophysiology), the Affective Norms for Polish words (Imbir, Behavior Research Methods 47:860-870, 2015), the Norms of valence and arousal for English words (Warriner et al., Behavior Research Methods 45:1191-1207, 2013) and from the Greek lexicon of New Greek Language (Mpampiniotis, Leksiko tis Neas Ellinikis Glossas (Dictionary of the Contemporary Greek Language), Kentro Leksikologias, Athens, 2002). The participants assessed an average of 70 words through an online survey procedure. Results present the affective and psycholinguistic features of the words. Also, results provide associations between affective and psycholinguistic aspects of the word stimuli. Hence, the study produces insights on the effects of psycho-linguistic parameters of word stimuli on the affective ones and their interactions, by combining evaluations of valence and arousal and/or including ratings for affective and psycholinguistic dimensions of the words. As such, the current study offers a valuable resource that enables researchers working with Greek speaking populations to control or manipulate the affective or psycho-linguistic dimensions of words in different experimental paradigms, adjust them to specific experimental questions or issues of interest, and extract more accurate findings and conclusions. The newly developed database is freely available for researchers and can be found here: http://dx.doi.org/10.23668/psycharchives.5079, Author(s): Potheini Vaiouli [sup.1] , Maria Panteli [sup.1] , Georgia Panayiotou [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.6603.3, 0000000121167908, Department of Psychology and Center for Applied Neuroscience, University of Cyprus, , New [...]

The present article exhibits the use of a linguistic multiple-choice questionnaire format for evoking relational triangulation performances while examining whether between-subject variability in such performances might be adequate to relate to variability in other perspective-taking performances and proclivities. Verbally competent adults (N = 32) were administered a pilot nine-item linguistic relational triangulation questionnaire (RTQ-MST9) with three three-item subscales pertaining to triangulations of material, spatial, and temporal perspectives. Nonlinguistic behavioral measures of perspective-taking training fluency and derivation performances were drawn from an operant, match-to-sample (MTS), visuospatial relational triangulation perspective-taking protocol (RT-PTP). Participants also completed the linguistic Barnes-Holmes Perspective Taking Protocol (BH-PTP) to evoke verbal perspective taking performances in terms of deictic relational framing. Participants furthermore completed the linguistic Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), a widely used self-report measure of general perspective taking proclivities. Whereas the material subscale of the RTQ-MST9 did not evidence associations in correlational analyses, the spatial and temporal subscales were associated with certain aspects of perspective taking on the RT-PTP, BH-PTP, and IRI. The number of observed significant correlations was reliably above what would be expected on the basis of chance alone. However, it must be cautioned that the particular correlational results of this study should be held lightly as the present sample size is limited and there were no corrections for familywise error rate. Instead, the findings suggest in general terms that linguistic questionnaires of relational triangulation may be a viable methodology for evoking and measuring variable performances in verbal perspective taking in future studies. Keywords perspective taking * theory of mind * deixis * relational triangulation * derived relations * relational frame theory, The relational triangulation (RT) framework (Guinther, 2017, 2018a, 2018b, 2021) is an account of verbal perspective taking based in relational frame theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes et al., 2001). As described [...]

The purpose of this study was to determine if Bloom-based Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) instruction could enhance EFL learners' use of the speech act of request. Based on their OQPT scores, 43 students were assigned to a control group (n=23) and a treatment group (n=20). A written discourse completion task (WDCT) was developed to measure participants' use of the speech act of request before and after the intervention. The results pointed to a significant difference between the performance of the treatment group in which Bloom-based treatment supported by Vygotskian scaffolding was employed and the control group which received no explicit ILP instruction. The treatment group also yielded significant gains from the pretest to posttest and to delayed posttest, while no significant improvement was observed in the performance of the control group. In-depth examination of the participants' WDCT performance indicated that the four pragmatics factors (correct use of speech acts, type of expressions, amount of information, and degree of politeness) measured in this study, improved significantly, but differentially, from the pretest to delayed posttest. Comparison of the pretest and posttest data suggested that the component of degree of politeness enjoyed the highest degree of gain followed by amount of information, correct use of speech acts and type of expression., Author(s): Shiva Kaivanpanah [sup.1] , Mostafa Taghizadeh Langari [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.46072.37, 0000 0004 0612 7950, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University [...]

Animacy effects in memory correspond to the observation that animates (e.g., cow) are remembered better than inanimates (e.g., pencil). Although the ultimate explanation of these effects seems to be well-documented, clear evidence that would support one or other of the proximate explanations of animacy effects has proven difficult to obtain. Here, we focused on the richness-of-encoding account of animacy effects in memory, which assumes that animates are recalled better than inanimates because the former are encoded with many more distinct associations with other items (i.e., richer memory traces) than the latter. Our goal was to provide further evidence for this account by replicating and extending the analyses of Meinhardt, Bell, Buchner, and Röer (2020) showing that more ideas are generated in response to animate than inanimate words and, importantly, that this generation process mediates the better recall of animates over inanimates. In line with the richness-of-encoding account, we successfully replicated the finding that more ideas were produced in response to animates than inanimates. Even though there is some evidence that the generation of ideas mediates animacy effects in memory, we also report findings from reanalyses of previous studies (Bonin et al., Experimental Psychology, 62, 371-384, Bonin et al., 2015 (See CR9); Gelin et al., Memory, 25, 2-18, Gelin et al., 2017 (See CR18); Gelin et al., Memory, 27, 209-223, Gelin et al., 2019 (See CR19)) which-although supporting mediation-show that the number of ideas generated in response to animate and inanimate words cannot reliably predict memory of these words when they are learned in different encoding contexts., Author(s): Patrick Bonin [sup.1] , Gaëtan Thiebaut [sup.1] , Aurélia Bugaiska [sup.1] , Alain Méot [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.493090.7, 0000 0004 4910 6615, Univ. Bourgogne Franche-Comté, LEAD-CNRS UMR5022, , [...]

With the prevalence of online shopping, product presentation tactics, especially text descriptions, are particularly significant in attracting consumers. Of current text description styles, pallid and vivid styles predominate. However, it is not entirely clear how these description styles affect consumer utilitarian attitude and purchase intention. Addressing this gap, two online experiments were conducted to support a moderated mediation model based on the elaboration likelihood model. The results reveal that the effect of text description style on utilitarian attitude is contingent upon message involvement and that utilitarian attitude in turn affects purchase intention. Compared to pallid text description, vivid text description has a more positive effect on consumer utilitarian attitude and subsequent purchase intention in low message involvement conditions. However, pallid description has a greater influence on consumer utilitarian attitude and subsequent purchase intention in high message involvement scenarios. Demonstrating the critical role of message involvement in the effectiveness of different text description styles, this study discusses both the theoretical and managerial applications of these results., Author(s): Fei-Si Yao [sup.1] , Jing-Bo Shao [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.19373.3f, 0000 0001 0193 3564, School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, , 13 Fayuan Street, Nangang District, Harbin, [...]

In 1986, Nils Christie proposed that the ideal victim is worthy of sympathy because he or she possesses specific characteristics. Since that time, numerous social scientists have used his ideal victim construct to guide their research. However, few empirical studies have explored whether laypersons use the ideal victim construct to guide their thinking about victims. This study collected and analyzed victim descriptions to empirically explore how people conceptualize victims. Participants were asked to describe either legitimate or illegitimate victims. Then, linguistic analyses were conducted on these descriptions. Legitimate victim descriptions closely aligned with Christie's ideal victim construct, focusing on concepts such as innocence, vulnerability, experiencing harm, and helplessness. Sympathy-laden language was used in legitimate victim descriptions. Illegitimate victims were described as individuals who failed to be true victims or as phonies. This study provides insight into how laypeople think about victims and provides data-driven support for the ideal victim construct., Author(s): Jerome A. Lewis [sup.1] , James C. Hamilton [sup.2] , J. Dean Elmore [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.441585.9, 0000 0000 9766 3468, Bellevue University, , Bellevue, NE, USA (2) [...]

The current study used artificial intelligence to create a personality profile of pseudocommandos based on language used in their writings. Pseudocommandos are mass murderers who are obsessed with weapons and meticulously plan their attack. The data source was the writings of 11 male pseudocommandos from the United States, of whom 7 committed suicide at the time of the attack. Manifestos and other writing samples by pseudocommandos were collected online in the public domain and analysed using IBM Watson Personality Insights. Results indicated pseudocommandos scored higher than the general population on Openness to experience, and lower than the general population on Extraversion and Agreeableness. No difference was found between pseudocommandos and the general population on Neuroticism or Conscientiousness. Facet-level analysis generally indicated a similar direction of results. This study lays foundations for a novel, post hoc approach to examining this previously unknowable group., Author(s): Madeline Kop [sup.1] , Paul Read [sup.1] , Benjamin R. Walker [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.1002.3, 0000 0004 1936 7857, School of Psychological Sciences, Monash University, , Melbourne, Australia [...]

Emotional load assessment of the written words has gained considerable interest in psycholinguistics, semantics, and analysis of psychophysiological and electrophysiological correlates of emotional processing. Considering the lack of a publicly available database with affective ratings of contemporary verbal stimuli obtained from native Turkish speakers, we present the affective norms for two datasets of Turkish words carefully adapted from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database. The valence and arousal ratings are obtained from 61 college-aged participants for 127 highly arousing, emotionally-loaded words in the Adapted Turkish Affective List (ATAL). The ATAL ratings show a tendency of classifying fewer words as positive compared to the original list of stimuli, significantly higher arousal levels for positively rated Turkish stimuli compared to the negative and neutral words, and more congruence in arousal levels of positively exciting words. For the medium to high arousing 508 words in the Expanded Turkish Affective List (ETAL) that cover the whole 9-point spectrum of the valence dimension, 136 Turkish respondents from a wider age, education, and occupation background show higher excitability towards highly unpleasant words. Strong cross-linguistic correlations of + 0.968 between the valence ratings of ANEW and ATAL and + 0.878 for ANEW and ETAL demonstrate the ease of transferring and perceiving the valence levels across English and Turkish. The medium correlation of roughly + 0.450 between the English and Turkish arousal ratings account for lower excitation levels perceived by the native Turkish speakers and indicate the arousal dimension is similar to familiarity and originality in exhibiting more variations between different cultures. These findings demonstrate that this expanded database of partial affective normative ratings can be used as the ground truth for emotional and neurocognitive assessments, and that the presented methodology can be utilized for developing a comprehensive Turkish affective lexicon. The utilized word selection criteria also enable a cross-cultural analysis of adapted words in Turkish and other languages. Detailed normative ratings of this Turkish adaptation are included in the supplementary materials., Author(s): Mastaneh Torkamani-Azar [sup.1] , Sumeyra Demir Kanik [sup.1] , Ayse Tuba Vardan [sup.1] [sup.2] , Cagla Aydin [sup.3] , Mujdat Cetin [sup.1] [sup.4] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000 0004 0637 [...]

This study examined facial expressions produced during a British Sign Language (BSL) narrative task (Herman et al., International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 49(3):343-353, 2014) by typically developing deaf children and deaf children with autism spectrum disorder. The children produced BSL versions of a video story in which two children are seen to enact a language-free scenario where one tricks the other. This task encourages elicitation of facial acts signalling intention and emotion, since the protagonists showed a range of such expressions during the events portrayed. Results showed that typically developing deaf children produced facial expressions which closely aligned with native adult signers' BSL narrative versions of the task. Children with ASD produced fewer targeted expressions and showed qualitative differences in the facial actions that they produced., Author(s): Tanya Denmark [sup.1] [sup.2] , Joanna Atkinson [sup.2] , Ruth Campbell [sup.2] , John Swettenham [sup.1] Author Affiliations: (Aff1) 0000000121901201, grid.83440.3b, Division of Psychology and Language Science, Department of [...]

Responding by exclusion, usually investigated using a baseline of auditory-visual conditional discriminations for which auditory samples are names, is a robust phenomenon; however, it lacks generality to other lexical word classes. This study had two purposes: (1) to assess the generality of learning by exclusion to word-object property relations, and (2) to evaluate the effect of additive exclusion trials on learning outcomes. Children (aged 24 to 29 months) were taught auditory-visual baselines for three object name-object relations (Noun condition) and/or three adjective (emotion) names-facial expressions relations (Adjective condition). Each baseline and its associated tests were presented sequentially; the order was counterbalanced across participants. After baseline performance met criterion, exclusion, control, and learning outcome trials in extinction were intermixed with reinforced baseline trials, and followed by additive reinforced exclusion trials and learning outcome tests. More trials to criterion were required to establish the Adjective baseline, but the exclusion and learning outcome results of both conditions were comparable, suggesting that responding and learning by exclusion have generality across stimulus (lexical) types. Additive exclusion trials increased learning outcomes, especially for one type of learning probe. The necessary and sufficient tests to determine learning outcomes of exclusion responding still deserve discussion and investigation. Keywords Exclusion responding * Learning by exclusion * Adjectives * Young children, The presence of a novel stimulus amidst other familiar stimuli is one condition that can potentially facilitate word learning (Carey & Bartlett, 1978; Vincent-Smith, Bricker, & Bricker, 1974). Over the [...]

The current study examined delays in syntax and morphology, and vocabulary, in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children ages 4-6 years with ASD (n = 21) and typical development (n = 21), matched on nonverbal mental age, completed five language tasks. The ASD group had significant delays in both syntax and morphology, and vocabulary measures, with significant within-group heterogeneity; furthermore, syntactic and morphological measures were impaired even for subgroups matched on vocabulary. Children in the ASD group without early language delay showed syntactic and morphological impairment, with intact performance on vocabulary and sentence repetition. Findings indicate that syntactic and morphological impairments are a significant concern for high-functioning children with ASD, and may be overlooked if language evaluation focuses exclusively on vocabulary., Author(s): Cecilia Brynskov [sup.1] , Inge-Marie Eigsti [sup.2] , Meta Jørgensen [sup.3] , Sanne Lemcke [sup.3] , Ocke-Schwen Bohn [sup.4] [sup.5] , Peter Krøjgaard [sup.1] [sup.5] Author Affiliations: (1) 0000 [...]

Embodied theories of language propose that word meaning is inextricably tied to--grounded in--mental representations of perceptual, motor, and affective experiences of the world. The four experiments described in this article demonstrate that accessing the meanings of action verbs like smile, punch, and kick requires language understanders to activate modality-specific cognitive representations responsible for performing and perceiving those same actions. The main task used is a word--image matching task, where participants see an action verb and an image depicting an action. Their task is to decide as quickly as possible whether the verb and the image depict the same action. Of critical interest is participants' behavior when the verb and image do not match, in which case the two actions can use the same effector or different effectors. In Experiment 1, we found that participants took significantly longer to reject a verb--image pair when the actions depicted by the image and denoted by the verb used the same effector than when they used different effectors. Experiment 2 yielded the same result when the order of presentation was reversed, replicating the effect in Cantonese. Experiment 3 replicated the effect in English with a verb--verb near-synonym task, and in Experiment 4, we once again replicated the effect with learners of English as a second language. This robust interference effect, whereby a shared effector slows discrimination, shows that language understanders activate effector-specific neurocognitive representations during both picture perception and action word understanding. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.7.969

We explore the adequacy of two types of similarity representation in the context of semantic concepts. To this end, we evaluate different categorization models, assuming either a geometric or a featural representation, using categorization decisions involving familiar and unfamiliar foods and animals. The study aims to assess the optimal stimulus representation as a function of the familiarity of the stimuli. For the unfamiliar stimuli, the geometric categorization models provide the best account of the categorization data, whereas for the familiar stimuli, the featural categorization models provide the best account. This pattern of results suggests that people rely on perceptual information to assign an unfamiliar stimulus to a category but rely on more elaborate conceptual knowledge when assigning a familiar stimulus. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.7.962

The degree to which phonological codes constrain handwriting is at present controversial. Two experiments used a picture--word interference paradigm in which participants wrote down the names of pictures while attempting to ignore visual distractor words presented at various time intervals (SOAs). Distractors could be orthographically and phonologically related, orthographically related only, or unrelated. We found an exclusive effect of phonology at an early SOA, and orthographic priming at a later SOA. In a second experiment, we showed that the effect of phonology was diminished when writers engaged in concurrent articulatory suppression. The results suggest a role of phonology in the generation of handwritten words that is to some extent dependent on situational circumstances. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.4.519

We present two masked priming lexical decision experiments in which we examined whether a nonword prime word would activate associative/semantic information from its corresponding addition neighbor (e.g., lght--DARK via the addition neighbor light), producing associative/semantic priming. The rationale was the following: If a nonword prime with a missing letter produced a semantic/associative priming effect, this would clearly indicate that this nonword was activating the lexical/semantic representations of its base word, thereby reinforcing the models of visual-word recognition in which the orthographic representations produced by lght (or ligt) and light are quite similar (e.g., SOLAR, SERIOL, open-bigram, and overlap models). The results showed that the magnitude of the masked associative priming effect with subset primes was remarkably similar to that of the priming effect with the corresponding word prime. Furthermore, the magnitude of the associative priming effect was similar when the deleted letter was a vowel and when the deleted letter was a consonant. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.4.513

Memory conjunction errors occur when aspects of two different events are falsely recognized or recalled as having occurred as parts of the same event. One theoretical account of conjunction errors is rooted in traditional dual-process models of recognition judgments, in which responses are based on an item's familiarity or the retrieval of recollected details associated with the encoding of that item. We manipulated the familiarity of test probes by varying their semantic overlap with studied items, taking advantage of the inherent semantic transparency of compound words. Transparent compounds are those whose component parts (lexemes) are semantically related to the meaning of the entire word. In contrast, opaque compounds' lexemes do not contribute directly to the meaning of the compound. We showed that the familiarity of semantically transparent assembly lures created from their lexemes (study dog and house, test on doghouse) is greater than the familiarity of opaque assembly lures (study back and draw, test on drawback). A response-signal experiment revealed no evidence for the use of a recall-to-reject process for either semantically transparent or opaque lures. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.1.47

The present study identified two aspects of complexity that have been manipulated in the implicit learning literature and investigated how they affect implicit and explicit learning of artificial grammars. Ten finite state grammars were used to vary complexity. The results indicated that dependency length is more relevant to the complexity of a structure than is the number of associations that have to be learned. Although implicit learning led to better performance on a grammaticality judgment test than did explicit learning, it was negatively affected by increasing complexity: Performance decreased as there was an increase in the number of previous letters that had to be taken into account to determine whether or not the next letter was a grammatical continuation. In particular, the results suggested that implicit learning of higher order dependencies is hampered by the presence of longer dependencies. Knowledge of first-order dependencies was acquired regardless of complexity and learning mode.

Nairne, Thompson, and Pandeirada (2007) demonstrated a striking phenomenon: Words rated for relevance to a grasslands survival scenario were remembered better than identical words encoded under other deep processing conditions. Having replicated this effect using a novel set of words (Experiment 1), we contrasted the schematic processing and evolutionary accounts of the recall advantage (Experiment 2). Inconsistent with the schematic processing account, the grasslands survival scenario produced better recall than did a city survival scenario requiring comparable schematic processing. Recall in the grasslands scenario was unaffected by a self-reference manipulation. The findings are consistent with an evolutionary account that attributes the recall advantage to adaptive memory biases.

Syntactically ambiguous sentences are sometimes read faster than disambiguated strings. Models of parsing have explained this tendency by appealing either to a race in the construction of alternative structures or to reanalysis. However, it is also possible that readers of ambiguous sentences save time by strategically underspecifying interpretations of ambiguous attachments. In a self-paced reading study, participants viewed sentences with relative clauses that could attach to one of two sites. Type of question was also manipulated between participants in order to test whether goals can influence reading/parsing strategies. The experiment revealed an ambiguity advantage in reading times, but only when participants expected superficial comprehension questions. When participants expected queries about relative clause interpretation, disambiguating regions were inspected with more care, and the ambiguity advantage was attenuated. However, even when participants expected relative clause queries, question-answering times suggested underspecified representations of ambiguous relative clause attachments. The results support the construal and 'good-enough' models of parsing.

Studies in several languages have shown that subject-relative clauses are easier to process than object-relative clauses. Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2006) have proposed the topichood hypothesis to account for the preference for subject-relative clauses. This hypothesis claims that the entity in the relative clause that is most topicworthy will be chosen as the subject. By default, the antecedent of the relative clause will be chosen as the subject of the relative clause, because it is the topic of the relative clause. However, when the noun phrase (NP) in the relative clause is also topicworthy, the preference for the antecedent to be the subject will disappear. This was confirmed in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested relative clauses with a personal pronoun in the relative clause. We obtained a preference for object-relative clauses, in line with the assumption that personal pronouns refer to a discourse topic and are thus topicworthy. In Experiment 2, the discourse status of the NP in the relative clause was manipulated; either it was not present in the preceding context, or it was the discourse topic. The experiment showed that when the NP in the relative clause refers to the discourse topic, the difficulty of object-relative clauses is reduced, in comparison with relative clauses with an NP that is new in the discourse, even in the absence of any explicit cue in the relative clause itself. The experiments show that discourse factors guide processing at the sentence level.

In contrast to prior research, our results demonstrate that it is possible to acquire rich, highly accurate, and quickly accessed knowledge of an artificial grammar. Across two experiments, we trained participants by using a string-edit task and highlighting relatively low-level (letters), medium-level (chunks), or high-level (structural; Le., grammar diagram) information to increase the efficiency of grammar acquisition. In both experiments, participants who had structural information available during training generated more highly accurate strings during a cued generation test than did those in other conditions, with equivalent speed. Experiment 2 revealed that structural information enhanced acquisition only when relevant features were highlighted during the task using animation. We suggest that two critical components for producing enhanced performance from provided model-based knowledge involve (1) using the model to acquire experience-based knowledge, rather than using a representation of the model to generate responses, and (2) receiving that knowledge precisely when it is needed during training.

The activation--selection model (ASM) of determining the meaning of an ambiguous word is unique in that it is able to account for the long-term effects of meaning selection without an explicit mechanism for suppressing the representation of the nonselected meaning. The model assumes that a meaning is selected when a threshold number of attributes associated with that particular meaning are activated. When a meaning is selected, the ASM assumes that the weights of the attributes that are associated with the chosen meaning are increased. This two-phase process (transient activation followed by long-term weight changes) provides a mechanism by which meaning selection at one time can affect meaning selection at a much later time. The ASM can explain the results of the presently reported experiments, in which the meaning selected for a homophone presented in an unbiased context is affected by multiple previous presentations of the homophone in different contexts. In particular, although participants who are initially oriented toward the secondary meaning of a homophone show an increased proportion of dominant responses when next primed by the dominant meaning of the homophone, the proportion of dominant responses decreases to below baseline levels when the homophone is later presented in a neutral context, indicating the lasting influence of the initial secondary meaning context.

We used a deadline procedure to investigate how time pressure may influence the processes involved in picture naming. The deadline exaggerated errors found under naming without deadline. There were also category differences in performance between living and nonliving things and, in particular, for animals versus fruit and vegetables. The majority of errors were visually and semantically related to the target (e.g., celery-asparagus), and there was a greater proportion of these errors made to living things. Importantly, there were also more visual-semantic errors to animals than to fruit and vegetables. In addition, there were a smaller number of pure semantic errors (e.g., nut-bolt), which were made predominantly to nonliving things. The different kinds of error were correlated with different variables. Overall, visual-semantic errors were associated with visual complexity and visual similarity, whereas pure semantic errors were associated with imageability and age of acquisition. However, for animals, visual-semantic errors were associated with visual complexity, whereas for fruit and vegetables they were associated with visual similarity. We discuss these findings in terms of theories of category-specific semantic impairment and models of picture naming.

The use of repeated expressions to establish coreference allows an investigation of the relationship between basic processes of word recognition and higher level language processes that involve the integration of information into a discourse model. In two experiments on reading, we used eye tracking and event-related potentials to examine whether repeated expressions that are coreferential within a local discourse context show the kind of repetition priming that is shown in lists of words. In both experiments, the effects of lexical repetition were modulated by the effects of local discourse context that arose from manipulations of the linguistic prominence of the antecedent of a coreferentially repeated name. These results are interpreted within the context of discourse prominence theory, which suggests that processes of coreferential interpretation interact with basic mechanisms of memory integration during the construction of a model of discourse.

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of letter location information in recognition memory judgments. The experiments used the recognition without identification paradigm (Peynircioglu, 1990), in which participants first attempt to identify the test item and then make a recognition decision as to whether or not the item was studied. In these studies, items that are not identified but that correspond to items that were presented are typically still rated as more likely to have been studied than those that were not presented. The present experiments demonstrated this finding with a variant of the conjunction lure paradigm. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were tested with word fragments that were made from the letters of two words. When the letters were from studied items, fragments were rated higher than when the test items were derived from two unstudied items, or one studied item and one unstudied item, suggesting that recognition without identification is prone to the same types of errors as recognition with identification. Results are discussed in terms of familiarity effects in recognition memory.

We report an eyetracking study investigating the effects of linguistic focus on eye movements and memory during two readings of a text. Across two presentations of the text, a critical word either changed to a semantically related word or remained unchanged. Focus on the critical word was manipulated using context. Eye movements were monitored during reading, and there was a secondary task of detecting the word change. Results indicated that when a word changed, participants were more successful at detecting it when it was in focus. In the second display, there were more fixations and longer viewing times on a changed than on an unchanged word, but only when the critical word was in focus; eye movement data for changed and unchanged words did not differ when the word was not in focus. We suggest that linguistic focus leads to more detailed lexical semantic representations but not more effortful initial encoding of information.

Performance in two experiments was compared on a list of words of high and low frequency in which familiarity/meaningfulness (FM) was balanced and on a list of high- and low-frequency words in which FM was confounded with frequency (i.e., high frequency-high familiarity vs. low frequency-low familiarity). Both repetition and task (lexical decision and naming) were investigated. In the lexical decision task of Experiment 1, both frequency and repetition effects were larger in the list with FM confounded than in the list with FM matched. In the naming task, frequency and repetition effects and their interaction were significant, but there was no influence of FM list context. In Experiment 2, in which the repetitions occurred across blocks, as opposed to randomly intermixed within a list, similar results were found; however, there was no interaction between list and repetition. The results suggest that an evaluation of items in terms of their meaning and familiarity explains a large part of the variance, only in lexical decision. These dimensions may be cued both by subjective feelings of familiarity and the extent to which semantic information is available and by episodic traces due to recent encounters with the item.

In an eye movement experiment, we examined the use of reanalysis strategies during the reading of locally ambiguous but globally unambiguous Spanish sentences. Among other measures, we examined regressive eye movements made while readers were recovering in reading mild garden path sentences. The sentences had an adverbial clause that, depending on the mood (indicative vs. subjunctive) of the subordinate clause verb, could attach high (to the main verb of the sentence) or low (to the verb in the subordinate clause). Although Spanish speakers favor low attachment, the high attachment version was quite easy to understand. Readers predominately used two alternative strategies to recover from the mild garden path in our sentences. In the more common reanalysis strategy, theft eyes regressed from the last region (disambiguation+1) directly to the main verb in the sentence. Following this, they reread the rest of the sentence, fixating the next region and the adverb (the beginning of the ambiguous part of the sentence). Less frequently, readers regressed from the last region (disambiguation+1) directly to the adverb. We argue that both types of strategies are consistent with a selective reanalysis process as described by Frazier and Rayner (1982).

Results from two separate norming studies of lexical access in Italian were merged, permitting a comparison of word-reading and picture-naming latencies and the factors that predict each one for an overlapping subsample of 128 common nouns. Factor analysis of shared lexical predictors yielded four latent variables: a frequency factor, a semantic factor, a length factor, and a final factor dominated by frication on the initial phoneme. Age of acquisition (AoA) loaded highly on the first two factors, suggesting that it can be split into separate sources of variance. Regression analyses using factor scores as predictors showed that word reading and picture naming are both influenced by the frequency/AoA factor. The semantics/AoA factor influenced only picture naming, whereas the length and frication factors influenced only word reading. Generalizability of these results to other languages is discussed, including potential effects of cross-language differences in orthographic transparency.

Word frequency can produce opposite effects on recognition and order memory: Low-frequency words produce greater recognition accuracy, whereas high-frequency words produce superior order memory. The present experiments further delineate the relationship between word frequency and order memory. Experiment 1 indicates that low-frequency words produce worse performance on a measure of absolute order memory but not on a test of relative order, which is consistent with the idea that different forms of information underlie different types of order judgments (Greene, Thapar, & Westerman, 1998). Experiment 2 contrasted high-, low-, and very low-frequency words on recognition memory and absolute order memory. In comparison with high-frequency words, low-frequency words enhanced recognition, whereas very low-frequency words did not. Both low- and very low-frequency words, however, produced worse memory for absolute order. Thus, the relationship between frequency and item memory is an inverted U-shaped function, whereas the relationship between frequency and absolute order memory is direct. This implies that the item-enhancing effects of lower word frequency may be dissociated from its order-disrupting effects.

In two experiments on Stroop interference, we examined whether sentences can be processed without the intention of the reader. Participants named the ink colors in which words in sentences were printed, and the ink colors in which the same words, randomly arranged, were printed. In Experiment 1, sentences yielded longer response times (RTs) and more errors than did nonsentences, but only when they included words that were highly relevant to the color-naming task (i.e., color and color-related words). In Experiment 2, sentences yielded more errors than did nonsentences, and sentences in which the color words matched the set of ink colors yielded longer RTs than did nonsentences. The results indicate that sentence processing can be obligatory when the component words are highly relevant to the task.

Positive and responsive listening behavior benefits marital satisfaction, but previous reports have examined emotionally positive behavior confounded with responsive behavior, and focused primarily on younger marriages. Psycholinguistic views of listening suggest that responsive listening is distinct from emotionally positive listening. The former may change with an aging relationship, while the latter is unlikely to do so. Long-married couples share extensive common ground about recurrent conflicts, reducing the need for some listening behaviors. We observed 79 younger and older married couples, happily and unhappily married, discussing conflicts. We coded listening behaviors indicative of attention and comprehension (responsiveness) as well as those expressing emotions. We expected that older married couples would display lower frequencies of responsive listening behaviors than middle-aged couples. Results provide conditional support for this hypothesis. Implications for research on marital communication and aging are discussed.

Sex differences in phonological processing were investigated in four experiments. Two experiments required college students to decide whether two five-letter strings matched. Same-case (AA) pairs of letter strings could be matched using physical features, whereas mixed-case (Aa) pairs of letter strings required the mediation of a speech-based code (letter name) for the comparison. Women were significantly faster than men when the comparisons required the speech-based codes. In another experiment, college students read lists of words and lists of pseudohomophones to determine whether there was a sex difference in the computation of phonology for unfamiliar words (assembled phonology). In a final experiment, students read lists of words with phonologically inconsistent spelling patterns to determine whether there was a sex difference in accessing pronunciations of familiar words (addressed phonology). Women were more proficient than men under both of these conditions. Results were interpreted in terms of a female advantage in both prelexical and lexical processing, an advantage that may stem from a sex difference in the quality of the phonological representations.

We report a sign length effect in deaf users of American Sign Language that is analogous to the word length effect for speech. Lists containing long signs (signs that traverse relatively long distances) produced poorer memory performance than did lists of short signs (signs that do not change in location). Further, this length effect was eliminated by articulatory suppression (repetitive motion of the hands), and articulatory suppression produced an overall drop in performance. The pattern of results, together with previous findings (Wilson & Emmorey, 1997), provides evidence for a working memory system for sign language that consists of a phonological storage buffer and an articulatory rehearsal mechanism. This indicates a close equivalence of structure between working memory for sign language and working memory for speech. The implications of this equivalence are discussed.

Two experiments examined processing of singular pronouns when the antecedent (e.g.,Mary) was a noun phrase (NP) in a conjoined phrase (e.g., Mary and John). Whole-sentence reading times showed an increase in processing time associated with splitting the conjoined phrase to access a single NP antecedent. The increase in processing occurred both when the antecedent was in the subject position and when it was in a nonsubject position. The source of the disruption was further investigated using eyetracking methods. Summing over regions of the text, the magnitude of the processing cost incurred by having to split a conjoined NP was closely comparable when there was and when there was not a gender-appropriate distracting potential antecedent. When there was no such potential antecedent, the increase in processing time occurred immediately in the pronoun region when eye movements were measured. In contrast, when there was a second discourse entity that matched the gender and number of the pronoun (but was not a plausible antecedent for the pronoun), eyetracking measures suggested that the processing difficulty was delayed until additional information was read that forced the antecedent to be one of the conjoined NPs. The results are interpreted in terms of Sanford and Garrod's (1981) scenario-based model of text comprehension.

The two experiments reported here were designed to examine discourse planning during language production. Following the work of Levelt (1981, 1982), participants were shown simple networks consisting of two branches, and their task was to describe the networks. The two branches of the networks differed in either length or complexity; the dependent measure was participants' decisions to describe the left or right branch first. The experiments showed that speakers preferred to describe a less complex branch before a more complex branch and preferred to describe a shorter branch before a longer branch. Levelt's minimal-load principle is invoked to explain these results, along with the principle of incrementalism (Levelt, 1989). Discussion focuses on the possibility that incrementalism in production is useful to both the speaker and the listener.

In two experiments, we explored how readers encode information that is linguistically focused. Subjects read sentences in which a word or phrase was focused by a syntactic manipulation (Experiment 1) or by a preceding context (Experiment 2) while their eye movements were monitored. Readers had longer reading times while reading a region of the sentence that was focused than when the same region was not focused. The results suggest that readers encode focused information more carefully, either upon first encountering it or during a second-pass reading of it. We conclude that the enhanced memory representations for focused information found in previous studies may be due in part to differences in reading patterns for focused information.

This study introduces a new paradigm for investigating lexical processing. First, an analysis of data from a series of word-spotting experiments is presented suggesting that listeners treat vowels as more mumble than consonants in auditory word recognition in English. In order to assess this hypothesis, a word reconstruction task was devised in which listeners were required to turn word-like nonwords into words by adapting the identity of either one vowel or one consonant. Listeners modified vowel identity more readily than consonant identity. Furthermore, incorrect responses more often involved a vowel change than a consonant change. These findings are compatible with the proposal that English listeners are equipped to deal with vowel variability by assuming that vowel identity is comparatively underdefined. The results are discussed in the light of theoretical accounts of speech processing.

Four experiments conducted in French were performed to investigate the role of grammatical congruency and vocabulary class on lexical decision times. In Experiment 1, using a double lexical decision, slower reaction times were found for pairs of words that disagreed in gender or number than for congruent pairs. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 tested this effect with a standard priming procedure. The grammatical congruency effect varied according to presentation times (130, 150, or 500 msec) and to vocabulary class of context word (closed or open). Closed-class context words induced stronger grammatical effect than did open-class words. These results suggest that the grammatical link existing between the two words of a pair is more immediately computed when the first one is a closed-class item and argue for a distinct computational role of open- and closed-class words in sentence processing.

The effects of rhythmic finger tapping on the phonological similarity effect were investigated in two experiments. In both, subjects were tested for serial recall of visually presented letter sequences that were either phonologically similar or dissimilar. The letter sequences had to be remembered under three tapping conditions: right-hand tapping, left-hand tapping, and a no-tapping control. Experiment 1 showed clear phonological similarity effects in both the control and the left-hand tapping conditions, but not in the right-hand tapping condition, when recall responses were written with the right hand. When the number of tapping practice trials was fixed at two and recall was vocal in Experiment 2, the phonological similarity effect was eliminated in both the right-hand and the left-hand tapping conditions. These results suggest that some form of speech motor programs played an important role in serial recall.

Three experiments were conducted to examine cross-language priming in bilinguals. The first was a cross-language primed lexical decision task experiment with Chinese-English bilinguals. Subjects made lexical decisions about primary associate targets in the two languages at the same rate, but priming occurred only when the prime was in their first language (L1), Chinese, and the target was in their second language (L2), English. Experiment 2 produced the same pattern of asymmetrical priming with two alphabetic languages, French and Dutch. In Experiment 3, the crucial stimuli were translation equivalents. In contrast to the results of Experiments 1 and 2, priming occurred across languages in both the L1-L2 and L2-L1 conditions. However, this priming was also asymmetrical, with more priming occurring in the L1-L2 condition. A tentative separate-interconnected model of bilingual memory is described. It suggests that the representations of words expressed in different languages are stored in separate memory systems, which may be interconnected via one-to-one links between some translation-equivalent representations as well as meaning-integration processes.

Previous research has shown that more attractive voices are associated with more favorable personality impressions. The present study examined which acoustic characteristics make a voice attractive. Segments of recorded voices were rated on various dimensions of voice quality, attractiveness, and personality impressions. Objective measures of voice quality were obtained from spectrogram analysis. Overall, the subjective ratings of voice quality predicted vocal attractiveness better than the objective measures. When vocal attractiveness was regressed onto both subjective and objective measures, the final regression equation included 8 subjective measures, which together accounted for 74% of the variance of the attractiveness scores. It also was found that the measures of voice quality accounted for variance in favorableness of personality impressions above and beyond the contribution of vocal attractiveness. Thus, attractiveness captures an important dimension of the voice but does not cover all aspects of voice quality.

The theoretical distinction between an articulatory control process and a short-term phonological store was supported in five experiments on immediate serial recall. In Experiment 1, articulatory suppression during the presentation and recall of auditory material abolished the word length effect but not the phonemic similarity effect. In Experiment 2, the two latter effects were found to be independent with auditory presentation. In Experiment 3, the effects of irrelevant speech and word length were found to be independent with visual presentation. In Experiment 4, articulatory suppression during the presentation and recall of auditory material abolished the phonemic similarity effect with a slow articulatory suppression with a conventional presentation rate did not reduce the effect of phonemic similarity, even when a 10-sec interval was interposed between presentation and recall. These results indicate that the encoding, maintenance, and retrieval of spoken material within the phonological store do not depend on a process of articulatory rehearsal.

Word frequency is widely believed to affect object naming speed, despite several studies in which it has been reported that frequency effects may be redundant upon age of acquisition. We report, first, a reanalysis of data from the study by Oldfield and Wingfield (1965), which is standardly cited as evidence for a word frequency effect in object naming; then we report two new experiments. The reanalysis of Oldfield and Wingfield shows that age of acquisition is the major determinant of naming speed, and that frequency plays no independent role when its correlation with other variables is taken into account. In Experiment 1, age of acquisition and phoneme length proved to be the primary determinants of object naming speed. Frequency, prototypicality, and imageability had no independent effect. In Experiment 2, subjects classified objects into two semantic categories (natural or man-made). Prototypicality and semantic category were the only variables to have a significant effect on reaction time, with no effect of age of acquisition, frequency, imageability, or word length. We conclude that age of acquisition, not word frequency, affects the retrieval and/or execution of object names, not the process of object recognition. The locus of this effect is discussed, along with the possibility that words learned in early childhood may be more resistant to the effects of brain injury in at least some adult aphasics than words learned somewhat later.

Tip-of-the-tongue states may represent the momentary unavailability of an otherwise accessible word or the weak activation of an otherwise inaccessible word. In three experiments designed to address these alternative views, subjects attempted to retrieve rare target words from their definitions. The definitions were followed by cues that were related to the targets in sound, by cues that were related in meaning, and by cues that were not related to the targets. Experiment 1 found that compared with unrelated cues, related cue words that were presented immediately after target definitions helped rather than hindered lexical retrieval, and that sound cues were more effective retrieval aids than meaning cues. Experiment 2 replicated these results when cues were presented after an initial target-retrieval attempt. These findings reverse a previous one (Jones, 1989) that was reproduced in Experiment 3 and shown to stem from a small group of unusually difficult target definitions.

An important characteristic of automatic processing is its uncontrollability. The Stroop phenomenon is regarded as a prototypical example of this characteristic of automatic processing, hence, the Stroop effect should not change when the percentages of color words versus neutral stimuli are manipulated to induce controlled processing. We found that Stroop interference decreased as the percentage of color words increased. Furthermore, the magnitude of the inhibitory component of the Stroop effect was negatively correlated with the percentage of color words; the facilitatory component was insensitive to the manipulation. These results suggest that the Stroop effect is controllable (see Logan, 1980) and that the locus of control is postlexical. The results also suggest that facilitation and inhibition are produced by different mechanisms and challenge those models of the Stroop phenomenon (e.g., Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, 1990; Phaf, Van der Heijden, & Hudson, 1990) that assume that a single processing mechanism causes facilitation and inhibition and that control affects facilitation and inhibition alike (Logan, 1980).

In the present study, we examined letter detection in very frequent function-word sequences. It has been claimed that such sequences are processed in a unitized manner, thus preempting access to their constituent letters. In contrast, we showed that letter detection in the words for and the (1) was no more difficult when the words appeared in adjacent locations in a sentence (familiar) than when they appeared apart (less familiar sequence) and (2) was contingent upon the words' syntactic roles within the phrase. Thus, letter detection in for was easier when the sequence was separated by a clause boundary than when the words were part of the same clause. The advantage derived from clause separation was strongest when a comma divided clauses. These results challenge the unitization account of the 'missing-letter' effect in common phrases and support a position where this phenomenon is seen to reflect the extraction of phrase structure during reading.

The present research examined the role of phonological and orthographic properties of cues in mediating the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The task required subjects to resolve fragmented words when provided with semantically related cues (e.g., spiteful: ---DIC----). Phonological properties of the letter cues were manipulated such that the letters either corresponded to the syllables (e.g., DIC in vindictive) or nonsyllables (NDI) in the word. Orthographic properties of the letter cues were manipulated by selecting letter groups that either co-occurred frequently in the language or did not. In two experiments, results revealed little or no effect of the phonological variable (syllables) but a reliable effect of the orthographic variable (letter-cue frequency). Letter cues with a low frequency of co-occurrence in the language led to better completion of the fragmented words. We interpret these findings as support for models of lexical representation that are based on orthographic properties (e.g., Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) rather than those based on phonological constraints.