Journal of memory and language最新文献

Words with similar meanings sometimes sound similar, which carries both risks, such as confusion, and rewards, such as ease of comprehension. It has been argued that languages evolve to balance these competing pressures, so words more often overlap in both form and meaning when they are less likely to be confused. By measuring the phonological similarity of responses to English cues in a word association megastudy, we provide evidence of a tendency to activate similar-sounding words in response to words that reside in sparse semantic neighbourhoods and in response to words for abstract concepts. Crucially, we provide evidence that the availability of similar-sounding associates helps people retrieve and represent the meanings of words from sparse neighbourhoods and words for abstract concepts, as measured by reaction time in semantic decisions and by accuracy in recognition memory. We propose that phonological connections compensate for weak semantic connections when representing word meanings, which we discuss in terms of multiplex networks, models of word-meaning access, and theories of language evolution.

The episodic context account (Gaskell et al., 2019) proposes that the act of language comprehension gives rise to an episodic discourse representation, and that this representation is prone to sleep-related memory effects. In three experiments, we tested this prediction by asking participants to read/listen to naturalistic stories before their memory was tested after a 12-hr interval, which included either daytime wakefulness or overnight sleep. To assess discourse memory, we used sentence recognition (Experiment 1; N = 386), free story recall (Experiment 2; N = 96), and cued recall (Experiments 2 and 3; N = 192). We found no evidence of sleep-related effects in sentence recognition or free recall, but cued recall (aka fill-in-the-blank) showed that the degree of time-related distortion, as indexed by both a subjective categorisation measure and Latent Semantic Analysis, was lower after sleep than after wake. Overall, our experiments suggest that the effect of sleep on discourse memory is modest but observable and may [1] be constrained by the retrieval processes (recollection vs. familiarity & associative vs. item), [2] lie on a qualitative level that is difficult to detect in an all-or-nothing scoring metric, and [3] primarily situated in the textbase level of the tripartite model of discourse processing.

We introduce Mouse Tracking for Reading (MoTR) a new incremental processing measurement tool that can be used to collect word-by-word reading times. In a MoTR trial, participants are presented with text, which is blurred, except for a small region around the tip of the mouse. Participants must move the mouse to reveal and read the text. Mouse movement is recorded, and, using a postprocessing pipeline we present, can be analyzed to produce scanpaths as well as word-by-word reading times. We validate MoTR in two suites of experiments. In the first experiment, we collect data for the English-language Provo Corpus (Luke and Christianson, 2018). We analyze scanpaths and show that participants interpolate between two types of strategies for reading during a MoTR trial – sometimes they fixate on individual words, somewhat akin to eye-tracking, while other times they produce a more constant pass over the text, slowing down in response to processing difficulties. Taking these strategies into account, we show that the word-by-word reading times produced by our data analysis pipeline correlate well with previously collected eye-tracking data for this corpus, and that these correlations are higher than those produced by SPR data, which we also collect for the corpus. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there is a linear relationship between by-word MoTR values and word-level surprisal values, as has been previously shown for eye-tracking data (Smith and Levy, 2013). In the second experiment, we assess whether MoTR can be used to study sentence processing phenomena in targeted psycholinguistics experiments. Using materials from Witzel et al. (2012), we show that MoTR can reveal English speakers’ preferences for low attachment during online sentence comprehension. We argue that MoTR presents a compelling tradeoff between multiple experimental considerations: It is cheap to run and can be presented in a browser enabling the collection of data over the internet. It is more naturalistic than some alternative processing measures, allowing participants to skip words and regress to previous sentence regions. Finally, it has good sensitivity, detecting signatures of psycholinguistic processing behaviors from a relatively small number of participants.

A substantial literature exists using the syntactic priming methodology with children to test hypotheses regarding the acquisition of syntax, under the assumption that priming effects reveal both the presence of syntactic knowledge and the underlying nature of learning mechanisms supporting the acquisition of grammar. Here we present the first meta-analysis of syntactic priming studies in children. We identified 37 eligible studies and extracted 108 effect sizes corresponding to 76 samples of 2,378 unique participants. Our analysis confirmed a medium-to-large syntactic priming effect. The overall estimate of the priming effect was a log odds ratio of 1.44 (Cohen’s d = 0.80). This is equivalent to a structure that occurs 50 % of the time when unprimed occurring 81 % of the time when primed. Several variables moderated the magnitude of priming in children, including (i) within- or between-subjects design, (ii) lexical overlap, (iii) structural alternation investigated and, (iv) the animacy configuration of syntactic arguments. There was little evidence of publication bias in the size of the main priming effect, however, power analyses showed that, while studies typically have enough power to identify the basic priming effect, they are typically underpowered when their focus is on moderators of priming. The results provide a foundation for future research, suggesting several avenues of enquiry.

Much recent research on the front end of visual word recognition has focused on how letters with and without diacritic marks are identified. In this study we report three masked priming letter match experiments which examine the processing of two types of diacritic marks in Arabic, a language/writing system rich in diacritics. Experiment 1 focused on diacritic dots that are obligatory and signal a phonemic contrast in consonants. The results showed an oft-replicated asymmetric diacritic priming pattern, namely, that for a target letter with a diacritic (e.g., ش, /$/), the prime without the diacritic (e.g., س, /s/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ش–ش= س–ش).; in contrast, a target without a diacritic is primed less strongly by the prime with the diacritic than by the identity prime (e.g., س–س < ش–س). Experiment 2 used vowel diacritics which also signal a phonemic contrast when present and collectively play the role of a morpheme, but are not obligatory and appear only in text for children or in the Quran. The results revealed a novel pattern in which both target letters with (e.g., سَ, /sa/) and without (e.g., س, /s/) vowel diacritics were equally facilitated by identity and related primes (e.g., س–سَ = سَ–سَ and سَ–س = س–س). Experiment 3 replicated these effects using a within-participant design. These results are discussed in light of current views of letter and diacritic processing.

Statistical learning (SL) is postulated to play an important role in the process of language acquisition as well as in other cognitive functions. It was found to enable learning of various types of statistical patterns across different sensory modalities. However, few studies have distinguished distributional SL (DSL) from sequential and spatial SL, or examined DSL across modalities using comparable tasks. Considering the relevance of such findings to the nature of SL, the current study investigated the modality- and stimulus-specificity of DSL. Using a within-subject design we compared DSL performance in auditory and visual modalities. For each sensory modality, two stimulus types were used: linguistic versus non-linguistic auditory stimuli and temporal versus spatial visual stimuli. In each condition, participants were exposed to stimuli that varied in their length as they were drawn from two categories (short versus long). DSL was assessed using a categorization task and a production task. Results showed that learners’ performance was only correlated for tasks in the same sensory modality. Moreover, participants were better at categorizing the temporal signals in the auditory conditions than in the visual condition, where in turn an advantage of the spatial condition was observed. In the production task participants exaggerated signal length more for linguistic signals than non-linguistic signals. Together, these findings suggest that DSL is modality- and stimulus-sensitive.

Skilled readers use multiple heuristics to guide their eye movements during reading. One possible cue that readers may rely on is the way in which information about word identity is typically spread across words. In many (but not all) languages, words are, on average, more informative on the left, predicting that readers should have a preference for left-of-center fixation when targeting words. Any such effect will, however, be modulated by important perceptual constraints and may be masked by various confounding factors. In three experiments with artificially constructed lexicons, we provide causal evidence that the way in which a language distributes information affects how readers land on words. We further support our analyses with a Bayesian cognitive model of visual word recognition that predicts where readers ought to fixate in order to minimize uncertainty about word identity. Taken together, our findings suggest that global properties of the lexicon may play a role in isolated word targeting, and may therefore make a contribution to eye movement behavior in more natural reading settings.

Conceptual knowledge is known to modulate episodic memory, but it remains unclear whether and how verbal labels shape event learning and recollection over time. To investigate this issue, we asked participants to study and memorise unfamiliar animations and their titles. The titles conveyed fast or slow motion speed (e.g., a bus vs ambulance travelling). Event memory was assessed at different time points—soon after learning and after 12 h of sleep or wakefulness—using a timed mental event reproduction task and verbal recall. Unlike previous findings with these stimuli, we found that intentional title study elicited title-related biases on reproduced durations soon after learning. Post-sleep but not post-wakefulness recollection also showed title-related biases and systematically longer reproduced durations. Nevertheless, reproduced durations correlated with stimulus segments, stimulus durations and verbal recall, indicating that event memories combined episodic and verbal conceptual features. Results suggest that intentional verbal learning promoted conceptual influences at encoding and that sleep-dependent consolidation enhanced these influences. We argue that the degree of integration between conceptual and episodic features determines the extent of conceptual influences and, more generally, the role of verbal labels in event learning and memory.

This study investigated bilingual language control in emotional contexts. We assessed the language switching and mixing performance of two groups of Chinese-English bilinguals in picture naming under neutral, negative, and positive emotional states. One group switched languages voluntarily while another matched group switched languages according to external cues. We found that negative state impaired proactive control, whereas positive state seemed to improve proactive control. Importantly, the detrimental effects of negative state could be proportional to the cognitive demands imposed by the naming context. However, negative states disrupted proactive control in voluntary but not cued naming, where the proactive control demands were comparable. This finding suggests that the control system selectively compensates for the emotional disruption of control in a cued-naming context requiring strict control but not in a voluntary-naming context preferring less strict control. Accordingly, we tentatively proposed a theoretical account of the adaptive control mechanism in emotional contexts. These findings would extend the Adaptive Control Hypothesis to more naturalistic settings.