Journal of memory and language最新文献

For decades, researchers have debated whether readers benefit from translating visual word forms into phonological codes. A focus of this debate has been on the earliest moments of processing when a word is perceived in parafoveal vision (i.e., phonological preview benefit). A recent meta-analysis (Vasilev et al., 2019) concluded that the phonological preview benefit may be small and unreliable but they did not take into account potentially important stimulus-level or participant-level factors that varied across the included studies. Therefore, we conducted two well-powered experiments that systematically investigated the effects of sentence constraint, preview lexicality, and participant language skills on the phonological preview benefit effect. We found phonological preview benefits that were larger in high versus low constraint sentences, larger for words than pseudowords, and larger for better spellers. We conclude that phonological codes do facilitate early word recognition during reading, but that the phonological preview benefit magnitude depends on subject- and stimulus-level factors.

In two structural priming experiments, we investigated the representations of lexically-specific syntactic restrictions of English verbs for highly proficient and immersed second language (L2) speakers of English. We considered the interplay of two possible mechanisms: generalization from the first language (L1) and statistical learning within the L2 (both of abstract structure and of lexically-specific information). In both experiments, L2 speakers with either Germanic or Romance languages as L1 were primed to produce dispreferred double-object structures involving non-alternating dative verbs. Priming occurred from ungrammatical double-object primes involving different non-alternating verbs (Experiment 1) and from grammatical primes involving alternating verbs (Experiment 2), supporting abstract statistical learning within the L2. However, we found no differences between L1-Germanic speakers (who have the double-object structure in their L1) and L1-Romance speakers (who do not), inconsistent with the prediction for between-group differences of the L1-generalization account. Additionally, L2 speakers in Experiment 2 showed a lexical boost: There was stronger priming after (dispreferred) non-alternating same-verb double-object primes than after (grammatical) alternating different-verb primes. Such lexically-driven persistence was also shown by L1 English speakers (Ivanova, Pickering, McLean, Costa, & Branigan, 2012) and may underlie statistical learning of lexically-dependent structural regularities. We conclude that lexically-specific syntactic restrictions in highly proficient and immersed L2 speakers are shaped by statistical learning (both abstract and lexically-specific) within the L2, but not by generalization from the L1.

The present research shows that language comprehenders are sensitive to multiple states of target and semantically related objects. In Experiments 1 to 2B, participants (total N = 273) read sentences that either implied a minimal change of an object’s state (e.g., “Jane chose a mango”) or a substantial change (e.g., “Jane stepped on a mango”) and then verified whether a subsequently pictured object was mentioned in the sentence. Crucially, the picture either showed the original/modified state of an object that was mentioned in the sentence (e.g., “mango” in Experiment 1) or not (e.g., “banana” in Experiments 2A and 2B). The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that the objects in a modified state were verified faster when a sentence implied a substantial state-change rather than a minimal state-change. In contrast, the reverse was true for the objects in the original state. Importantly, verification latencies of pictures depicting original and modified states of an object in the substantial state-change condition were approximately similar, thus suggesting that language comprehenders maintain multiple representations of an object in different states. The results of Experiments 2A and 2B revealed that when participants had to indicate that a pictured object (e.g., banana) was not mentioned in the sentence, their verification latencies were slowed down when the sentence contained a semantically related item (e.g., mango) and described this item as being changed substantially by the action. However, these verification latencies varied continuously with the degree of change: the more dissimilar the states of a semantically related item, the less time participants needed to verify a pictured object. The results are discussed through the prism of theories emphasizing dynamic views of event cognition.

The past 10 years have seen rapid growth of online (web-based) data collection across the behavioural sciences. Despite the many important contributions of such studies, some researchers have concerns about the reduction in experimental control when research moves outside of laboratory conditions. This paper provides an accessible overview of the issues that can adversely affect data quality in online experiments, with particular focus on cognitive studies of memory and language. I provide checklists for researchers setting up such experiments to help improve data quality. These recommendations focus on three key aspects of experimental design: the technology choices made by researchers and participants, participant recruitment methods, and the performance of participants during experiments. I argue that ensuring high data quality for online experiments requires significant effort prior to data collection to maintain the credibility of our rapidly expanding evidence base. With such safeguards in place, online experiments will continue to provide important, paradigm-changing opportunities across the behavioural sciences.

We investigate the onomasiological question of which words speakers actually use and produce when trying to convey an intended meaning. This is not limited to selecting the best-fitting available existing word, but also includes word formation, the coinage of novel words. In the first two experiments, we introduce the taboo game paradigm in which participants were instructed to produce a single-word substitution for different words so that others can later identify them. Using distributional semantic models with the capability to produce quantitative representations for existing and novel word responses, we find that (a) responses tend to be semantically close to the targets and (b) existing words were represented closer than novel words, but (c) even novel compounds were often closer than the targets’ free associates. In a final third experiment, we find that other participants are more likely to guess the correct original word (a) for responses closer to the original targets, and (b) for novel compound responses as compared to existing word responses. This shows that the production of both existing and novel words can be accurately captured in a unified computational framework of the semantic mechanisms driving word choice.

Recall from episodic memory has been shown to enhance both memory for the retrieved information (e.g., relative to a restudy control condition; the testing effect, or TE) and memory for different, subsequently studied materials (the forward testing effect, or FTE). Hence, the TE may be subject to an FTE confound when training in a TE experiment involves either testing prior to restudy or when restudied and tested items are randomly mixed. Across two cued-recall TE experiments, we show that (1) a potent FTE confound exists in the test-first but not the mixed training design, (2) there are no other evident learning related interactions between restudied and tested items across three frequently used training phase task orderings, and (3) the predictions of the dual-memory model of test-enhanced learning – which posits that a test trial creates a memory that is separate from the initially encoded study memory, yielding two routes to retrieval for tested items – are held both when there is and is not a confounding FTE. Further, our results yielded no evidence for two accounts of the FTE (the proactive interference and reset of encoding hypotheses) as applied to cued recall but are consistent with two alternative accounts (the strategy change and increasing effort hypotheses). Through distribution analyses we identify a novel and potent FTE individual differences effect that can be accommodated by the latter accounts. Finally, we show that at least three large-n studies exploring individual differences in the TE are confounded by the FTE, compromising conclusions in those papers about the efficacy of the TE across individuals.

This paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood by examining the degree to which bare nouns and full determiner phrases (DPs) cause agreement attraction effects in Romanian. Romanian represents an ideal testing ground for this, given two distributional constraints making bare nouns less subject-like: Locative Determiner Omission, preventing locative prepositions from taking nouns with definite articles (unless modified by adjectives), and the Naked Noun Constraint, disallowing bare nouns as preverbal subjects. We predicted that bare nouns should be less likely to trigger agreement attraction than overt DPs. We conducted four speeded forced-choice sentence continuation tasks on Romanian native speakers to test this prediction. We observe that overt DPs cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns. We suggest that the results are consistent with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for forming agreement dependencies, where cues that determine subjecthood are used to reactivate elements in working memory upon processing a verb. These cues can be language specific, and in Romanian, this means that agreement attraction is sensitive to the morphophonological overtness of the determiner.

Two eye-tracking experiments in alphabetic Finnish and two in logographic Chinese examined the recognition of two-constituent compound words in reading. In Finnish, two-constituent compound words vary greatly in length, whereas in Chinese they are identical in length. According to the visual acuity principle (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003), short Finnish compound words and all two-character Chinese compound words that fit in foveal vision are recognized holistically, whereas long Finnish compound words are recognized via components. Experiment 1 in Finnish provided evidence consistent with the account, whereas the results for long compound words presented in condensed font in Experiment 2 were inconsistent with it. In Chinese, the first-character frequency effect was non-significant even when the compound words were presented in large font. The Finnish results suggest that componential processing is necessary when the compound word entails more than 10 letters. The Chinese results are compatible with the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020) that assumes whole-word representations to overrule the activation of components during compound word recognition.

This study explores whether people’s preference to restrict to-be-learned material is influenced by memory test timing. In Experiments 1a and 2a, participants studied word lists. For control groups, lists were displayed in their entirety, whereas participants in other groups could stop the lists early. We investigated whether participants decided to terminate learning when they expected their free-recall memory to be tested after a short (Experiment 1a) or long (Experiment 2a) delay. Experiments 1b and 2b tested participants’ theoretical assumptions about learning termination. Participants who terminated learning recalled fewer words than those who saw all to-be-remembered materials. When the memory test immediately followed the learning phase, more than half of the participants decided to stop learning. However, when there was any time delay between learning and testing, only around a quarter of them decided to stop. Delayed testing can effectively discourage a maladaptive learning strategy of learning termination.

Although every student of memory knows about the Atkinson-Shiffrin (1968) model, few know that it was advanced as a general-purpose modeling framework, not as the specific theoretical instantiation that appears in textbooks today. Largely missing from the historical record is the broader theoretical perspective proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968), one that is surprisingly consistent with contemporary views of human memory. For example, they described “working memory” (using those words) as consisting of a verbal short-term store and a visual short-term store. In addition, using logic that still makes sense today, they justified the distinction between short-term store and long-term store based on the memory profile of the amnesic patient HM, whose verbal short-term store was largely intact despite his inability to form long-term memories. Finally, they explained that some “coding processes” are more effective than others in transferring information from short-term store to long-term store, a perspective that is consistent with the subsequently proposed notion of “depth of processing.” Given its preeminent status in the history of human memory research and its enduring influence on the field today, Atkinson and Shiffrin’s 1968 chapter is reproduced here so that students of memory, including textbook writers, can better appreciate the surprisingly modern ideas they actually proposed.