Journal of memory and language最新文献

Different speakers often use different names to refer to the same entity (e.g., “woman” vs. “tennis player” for a given woman playing tennis). We study how visual typicality affects variation in naming behavior. We use a novel computational approach to estimate visual typicality from images, and analyze a large dataset containing naming data for realistic images. In contrast to previous work, we take into account the visual properties of both the object and the scene in which it appears; and factor in multiple candidate names. We show that visual typicality mediates competition between candidate names: high competition, induced by the relationship between the visual properties of the object and the visual representations associated to names, predicts higher naming variation. On a methodological level, we demonstrate the potential of using large-scale datasets with realistic images in conjunction with computational methods to shed light on how people name objects.

Cross-linguistically prevalent semantic distinctions are widely assumed to be easier to learn because they reflect natural concepts. Here we propose an alternative, pragmatic perspective that links both the cross-linguistic prevalence and the learnability of semantic distinctions to communicative pressures. We focus on evidentiality (the encoding of the speaker’s information source). Across languages, grammatical evidential systems are more likely to encode indirect sources (especially, reported information) compared to direct sources (e.g., visual perception). On a conceptual account, this seems puzzling, since humans reason naturally about how seeing connects to knowing. On a pragmatic account, however, the predominant encoding of the speaker’s reportative compared to visual information sources can be explained in terms of informativeness (visual access is ubiquitous and potentially more reliable, hence less marked). We tested the pragmatic account in four experiments. Adult English speakers exposed to novel miniature evidential morphological systems consistently showed higher learning rates for systems with a single indirect (reportative) compared to a single direct (visual) evidential morpheme (Experiment 1). This pattern persisted even when participants were given specific cues to the target meanings (Experiment 2) and partly extended to cases where evidential meanings were conveyed through visual, not linguistic, means (Experiment 3). It also persisted when the evidential morphemes had to be learned from different materials (Experiment 4). We conclude that the cross-linguistic bias to mark reportative/indirect over visual/direct sources of information has pragmatic roots that also shape the learnability of evidential semantic distinctions.

A foundational principle of communication is that speakers should offer as much information as required during conversation. Thus, if a speaker offers a statement with limited information (e.g., “I like the candle” when asked about a gift containing a candle and a sweater), the listener often takes the speaker to imply that a more informative statement (“I like the candle and the sweater”) does not hold. Classic theories of communication have proposed that the principle of informativeness extends to purposeful exchanges beyond linguistic interactions, but relevant evidence so far is limited. In a set of studies, we adopt a simple visual-world paradigm to investigate whether 4- and 5-year-old children and adults expect drawings, like utterances, to be informative in accordance with the creator’s knowledge. We find that 5-year-olds and adults (but not 4-year-olds) apply the principle of informativeness to non-linguistic symbols; furthermore, the 5-year-olds’ success in this task depends on features of the symbols. We discuss the implications of these findings for debates over the mechanisms underlying pragmatic inference, as well as for children’s developing understanding of the symbolic function of drawings.

An understanding of how listeners divide their attention between two simultaneous talkers requires modelling the interaction between acoustic factors (energetic masking) and cognitive processes (control of auditory attention). The impact of spatial separation between the two talkers on this interaction is unclear, since separation is likely to create both acoustic benefits (release from energetic masking) and cognitive costs (increased demands on spatial attentional control). To explore this question, we manipulated the degree of energetic masking (high vs. low) and spatial separation (collocated to dichotic) between two simultaneous talkers. When energetic masking was high (Experiment 1, unmanipulated talker voices), transcription performance improved monotonically from collocated to dichotic, owing to a gradual release from energetic masking. When energetic masking was low (Experiment 2, bandpass-filtered talker voices), the benefit of spatial separation disappeared; performance even worsened in the dichotic condition. Additionally, across both experiments, individual differences in working memory best predicted transcription performance in conditions where energetic masking was low. These results suggest that energetic masking is the dominant challenge during divided-attention listening, but that the contribution of cognitive control and working memory can be observed when energetic masking is reduced, at least in the context of the current paradigm. The findings are discussed in light of Norman and Bobrow’s (1975) concept of data-limited vs. resource-limited tasks, which we propose is a promising framework for reinterpreting existing results from speech-in-noise perception research.

Accounts of language production make different predictions about the conditions under which structural priming should be enhanced by lexical repetition (the lexical boost). Repetition of the head verb strongly enhances structural priming of a sentence, but studies of English have found contradictory results regarding the effects of noun repetition. In two experiments, Mandarin participants read a prime sentence aloud and then produced a target picture description of a dative event. In Experiment 1, the verb was printed on the target picture, and we found that repetition of the verb enhanced priming (vs. no repetition) but repetition of the agent, theme, or recipient argument did not. In Experiment 2, both the agent noun and the verb were printed on the picture, and we found that verb repetition enhanced priming but agent repetition did not. These results indicate that the lexical boost is restricted to the head verb in Mandarin and therefore support lemma-based residual activation accounts of language production in which activation of a head leads to activation of its associated grammatical construction.

Prior familiarity with a face seems to substantively change the way we encode and recognize later instances of that face. We report five experiments that examine the effects of varying levels of prior familiarity and conceptual knowledge on face recognition memory. All experiments employed a 3-phase procedure, in which faces were familiarized in varying ways and to varying extents prior to study and test. Across experiments, increased prior familiarity led to a simultaneous increase in both correct and false identification rates, either when familiarity was gained through passive exposures or conceptual processing. Discriminability, on the other hand, was enhanced by prior familiarity only when the level of familiarity was high and when it involved conceptual processing (Experiments 1–3). Familiarity engendered by passive exposure affected response bias equivalently to more active orienting tasks, but it reduced discriminability in a standard Old/New recognition test (Experiment 4) and did not lead to an enhancement in discriminability in a lineup identification task (Experiment 5). Familiarity engendered by trait evaluations (Experiments 1–3) or name learning (Experiments 2–5) increased discriminability and yielded a more liberal response bias. These results suggest that the benefits of prior familiarity on discriminability in recognition memory are determined by the presence of prior conceptual knowledge. The implications of this work for eyewitness identification situations in which the suspect is known or familiar to the witness are discussed.

In the cue-distractor paradigm, individuals observe a spoken distractor syllable while responding to a visual cue referring to a syllable. When the task is to utter the cued syllable, distractors sharing fewer subphonemic properties with the cued syllable (below the level of phonemes) lead to slower reaction times (RTs), indicating representations involved in speech perception and production are closely linked. The present study investigated whether a subphonemic level of representation is involved when the task was to manually indicate (but not produce) an orthographically cued syllable. Results revealed RT modulations closely mirroring those reported previously for uttered responses. In an additional experiment, phonetic variants of phonologically identical distractors were presented, but RT modulations were unaffected by this manipulation. The present findings indicate that perceiving speech accesses a relatively detailed phonological level of representation which is closely aligned with representations pertinent in orthographic syllable recognition and in speech production.

It has been proposed that the order in which words are prepared for production depends on the speaker’s language. When producing the translation equivalent of the small cat, speakers of German or Dutch select the gender-marked determiner at a relatively early stage of production. Speakers of French or Italian postpone the encoding of a determiner or adjective until the phonological form of the noun is available. Hence, even though the words are produced in the same order (e.g., die kleine Katze in German, le petit chat in French), they are not planned in the same order and might require different amounts of advanced planning prior to production onset. This distinction between early and late selection languages was proposed to account for the observation that speakers of Germanic and Slavic languages, but not of Romance languages, are slower to name pictures in the context of a distractor word of a different gender. Meta-analyses are conducted to provide the first direct test of this cross-linguistic difference and to test a prediction of the late selection hypothesis. They confirm the existence of the gender congruency effect in German/Slavic languages and its absence in Romance languages when target and distractor words are presented simultaneously. They do not allow confirming the hypothesis that in the latter languages, a similar effect emerges when the presentation of the distractor is delayed. Overall, these analyses confirm the cross-linguistic difference but show that the evidence available to date is not sufficient to confirm or reject the late selection hypothesis as an explanation of this difference. We highlight specific directions for future research.

There is a long-standing controversy around the question of whether referent predictability affects pronominalization: while there are good theoretical reasons for this prediction (e.g., Arnold, 2008), the experimental evidence has been rather mixed.

We here report on three highly powered studies that manipulate a range of factors that have differed between previous studies, in order to determine more exactly under which conditions a predictability effect on pronominalization can be found.

We use a constrained as well as a free reference task, and manipulate verb type, antecedent ambiguity, length of NP and whether the stimuli are presented within a story context or not. Our results find the story context to be the single important factor that allows to elicit an effect of predictability on pronoun choice, in line with (Rosa and Arnold, 2017; Weatherford and Arnold, 2021). We also propose a parametrization for a rational speech act model, that reconciles the findings between many of the experiments in the literature.