Journal of Experimental Psychology-Learning Memory and Cognition最新文献

This study investigated (a) whether L2 semantic processing is modulated by automatic activation of L1 translations, (b) whether L1 translation activation involves both phonological and orthographic representations, and (c) whether these phonological and orthographic representations of L1 translations are accessed along a similar time course. To this end, 48 Hebrew-English bilinguals and 48 native English speakers with no Hebrew knowledge performed a semantic relatedness judgment task in English. Critical prime-target pairs (n = 96) were semantically unrelated, but their translations in Hebrew could include form overlap. Specifically, complete translation-overlap pairs shared both a phonological and an orthographic lexical form (e.g., "beak" and "source" = מקור /makor/), whereas partial translation-overlap pairs shared either a phonological form (e.g., "skin" and "light" = /or/) or an orthographic form (e.g., "book" and "barber" = ספר) in Hebrew. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of the prime-target L2-English words was further manipulated to reveal the time course of phonological and orthographic translation activation. Results showed that complete overlap in the translation lead Hebrew-English bilinguals, but not native English speakers, to judge semantically unrelated pairs as related in meaning and to do so more quickly irrespective of SOA. For partial translation overlap in phonology, the percentage of "yes" responses was affected only in the short SOA (300 ms), and under partial translation overlap in orthography, only in the long SOA (750 ms). These findings suggest that L1 translation activation during L2 word processing spreads to both phonological and orthographic representations but at different time points along processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Controversies persist in the literature regarding the existence of bilingual language control during comprehension, which may be attributed to overlooking the modulating effect of word concreteness. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment using abstract and concrete words, thereby manipulating the activation level of the nontarget language. Sixty Chinese-English bilinguals were instructed to switch between two languages in word reading tasks. We found that abstract words (e.g., [correct], wrong) did not show switching costs, indicating no additional time for switching between languages compared to repeating the same language. In contrast, concrete words (e.g., [sunny], rainy) elicited significant larger switching costs. These findings might suggest greater language control demands on the nontarget language when reading more concrete words. This study offers insights into the modulating effect of word concreteness in language processing on bilingual language control during reading comprehension. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Humans have a limited amount of cognitive resources to process various cognitive operations at a given moment. The Source of Activation Confusion model of episodic memory proposes that resources are consumed during each processing, and once depleted, they need time to recover gradually. This has been supported by a series of behavioral findings in the past. However, the neural substrate of the resources is not known. In the present study, over an existing electroencephalogram data set of a free recall task (Kahana et al., 2022), we provided a neural index reflecting the amount of cognitive resources available for forming new memory traces. Unique to our approach, we obtained the neural index not through correlating neural patterns with behavior outcomes or experimental conditions, but by demonstrating its alignment with a latent quantity of cognitive resources inferred from the Source of Activation Confusion model. In addition, we showed that the identified neural index can be used to propose novel hypothesis regarding other long-term memory phenomena. Specifically, we found that according to the neural index, neural encoding patterns for subsequently recalled items correspond to greater available cognitive resources compared with those for subsequently unrecalled items. This provides a mechanistic account for the long-established subsequent memory effects (i.e., differential neural encoding patterns between subsequently recalled vs. subsequently unrecalled items), which has been previously associated with attention, fatigue, and properties of the stimuli. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

We detail a successful attempt in modeling associations about the age, gender, and polarity of fictional characters based on their names alone. We started by collecting ratings through an online survey on a sample of annotated names from young-adult, children, and fan-fiction stories. We collected ratings over three semantic differentials (gender: male-female; age: old-young; polarity: evil-good) using a slider bar. First, we show that participants tend to agree with authors: names judged to better suit female/young/evil characters tend to be assigned to female/young/evil characters in the original stories. We then show that, in a series of computational studies, we can predict participants' ratings on the three attributes using a distributional semantic model which derives representations for both lexical and sublexical patterns. This attempt was successful for all names, including made-up ones, and using both a supervised and an unsupervised approach. The prediction supported by distributed representations is much better than that afforded by symbolic features such as letters and phonological features, also when accounting for the complexity of the feature spaces. Our results show that people interpret both known and novel names relying on lexical and sublexical patterns, which suggests the availability of systematic form-meaning mappings in everyday language use. This further lends credit to the hypothesis that language internal statistics can support systematic form-meaning associations which apply to both known and novel lexical items. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The ability to recognize the smallest/largest objects or numbers in our environment is an essential cognitive skill, however, little is known about perceiving multidigit numbers as end-values. The present study examined end effects in multidigit numbers and whether such effects are impacted by number length, which captures the numeric scale (e.g., 10's, 100's). Across four experiments (N = 120, 100, 80, and 120, respectively), participants performed three types of numerical comparisons: same-scale comparisons between end-values and nonend-values (e.g., 100 vs. 200), different-scale comparisons between end-values and nonend-values (e.g., 1,000 vs. 200), and same-scale comparisons of nonend-values (e.g., 300 vs. 200). The type of the end-value (i.e., lower/upper) and overall numerical range used in each experiment varied. The results revealed: (a) a novel numeric-scale end effect, characterized by a relatively small end effect for comparisons between nonend-values and end-values from an adjacent numeric scale, and a larger, consistently sized end effect for comparisons between nonend-values and end-values from nonadjacent numeric scales (≥ 2 scales), (b) absent or weak end effects in same-scale multidigit number comparisons, and (c) replication of the lower end effect for single-digit comparisons to the end-value 1. These results reveal differential processing of numbers from adjacent versus nonadjacent numeric scales. We rule out a psychophysical explanation for our findings and instead provide a syntactic explanation based on the perceptual dominance of the numeric-scale component and the way it manifests in the counting process. We conclude that a number's scale plays a crucial role in evaluating multidigit number magnitude. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).