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

The present study investigated the word-form encoding process of handwriting in a nonalphabetic writing system, Chinese. The form-preparation paradigm (Experiment 1) and the picture-word interference paradigm (Experiment 2) were adopted to examine the facilitation effects of radical or logographeme overlap in Chinese handwritten production. Three different groups of Chinese writers were involved: Mainland Chinese participants who mainly used phonology-based Chinese input methods (Pinyin) for typewriting and the simplified Chinese script, Hong Kong participants who mainly used orthography-based input methods (e.g., Sucheng, Cangjie) and the traditional script, and Taiwanese participants who mainly used phonology-based input methods (Zhuyin) and the traditional script. The radical effects were consistently observed in the two paradigms across groups, indicating a prominent role of radicals in planning Chinese handwritten production. The Hong Kong participants showed a significantly larger radical effect than the Taiwanese participants, suggesting an influence of typewriting experience on the salience of radicals during Chinese handwriting. On the other hand, the logographeme effects were significant in the Mainland participants only and significantly smaller than the radical effects in the form-preparation paradigm and at 0-ms stimulus onset asynchrony in the picture-word interference paradigm. No significant difference was found between the radical and logographeme effects at -100- and 100-ms stimulus onset asynchrony, suggesting that the time courses of radical processing and logographeme processing are similar despite the lower salience of logographemes in planning Chinese handwritten production. Overall, these findings suggest that radicals and (nonradical) logographemes are processed at the same level of word-form encoding during Chinese handwritten production, but with different saliences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Statistical learning (SL) is hypothesized to play a fundamental role in reading, yet the correlations between reading and SL are largely mixed. This inconsistency may result from the fact that most SL studies train participants to learn novel, nonlinguistic visual regularities, which overlooks two important factors: (a) SL performance varies across domains, and (b) most SL studies utilize tasks with short exposure phases with a limited set of novel structured stimuli. Rather than exposing participants to novel statistics, we explored how prior learning of the statistical regularities inherent in natural texts predicts individual differences in reading. We developed a novel measure of long-term orthographic SL by assessing participants' ability to chunk letter information based on its statistical properties. Adults were prompted to find high- and low-frequency English words (derived from written-language corpora) when a single target word was embedded in an array of background distractors comprising letters that do not form words. Performance on this task was compared against three established measures of component skills of reading: lexical decision, orthographic awareness, and spelling recognition. Participants were faster and more accurate at identifying high-frequency words, replicating classic psycholinguistic results. Performance was also impacted by semantic diversity-the variation of the semantic contexts a word appears in-independent of frequency. Critically, word search performance significantly predicted each reading subtest, suggesting that the task draws upon key reading-related skills. Sensitivity to orthographic statistical structure may serve as a crucial foundation that drives individual differences in reading, consistent with SL-based accounts of language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

During spoken word recognition, words that are related phonologically (e.g., dog and dot) and words that are related semantically (e.g., dog and bear) are known to become active within the first second of word recognition. The time course of activation and resolution of these competing words changes as a function of linguistic knowledge. This preregistered study aimed to examine how a less commonly used linguistic predictor, percent lifetime language exposure, affects the time course of target and competitor activation in an eye-tracking visual world paradigm. Lifetime exposure was expected to capture variability in the representations and processes that contribute to individual differences in spoken word recognition. Results show that when putting lifetime exposure to French on a scale, more lifetime exposure was related to target fixations and slightly related to early phonological coactivation, but not related to semantic coactivation. These analyses demonstrate how generalized additive mixed models might help examine time course data with more continuous linguistic variables. Exploratory analyses looked at the amount of variance captured by three linguistic experience predictors (lifetime French exposure, recent French exposure, French vocabulary) on indices of target, phonological, and semantic fixations and identified vocabulary size as most frequently explaining significant variance, but the pattern of results did not differ from those of lifetime language exposure. These findings suggest that lifetime language exposure may not fully capture subtle differences in linguistic experience that affect lexical coactivation such as those brought upon by differences in exposure trajectories across the lifetime or differences in the setting of language exposure. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Efficient written word recognition is crucial for effective reading and comprehension. However, whether deaf people recognize written words through the same psychological mechanisms as those of hearing individuals remains controversial. The present study utilized mouse-tracking technology to examine the differences in the transposed-character effect and the substituted-character effect during the recognition of four-character Chinese words between prelingually deaf adults (PDAs) and their hearing counterparts. The PDAs were found to experience greater difficulties in recognizing Chinese written pseudowords although both groups exhibited significant transposed-character effects with lower accuracies, longer response times, and larger areas under the curve in transposed-character pseudoword conditions. Furthermore, the PDAs demonstrated more pronounced substituted-character effects in the substituted-character pseudoword conditions compared with hearing people. These results revealed that Chinese written word recognition of the hearing participants followed the multiple-route model derived from alphabetic languages, while PDAs tend to rely more on whole-word and orthographic processing due to their limited access to phonological information. This study can provide theoretical guidance and potential targeted intervention measures for enhancing the reading abilities of deaf individuals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Working memory allows us to keep information readily available and accessible over brief periods of time, so that the information can be used for ongoing cognition when it is no longer present in the immediate environment. The amount of information that can be held in working memory is limited, and this has important implications. One prominent theoretical proposal is that the limited capacity of working memory stems from the limited amount of information that can be reactivated before it is lost from working memory, through a reactivation mechanism known as refreshing. Following this proposal, refreshing is a key determinant for working memory capacity. The present study aimed to test this hypothesis extensively. Our reasoning was that, if refreshing is a key determinant of working memory capacity, then we should be able to detect (a) the consequences of instructed refreshing and (b) the spontaneous use of refreshing across a variety of memory materials and task conditions. This would demonstrate the effectiveness and the general, spontaneous use of refreshing, respectively. Across a set of experiments using verbal, spatial, and visual materials in an item recognition task, we showed that refreshing mostly results in increased accessibility for the refreshed information when its use is instructed, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of refreshing. However, the inconsistent spontaneous use of refreshing across materials and task conditions was not in line with a general role of refreshing in keeping information in mind. Therefore, refreshing is unlikely to be a main determinant of working memory capacity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Spoken language understanding requires the integration of incoming speech with representations of the preceding context. How rich the information is that listeners maintain in these contextual representations has been a long-standing question. Under one view, subcategorical information about the preceding input-including any uncertainty about the underlying categories-is quickly discarded due to memory limitations. Alternative views hold that listeners maintain some subcategorical information far beyond word boundaries. This would facilitate more effective integration with subsequent context, under the assumption that subsequent context is informative about the preceding input. We thus ask whether listeners are sensitive to changes in the informativity of subsequent context by changing the expected utility of subcategorical information maintenance. In three experiments, we manipulate how informative subsequent context is about words that occur six to nine syllables earlier. We find that reduced informativity leads listeners to down-weight the importance of subsequent context. This suggests that listeners can adjust the degree to which they maintain subcategorical information. We do, however, also identify alternative interpretations that affect not only the present results but also the interpretation of previous work on subcategorical information maintenance. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

People learn and retrieve cognitive control settings (e.g., attentional focus) associated with stimulus and contextual features. It has been theorized that control adjustments occur at the item level (e.g., for a specific picture) and the category level (i.e., for the overarching category represented by the picture), but evidence is lacking for the former. We aimed to determine whether control can truly operate at the item level. In Experiments 1-3, we manipulated item-specific proportion congruencies in a picture-word Stroop task while holding category-specific proportion congruencies constant at 50% congruent. One item in each animal category (e.g., Dog 1, Fish 1) was mostly congruent (MC) and one item (e.g., Dog 2, Fish 2) was mostly incongruent (MI). Item-level control (i.e., larger Stroop effect for MC items compared to MI items) was observed in Experiment 1, but neither Experiment 2 nor 3 replicated this finding. Experiments 4a and 4b used MC and MI categories, with each comprising both MC and MI items, allowing us to potentially index both levels of control. However, the findings indicated that control operated only at the category level and not the item level. Using novel stimuli, Experiment 5 showed Stroop effects differed between items that shared a response but were visually/conceptually dissimilar. This finding suggests that applying item-level control may be difficult when items within a category are visually/conceptually similar (as in Experiments 1-4). Collectively, our findings provided little evidence for item-level control; instead, the findings suggest control primarily operates at the category level in the picture-word Stroop task. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Framing effects (risk preferences reverse for gains vs. losses) and the Allais paradox (risk preferences reverse when an option is certain vs. not) are major violations of rational choice theory. In contrast to typical samples, certified public accountants who are competent in working with probabilities and expected values should be an ideal test case for rational choice, especially high scorers on the cognitive reflection test (CRT). Although dual-process theories emphasize numeracy and cognitive reflection, fuzzy-trace theory emphasizes gist-based intuition to explain these effects among cognitively advanced decision-makers. Thus, we recruited a high-numeracy sample of certified public accountants (N = 259) and students (N = 648). We administered classic dread-disease framing, business framing, and Allais paradox problems and the CRT. Each participant received a gain and loss framing problem from different domains (one disease and one business), with presentation order counterbalanced across participants. Order of Allais problems was counterbalanced within participants. Within-participants (cross-domain) framing, between-participants (within-domain) framing, and the Allais paradox were observed for both samples. Accountants did not show domain-specific attenuation (differentially smaller framing) for business problems. Despite large expected-value differences between Allais problem options, accountants' choices resembled students' choices. Contrary to dual-process theories, CRT scores were positively related to framing for students (more framing with higher CRT) and inconsistently related for accountants, but high scorers had robust framing effects; high scorers also showed the Allais paradox. Results are consistent with fuzzy-trace theory's expectation that experts show framing effects because they rely primarily on gist-based intuition, not because they lack numeracy or cognitive reflection. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

In two visual-world eyetracking experiments, we investigated how effectively addressees use information about a speaker's perspective to resolve temporary ambiguities in spoken expressions containing prenominal scalar adjectives (e.g., the small candle). The experiments used a new "Display Change" task to create situations where an addressee's perspective conflicted with that of a speaker, allowing the point of disambiguation (early vs. late) to be specified independently from each perspective. Contrary to existing perspective-taking theories, the only situation in which addressees resolved references early was when both perspectives afforded early disambiguation. When perspectives conflicted, addressees exhibited a lower rate of preferential looks to the target and slower response times. This disruption to contrastive inference reflects either the suspension of pragmatic inferencing or cognitive limitations on the simultaneous representation and use of incompatible perspectives. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Variation in eye movement patterns can be considerable even within skilled readers. Here, individual differences and eye movements of 88 average-to-very-skilled readers were assessed to examine the reliability of previous observations of a reduced word frequency effect associated with skilled reading. Shorter fixation durations and higher skipping rates were observed for high frequency compared to low-frequency words. High scores on reading ability tests and vocabulary knowledge tests predicted reduced frequency effects in gaze duration in models with single individual differences predictors, demonstrated by faster reading of low-frequency words compared to low scorers. A principal components analysis grouped individual differences tests based on shared variance. High "lexical proficiency" predicted shorter gaze durations, reading times, and increased word skipping. "Lexical proficiency" and the Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-II comprehension test predicted a reduced frequency effect in go past times, and all tests apart from the Nelson Denny Reading Test comprehension test predicted a reduced frequency effect in sentence reading times. Data revealed surprising discrepancies in findings based on two subtests supposedly measuring comprehension (Nelson Denny Reading Test and Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-II), constituting an example of the jingle fallacy: the false assumption that two measures that share a name actually measure the same construct. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).