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

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).

How does the language comprehension system identify and interpret word constituents-or morphemes-during sentence reading? We investigated this question by employing words containing semantically ambiguous roots (e.g., bark, with meanings related to both "dog" and "tree") which are disambiguated when affixed by -ing (e.g., barking; related to "dog" only). We aimed to understand whether higher-level access to the meaning of the root bark would be constrained by lower-level morphological affixation. In Experiment 1, using eye-tracking, participants read sentences containing words with semantically ambiguous roots, such as barking (a prime), combined with targets that were either related to two meanings of the root (dog, tree) or they were cloze and unrelated controls. All five eye-tracking measures we employed (first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past time, total reading time, and regressions to target) showed no difference between the two root-related targets, which were slower than cloze, but faster than unrelated. Results show that even in cases where a meaning is inconsistent with the full word form (barking-tree), both meanings of the ambiguous root are activated. These results were supported by Experiment 2, employing a maze task in which the time to select the cloze (night) continuation for the sentence He heard loud barking during the … was disrupted by the presence of distractors related to both meanings of bark. We discuss the implications of these findings for the nature of morphological parsing and lexical ambiguity resolution in sentence contexts. We suggest that word recognition and lexical access processes involve separating roots from affixes, yielding independent and exhaustive access to root meanings-even when they are ruled out by affixation and context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).