Abstract not found

similarity effects in masked associative priming One issue that all models of visual word recognition in alphabetic orthographies must ultimately take a position on is how the human processing system encodes letter positions when creating internal orthographic representations. Furthermore, although the choice of a coding scheme might seem to be a secondary aspect of these models, it can have a large impact on a model’s predictions (Andrews, 1996). For example, virtually all of the current models assume that the derived orthographic representation activates the lexical representations of formally similar words

This paper identifies several serious problems with the widespread use of ANOVAs for the analysis of categorical outcome variables such as forced-choice variables, question-answer accuracy, choice in production (e.g. in syntactic priming research), et cetera. I show that even after applying the arcsine-square-root transformation to proportional data, ANOVA can yield spurious results. I discuss conceptual issues underlying these problems and alternatives provided by modern statistics. Specifically, I introduce ordinary logit models (i.e. logistic regression), which are well-suited to analyze categorical data and offer many advantages over ANOVA. Unfortunately, ordinary logit models do not include random effect modeling. To address this issue, I describe mixed logit models (Generalized Linear Mixed Models for binomially distributed outcomes, Breslow & Clayton, 1993), which combine the advantages of ordinary logit models with the ability to account for random subject and item effects in one step of analysis. Throughout the paper, I use a psycholinguistic data set to compare the different statistical methods.

There is an active debate within the field of phonology concerning the cognitive status of substantive phonetic factors such as ease of articulation and perceptual distinctiveness. A new framework is proposed in which substance acts as a bias, or prior, on phonological learning. Two experiments tested this framework with a method in which participants are first provided highly impoverished evidence of a new phonological pattern, and then tested on how they extend this pattern to novel contexts and novel sounds. Participants were found to generalize velar palatalization (e.g., the change from [k]asinkeep to [t�ʃ]asincheap) in a way that accords with linguistic typology, and that is predicted by a cognitive bias in favor of changes that relate perceptually similar sounds. Velar palatalization was extended from the mid front vowel context (i.e., before [e]asincape) to the high front vowel context (i.e., before [i]asin keep), but not vice versa. The key explanatory notion of perceptual similarity is quantified with a psychological model of categorization, and the substantively biased framework is formalized as a conditional random field. Implications of these results for the debate on substance, theories of phonological generalization, and the formalization of similarity are discussed.

Four lexical decision experiments were conducted to analyze whether the previous presentation of a syllabic "neighbor" (e.g., boca and bono; which share the first syllable in Spanish) influences recognition performance using a masked priming paradigm. The results showed an inhibitory effect of more frequent syllabic primes (boca-BONO; Experiment 1) and some facilitation of nonword syllabic primes (bofa-BONO; Experiments 2-3). Further, when monosyllabic pairs were used (ziel-ZINC; Experiment 3), no priming effects of the two first letters were found. Finally, by using only syllables as primes (ca**** vs. cas***), latencies to CV and CVC words were faster when preceded by primes that corresponded to the first syllable than by primes that contained one letter more or less than the first syllable (Experiment 4). The results are interpreted in the context of activation models that take into account a syllabic level of representation.

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., “Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour”). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace were in liquid form, allowing them to be poured). The number of candidate objects that could afford the action was found to determine whether listeners initially misinterpreted the ambiguous phrase (“in the bowl”) as specifying a location. The findings indicate that syntactic decisions are guided by the listener’s situation-specific evaluation of how to achieve the behavioral goal of an utterance. As a sentence unfolds in time, the grammatical relationships among its constituents are often temporarily ambiguous. For example, the phrase italicized in (1) may indicate the location where an egg is being poured, or may specify which of several eggs is intended. (1) The baker poured the egg in the bowl... (2) a....while stirring continuously.

Data from repeated measures experiments are usually analyzed with conventional ANOVA. Three well-known problems with ANOVA are the sphericity assumption, the design e#ect (sampling hierarchy), and the requirement for complete designs and data sets. This tutorial explains and demonstrates multi-level modeling (MLM) as an alternative analysis tool for repeated measures data. MLM allows us to estimate variance and covariance components explicitly. MLM does not require sphericity, it takes the sampling hierarchy into account, and it is capable of analyzing incomplete data. A fictitious data set is analyzed with MLM and ANOVA, and analysis results are compared. Moreover, existing data from a repeated measures design are re-analyzed with MLM, to demonstrate its advantages. Monte Carlo simulations suggest that MLM yields higher power than ANOVA, in particular under realistic circumstances. Although technically complex, MLM is recommended as a useful tool for analyzing repeated measures data from speech research.

The authors report 6 self-paced word-by-word reading studies of how morphosyntactic agreement, focus status, and the structural constraints of binding theory apply and interact during the online interpretation of pronouns (e.g., him, her) and anaphors (e.g., himself, each other). Previous studies held that structural conditions on coreference work as interpretive filters that impose exceptionless limits on which antecedent candidates can be evaluated by subsequent, content-based processes. These experiments instead support an interactive-parallel-constraint model, in which multiple weighted constraints (including constraints on binding) simultaneously influence the net activation of a candidate during preselection stages of antecedent evaluation. Accordingly, structurally inaccessible candidates can interfere with antecedent selection if they are both prominent in focus structure and gender–number compatible with the pronoun or anaphor. Apprehending referential dependencies constitutes a central part of language understanding. Formal and experimental studies show that coreference processing is influenced by (a) the morphological and syntactic properties of the referentially dependent expression and its potential antecedents (Chomsky, 1981; Lasnik, 1989; Reinhart, 1983a, 1983b), (b) structural parallelism (Chambers & Smyth, 1998; Smyth, 1994), (c) the “causal ” semantics of sentence predicates and connectives (Caramazza, Grober, Garvey, & Yates,

& An important method for studying how the brain processes familiar stimuli is to present the same item on more than one occasion and measure how responses change with repetition. Here we use repetition priming in a sparse functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to probe the neuroanatomical basis of spoken word recognition and the representations of spoken words that mediate repetition priming effects. Participants made lexical decisions to words and pseudowords spoken by a male or female voice that were presented twice, with half of the repetitions in a different voice. Behavioral and neural priming was observed for both words and pseudowords and was not affected by voice changes. The fMRI data revealed an elevated response to words compared to pseudowords in both posterior and anterior temporal regions, suggesting that both contribute to word recognition. Both reduced and elevated activation for second presentations (repetition suppression and enhancement) were observed in frontal and posterior regions. Correlations between behavioral priming and neural repetition suppression were observed in frontal regions, suggesting that repetition priming effects for spoken words reflect changes within systems involved in generating behavioral responses. Based on the current results, these processes are sufficiently abstract to display priming despite changes in the physical form of the stimulus and operate equivalently for words and pseudowords. &

According to some theories of recognition memory (e.g., Dennis and Humphreys, 2001), the number of different contexts in which words appear determines how memorable individual occurences of words will be: A word that occurs in a small number different contexts should be better recognized than a word that appears in a larger number of different contexts. To empirically test this prediction, a normative measure is developed, which is referred to here as context variability, that estimates the number of different contexts in which words appear in everyday life. The present findings confirm the prediction that words low in context variability are better recognized (on average) than words that are high in context variability.