Consequential validity of the Implicit Association Test: Comment on Blanton and Jaccard (2006).

Numeric values of psychological measures often have an arbitrary character before research has grounded their meanings, thereby providing what S. J. Messick (1995) called consequential validity (part of which H. Blanton and J. Jaccard [see record 2006-00920-003] now identify as metric meaningfulness). Some measures are predisposed by their design to acquire meanings easily, an example being the sensitivity measure of signal detection theory. Others are less well prepared, illustrated by most self-report measures of self-esteem. Counter to Blanton and Jaccard's characterization, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has properties that predispose it to acquire consequential validity rapidly. With the IAT as the subject of over 250 publications since 1998, there is now much evidence for its consequential validity. The IAT has attracted more scholarly criticism than have other measures designed for similar purposes. The authors speculate as to why the IAT is an attractive target. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

An effective method for building meaning vocabulary in primary grades.

Teaching vocabulary to primary grade children is essential. Previous studies of teaching vocabulary (word meanings) using story books in the primary grades reported gains of 20%-25% of word meanings taught. The present studies concern possible influences on word meaning acquisition during instruction (Study 1) and increasing the percentage and number of word meanings acquired (Study 2). Both studies were conducted in a working-class school with approximately 50% English-language learners. The regular classroom teachers worked with their whole classes in these studies. In Study 1, average gains of 12% of word meanings were obtained using repeated reading. Adding word explanations added a 10% gain for a total gain of 22%. Pretesting had no effect on gains. In Study 2, results showed learning of 41% of word meanings taught. At this rate of learning word meanings taught, it would be possible for children to learn 400 word meanings a year if 1,000 word meanings were taught. The feasibility of teaching vocabulary to primary grade children is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Meaning or medicine: The future of psychoanalysis in the professional schools.

Psychoanalysis is experiencing a decreasing presence in predoctoral education. The promotion by the American Psychological Association of so-called "evidence-based treatments" reflects the dominance of technocratic, positivistic epistemology, and cognitive-behavioral symptom-oriented approaches to psychotherapy fashioned in the medical model. In contrast, professional schools of psychology, most awarding the PsyD, are committed to epistemological and theoretical pluralisms more suited to psychoanalysis, essentially a humanistic and critical discipline concerned with human agency and language, not biological mechanisms. Psychoanalysis defines problems in terms of human meanings, rather than quasimedical procedures. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The arbitrariness of the sign: Learning advantages from the structure of the vocabulary.

Recent research has demonstrated that systematic mappings between phonological word forms and their meanings can facilitate language learning (e.g., in the form of sound symbolism or cues to grammatical categories). Yet, paradoxically from a learning viewpoint, most words have an arbitrary form-meaning mapping. We hypothesized that this paradox may reflect a division of labor between 2 different language learning functions: arbitrariness facilitates learning specific word meanings and systematicity facilitates learning to group words into categories. In a series of computational investigations and artificial language learning studies, we varied the extent to which the language was arbitrary or systematic. For both the simulations and the behavioral studies, we found that the optimal structure of the vocabulary for learning incorporated this division of labor. Corpus analyses of English and French indicate that these predicted patterns are also found in natural languages. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Meaning making and psychological adjustment following cancer: The mediating roles of growth, life meaning, and restored just-world beliefs.

Cancer survivors' efforts at meaning making may influence the extent to which they successfully make meaning from their experience (i.e., experience posttraumatic growth, find life meaningful, and restore beliefs in a just world), which may, in turn, influence their psychological adjustment. Previous research regarding both meaning making processes and meanings made as determinants of adjustment has shown inconsistent effects, partly because of the lack of clearly articulated theoretical frameworks and problematic research strategies. In a 1-year longitudinal study, the authors distinguished the meaning making process from the outcomes of that process (meanings made), employing specific measures of both. The authors tested pathways through which meaning making efforts led to 3 different meanings made (growth, life meaning, and restored just-world belief) in a sample of 172 young to middle-age adult cancer survivors, and they explored whether those meanings made mediated the effect of meaning making efforts on psychological adjustment. Cross-sectional and longitudinal path models of the meaning making process indicate that meaning making efforts are related to better adjustment through the successful creation of adaptive meanings made from the cancer experience. The authors conclude with clinical implications and suggestions for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Empirical evidence of Aristotle’s concepts of predication and opposition.

In the past four or five years I have been especially dependent on Aristotle's writings as I have initiated a series of experiments that can legitimately be called empirical efforts to prove Aristotelian conceptions to be true. In actuality, of course, I am trying to prove my own theory to be true—that is, worthy of consideration because it is consistent with observed human actions. However, by extension, I am surely seeking evidence for Aristotle's image of human cognition. There are two Aristotlelian conceptions that underwrite my theoretical and empirical efforts: predication and opposition. When we speak of a "predication" in cognition we refer to a process that is fundamentally creative. Predications deal in meanings; and the way in which we align meanings, lending the meaning of one concept to another is what predication is all about. Predication is the act of affirming, denying, or qualifying certain patterns of meaning in relation to other patterns of meaning. The second Aristotelian conception that I have been employing theoretically and investigating empirically is "opposition." Although association through frequent contact was recognized by Aristotle (1952b), he also appreciated that there is often an intrinsic tie of opposite meanings to be seen in human reason. In my own interpretation of Aristotle, I believe that we can see the ultimate necessity of predication stemming from the opositional ties of meanings like this. If I am cognizing within a congerie of interlacing meanings which relate to and, indeed, delimit the definitions of their opposite meanings, then it is up to me as a cognizer to continually "take a position" on just what I am going to affirm—or not! (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Making sense of word senses: The comprehension of polysemy depends on sense overlap.

Studies of polysemy are few in number and are contradictory. Some have found differences between polysemy and homonymy (L. Frazier & K. Rayner, 1990), and others have found similarities (D. K. Klein & G. Murphy, 2001). The authors investigated this issue using the methods of D. K. Klein and G. Murphy (2001), in whose study participants judged whether ambiguous words embedded in word pairs (e.g., tasty chicken) made sense as a function of a cooperating, conflicting, or neutral context. The ambiguous words were independently rated as having low, moderate, or highly overlapping senses to approximate a continuum from homonymy to metonymic polysemy. The effects of meaning dominance were examined. Words with highly overlapping meanings (e.g., metonymy) showed reduced effects of context and dominance compared with words with moderately or low overlapping meanings (e.g., metaphorical polysemy and homonymy). These results suggest that the comprehension of ambiguous words is mediated by the semantic overlap of alternative senses/meanings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition.

Reviews research concerned with processing words that have more than one meaning. Three principal models of ambiguity processing are outlined—context-dependent, ordered-access, and exhaustive access—and the research on which they are based is discussed. Findings seem best served by a hybrid model that allows for activation to accrue for all meanings, with the degree of activation sensitive to the frequency of the meanings and context. The major results of this field are interpreted in terms of the literature in word recognition. Such interpretation is important because of the guidance that such models may give to ambiguity research and because of the importance that ambiguous words hold for more general models of lexical access. (77 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Styles of language use: Individual and cultural variability in conversational indirectness.

People differ in terms of whether they express their meanings directly or indirectly and whether they look for indirect meanings in remarks of others. Although many researchers have noted these differences, empirical research on this topic has been rare. This article reports the development and validation of a measure that assesses the production of indirectness (the extent to which a person phrases his or her remarks directly or indirectly) and the comprehension of indirectness (the extent to which a person looks for indirect meanings in the remarks of others). The author then used this measure to investigate intercultural communication (Koreans were more likely to speak indirectly and to look for indirect meanings than were Americans) and individual differences in conversation processing (people who scored high on the measure were more likely to comprehend certain indirect meanings and to be quicker at doing so than were those who scored low). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Contextual insensitivity in schizophrenic language processing: Evidence from lexical ambiguity.

The authors investigated whether contextual failures in schizophrenia are due to deficits in the detection of context or the inhibition of contextually irrelevant information. Eighteen schizophrenia patients and 24 nonpsychiatric controls were tested via a cross-modal semantic priming task. Participants heard sentences containing homonyms and made lexical decisions about visual targets related to the homonyms' dominant or subordinate meanings. When sentences moderately biased subordinate meanings (e.g., the animal enclosure meaning of pen), schizophrenia patients showed priming of dominant targets (e.g., paper) and subordinate targets (e.g., pig). In contrast, controls showed priming only of subordininate targets. When contexts strongly biased subordinate meanings, both groups showed priming only of subordinate targets. The results suggest that inhibitory deficits rather than context detection deficits underlie contextual failures in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of left frontal lesions on the selection of context-appropriate meanings.

The present study examined the role of the left frontal cortex in strategic aspects of semantic processing. Participants were tested in a semantic priming task involving the meaning access of ambiguous and unambiguous words. Patients with left or bilateral frontal lesions failed to develop semantic facilitation of context-appropriate homograph meanings relative to age-matched controls. When the ambiguous words, however, were replaced by unambiguous words, patients with left frontal lesions improved to normal levels of semantic priming. This pattern of results seems difficult to explain in terms of a problem to access semantic information per se or to use contextual cues. The findings are, however, consistent with a deficit in selecting context-appropriate meanings in the presence of competing meanings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic effects in single-word naming.

Three experiments demonstrated that, for lower frequency words, reading aloud is affected not only by spelling-sound typicality but also by a semantic variable, imageability. Participants were slower and more error prone when naming exception words with abstract meanings (e.g., scarce ) than when naming either abstract regular words (e.g., scribe ) or imageable exception words (e.g., soot ). It is proposed that semantic representations of words have the largest impact on translating orthography to phonology when this translation process is slow or noisy (i.e., for low-frequency exceptions) and that words with rich semantic representations (i.e., high-imageability words) are most likely to benefit from this interaction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of long-term vocabulary instruction on lexical access and reading comprehension.

To examine the relationship between knowledge of word meanings and semantic processes, 27 4th-grade children were taught 104 words over a 5-mo period. Following instruction, Ss performed tasks designed to require semantic processes ranging from single word semantic decisions to simple sentence verification and memory for connected text. On all these tasks, instructed Ss performed at a significantly higher level than controls matched on pre-instruction vocabulary knowledge and comprehension. Thus, instructed Ss gave evidence both of learning word meanings taught by the program and of being able to process instructed words more efficiently in tasks more reflective of comprehension. Implications for vocabulary instruction and the role of individual word meanings in comprehension are discussed. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hemispheric differences in context sensitivity during lexical ambiguity resolution

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the influence of contextual constraint on lexical ambiguity resolution in the cerebral hemispheres. A cross-modal priming variant of the divided visual field task was utilized in which subjects heard sentences containing homonyms and made lexical decisions to targets semantically related to dominant and subordinate meanings. Experiment 1 showed priming in both hemispheres of dominant meanings for homonyms embedded in neutral sentence contexts. Experiment 2 showed priming in both hemispheres of dominant and subordinate meanings for homonyms embedded in sentence contexts that biased a central semantic feature of the subordinate meaning. Experiment 3 showed priming of dominant meanings in the left hemisphere (LH), and priming of the subordinate meaning in the right hemisphere (RH) for homonyms embedded in sentences that biased a peripheral semantic feature of the subordinate meaning. These results are consistent with a context-sensitive model of language processing that incorporates differential sensitivity to semantic relationships in the cerebral hemispheres.     

Direct Assessments of the Processing Time Hypothesis for the Missing-Letter Effect.

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequently used words or in the most frequent meaning of a polysemic word. According to the processing time hypothesis, this occurs because familiar words and meanings are identified faster, leaving less time for letter identification. Contrary to the predictions of the processing time hypothesis, with a rapid serial visual presentation procedure, participants were slower at detecting target letters for more frequent words or the most frequent meaning of a word (Experiments 1 and 2) or at detecting the word itself instead of a target letter (Experiment 3). In Experiments 4 and 5, participants self-initiated the presentation of each word, and the same pattern of results was observed as in Experiments 1 and 3. Positive correlations were also found between omission rate and response latencies. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Fuzzy-trace theory and children's false memories

Fuzzy-trace theory's concepts of identity judgment, nonidentity judgment, and similarity judgment provide a unified account of the false-memory phenomena that have been most commonly studied in children: false-recognition effects and misinformation effects. False-recognition effects (elevated false-alarm rates for unpresented distractors that preserve the meanings of presented targets) are due to increased rates of similarity or false identity judgment about distractors or to decreased rates of nonidentity judgment. Misinformation effects (erroneous acceptance of misleading postevent information and erroneous rejection of actual events) are also due to variability in rates of similarity, identity, and nonidentity judgment. Two experimental paradigms are presented, one for false recognition (conjoint recognition) and one for misinformation (conjoint misinformation), that allow investigators to tease apart the contributions of these processes to children's false-memory reports. Each paradigm is implemented in a mathematical model that provides numerical estimates of the processes.     

Effect of meaning on letter detection.

Six experiments examined whether familiarity of word meaning affected letter detection in common function words. Fewer detection errors occurred for the when it had an unusual meaning, was contrastive, or had an ambiguous referent. Fewer errors occurred for less common meanings of in and it even when it took on less semantic content and was a function word. These experiments suggest that the length of time spent processing a given word is a major determinant of letter detection errors on that word, that common meanings of words are more quickly accessed than uncommon meanings, that word meaning plays an important role in letter detection, and that visual processing of letters occurs during a late stage of semantic accessing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multichannel nonverbal communication: Evidence for combinatory rules.

Tested the hypothesis that Ss who view certain combinations of nonverbal behaviors in 3 channels—eye contact, posture, and distance—agree strongly about the specific meanings of these combinations. However, other combinations of these same channels, as well as unichannel behaviors, will result in little agreement about their meanings. An actor's nonverbal behaviors were filmed simultaneously by 4 cameras. One camera recorded behaviors in all 3 channels, but each of the other cameras filmed the behavior of a single channel. The Ss, 320 undergraduates, assigned meanings to the filmed behaviors by selecting from a list of 20 adjectives those that best described the actor's behavior. A panel of judges had previously found that these adjectives portrayed one of the following meanings: deprivation of status or esteem, deprivation of love or affection, provision of love or affection, provision of status or esteem. Five adjectives were selected from each class of meaning. In general, the results support the hypothesis. Some deviations were found and are discussed. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)