The mechanisms of suppression and enhancement in comprehension.

The goal of comprehension is to build coherent mental representations or structures. These structures represent clauses, sentences, paragraphs, passages, and other meaningful units. Thus, comprehending a clause requires building a mental structure to represent what that clause is about; comprehending a sentence requires building a mental structure to represent what that sentence is about; comprehending a passage requires building a mental structure to represent what that passage is about. In Gernsbacher (1990), I described a simple framework for understanding how comprehenders build mental structures during comprehension. I call this framework, the Structure Building Framework. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Investigating differences in general comprehension skill.

For adults, skill at comprehending written language correlates highly with skill at comprehending spoken language. Does this general comprehension skill extend beyond language-based modalities? And if it does, what cognitive processes and mechanisms differentiate individuals who are more versus less proficient in general comprehension skill? In our first experiment, we found that skill in comprehending written and auditory stories correlates highly with skill in comprehending nonverbal, picture stories. This finding supports the hypothesis that general comprehension skill extends beyond language. We also found support for the hypotheses that poorer access to recently comprehended information marks less proficient general comprehension skill (Experiment 2) because less skilled comprehenders develop too many mental substructures during comprehension (Experiment 3), perhaps because they inefficiently suppress irrelevant information (Experiment 4). Thus, the cognitive processes and mechanisms involved in capturing and representing the structure of comprehensible information provide one source of individual differences in general comprehension skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Language deficits, localization, and grammar: Evidence for a distributive model of language breakdown in aphasic patients and neurologically intact individuals.

Selective deficits in aphasic patients' grammatical production and comprehension are often cited as evidence that syntactic processing is modular and localizable in discrete areas of the brain (e.g., Y. Grodzinsky, 2000). The authors review a large body of experimental evidence suggesting that morphosyntactic deficits can be observed in a number of aphasic and neurologically intact populations. They present new data showing that receptive agrammatism is found not only over a range of aphasic groups, but is also observed in neurologically intact individuals processing under stressful conditions. The authors suggest that these data are most compatible with a domain-general account of language, one that emphasizes the interaction of linguistic distributions with the properties of an associative processor working under normal or suboptimal conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Research psychologist' roles in the genetic revolution.

Comments on the article by A. F. Patenaude et al (see record 2002-12457-022) that discusses advances in genetics and genetic testing and the role of psychology and psychologists in this field. Goldsmith et al present their thoughts on the role of psychologists in the genetic revolution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Remembering left–right orientation of pictures.

Studied orientation retrieval and recognition memory for pictures in 32 undergraduate or graduate students. Results indicate an asymmetry in classifying test items as "same" vs "different" in left–right orientation. Identical copies of previously viewed items were classified more accurately than left–right reversals of those items. Response bias could not explain this asymmetry, and, moreover, correct "same" and "different" classifications were independently manipulable. Whereas repetition of input pictures (1 vs 2 presentations) affected primarily correct "same" classifications, retention interval (3 hrs vs 1 wk) affected primarily correct "different" classifications. Repetition but not retention interval affected judgments that previously seen pictures (both identical and reversed) were "old." Findings support a dual-process hypothesis that links "same" classifications to high familiarity, and "different" classifications to conscious sampling of images of previously viewed pictures. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resolving 20 years of inconsistent interactions between lexical familiarity and orthography, concreteness, and polysemy.

Word recognition studies conducted over the past 2 decades manipulated lexical familiarity by presenting words of high vs low printed frequency, and most reported an interaction between printed frequency and one of several second variables, namely, orthographic regularity, semantic concreteness, or polysemy. However, the direction of these interactions was inconsistent from study to study. Six new experiments clarify these discordant results. Exps I and II, conducted with 89 college students, demonstrate that words of the same low printed frequency are not always equally familiar to Ss. Instead, Ss' ratings of experiential familiarity suggest that many of the low-printed-frequency words used in prior studies varied along this dimension. Four lexical decision experiments, conducted with 78 undergraduates, reexamined the prior findings by orthogonally manipulating lexical familiarity, as assessed by experiential familiarity ratings, with bigram frequency, semantic concreteness, and number of meanings. Results suggest that of these variables, only experiential familiarity reliably affects word recognition latencies. This in turn suggests that previous inconsistent findings were due to confounding experiential familiarity with a second variable. (68 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)