Controlling Stroop interference: Evidence from a bilingual task.

Skilled performance is often associated with automaticity. Automatic processes are generally thought of as uncontrollable so that automaticity implies the lack of control. The Stroop Color and Word Test is one of the most cited examples of automaticity and uncontrollability of word reading. This task is also employed extensively to investigate the structure of the bilingual lexicon. The present work employed a Hebrew-Arabic bilingual Stroop task in 2 separate experiments. To induce controlled processing, the authors varied the Ss' expectations regarding the written (irrelevant) color words. The Stroop interference effect was always present, but Ss were able to control (reduce) it in their native language but not in their second language. In addition, the presumed structure of the bilingual lexicon seems to change in accordance with proficiency in the second language. It is suggested that automaticity and control are both characteristics of skilled performance with each of them reflecting a different aspect and each subserving a different function of our cognitive system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Frequency effects in spoken and visual word recognition: Evidence from dual-task methodologies.

The authors report 3 dual-task experiments concerning the locus of frequency effects in word recognition. In all experiments, Task 1 entailed a simple perceptual choice and Task 2 involved lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an underadditive effect of word frequency arose for spoken words. Experiment 2 also showed underadditivity for visual lexical decision. It was concluded that word frequency exerts an influence prior to any dual-task bottleneck. A related finding in similar dual-task experiments is Task 2 response postponement at short stimulus onset asynchronies. This was explored in Experiment 3, and it was shown that response postponement was equivalent for both spoken and visual word recognition. These results imply that frequency-sensitive processes operate early and automatically. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automaticity of word recognition under phonics and whole-word instruction.

38 undergraduates learned to read words spelled with novel letters under phonics or whole-word conditions. Training was carried through several overlearning trials, and vocalization latency of word recognition responses was measured. On initial overlearning trials, vocalizations of phonics Ss were faster than those of whole-word Ss. At no stage of overlearning were whole-word Ss faster than phonics Ss. Vocalization latencies declined as overlearning progressed at approximately equal rates for phonics and whole-word Ss but did not reach fully automated speeds. Correlations of vocalization latencies from overlearning trials and a baseline task indicated that whole-word instruction resulted in word recognition mechanisms similar to fully automated mechanisms but that phonics instruction did not. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive mood and executive function: Evidence from Stroop and fluency tasks.

Contrasting predictions have been made about the effects of positive mood states on the performance of frontal lobe tests that tap executive functions such as inhibition, switching, and strategy use. It has been argued that positive mood is likely to improve some cognitive processes, particularly those dependent on the frontal cortex and anterior cingulate of the brain. However, there is some evidence that happy mood may impair executive functioning. The current experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on Stroop and fluency tests, which are frequently used to assess executive function. Positive mood impaired performance on a switching condition of the Stroop test, but improved performance on a creative uses test of fluency. The effect of positive mood on an executive task may therefore depend on whether a task is inherently motivating or is impaired by diffuse semantic activation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stroop color—word interference and electroencephalogram activation: Evidence for age-related decline of the anterior attention system.

Groups of healthy, community-dwelling younger and older adults performed a Stroop task in which color and word could be congruent or incongruent and spatially integrated or separated. During the task, continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from frontal, parietal, and occipital regions. The magnitude of the Stroop interference effect and task-related EEG activation was greater for older than younger adults when stimuli were integrated. This effect was significant over medial and lateral frontal and parietal, but not occipital, regions. In comparison, interference and EEG activation did not differ for younger and older adults when stimuli were separated. These findings support the hypothesis that the anterior attention system is more sensitive to the effects of increasing age than the posterior attention system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Automatic processing of psychological distance: Evidence from a Stroop task.

A picture-word version of the Stroop task was used to test the automatic activation of psychological distance by words carrying various senses of psychological distance: temporal (tomorrow, in a year), social (friend, enemy), and hypotheticality (sure, maybe). The pictures implied depth, with the words appearing relatively close to or distant from the observer. The participants classified the spatial distance of words faster when the word's implicit psychological distance matched its spatial distance (e.g., a geographically close word was classified faster when it was "friend" than when it was "enemy"). The findings are consistent with the idea that psychological distance is accessed automatically, even when it is not directly related to people's current goals, and suggest that psychological distance is an important dimension of meaning, common to spatial distance, temporal distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Suedohomofoan effects in visual word recognition: Evidence for phonological processing.

Investigated the pseudohomophone effect, which is considered to be evidence that phonological recoding occurs in the lexical decision task in which a letter string like brane is identified as a nonword. 22 undergraduates read 156 letter strings, half of which were words, and identified them as words or nonwords. Half of the nonwords were pseudohomophones like brane, which sounds like a real word but is not spelled like one; half were strings like slint, which neither looks nor sounds like a real word. Response time to pseudohomophones was slower than response time to other nonwords. The interpretation of this result is that the letter string brane is transformed into a phonological code that accesses the entry for brain in a phonological lexicon, thus necessitating a time-consuming spelling check to avoid making a false positive response. Since letter strings like slint have no lexical entries, a postaccess spelling check is not necessary. Thus, the pseudohomophone effect reflects phonological processing. (French abstract) (11 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lexical and prelexical influences on word segmentation: Evidence from priming.

The authors examined the interaction of acoustic and lexical information in lexical access and segmentation. The cross-modal lexical priming technique was used to determine which word meanings listeners access at the offsets of oronyms (e.g., tulips or two lips) presented in connected speech. In Experiment 1, participants showed priming by the meaning of tulips when presented with two lips. In Experiment 2, priming by the meaning of the 2nd word was found in such sequences (e.g., lips in two lips). Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrated that listeners do not show priming by lips when it is pronounced as part of tulips. The results of these experiments show that listeners sometimes access words other than those intended by speakers and may simultaneously access words associated with several parses of ambiguous sequences. Furthermore, the results suggest that acoustic marking of word onsets places constraints on the success of lexical access. To account for these results, the authors propose a new model of lexical access and segmentation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Abstract word deficits in aphasia: Evidence from semantic priming.

J.G. and D.E. are nonfluent aphasic patients who appear to have selective problems with abstract words on a variety of standard tests. Such a pattern would normally be interpreted as indicating a central semantic deficit for abstract words. The authors show that this is not the case by means of a semantic priming task that tests for implicit knowledge of the meanings of abstract and concrete words. Spoken word pairs that were either abstract or concrete synonyms (e.g., street-road or luck-chance) were presented; both Ss showed priming for the abstract and concrete pairs. The researchers followed up by asking the Ss to produce definitions to spoken abstract and concrete words; these definitions were also normal. The priming and definition data suggest that the semantic representations of abstract words in these Ss were relatively unimpaired. The researchers found that the Ss have problems only with spoken abstract words in just those tasks where normal controls also have difficulty. In contrast, they clearly have deficits in reading abstract words aloud, which may be due to problems with output phonology. Implications of these data for claims concerning hemispheric differences in the representation of abstract and concrete words are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention within auditory word perception: Insights from the phonemic restoration illusion.

Conducted 2 experiments to determine the extent to which attention plays a role in the phonemic restoration illusion and to infer from this the nature of attention in auditory word perception. Exp I examined the effect of training on the magnitude of the phonemic restoration illusion. 24 Ss received training with the potentially restorable stimuli (972 trials with feedback); in addition, the presence or absence of an attentional cue, contained in a visual prime preceeding each trial, was varied between groups of Ss. Findings reveal that cuing the identity and location of the critical phoneme of each test word allowed Ss to attend to the critical phoneme, thereby inhibiting the illusion, but only when the prime also identified the test word itself. Exp II was a 2-part replication of Exp I, using 92 Ss and some modifications of the conditions. Results show that when the prime provided only the identity or location of the critical phoneme, or only the identity of the word, Ss performed identically to those Ss for whom the prime contained no information at all about the test word. Training did not produce any generalized learning about the types of stimuli used. Results indicate that attention is necessary to perceive phonemic units selectively and is focused through the level that has primacy in the perception of spoken words, the mental lexicon. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A dual read-out model of word context effects in letter perception: Further investigations of the word superiority effect.

A dual read-out model of context effects in letter perception is described that predicts forced-choice accuracy in the Reicher paradigm and its relation to word reportability. It is hypothesized that a correct choice to a letter in a word context is made when either the correct letter representation or a word representation containing the correct letter in the correct position reaches a response threshold (a criterion level of activation). This hypothesis was implemented using the basic architecture of the interactive activation model (J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981) in its semistochastic variant (A. M. Jacobs & J. Grainger, 1992). The model successfully captures the data of J. C. Johnston (1978), otherwise thought to be critically damaging for this type of model, and accurately predicts performance in a series of new experiments using the Reicher paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Modularity beyond perception: Evidence from the PRP paradigm.

The Dimension Action (DA) model asserts that the visual system is modular, and that each task involves multiple-response mechanisms rather than a unitary-response selection mechanism. The model has been supported by evidence from single-task interference paradigms. We use the psychological refractory period paradigm and show that dual-task performance can also be explained by the DA model. In 6 experiments we contrasted predictions from the DA model with predictions from the Response Selection Bottleneck (RSB; Pashler, 1994) model asserting that dual-task limitations are due to a unitary-response selection mechanism. Task 1 in all experiments was a tone discrimination task. In Experiments 1 to 3, Task 2 was a variation of either the Stroop or the flanker tasks. Experiments 4 to 6 manipulated response selection directly. The results showed that response selection effects can be underadditive in some conditions and additive in others depending on the modular nature of the response effect. Together, the results support the existence of an underlying modular architecture as proposed by the DA model and pose serious difficulties for the RSB model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Event perception and the word repetition effect.

Five experiments examined repetition effects on tachistoscopic word identification with masked and unmasked primes varying in lag (to the targets) and word frequency. Qualitative differences in lag effects were found between masked and unmasked primes, with only unmasked primes producing long-lasting repetition effects. Masked primes facilitated performance under conditions in which subjects did not discriminate the presence of prime letter strings; unmasked primes only facilitated target identification when there were visual cues segmenting primes from targets. These qualitative differences between masked and unmasked primes were attributed to effects occurring within a perceptual event (with masked primes) relative to those occurring across events (with unmasked primes). The relevance of the data for understanding both the word repetition effect and event perception in reading is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Visual word recognition in bilinguals: Evidence from masked phonological priming.

Bilingual written language representation was investigated with the masked phonological priming paradigm. Pseudohomophonic and control primes of French target words were used to show that Dutch–French bilinguals exhibit the same pattern of phonological and orthographic priming as native French speakers, which suggests that the same processes underlie first- and second-language processing. It was also found that for bilinguals, but not monolinguals, it is possible to prime a target word of the second language with a homophonic stimulus (either word or nonword) of the first language. This interlingual phonological priming effect was of the same size as the intralingual priming effect. Implications for theories of bilingual written language representation and for the interpretation of the masked phonological priming paradigm are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Comprehension of arithmetic word problems: Evidence from students' eye fixations.

Students have difficulty solving arithmetic word problems containing a relational term that is inconsistent with the required arithmetic operation (e.g., containing the term less, yet requiring addition) rather than consistent. To investigate this consistency effect, students' eye fixations were recorded as they read arithmetic word problems on a computer monitor and stated a solution plan for each problem. As predicted, low-accuracy students made more reversal errors on inconsistent than consistent problems, students took more time for inconsistent than consistent problems, this additional time was localized in the integration/planning stages of problem solving rather than in the initial reading of the problem, these response-time patterns were obtained for high-accuracy but not for low-accuracy students, and high-accuracy students required more rereadings of previously fixated words for inconsistent than for consistent problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Context-dependent migrations in visual word perception.

In the present study we investigate the effect of context—that is, a prime—on migration errors. Migration errors, or migrations, are caused by perceptual interactions between two words in a visual display, such as line–lace. After postcuing, subjects sometimes report lane or lice, instead of the requested word line. This phenomenon has been demonstrated by previous studies. In the experiments reported here, we replicate this phenomenon. We also find that more migrations of the lane type occur (compared with lice type), when the display line–lace is preceded by a prime related to lane (but not to lice). This shows that higher order word knowledge, in the form of semantic relations between words, influences the migration phenomenon. Further, we show that the number of migration errors are not a result of only a summation of activation from the letters in the display. The method we developed to isolate context-dependent migrations also gives valuable information about the effect of contextual information on word perception. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sources of information in word perception.

Disyllabic words were presented tachistoscopically to a total of 16 undergraduates in 2 experiments, and report of the words was required. In Exp I, word frequency was varied but the frequencies of the constituent syllables were held constant. In Exp II, syllable frequency varied while word frequency remained constant. The prime determinant of perceptual accuracy was word frequency, but an analysis of partial errors showed that some discriminability effects at both the word and the syllable level were present. There was a slight advantage for the 1st syllable over the 2nd within a word. There was no overall improvement with practice, but errors on high frequency words became fewer and on low frequency words correspondingly more frequent. Results suggest that word perception involves extraction and resynthesis of information about components of several different sizes within a word. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stroop Dilution Revisited: Evidence for Domain-Specific, Limited-Capacity Processing.

Nine experiments show that in the context of Stroop dilution the extent to which flanking distractors are processed depends on the nature of the material at fixation. A Stroop effect is eliminated if a word or a nonword is colored and appears at fixation and the color word appears as a flanker. A Stroop effect is observed when the color carrier at fixation is from a different domain than the color word distractor (e.g., Arabic digits). It is argued that when the material at fixation is in the same domain as the color word distractor, the distractor is not processed. Taken together, these results implicate a role for material-specific, limited-capacity processing in the context of this variant of the Stroop paradigm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Separate mechanisms recruited by exogenous and endogenous spatial cues: Evidence from a spatial Stroop paradigm.

The present experiments tested whether endogenous and exogenous cues produce separate effects on target processing. In Experiment 1, participants discriminated whether an arrow presented left or right of fixation pointed to the left or right. For 1 group, the arrow was preceded by a peripheral noninformative cue. For the other group, the arrow was preceded by a central, symbolic, informative cue. The 2 types of cues modulated the spatial Stroop effect in opposite ways, with endogenous cues producing larger spatial Stroop effects for valid trials and exogenous cues producing smaller spatial Stroop effects for valid trials. In Experiments 2A and 2B, the influence of peripheral noninformative and peripheral informative cues on the spatial Stroop effect was directly compared. The spatial Stroop effect was smaller for valid than for invalid trials for both types of cues. These results point to a distinction between the influence of central and peripheral attentional cues on performance and are not consistent with a unitary view of endogenous and exogenous attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguishing response conflict and task conflict in the Stroop task: Evidence from ex-Gaussian distribution analysis.

It has been suggested that performance in the Stroop task is influenced by response conflict as well as task conflict. The present study investigated the idea that both conflict types can be isolated by applying ex-Gaussian distribution analysis which decomposes response time into a Gaussian and an exponential component. Two experiments were conducted in which manual versions of a standard Stroop task (Experiment 1) and a separated Stroop task (Experiment 2) were performed under task-switching conditions. Effects of response congruency and stimulus bivalency were used to measure response conflict and task conflict, respectively. Ex-Gaussian analysis revealed that response conflict was mainly observed in the Gaussian component, whereas task conflict was stronger in the exponential component. Moreover, task conflict in the exponential component was selectively enhanced under task-switching conditions. The results suggest that ex-Gaussian analysis can be used as a tool to isolate different conflict types in the Stroop task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)