Surface form typicality and asymmetric transfer in episodic memory for spoken words.

A series of experiments was conducted to determine whether the typicality of the surface form of speech would affect memory retention of spoken words. For each surface characteristic studied, a continuous recognition-memory task was used in which listeners based recognition judgments on word identity alone. For "typical" items, repetition benefits did not depend on whether the surface forms of the 1st and 2nd occurrences matched or mismatched. For "atypical" items, a larger repetition benefit occurred when the surface forms of the 2 occurrences matched. These results suggest that episodic memory for spoken words may be directly related to the perceived typicality of particular surface characteristics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repeated events in rapid lists: II. Remembering repetitions.

People have difficulty reporting the repetition of a word presented twice in a rapid list. However, the authors observed that success in reporting repetition increased when subjects were required to recall list words prior to judging repetition. It was concluded that failure to report repetition often results from failure to remember the separate occurrences of the word, rather than a failure to encode them. The authors also observed that after-list processing can assist remembering the repetition either by cueing retrieval of the contexts of the separate occurrences or by allowing the subject to experience a feeling of repetition. They concluded that reporting repetition depends as much on processing conducted after the list as it does on encoding during list presentation. An account of processing in rapid lists, based on independent encoding of the occurrences of repeated words during the list and on reflective processing conducted after the list, is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of repetition effects for words and unfamiliar faces.

The repetition effect on reaction time to words and unfamiliar faces was examined at lags of 0, 4, and 15 items between 1st and 2nd presentations. For words, Ss made either a lexical decision or a decision based on the stimulus's structural attributes. In the lexical decision task, a significant repetition effect was found at all 3 lags for words, whereas for nonwords the effect was significant only at Lag 0. In the structural decision task, the repeated decision was facilitated for both words and nonwords only at Lag 0, despite a word superiority effect at all lags. Target faces were presented either 0, 1, or 5 times before testing. Ss made either structural discriminations (face/nonface) or recognition judgments. In the structural discrimination task, the effect of repetition was significant only at Lag 0 (regardless of the number of pretest presentations). In the recognition task, the repetition effect was longer lasting, and its magnitude increased with the number of presentations which, presumably, determined the strength of the episodic memory trace. These results are taken as showing that repetition effects, like other measures of memory, are influenced by the type of stimulus, its preexperimental history, the level to which it is processed, and the lag between the initial presentation and the test. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual abstraction and interactivity in repeated oral reading: Where do things stand?

B. W. A. Whittlesea (see record 1990-27520-001) reports context specificity in oral rereading. Repetition benefit is larger when a random scrambling of a text is read twice than when two different scramblings are read, indicating an "episodic" or "text-level" contribution to repetition benefit. We examine Whittlesea's data by focusing on variability across stimulus materials in the magnitude of context specificity, which ranges from –0.1% to 694.7% of the repetition benefit attributable solely to lexical overlap. We describe similar variability in other recent research, including new work of our own. The central question in the episodic–abstractionist debate is no longer whether context specificity can or cannot be found in rereading but what factors govern the relative contributions of text-level and lexical-level repetition. We offer a "level of focal attention" hypothesis to supplant the "task change" hypothesis of T. H. Carr et al (see record 1989-38877-001). The new hypothesis is a strategy-oriented version of transfer-appropriate processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The interplay of meaning, sound, and syntax in sentence production.

A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors' 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of information in the system is strictly unidirectional. On the basis of the reviewed evidence, they conclude that both assumptions have to be revised. Their 2nd goal was to propose an alternative framework that does not assume strict encapsulation but that maintains multiple levels of integration for production. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Investigating strength and frequency effects in recognition memory using type-2 signal detection theory.

Criterion- versus distribution-shift accounts of frequency and strength effects in recognition memory were investigated with Type-2 signal detection receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis, which provides a measure of metacognitive monitoring. Experiment 1 demonstrated a frequency-based mirror effect, with a higher hit rate and lower false alarm rate, for low frequency words compared with high frequency words. In Experiment 2, the authors manipulated item strength with repetition, which showed an increased hit rate but no effect on the false alarm rate. Whereas Type-1 indices were ambiguous as to whether these effects were based on a criterion- or distribution-shift model, the two models predict opposite effects on Type-2 distractor monitoring under some assumptions. Hence, Type-2 ROC analysis discriminated between potential models of recognition that could not be discriminated using Type-1 indices alone. In Experiment 3, the authors manipulated Type-1 response bias by varying the number of old versus new response categories to confirm the assumptions made in Experiments 1 and 2. The authors conclude that Type-2 analyses are a useful tool for investigating recognition memory when used in conjunction with more traditional Type-1 analyses. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The time course of name retrieval during multiple-object naming: Evidence from extrafoveal-on-foveal effects.

The goal of the study was to examine whether speakers naming pairs of objects would retrieve the names of the objects in parallel or in sequence. To this end, we recorded the speakers’ eye movements and determined whether the difficulty of retrieving the name of the 2nd object affected the duration of the gazes to the 1st object. Two experiments, which differed in the spatial arrangement of the objects, showed that the speakers looked longer at the 1st object when the name of the 2nd object was easy than when it was more difficult to retrieve. Thus, the easy 2nd-object names interfered more with the processing of the 1st object than the more difficult 2nd-object names. In the 3rd experiment, the processing of the 1st object was rendered more difficult by presenting it upside down. No effect of 2nd-object difficulty on the gaze duration for the 1st object was found. These results suggest that speakers can retrieve the names of a foveated and an extrafoveal object in parallel, provided that the processing of the foveated object is not too demanding. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Representation of lexical form.

The authors attempted to determine whether surface representations of spoken words are mapped onto underlying, abstract representations. In particular, they tested the hypothesis that flaps--neutralized allophones of intervocalic /t/s and /d/s--are mapped onto their underlying phonemic counterparts. In 6 repetition priming experiments, participants responded to stimuli in 2 blocks of trials. Stimuli in the 1st block served as primes and those in the 2nd as targets. Primes and targets consisted of English words containing intervocalic /t/s and /d/s that, when produced casually, were flapped. In all 6 experiments, reaction times to target items were measured as a function of prime type. The results provide evidence for both surface and underlying form-based representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological recoding of nonword orthographic rime primes.

The effectiveness of nonword orthographic rime primes as a function of the regularity (as defined by grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules) of typical pronunciation was examined in this research. In Experiments 1 and 2, predictions from GPC and orthographic rime unit accounts converged, but in Experiments 3 and 4 they diverged. Experiment 1 showed that when nonword orthographic rimes were used to prime consistent regular words (e.g., mist) and atypically irregular words (e.g., pint), reliable priming was observed for regular words, but priming of atypically irregular words occurred only in the 2nd block of trials, after the orthographic rime prime itself had been primed by the Block 1 presentation of the target word. In subsequent experiments, only the 1st block of trials was examined. Experiment 2 replicated selective priming of consistent regular words observed in Block 1 of Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, nonword orthographic rimes were as effective at priming typically irregular target words (e.g., grind) as they were in priming inconsistent but typically regular target words (e.g., flint)… (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sixteen- and 24-month-olds' use of mutual exclusivity as a default assumption in second-label learning.

The significance of the mutual exclusivity assumption for early word learning has been questioned on 2 accounts: (1) Children learn second labels for objects, which violates the assumption, and (2) evidence documenting use of mutual exclusivity comes mostly from older children. This article addresses both concerns. Use of mutual exclusivity predicts not that learning 2nd labels is impossible but that it is harder than learning 1st labels. To test this, very young children were taught novel labels for objects they either could or could not already name. In Study 1, contrary to predictions, 24-mo-olds learned 1st and 2nd labels equally well. But in Study 2, when children had an additional word to learn, they had trouble learning second (but not first) labels. Similarly, in Study 3, 16-mo-olds who were taught only one new word had trouble learning second labels. Thus, from 16 mo on, mutual exclusivity helps children interpret novel words. Yet, when their processing capacity is not overly taxed, 24-mo-olds can override this default assumption. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Words and voices: episodic traces in spoken word identification and recognition memory

Most theories of spoken word identification assume that variable speech signals are matched to canonical representations in memory. To achieve this, idiosyncratic voice details are first normalized, allowing direct comparison of the input to the lexicon. This investigation assessed both explicit and implicit memory for spoken words as a function of speakers' voices, delays between study and test, and levels of processing. In 2 experiments, voice attributes of spoken words were clearly retained in memory. Moreover, listeners were sensitive to fine-grained similarity between 1st and 2nd presentations of different-voice words, but only when words were initially encoded at relatively shallow levels of processing. The results suggest that episodic memory traces of spoken words retain the surface details typically considered as noise in perceptual systems.     

Guessing strategies, aging, and bias effects in perceptual identification

In the typical single-stimulus perceptual identification task, accuracy is improved by prior study of test words, a repetition priming benefit. There is also a cost, inasmuch as previously studied words are likely to be produced (incorrectly) as responses if the test word is orthographically similar but not identical to a studied word. In two-alternative forced-choice perceptual identification, a test word is flashed and followed by two alternatives, one of which is the correct response. When the two alternatives are orthographically similar, test words identical to previously studied items are identified more accurately than new words (a benefit) but tests words orthographically similar to studied words are identified less accurately than new words (a cost). Ratcliff and McKoon (in press) argue that these are bias effects that arise in the decision stage of word identification. We report five experiments that examined the alternative hypothesis that these bias effects arise from postperceptual guessing strategies. In single-stimulus perceptual identification, repetition priming benefits were equally great for young and older adults who claimed to use deliberate guessing strategies and those who did not (Experiment 1). In contrast, only groups of young and older people who claimed to deliberately guess studied words in a two-alternative forced-choice task (Experiments 2 and 5) showed reliable benefits and costs. Costs and benefits were abolished in the two-alternative forced-choice task when a very long study list was used, presumably because the increased retrieval burden made the use of deliberate guessing strategies less attractive (Experiment 3). Under conditions similar to those of Experiment 3, repetition priming was observed in single-stimulus perceptual identification (Experiment 4). These results are consistent with the view that costs and benefits in the forced-choice perceptual identification task arise from deliberate guessing strategies but that those in the single-stimulus task do not. The possibility that the observed relationship between strategy reports and priming effects reflects erroneous postexperimental assessments of strategies by participants is also considered.     

Word Learning and Individual Differences in Word Learning Reflected in Event-Related Potentials.

Adults learned the meanings of rare words (e.g., gloaming) and then made meaning judgments on pairs of words. The 1st word was a trained rare word, an untrained rare word, or an untrained familiar word. Event-related potentials distinguished trained rare words from both untrained rare and familiar words, first at 140 ms and again at 400-600 ms after onset of the 1st word. These results may point to an episodic memory effect. The 2nd word produced an N400 that distinguished trained and familiar word pairs that were related in meaning from unrelated word pairs. Skilled comprehenders learned more words than less skilled comprehenders and showed a stronger episodic memory effect at 400-600 ms on the 1st word and a stronger N400 effect on the 2nd word. These results suggest that superior word learning among skilled comprehenders may arise from a stronger episodic trace that includes orthographic and meaning information and illustrate, how an episodic theory of word identification can explain reading skill. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval-induced forgetting in a category recognition task.

Prior work on retrieval-induced forgetting showed that retrieving a subset of formerly studied items can impair item recognition of related, nonretrieved material. Here it was investigated whether retrieval practice can also impair the items' recognition as a member of a studied category. Subjects studied preexperimentally unrelated words that were categorized by their font colors, then practiced retrieving a subset of the words using a word stem completion task. Finally, an episodic category recognition test based on confidence ratings was applied. Receiver operating characteristic analysis of the data demonstrated a reliable impairment in subjects' recognition of the nonretrieved items' category relative to control items. The result indicates that retrieval-induced forgetting is not restricted to item recognition but generalizes to category recognition tasks. Inhibitory as well as noninhibitory explanations of the finding are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Further evidence of the intricacy of memory span.

Memory span was measured for lists of verbal items constructed such that the items in the 1st half of the list were of one category and those of the 2nd half were of another. In Exp 1, the lists consisted of digits and words (e.g., 2, 8, 77, horse, cow, sheep or horse, cow, sheep, 2, 8, 7); in Exp 2, they consisted of words from the same semantic domain and words from different semantic domains; in Exps 3 and 4, they consisted of words that rhymed and words that did not rhyme. A category-order effect occurred in each experiment: Span was larger when the digits, same-domain words, or rhyming words occurred in the 1st half of the list than when they occurred in the 2nd half. These findings suggest that memory span is more complex than is generally assumed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Determinants of parafoveal preview benefit in high and low working memory capacity readers: Implications for eye movement control.

The experiment in this article extended studies by A. W. Inhoff and K. Rayner (see record 1988-06513-001) and J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira (see record 1990-18858-001) to determine how the printed frequency of two adjacent words influenced the benefit of having parafoveal preview of the 2nd word. High- and low-span participants (assessed by M. Daneman and P. A. Carpenter's, [see PA, Vol 66:2775] Reading Span Test) were tested to determine whether working memory capacity influenced parafoveal preview benefit. Parafoveal preview benefit was determined by an interaction of both words' frequencies in first fixation and by the 2nd word's frequency in gaze duration. However, readers were generally fixated closer to the beginning of the 2nd word when the 1st word was low frequency. When the viewing distance confound was minimized, the prior word's frequency did affect parafoveal preview benefit. Parafoveal preview benefit did not vary between reading groups. Group distributions of fixation duration provided no evidence for J. M. Henderson and F. Ferreira's fixation cutoff model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repetition blindness, forward and backward.

In these experiments, 2 letters were presented sequentially to the left and right of fixation, followed by pattern masks. Report was cued by spatial location (Experiments 1a, 1b, 2, 4, and 5) or temporal position (Experiments 3, 4, and 5). In all experiments, 2 identical letters on a trial resulted in reduced accuracy of report (repetition blindness; RB) for both the 1st and 2nd presented letters. This decrement was greater for the 2nd letter if subjects expected temporal cues, but tended to be greater for the Ist letter if they expected spatial cues. Analyses of errors and responses on catch trials indicated no bias against report of repetitions, and the repetition decrement did not interact with output order. The data are inconsistent with both type-refractoriness and memory-retrieval accounts of RB. A modified version of N. G. Kanwisher's (1987) token-individuation theory is proposed to account for the results. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Blinks of the mind: Memory effects of attentional processes.

If 2 words are presented successively within 500 ms, subjects often miss the 2nd word. This attentional blink reflects a limited capacity to attend to incoming information. Memory effects were studied for words that fell within an attentional blink. Unrelated words were presented in a modified rapid serial visual presentation task at varying stimulus-onset asynchronies, and attention was systematically manipulated. Subsequently, recognition, repetition priming, and semantic priming were measured separately in 3 experiments. Unidentified words showed no recognition and no repetition priming. However, blinked (i.e., unidentified) words did produce semantic priming in related words. When, for instance, ring was blinked, it was easier to subsequently identify wedding than apple. In contrast, when the blinked word itself was presented again, it was not easier to identify than an unrelated word. Possible interpretations of this paradoxical finding are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Associative processes in repetition priming.

Three experiments that investigated alternative accounts of repetition priming are reported. All 3 experiments used semantic comparison tasks and included trials in which each of the 2 words being compared had previously occurred on separate trials. In the re-pair match condition, the response required matched that on the 2 previous trials in which the words had occurred. In the re-pair mismatch condition, the response required was opposite to that on the previous trials containing the words forming the critical pair. In all 3 experiments, responses were faster and more accurate in the re-pair match condition than in the re-pair mismatch condition. Possible accounts of this effect within the frameworks of instance theory and of transfer appropriate processing are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategical invariance in lexical access: The reappearance of the pseudohomophone effect.

Examined the relationship between the presence of homophones and the appearance of the pseudohomophone effect, using 26 undergraduates. Ss were exposed to 10 pseudohomonyms, 10 nonwords, and 20 homophonic words or 20 nonhomophonic words in the 1st trial and to 15 pseudohomophones, 15 nonwords, and 30 nonhomophonic words during the 2nd trial. Ss' reaction time (RT) to a lexical decision task was recorded. Ss exposed to homophonic words during the 1st trial showed greater RT for decisions on pseudohomophones (pseudohomophone effect). Results support the conclusion of I. Dennis et al (1985) that the presence of homophones encourages a strategy of lexical decision making that changes the use made of phonological evidence. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)