Phonological words and stuttering on function words

Stuttering on function words was examined in 51 people who stutter. The people who stutter were subdivided into young (2 to 6 years), middle (6 to 9 years), and older (9 to 12 years) child groups; teenagers (13 to 18 years); and adults (20 to 40 years). As reported by previous researchers, children up to about age 9 stuttered more on function words (pronouns, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs), whereas older people tended to stutter more on content words (nouns, main verbs, adverbs, adjectives). Function words in early positions in utterances, again as reported elsewhere, were more likely to be stuttered than function words at later positions in an utterance. This was most apparent for the younger groups of speakers. For the remaining analyses, utterances were segmented into phonological words on the basis of Selkirk's work (1984). Stuttering rate was higher when function words occurred in early phonological word positions than other phonological word positions whether the phonological word appeared in initial position in an utterance or not. Stuttering rate was highly dependent on whether the function word occurred before or after the single content word allowed in Selkirk's (1984) phonological words. This applied, once again, whether the phonological word was utterance-initial or not. It is argued that stuttering of function words before their content word in phonological words in young speakers is used as a delaying tactic when the forthcoming content word is not prepared for articulation.     

Set, structure, and the recall of words.

Presented 40 adjective-noun pairs at the rate of 5 sec/pair to a total of 396 undergraduates in 2 experiments. In both experiments, groups of Ss were given, prior to the initial presentation, (a) either a set to remember the pairs or the nouns; (b) adjectives which were either repeated or varied from the 1st to the 2nd 20 pairs; and (c) pairs which either belonged or did not belong together (e.g., "brave army" vs. "sweet army"). When Ss were given the adjectives and asked to recall the correct nouns, results show that set for pairs, the repeat condition, and the belonging condition provided reliably higher recall scores. Also, the Set * Repeat * Belonging interaction was significant. When Ss were given a blank piece of paper and asked to recall only nouns, only the set for nouns produced higher recall scores. Results support the emphasis-congruence hypothesis in recall, i.e., when the material emphasized in learning is congruent with what is needed in recall, then there is better recall. (French summary) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repetition priming of words, pseudowords, and nonwords.

In 5 experiments, the authors assessed repetition priming for words, pseudowords, and nonwords using a task that combines an implicit perceptual fluency measure and a recognition memory assessment for each list item. Words and pseudowords generated a consistently strong repetition effect even when there was a failure to recognize the stimulus. In 2 of the experiments, the repetition effect for nonwords was reliably above chance even when there was a failure to recognize the stimulus. The authors propose a parallel distributed processing (PDP) model based on the work of J. McClelland and D. Rumelhart (1985) as a way to understand the mechanisms potentially responsible for the pattern of findings. Although the error-driven nature of learning in the model results in a poor fit to the nonword priming data, this is not endemic to all PDP models. Using a model based on Hebbian learning, the authors instantiate a property that they believe is characteristic of implicit memory-that learning is primarily based on the strengthening of connections between units that become active during the processing of a stimulus. This model provides a far more satisfactory account of the data than does the error-driven model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Traits, trait words, and the explanation of behavior.

Almost 50 years ago, in 1937, Gordon Allport defined 'trait' as "...a generalized and focalized neuropsychic system, (peculiar to the individual), with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to initiate and guide consistent (equivalent) forms of adaptive and expressive behavior (1937, p. 295)." But today, the term 'trait' is out of vogue. Much of the reason for this lies in a misunderstanding of the concept: the truth is that most of the empirical literature has little to say about traits. While a number of epistemological and psychological reasons can be cited for the retention of 'trait', I will primarily address the logical status of the concept. If certain aspects of my discussion appear redundant or overly familiar, I apologize, but confusion in the literature necessitates a restatement of what is in fact a more or less traditional position. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading words: Simple task, complex story.

Reviews the book, Orthography and Word Recognition in Reading by Leslie Henderson (1982). The scope of this book is perhaps broader than the title might suggest to the uninitiated. The diverse range of topics covered includes the nature of different writing systems, speech recognition, the structure of lexical information in memory, models of word recognition, speech production, language disorders, subliminal perception, contextual effects on word recognition, and several others. Each of these areas supports an enormous web of theories, data and controversies, for which Henderson has set himself the difficult task of reviewing and critically evaluating. He covers a lot of ground and has succeeded, in my opinion, in creating an essential resource. In sum, this is an excellent book because of the wealth of material that is clearly presented and closely analyzed. Much of the discussion is critical of recent research and theory, sometimes strongly so, but the criticism is fair, and insightful, and it appropriately reflects the state of the field. It helps that the book is as gracefully written as technical prose can be. The best compliment that I can offer is that in reading the book I often had to put it down--to mull the author's thought-provoking ideas. While the book is nicely printed and securely bound, there are quite a number of typographical errors and misprints (e.g., the numbering of the footnotes runs out of sequence, and Jim Neely is turned into a she). Something to consider when the book goes into its second edition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Similar attentional, frequency, and associative effects for pseudohomophones and words

Between the presentation and recall of 1 or 5 digits, Ss performed a secondary task of naming a visually presented letter string--a pseudohomophone (e.g., FOLE, HOAP) or its real-word counterpart (FOAL, HOPE). Memory load interacted with frequency (HOPE vs. FOAL, HOAP vs. FOLE) but not with lexicality (HOPE vs. HOAP, FOAL vs. FOLE). This outcome counters models in which nonwords are named by a slow (resource-expensive) process that assembles phonology and words are named by a fast (resource-inexpensive) process that accesses lexical phonology. When the associative priming-of-naming task was secondary to the memory task, pseudohomophone associative priming (HOAP-DESPAIR, FOLE-HORSE) equaled associative priming (HOPE-DESPAIR, FOAL-HORSE) and was affected in the same way by memory load. Assembled phonology seems to underlie the naming of both words and nonwords.     

Congruency, attentional set, and laterality effects with emotional words.

The present study investigated the influence of attention and word-emotion congruency on auditory asymmetries with stimuli that include verbal and emotional components. Words were presented dichotically to 80 participants and were pronounced in either congruent or incongruent emotional tones. Participants were asked to identify the presence of a target word or emotion under 1 of 2 conditions. The blocked condition required detection of a word or emotional target in separate blocks. In the randomized condition, the target was changed across trials by means of a postcue. A right-ear advantage (REA) and a left-ear advantage (LEA) were found for word and emotion targets, respectively. However, the finding of a Condition × Stimulus Type × Ear × Congruency interaction indicated that in the randomized condition, a REA was obtained for words when the stimuli were congruent and a LEA was observed for emotions when the stimuli were incongruent. The findings suggest that randomizing the target reduced the influence of the attentional set established by blocking the target. It is likely that this promoted the detection of hemispheric interference in the randomized condition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Competition in spoken word recognition: Spotting words in other words.

Although word boundaries are rarely clearly marked, listeners can rapidly recognize the individual words of spoken sentences. Some theories explain this in terms of competition between multiply activated lexical hypotheses; others invoke sensitivity to prosodic structure. A connectionist model, SHORTLIST, is described, in which recognition by activation and competition is successful with a realistically sized lexicon. Three experiments are then reported in which listeners detected real words embedded in nonsense strings, some of which were themselves the onsets of longer words. Effects both of competition between words and of prosodic structure were observed, suggesting that activation and competition alone are not sufficient to explain word recognition in continuous speech. However, the results can be accounted for by a version of SHORTLIST that is sensitive to prosodic structure. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading rotated words.

In 4 experiments, 72 Hebrew-speaking university students performed lexical decisions on Hebrew letter strings that appeared at different orientations. Response times evidenced a strong interaction between string length and orientation. At angular deviations of less than 60° from the upright, neither orientation nor string length had any effect, suggesting that words were directly, and probably holistically, recognized. The results for the 60° deviation, while also exhibiting no effects of word length, yielded slower response times, suggesting a holistic rectification process. For deviations between 60° and 120°, the effects of disorientation increased sharply with increasing string length, suggesting piecemeal processing than may be due to the utilization of reading units smaller than the whole word or to piecemeal rectification. In this region, stimulus disorientation appears to impair word recognition by disrupting transgraphemic information rather than by interfering with letter identification. Extreme disorientations, 120° or more, exhibited no further impairment with increased disorientation, and all evidenced strong and similar length effects, suggesting letter-by-letter reading. Implications for the reading of normal and transformed text are discussed. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strategic effects in associative priming with words, homophones, and pseudohomophones.

G. Lukatela and M. T. Turvey (1994x) showed that at a 57-ms prime-presentation duration, the naming of a visually presented target word (frog) is primed not only by an associate word (toad) but also by a homophone (towed) and a pseudohomophone (tode) of the associate. At a 250-ms prime presentation, priming with the homophone was no longer observed. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated these priming effects in the Dutch language. Next, the authors extended the priming paradigm to a word/legalnon-word lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) and a word/pseudohomophone decision task (Experiment 4). Phonologically mediated associative priming was observed in all conditions with pseudohomophonic primes but not with homophonic primes. The latter did not prime at a 250-ms prime-presentation time and at 57 ms in the word/pseudohomophone task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Naming multisyllabic words.

The process of reading multisyllabic words aloud from print was examined in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 used multisyllabic words that vary in terms of the consistency of component spelling-sound correspondences. The stimuli were regular, regular inconsistent, and exception words analogous to the monosyllabic items used in previous studies. Both regular inconsistent and exception words produced longer naming latencies than regular words. In Experiment 2 these differences between word types were found to be limited to lower frequency items. Experiment 3 showed that effects of number of syllables on naming latency are also limited to lower frequency words. In the final experiment, consistency effects were obtained for both higher and lower frequency words when the stimulus display forced subjects to use syllabic units. Thus, frequency modulates the effects of two aspects of lexical structure—consistency of spelling-sound correspondences and number of syllables. The results suggest that the naming of multisyllabic words draws on some of the same knowledge representations and processes as monosyllabic words; however, naming does not require syllabic decomposition. The results are discussed in the context of current models of naming. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Enrichment of words by visual images: Books, slides, and videos.

This article reviews additions to 3 ways of visually enriching verbal accounts of the history of psychology: illustrated books, slides, and videos. Although each approach has its limitations and its merits, taken together they constitute a significant addition to the printed word. As such, they broaden the toolkits of both the learners and the teachers of the history of psychology. Reference is also made to 3 earlier publications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What words are stuttered?

A number of studies on the properties of stuttered words are critically reviewed. The factors considered are initial sound, position of letters in words and of words in sentences, length, and grammatical class. The studies reviewed indicate that on the whole these factors each affect stuttering independently. They contribute in different amounts to stuttering, but together seem to account for most of stuttering dependent on words. The amount of information from all these factors, and an additional factor of articulatory complexities for the consonant-vowel effect, are discussed as possible underlying mechanisms. An analogy in underlying mechanisms is suggested between hesitation pauses in normal speech and stuttering. (27 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)