The Gender Congruency Effect and the Selection of Freestanding and Bound Morphemes: Evidence From Croatian.

The authors report 3 picture-word interference experiments in which they explore some properties of the agreement process in speech production. In Experiment 1, Croatian speakers were asked to produce utterances in which the noun's gender value had an impact on the selection of gender-marked freestanding morphemes (pronouns) while ignoring the presentation of same- or different-gender distractor words. In Experiments 2 and 3, Croatian speakers were asked to name the same pictures using noun phrases in which the noun's gender value surfaced as an inflectional suffix. Different-gender distractors interfered more than same-gender distractors (the gender congruency effect) in Experiment 1, but not in Experiments 2 and 3. These contrasting results show that the cause of the gender congruency effect is not at the level where lexical-grammatical information is selected but at the level of selection of freestanding morphemes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When more is less: A counterintuitive effect of distractor frequency in the picture-word interference paradigm.

Pictures were shown with superimposed word distractors of high and low frequency. Low-frequency distractors produced greater interference on picture naming than did high-frequency distractors. This distractor frequency effect was not affected by manipulations that facilitated or hindered distractor recognition. Interference was reduced for distractors that were read aloud several times prior to being shown in the picture-naming task. Together these findings suggest that the distractor frequency effect has its locus at some stage of lexical access for production. Other findings further constrain hypotheses about which level of speech production is involved in the effect. The distractor frequency effect has implications for models of lexical processing in speaking as well as for accounts of picture-word interference and the frequency effect. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

From graphemes to abstract letter shapes: levels of representation in written spelling

The letter substitution errors of 2 dysgraphic subjects who, despite relatively intact oral spelling, made well-formed letter substitution errors in written spelling, were studied. Many of these errors bear a general physical similarity to the intended target. Analyses revealed that this similarity apparently was based on the features of the component strokes of letters rather than on visuospatial characteristics. A comparison of these subjects' letter substitution errors with those of 2 other individuals with brain damage, whose damage was at a different level of processing, revealed that the latter subjects' errors are not explicable in terms of stroke-feature similarity. Strong support was found for the computation of multiple representational types in the course of written spelling. This system includes a relatively abstract, effector-independent representational level that specifies the features of the component strokes of letters.     

Preparation and activity of complexes of transition metals and thiolic heterocyclic ligands

The activities of cell-associated IL-1 (IL-1 alpha) and extracellular IL-1 (IL-1 beta) in alveolar macrophages (AM) from rats with bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrolosis were measured to determine their role in fibroblast growth. AM were obtained on Days 1, 3, 6, 9 and 12 after a intratracheal injection of bleomycin, and the IL-1 activity and fibroblast growth-stimulating activity in fixed AM and AM supernatants were measured. Higher cell-associated IL-1 activity was detected in AM from bleomycin-treated rats than in those of control on Day 1 through 9. But extracellular IL-1 activity in the supernatant of AM from bleomycin-treated rats significantly higher only on Day 1. Expression of IL-1 alpha mRNA in AM from bleomycin-treated rats was significantly higher than that in AM of control, but there was no significant difference in the mRNA levels of IL-1 beta in AM of these two groups. Fixed AM from bleomycin-treated rats caused growth-inhibition of fibroblasts in a density-dependent manner. The inhibitory activity was decreased by pretreatment of fixed AM with anti IL-1 alpha antibody, but not anti IL-1 beta antibody. These results suggest that cell-associated IL-1 (IL-1 alpha) is produced continuously in AM from rats with bleomycin-induced pulmonary fibrosis and may be important in regulation of this disorder by inhibiting fibroblast growth.     

Grammatical intuitions of aphasic patients: sensitivity to functions

A miniature pig kidney cell line has been established from porcine fetuses taken aseptically by hysterectomy and maintained for more than 50 passages in Eagle's minimal essential medium containing 10% heat-inactivated newborn calf serum. Cell transfers were performed each week. Primary and serially passaged cells were found to be highly refractory to infection by Chlamydia trachomatis strains TW-3, Bour, and LGV 440L and Chlamydia psittaci strains meningopneumonitis and 6BC and insusceptible to poliovirus type 1. The cells were susceptible to vesicular stomatitis virus and herpes simplex type 1 virus. Identity of the cells was established by cytotoxicity, isozyme, and cytogenetic studies.     

Temporal and spatial repetition blindness: Effects of presentation mode and repetition lag on the perception of repeated items.

In this study, participants were asked to identify briefly presented 5-letter (Experiments 1-3) or 2-letter (Experiment 4) strings. Identical items in a repeated trial were identified worse than their counterparts in a nonrepeated trial, indicating repetition blindness (RB; N. G. Kanwisher, 1987). In Experiment 1, RB occurred regardless of whether items were presented successively or simultaneously. In Experiments 2-4, RB occurred regardless of whether 2 simultaneously presented items were spatially close or far apart. The magnitude of RB, however, varied with presentation mode and repetition lag: RB was smaller in simultaneous than successive presentation, and RB increased and then decreased with the number of items separating 2 identical ones. These results provide important constraints in the interpretation of RB. A model that attributes RB to the refractoriness of perceptual recognition units is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Retrieval of lexical–syntactic features in tip-of-the tongue states.

Italian speakers who signaled that they were in a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state were asked to recognize the grammatical gender and the initial and the final phonemes of the unavailable word. The proportions of gender and phoneme hits that occurred with "don't know" (DK) responses were adopted as baselines for chance-level performance. Participants were more accurate in recognizing the grammatical gender and the initial but not the final phoneme of target words when they were in TOT than in DK states. The availability of gender in TOT states suggests the independence of syntactic from phonological information in lexical access. However, the retrieval of gender was far from perfect for TOT words, and it was no better than recognition of the initial phoneme. These results are problematic for the notion that the selection of a lemma is synonymous with the retrieval of the word's syntactic features. The implications of these results for the distinction between lemma and lexeme levels of representation in lexical access are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The selection of determiners in noun phrase production.

Picture-word interference experiments conducted with Italian speakers investigated how determiners are selected in noun phrase (NP) production. Determiner production involves the selection of a noun's syntactic features (mass or count, gender), which specify the type of determiner to be selected, and the subsequent selection of a particular phonological form (e.g., the/a in English). The research focused on the syntactic feature of gender. Results repeatedly failed to replicate the gender-congruity effect in NP production reported with Dutch speakers (longer latencies for target-distractor noun pairs with contrasting as opposed to the same gender). It is proposed that the discrepant results reflect processing differences in lexical access in Italian and Dutch: The selection of determiners in Italian, but not in Dutch, depends on phonological properties of the word that follows it in the NP. Evidence consistent with this explanation was obtained in an experiment in which determiner selection in NP production was hindered by conflicting phonological information in the NP. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The specific-word frequency effect: Implications for the representation of homophones in speech production.

In a series of experiments, the authors investigated whether naming latencies for homophones (e.g., /nΛn/) are a function of specific-word frequency (i.e., the frequency of nun) or a function of cumulative homophone frequency (i.e., the sum of the frequencies of nun and none). Specific-word but not cumulative-homophone frequency affected picture-naming latencies. This result was obtained in 2 languages (English and Chinese). An analogous finding was obtained in a translation task, where bilingual speakers produced the English names of visually presented Spanish words. Control experiments ruled out that these results are an artifact of orthographic or articulatory factors, or of visual recognition. The results argue against the hypothesis that homophones share a common word-form representation, and support instead a model in which homophones have fully independent representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The cognate facilitation effect: Implications for models of lexical access.

Do nonselected lexical nodes activate their phonological information? Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were asked to name (a) pictures whose names are cognates, in the 2 languages (words that are phonologically similar in the 2 languages) and (b) pictures whose names are noncognates in the 2 languages. If nonselected lexical nodes are phonologically encoded, naming latencies should be shorter for cognate words, and because the cognate status of words is only meaningful for bilingual speakers, this difference should disappear when testing monolingual speakers. The results of Experiment 1 fully supported these predictions. In Experiment 2, the difference between cognate and noncognate words was larger when naming in the nondominant language than when naming in the dominant language. The results of the 2 experiments are interpreted as providing support to cascaded activation models of lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)