Journal of memory and language最新文献

{"title":"Tomato-tomahto: Phonological representations vs. surface-level features in speech planning","authors":"Brett R. Myers ,&nbsp;Cassandra L. Jacobs ,&nbsp;Andrés Buxó-Lugo ,&nbsp;Duane G. Watson","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104649","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104649","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Speakers often lengthen the duration of a word when it shares initial phonological segments with a previously uttered word (e.g.,<!--> <em>candy</em> and <em>candle</em>). One explanation for this is that words with initial similarity affect phonological encoding during sequence planning, yet it is unclear whether this similarity is phonetic or phonological. We manipulated phonetic differences by using a dialect variant: the <em>pin-pen</em> merger in American English. Participants completed an event description task in three experiments. We manipulated whether the participant’s target vowel ([ɪ] or [ɛ]) either phonetically matched or mismatched the vowel of the prime speaker, depending on the participant’s dialect. In the second experiment, we introduced a control vowel in the prime word ([æ] vs. [ɛ]). Participants in both dialect groups lengthened target words when they shared an initial phoneme, even when the vowel of the overlapping prime word was not shared across dialects. In the third experiment, we replicated this finding in a larger cohort of non-merger participants. All three experiments showed word lengthening despite the phonetic realization of phonemes, suggesting this effect is driven by phonological representations rather than surface-level pronunciations.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104649"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143888141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Memory retrieval in discourse: Illusions of coherence during presupposition resolution","authors":"Tijn Schmitz,&nbsp;Rick Nouwen,&nbsp;Jakub Dotlačil","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104637","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104637","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Syntactically inaccessible distractors can cause an illusion of grammaticality during the resolution of syntactic dependencies. At the discourse level, there is also a notion of accessibility. To what extent is this notion relevant to the processing of dependencies that go beyond the syntactic level? In three eye-tracking experiments, we studied illusion effects during presupposition resolution in short discourses. A sentence in the discourse triggered a presupposition, and a preceding sentence provided two candidate propositions for resolution: a target proposition that was accessible for presupposition resolution, and a distractor proposition that was inaccessible for the presupposition. Orthogonal to the accessibility manipulation, the two propositions could match or mismatch the semantic content of the presupposition. Experiment 1, focusing on the retrieval of gender features, showed an illusion effect by matching, but inaccessible, distractors, comparable to illusion effects in syntactic dependency resolution. In Experiment 2, which required the retrieval of compositional semantic information rather than a single feature, we replicate the finding that discourse-inaccessible information still influences memory retrieval in dependency resolution. In Experiment 3 we compared proactive and retroactive interference and demonstrated that the illusion effect is diminished or possibly even entirely disappears when the distractor is further away from the presupposition. We argue that our findings provide evidence that memory models deployed for syntactic retrieval should be extended to account for retrieval in discourses. This is challenging for most models of retrieval, more so for models that tie memory failures directly to (morpho-)syntactic structure building. We also indicate how a more general model of memory, the cue-based retrieval model, would have to be extended to capture our findings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104637"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143868797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visual word recognition is impeded by adjacent words","authors":"Laoura Ziaka ,&nbsp;Dzan Zelihic ,&nbsp;Bob McMurray ,&nbsp;Keith Baxelbaum ,&nbsp;Kristin Simonsen ,&nbsp;Athanassios Protopapas","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104641","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104641","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We report two experiments demonstrating that visual word recognition is impeded by the presence of nearby stimuli, especially adjacent words. Reading research has converged on a consensus that skilled readers control their attention to make use of information from adjacent (primarily upcoming) words, increasing reading efficiency. Other lines of research seem to point to potential interference from nearby items, yet this has not been investigated at the critical lexical level. To specifically target lexical activation, here we employ a novel variant of the visual world paradigm with masked (75 ms) flanked visual word targets, contrasting five flanker conditions across two experiments, namely none, repeated symbols, unknown font strings, pseudowords, and words. Analysis of multiple observed variables from 60 and 58 adult Norwegian speakers showed strong interference—compared to no flankers—for all flanker conditions except the repeated symbols. Interference increased with additional levels of possible flanker processing, and was greatest for higher-frequency word targets, consistent with rapid dynamic modulation of attentional breadth. Our findings demonstrate that nearby words interfere with lexical activation of the fixated word and call for a more nuanced approach to the role of preview in fluent reading. We conclude that skilled reading involves a constant complex interplay between the drive toward efficiency, which requires a broad attentional field, and the need to shield processing from interference, which limits attentional breadth.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104641"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143852275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Can the lateral mental timeline be automatically activated in language comprehension?","authors":"Julio Santiago ,&nbsp;Alessia Beracci ,&nbsp;Andrea Flumini ,&nbsp;Eva Sanjuan ,&nbsp;Marc Ouellet ,&nbsp;Pablo Solana","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104644","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104644","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The mental representation of time recruits spatial representations, but is space an essential, inescapable feature of mental time? Supporting a positive answer to this question, recent research has reported that lateral (left–right) space is automatically activated in lexical decision tasks in which the temporal reference of the words is irrelevant for the goals of the task (implicit tasks). Here, using always the same set of Spanish verbs and pseudoverbs marked for past or future tense, we assess the space–time congruency effect in reaction time and mouse trajectories, both in an explicit time judgement task and an implicit lexical decision task. Moreover, we report the first confirmatory (preregistered) study in this field of research using long lateral movements in lexical decision. The congruency effect was always significant in time judgement, but non-significant in lexical decision. Moreover, in reaction time this effect was significantly smaller than a Smallest Effect Size Of Interest (SESOI) of 10 ms, and even smaller than a recently reported 9 ms effect. Therefore, it was considered negligible. We conclude that there is no convincing evidence for an automatic activation of the lateral mental timeline in lexical decision.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104644"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143847351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shades of zero: Distinguishing impossibility from inconceivability","authors":"Jennifer Hu ,&nbsp;Felix Sosa ,&nbsp;Tomer Ullman","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104640","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104640","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Some things are impossible, but some things may be even more impossible than impossible. Levitating a feather using one’s mind is impossible in our world, but fits into our intuitive theories of possible worlds, whereas levitating a feather using the number five cannot be conceived in any possible world (“inconceivable”). While prior work has examined the distinction between improbable and impossible events, there has been little empirical research on inconceivability. Here, we investigate whether people maintain a distinction between impossibility and inconceivability, and how such distinctions might be made. We find that people can readily distinguish the impossible from the inconceivable, using categorization studies similar to those used to investigate the differences between impossible and improbable (Experiment 1). However, this distinction is not explained by people’s subjective ratings of event likelihood, which are near zero and indistinguishable between impossible and inconceivable event descriptions (Experiment 2). Finally, we ask whether the probabilities assigned to event descriptions by statistical language models (LMs) can be used to separate modal categories, and whether these probabilities align with people’s ratings (Experiment 3). We find high-level similarities between people and LMs: both distinguish among impossible and inconceivable event descriptions, and LM-derived string probabilities predict people’s ratings of event likelihood across modal categories. Our findings suggest that fine-grained knowledge about exceedingly rare events (i.e., the impossible and inconceivable) may be learned via statistical learning over linguistic forms, yet leave open the question of whether people represent the distinction between impossible and inconceivable as a difference not of <em>degree</em>, but of <em>kind</em>.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104640"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143833858","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Coordinating reference in conversation: The choice between linguistic conventions and linguistic precedents","authors":"Delphine Dahan","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104639","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104639","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>How do speakers coordinate meaning with their addresses such as choosing a referring expression that maximizes the probability that their addressee identifies its referent? Language offers a community a system of conventions for recurrent coordination problems. Furthermore, research on repeated reference involving novel and hard-to-name shapes has claimed that an initial reference sets up a precedent, a partner-specific perspective that can be used subsequently. In a referential communication task involving photos of everyday objects, the present study hypothesized that precedents are temporary solutions developed by conversational partners when community-wide conventions on how to refer to the entity are not readily available. Degree of accessibility to conventions for each object (i.e., the object’s name uncertainty) was quantified based on the distribution of words used by all participants to talk about the object for the first time. Results from two studies showed that for objects with low name uncertainty, the expressions used by a dyad on two consecutives mentions were no more similar to each other than to expressions used by other dyads, suggesting reliance to community-wide conventions. For objects with greater name uncertainty, however, a given dyad’s expressions produced on two successive mentions resembled each other more than they resembled other dyads’ expressions. Finally, the usage of bare nominals (vs. definite or indefinite noun phrases) to refer to an object on second mention decreased as the object’s name uncertainty increased, a finding that further supports the claim that conversational partners rely on precedents as temporary solutions to compensate for uncertain availability of community-wide conventions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104639"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-04-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143800690","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The effect of similarity-based interference on bottom-up and top-down processing in verb-final languages: Evidence from Hindi","authors":"Samar Husain ,&nbsp;Apurva ,&nbsp;Ishita Arun ,&nbsp;Himanshu Yadav","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104627","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104627","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Sentence comprehension is known to be driven by both bottom-up integrative and top-down predictive processes. While integrative processes are known to be subject to working memory constraints, the impact of such constraints on top-down processing is less clear. Previous work has argued that verb-final languages provide rather weak and equivocal support for working memory constraints during bottom-up integrative processes. For these languages, top-down prediction has been shown to be more dominant. Here, we report a series of cloze completion and self-paced reading studies on a verb-final language, Hindi, to investigate if preverbal nouns with similar case marking lead to increased processing difficulty at the clause-final verb. Results show no effect of case similarity on reading times at the verb, implying that a solely bottom-up dependency completion process driven by memory constraints cannot explain these data. Another key finding is that verb prediction failures increase in configurations where preverbal nouns have similar case markings. Model evaluation suggests an explanation based on representation distortion – when the pre-verbal input is stored in memory, it probabilistically distorts to a non-veridical (or less accessible) memory representation, and this degraded representation of the context generates potentially faulty predictions of the upcoming verb. Together, the current work reveals two new insights: (i) Both top-down prediction and bottom-up integration assumptions are necessary to explain the reading data from verb-final languages, and (ii) top-down prediction is subject to working memory constraints due to representation distortion of prior sentence input stored in memory.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104627"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143696096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Individual differences in mental imagery do not moderate the animacy advantage in memory","authors":"Michael J. Serra ,&nbsp;Julia N. Keiner ,&nbsp;Nicolasa C. Villalobos ,&nbsp;Abigail Kortenhoeven ,&nbsp;Miranda Scolari","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104638","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104638","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The “animacy effect” occurs when participants recall more animate (living) items than inanimate (nonliving) items in various memory tasks. Prior studies have suggested that the effect could stem from participants experiencing greater mental imagery while encoding animate than inanimate words. We examined whether individual differences in mental imagery alter the occurrence of this effect in a free-recall task. In three studies, participants encoded animate and inanimate words under intentional (Study 1) or incidental (Studies 2 and 3) conditions for a free-recall test. Studies 1 (n = 90) and 2 (n = 147) included groups that received or did not receive mental-imagery instructions; no participants in Study 3 (n = 325) received imagery instructions. Participants consistently reported more mental imagery while encoding animate than inanimate words and consistently demonstrated an animacy advantage in recall. This advantage was not moderated by mental-imagery instructions under purposeful encoding conditions (Study 1) but was reduced under incidental conditions where imagery instructions increased the recall of inanimate words (Study 2). None of the studies, however, provided strong evidence that individual differences in mental imagery—whether at the trait level as measured by the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) or during the task as measured by post-task self-report—contributed to or altered the animacy effect. The findings indicate that although greater mental imagery associated with animate than inanimate words can contribute to the animacy effect in free-recall, individual differences in mental-imagery experience do not seem to moderate this effect.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104638"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143686555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Measurement and sampling noise undermine inferences about awareness in location probability learning: A modeling approach","authors":"Alicia Franco-Martínez ,&nbsp;Francisco Vicente-Conesa ,&nbsp;David R. Shanks ,&nbsp;Miguel A. Vadillo","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104621","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104621","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Occasionally, experimental psychologists enter into the realm of psychometrics without being fully aware of the risks involved in the study of individual differences. Here we re-assess the many studies on the interaction between memory and attention in location probability learning that suggest that people can unconsciously learn to suppress salient but irrelevant distractors frequently presented in a certain location. In the additional singleton task, one of the arguments to support this claim is that suppression in memory-guided visual search does not significantly differ between “aware” and “unaware” participants. Although rarely acknowledged, this null interaction could also result if the data are contaminated by measurement and/or sampling noise. Unfortunately, the reliability of the awareness measure cannot be assessed with standard methods, since it is a single-trial test. In the present study we offer model-based estimations of measurement and sampling noise in empirical data. Our goal is to determine how often researchers would mistakenly conclude that learning is unconscious, given data from a model based on the opposite claim (i.e., that learning is conscious) but including noise in participants’ search times and awareness responses. To do so, we fitted this noisy conscious model to a dataset involving 159 participants who performed the additional singleton task. Estimated parameters from this model were used, first, to predict the observed pattern of results and, second, to simulate new responses and participants. Results suggest that, under reasonable measurement noise and sample sizes, simulated evidence from the model can paradoxically but falsely support arguments used to defend the unconscious learning hypothesis. This study serves as an illustration to experimental psychologists – particularly those investigating memory and learning – of the risks of neglecting basic psychometric requirements in individual differences research.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104621"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143621261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interference in the formation of filler-gap dependencies: Evidence from Hebrew relative clauses","authors":"Niki Saul ,&nbsp;Maayan Keshev ,&nbsp;Aya Meltzer-Asscher","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104626","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104626","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Much research in sentence processing has shown that the formation of syntactic dependencies is susceptible to interference from structurally irrelevant distractors. Interference may occur during encoding of a dependent, or during its retrieval. Filler phrases participating in filler-gap dependencies were argued to be encoded robustly and maintained actively in memory, raising the possibility that fillers are immune to interference. In two self-paced reading and two offline comprehension experiments, we look for online and offline evidence for interference in Hebrew relative clauses, using the gender feature to manipulate similarity between the filler and a distractor. In the self-paced reading experiments, we find weak evidence for facilitatory interference in ungrammatical sentences, but no evidence for inhibitory interference in grammatical sentences. In the offline comprehension experiments, we find robust evidence for interference in grammatical sentences, reflected in low comprehension accuracy. The results demonstrate that fillers are prone to interference similarly to other items in memory. We further show that interference is unaffected by the use of gender as a retrieval cue, in contrast to predictions made by cue-based retrieval models, and propose a novel account for so-called “encoding interference” effects.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"143 ","pages":"Article 104626"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2025-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143561850","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}