Journal of memory and language最新文献

{"title":"The Ins and Outs of spatial language: Pragmatics shapes early-developing, cross-linguistically robust encoding patterns","authors":"Myrto Grigoroglou ,&nbsp;Barbara Landau ,&nbsp;Anna Papafragou","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104545","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104545","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Research on the language of space has uncovered a complex set of conceptual and linguistic factors affecting the nature, use and acquisition of spatial vocabularies across languages. Here we highlight the important but understudied role of <em>pragmatic</em> factors in how spatial relations are encoded across ages and languages. We focus on Containment (<em>in/out</em>) and Support (<em>on/off</em>) terms that can denote both static locations (‘places’: <em>be in/out of X</em>) and dynamic motions (‘paths’: <em>go in/out of X</em>). We offer a new pragmatic analysis of place-denoting <em>out/off</em> as ‘negative’ locatives and, as a result, predict that such expressions should have a restricted informational contribution (and use) compared to <em>in/on</em>. This prediction is confirmed in four experiments. In elicited production tasks with English-speaking adults and three-year-olds, <em>out</em> and <em>off</em> (unlike <em>in</em> and <em>on</em>) are used extremely sparsely to describe static locations (Experiment 1) but quite frequently to describe dynamic motions (Experiment 2). When contextual support is present, the use of place-denoting <em>out/off</em> increases (Experiment 3). Similar patterns in the use of locatives are found in French, Greek and Turkish speakers (Experiment 4). We conclude that pragmatic factors produce striking, early emerging and cross-linguistically stable properties of spatial vocabulary.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104545"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X24000482/pdfft?md5=4fd3227c94e72ef2fefd3ef36ae5a347&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X24000482-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141482442","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}

{"title":"Affix priming with variable ING in English: Implications for unique vs. dual representation","authors":"Yosiane White ,&nbsp;David Embick ,&nbsp;Meredith Tamminga","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104535","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104535","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Variation in the pronunciation of spoken words constitutes one of the primary challenges to theories of Spoken Word Recognition (SWR). In this paper we examine the processing and representation of a type of variation that is connected to morphology: variation in ING, which is found in words that vary between an <em>-ing</em> and an <em>-in’</em> form. This variation, which is found in monomorphemes like <em>awning</em> in addition to affixed words, has been extensively studied, and has well-known social effects. Crucially, there is no consensus in the field as to whether the variation is morphological – involving distinct <em>-ing</em> and <em>-in’</em> morphemes – or phonological in nature, with <em>-in’</em> produced from an underlying <em>-ing</em> form. We connect the morphological and phonological analyses from the sociolinguistic literature to what have been called <em>dual representation</em> and <em>unique representation</em> in the SWR literature. We report the results of a series of experiments that use an auditory priming paradigm to explore the competing predictions of the dual and unique representation approaches. Priming provides insight into what types of representations are shared between the variants, which in turn informs the theoretical opposition at the center of the discussion about the locus of ING’s variation. The first of these experiments reveals priming both within and across ING variants, with significantly more priming found when both variants are <em>-in’</em>. Follow-up experiments manipulating the distance between prime and target, as well as introducing monomorphemes like <em>awning</em>, provide evidence that we interpret as favoring the unique representation view, with the <em>-ing/-in’</em> alternation being phonological in nature. Alternative explanations are explored as well, with an eye towards the directions that future work on variation might take.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104535"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X2400038X/pdfft?md5=a322fe0bef267052f6e8566afdf3391b&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X2400038X-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141314616","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}

{"title":"Wayward associations: When and why people think of similar-sounding words","authors":"David A. Haslett ,&nbsp;Zhenguang G. Cai","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104537","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Words with similar meanings sometimes sound similar, which carries both risks, such as confusion, and rewards, such as ease of comprehension. It has been argued that languages evolve to balance these competing pressures, so words more often overlap in both form and meaning when they are less likely to be confused. By measuring the phonological similarity of responses to English cues in a word association megastudy, we provide evidence of a tendency to activate similar-sounding words in response to words that reside in sparse semantic neighbourhoods and in response to words for abstract concepts. Crucially, we provide evidence that the availability of similar-sounding associates helps people retrieve and represent the meanings of words from sparse neighbourhoods and words for abstract concepts, as measured by reaction time in semantic decisions and by accuracy in recognition memory. We propose that phonological connections compensate for weak semantic connections when representing word meanings, which we discuss in terms of multiplex networks, models of word-meaning access, and theories of language evolution.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104537"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141298054","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":"Recall and recognition of discourse memory across sleep and wake","authors":"Matthew H.C. Mak ,&nbsp;Adam J. Curtis ,&nbsp;Jennifer M. Rodd ,&nbsp;M. Gareth Gaskell","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104536","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104536","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>The episodic context account (Gaskell et al., 2019) proposes that the act of language comprehension gives rise to an episodic discourse representation, and that this representation is prone to sleep-related memory effects. In three experiments, we tested this prediction by asking participants to read/listen to naturalistic stories before their memory was tested after a 12-hr interval, which included either daytime wakefulness or overnight sleep. To assess discourse memory, we used sentence recognition (Experiment 1; N = 386), free story recall (Experiment 2; N = 96), and cued recall (Experiments 2 and 3; N = 192). We found no evidence of sleep-related effects in sentence recognition or free recall, but cued recall (aka fill-in-the-blank) showed that the degree of time-related distortion, as indexed by both a subjective categorisation measure and Latent Semantic Analysis, was lower after sleep than after wake. Overall, our experiments suggest that the effect of sleep on discourse memory is modest but observable and may [1] be constrained by the retrieval processes (recollection vs. familiarity &amp; associative vs. item), [2] lie on a qualitative level that is difficult to detect in an all-or-nothing scoring metric, and [3] primarily situated in the textbase level of the tripartite model of discourse processing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104536"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X24000391/pdfft?md5=167377f12bc8a5f565ca1b3ef04b371a&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X24000391-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141193598","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}

{"title":"Mouse Tracking for Reading (MoTR): A new naturalistic incremental processing measurement tool","authors":"Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox ,&nbsp;Cui Ding ,&nbsp;Mrinmaya Sachan ,&nbsp;Lena Ann Jäger","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104534","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>We introduce Mouse Tracking for Reading (<span>MoTR</span>) a new incremental processing measurement tool that can be used to collect word-by-word reading times. In a <span>MoTR</span> trial, participants are presented with text, which is blurred, except for a small region around the tip of the mouse. Participants must move the mouse to reveal and read the text. Mouse movement is recorded, and, using a postprocessing pipeline we present, can be analyzed to produce scanpaths as well as word-by-word reading times. We validate <span>MoTR</span> in two suites of experiments. In the first experiment, we collect data for the English-language Provo Corpus (Luke and Christianson, 2018). We analyze scanpaths and show that participants interpolate between two types of strategies for reading during a <span>MoTR</span> trial – sometimes they fixate on individual words, somewhat akin to eye-tracking, while other times they produce a more constant pass over the text, slowing down in response to processing difficulties. Taking these strategies into account, we show that the word-by-word reading times produced by our data analysis pipeline correlate well with previously collected eye-tracking data for this corpus, and that these correlations are higher than those produced by SPR data, which we also collect for the corpus. Furthermore, we demonstrate that there is a linear relationship between by-word <span>MoTR</span> values and word-level surprisal values, as has been previously shown for eye-tracking data (Smith and Levy, 2013). In the second experiment, we assess whether <span>MoTR</span> can be used to study sentence processing phenomena in targeted psycholinguistics experiments. Using materials from Witzel et al. (2012), we show that <span>MoTR</span> can reveal English speakers’ preferences for low attachment during online sentence comprehension. We argue that <span>MoTR</span> presents a compelling tradeoff between multiple experimental considerations: It is cheap to run and can be presented in a browser enabling the collection of data over the internet. It is more naturalistic than some alternative processing measures, allowing participants to skip words and regress to previous sentence regions. Finally, it has good sensitivity, detecting signatures of psycholinguistic processing behaviors from a relatively small number of participants.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104534"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X24000378/pdfft?md5=670e0a82975ffff02e4b7fcdd166e9e4&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X24000378-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141095976","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}

{"title":"A meta-analysis of syntactic priming experiments in children","authors":"Shanthi Kumarage ,&nbsp;Seamus Donnelly ,&nbsp;Evan Kidd","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104532","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104532","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>A substantial literature exists using the syntactic priming methodology with children to test hypotheses regarding the acquisition of syntax, under the assumption that priming effects reveal both the presence of syntactic knowledge and the underlying nature of learning mechanisms supporting the acquisition of grammar. Here we present the first meta-analysis of syntactic priming studies in children. We identified 37 eligible studies and extracted 108 effect sizes corresponding to 76 samples of 2,378 unique participants. Our analysis confirmed a medium-to-large syntactic priming effect. The overall estimate of the priming effect was a log odds ratio of 1.44 (Cohen’s d = 0.80). This is equivalent to a structure that occurs 50 % of the time when unprimed occurring 81 % of the time when primed. Several variables moderated the magnitude of priming in children, including (i) within- or between-subjects design, (ii) lexical overlap, (iii) structural alternation investigated and, (iv) the animacy configuration of syntactic arguments. There was little evidence of publication bias in the size of the main priming effect, however, power analyses showed that, while studies typically have enough power to identify the basic priming effect, they are typically underpowered when their focus is on moderators of priming. The results provide a foundation for future research, suggesting several avenues of enquiry.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104532"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X24000354/pdfft?md5=f72c1de9dd80774577eed776606ce88e&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X24000354-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140951189","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}

{"title":"The differential effects of consonant and vowel diacritics in Arabic","authors":"Sami Boudelaa ,&nbsp;Dennis Norris ,&nbsp;Sachiko Kinoshita","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104533","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104533","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Much recent research on the front end of visual word recognition has focused on how letters with and without diacritic marks are identified. In this study we report three masked priming letter match experiments which examine the processing of two types of diacritic marks in Arabic, a language/writing system rich in diacritics. Experiment 1 focused on diacritic dots that are obligatory and signal a phonemic contrast in consonants. The results showed an oft-replicated asymmetric diacritic priming pattern, namely, that for a target letter with a diacritic (e.g., ش, /$/), the prime without the diacritic (e.g., س, /s/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ش–ش= س–ش).; in contrast, a target without a diacritic is primed less strongly by the prime with the diacritic than by the identity prime (e.g., س–س &lt; ش–س). Experiment 2 used vowel diacritics which also signal a phonemic contrast when present and collectively play the role of a morpheme, but are not obligatory and appear only in text for children or in the Quran. The results revealed a novel pattern in which both target letters with (e.g., سَ, /sa/) and without (e.g., س, /s/) vowel diacritics were equally facilitated by identity and related primes (e.g., س–سَ = سَ–سَ and سَ–س = س–س). Experiment 3 replicated these effects using a within-participant design. These results are discussed in light of current views of letter and diacritic processing.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104533"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-05-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X24000366/pdfft?md5=107fed8194d926d34738c0c0b66e802e&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X24000366-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140880008","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}

{"title":"Modality and stimulus effects on distributional statistical learning: Sound vs. sight, time vs. space","authors":"Haoyu Zhou ,&nbsp;Sabine van der Ham ,&nbsp;Bart de Boer ,&nbsp;Louisa Bogaerts ,&nbsp;Limor Raviv","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104531","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Statistical learning (SL) is postulated to play an important role in the process of language acquisition as well as in other cognitive functions. It was found to enable learning of various types of statistical patterns across different sensory modalities. However, few studies have distinguished distributional SL (DSL) from sequential and spatial SL, or examined DSL across modalities using comparable tasks. Considering the relevance of such findings to the nature of SL, the current study investigated the modality- and stimulus-specificity of DSL. Using a within-subject design we compared DSL performance in auditory and visual modalities. For each sensory modality, two stimulus types were used: linguistic versus non-linguistic auditory stimuli and temporal versus spatial visual stimuli. In each condition, participants were exposed to stimuli that varied in their length as they were drawn from two categories (short versus long). DSL was assessed using a categorization task and a production task. Results showed that learners’ performance was only correlated for tasks in the same sensory modality. Moreover, participants were better at categorizing the temporal signals in the auditory conditions than in the visual condition, where in turn an advantage of the spatial condition was observed. In the production task participants exaggerated signal length more for linguistic signals than non-linguistic signals. Together, these findings suggest that DSL is modality- and stimulus-sensitive.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104531"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140815578","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":"Readers target words where they expect to minimize uncertainty","authors":"Jon W. Carr ,&nbsp;Monica Fantini ,&nbsp;Lorena Perrotti ,&nbsp;Davide Crepaldi","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104530","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Skilled readers use multiple heuristics to guide their eye movements during reading. One possible cue that readers may rely on is the way in which information about word identity is typically spread across words. In many (but not all) languages, words are, on average, more informative on the left, predicting that readers should have a preference for left-of-center fixation when targeting words. Any such effect will, however, be modulated by important perceptual constraints and may be masked by various confounding factors. In three experiments with artificially constructed lexicons, we provide causal evidence that the way in which a language distributes information affects how readers land on words. We further support our analyses with a Bayesian cognitive model of visual word recognition that predicts where readers ought to fixate in order to minimize uncertainty about word identity. Taken together, our findings suggest that global properties of the lexicon may play a role in isolated word targeting, and may therefore make a contribution to eye movement behavior in more natural reading settings.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104530"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X24000330/pdfft?md5=acaaab94fa9e657788064d72f51855bf&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X24000330-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140649686","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}

{"title":"Influences of learned verbal labels and sleep on temporal event memory","authors":"Yaqi Wang ,&nbsp;M. Gareth Gaskell ,&nbsp;Silvia P. Gennari","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2024.104529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2024.104529","url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>Conceptual knowledge is known to modulate episodic memory, but it remains unclear whether and how verbal labels shape event learning and recollection over time. To investigate this issue, we asked participants to study and memorise unfamiliar animations and their titles. The titles conveyed fast or slow motion speed (e.g., <em>a bus</em> vs <em>ambulance travelling</em>). Event memory was assessed at different time points—soon after learning and after 12 h of sleep or wakefulness—using a timed mental event reproduction task and verbal recall. Unlike previous findings with these stimuli, we found that intentional title study elicited title-related biases on reproduced durations soon after learning. Post-sleep but not post-wakefulness recollection also showed title-related biases and systematically longer reproduced durations. Nevertheless, reproduced durations correlated with stimulus segments, stimulus durations and verbal recall, indicating that event memories combined episodic and verbal conceptual features. Results suggest that intentional verbal learning promoted conceptual influences at encoding and that sleep-dependent consolidation enhanced these influences. We argue that the degree of integration between conceptual and episodic features determines the extent of conceptual influences and, more generally, the role of verbal labels in event learning and memory.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"138 ","pages":"Article 104529"},"PeriodicalIF":4.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X24000329/pdfft?md5=d55c74ebba499cd246435608f0a04f9c&pid=1-s2.0-S0749596X24000329-main.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140644851","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}