Search

While the arbitrariness of language has long been considered one of its defining features, there is growing evidence that non-arbitrariness also plays an important role. Here we investigated two sources of non-arbitrariness: systematicity (via grammatical gender) and iconicity (via shape sound symbolism). We manipulated these two elements orthogonally, allowing us to examine the effect of each. In Experiment 1, we found that French speakers associated nonwords containing feminine (masculine) endings with round (sharp) shapes. French speakers also associated nonwords containing round-sounding (sharp-sounding) phonemes with round (sharp) shapes. This was repeated using auditory presentation with both an English-speaking (Experiment 2a) and French-speaking (Experiment 2b) sample. As predicted, the English speakers showed no effects of grammatical gender, while the French speakers did. These results demonstrate that speakers of a language with grammatical gender associate different properties to words belonging to different genders. The results also show that sound symbolism can emerge in stimuli with existing associated information (i.e., endings indicative of grammatical gender, and the association that they evoke). Finally, while previous studies have looked at effects of arbitrary and non-arbitrary mappings contained in a single stimulus, this is the first study to demonstrate that different kinds of non-arbitrary mappings can have an effect when appearing in the same stimulus. Together these results add to our understanding of the importance of non-arbitrariness in language.

Sequence learning plays a key role in many daily activities such as language and skills acquisition. The present study sought to assess the nature of the Hebb repetition effect—the enhanced serial recall for a repeated sequence of items compared to random sequences—by examining the vulnerability of this classical sequence-learning phenomenon to auditory distraction. Sound can cause unwanted distraction by either interfering specifically with the processes involved in the focal task (interference-by-process), or by diverting attention away from a focal task (attentional capture). Participants were asked to perform visual serial recall, in which one to-be-remembered sequence was repeated every four trials, while ignoring irrelevant sound. Whereas both changing-state (Experiment 1) and deviant sounds (Experiment 2) disrupted recall performance compared to steady-state sounds, performance for the repeated sequence increased across repetitions at the same rate regardless of the sound condition. Such findings suggest that Hebbian sequence learning is impervious to environmental interference, which provides further evidence that the Hebb repetition effect is an analogue of word-form learning.

The present study is a direct replication of Experiments 2 and 3 of Jones, Farrand, Stuart, & Morris (1995). Functional Equivalence of Verbal and Spatial Information in Serial Short-Term Memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1008-1018.

When readers are asked to detect a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss it more frequently when it is embedded in a frequent function word than in a less frequent content word. This missing-letter effect has been used to investigate the cognitive processes involved in reading. A similar effect, called the missing-phoneme effect has been found in aural language when participants listen to the narration of a text while searching for a target phoneme. In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that both effects derived from the same cognitive processes, by isolating the role of word frequency and word function. In Experiment 1, we used a paper and pencil procedure for reading and a continuous narration for the listening task. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used a rapid serial visual or auditory presentation procedure to control for the effects of preprocessing upcoming information: parafoveal processing in reading and coarticulation in aural language processing. Parallel findings were observed in the reading and listening tasks. In all experiments, there was an effect of word function, and there was an effect of word frequency in Experiments 1 and 3. Results are interpreted in light of the attentional disengagement model.

Heretofore, we learned that bilinguals better detected letters in inter-lingual homographs when the context language ascribed a content role to the homograph as compared to a function role. In previous work the target homographs appeared in passages that were of a single language. The present work investigated whether this letter detection pattern would hold if both languages were activated by intermixing languages in a passage. Results suggested that despite intermixing of languages that would excite competing function and content meanings, local sentence context was sufficient to engender a content over function word advantage for inter-lingual homographs that was reminiscent of that obtained with homogenous text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well established that rote rehearsal plays a key role in serial memory for lists of verbal items. Although a great deal of research has informed us about the nature of verbal rehearsal, much less attention has been devoted to rehearsal in serial memory for visual-spatial information. By using the dot task—a visual-spatial analogue of the classical verbal serial recall task—with delayed recall, performance and eyetracking data were recorded in order to establish whether visual-spatial rehearsal could be evidenced by eye movement. The use of eye movement as a form of rehearsal is detectable (Experiment 1), and it seems to contribute to serial memory performance over and above rehearsal based on shifts of spatial attention (Experiments 1 and 2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In immediate serial recall, items are better recalled when they are all drawn from the same semantic category. This is usually accounted for by a two-stage retrieval-based framework, in which, at recall, long-term knowledge is used to reconstruct degraded phonological traces. The category shared by list items would serve as an additional retrieval cue restricting the number of recall candidates. Usually, the long-term search set is not defined, but some authors have suggested an extended search set and others a restricted set that is composed of the most recently presented items. This was tested in an experiment in which participants undertook an immediate serial recall task either alone or under articulatory suppression with either semantically similar or dissimilar lists. A trial-by-trial analysis revealed that, in both quiet and suppression conditions, items from similar lists were better recalled on all the trials, including the first one. In addition, there was no interaction between semantic similarity and trial, indicating that the effect of similarity was of similar size on all the trials. The results are best interpreted within a proposal suggesting an extended long-term search set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]