Noun Stimuli Research Articles

The Gender Incongruency Effect in L3 Swedish due to Imperfect Gender Acquisition in L2 German

Abstract The study examines gender incongruency effects during gender retrieval in L3 Swedish learners, which are due to gender misassignment in L2 German. Twenty learners of L3 Swedish who had previously acquired two gender systems; one in their L1 Polish and the other in their L2 German, completed a speeded Gender Decision Task in Swedish and an untimed Gender Assignment Task in German. All noun stimuli were congruent in gender across the three languages (neuter → neuter, masculine and feminine → uter). Learners who erroneously assigned neuter gender to feminine but not to masculine nouns in L2 German showed higher error rates and longer response latencies in their attempts to retrieve uter gender in L3 Swedish. No interference was observed for neuter nouns. The present study thus demonstrates that incorrect gender representations in L2 German compete for selection with the target gender representations in L3 Swedish and that this cross-language interference is not always successfully resolved. Based on these findings, it is suggested that in the multilingual lexicon the connection of the uter gender node to the feminine gender node is weaker than to the masculine gender node.

The nature-disorder paradox: A perceptual study on how nature is disorderly yet aesthetically preferred.

Natural environments have powerful aesthetic appeal linked to their capacity for psychological restoration. In contrast, disorderly environments are aesthetically aversive, and have various detrimental psychological effects. But in our research, we have repeatedly found that natural environments are perceptually disorderly. What could explain this paradox? We present 3 competing hypotheses: the aesthetic preference for naturalness is more powerful than the aesthetic aversion to disorder (the nature-trumps-disorder hypothesis); disorder is trivial to aesthetic preference in natural contexts (the harmless-disorder hypothesis); and disorder is aesthetically preferred in natural contexts (the beneficial-disorder hypothesis). Utilizing novel methods of perceptual study and diverse stimuli, we rule in the nature-trumps-disorder hypothesis and rule out the harmless-disorder and beneficial-disorder hypotheses. In examining perceptual mechanisms, we find evidence that high-level scene semantics are both necessary and sufficient for the nature-trumps-disorder effect. Necessity is evidenced by the effect disappearing in experiments utilizing only low-level visual stimuli (i.e., where scene semantics have been removed) and experiments utilizing a rapid-scene-presentation procedure that obscures scene semantics. Sufficiency is evidenced by the effect reappearing in experiments utilizing noun stimuli which remove low-level visual features. Furthermore, we present evidence that the interaction of scene semantics with low-level visual features amplifies the nature-trumps-disorder effect-the effect is weaker both when statistically adjusting for quantified low-level visual features and when using noun stimuli which remove low-level visual features. These results have implications for psychological theories bearing on the joint influence of low- and high-level perceptual inputs on affect and cognition, as well as for aesthetic design. (PsycINFO Database Record

High-Definition tDCS of Noun and Verb Retrieval in Naming and Lexical Decision

High-definition transcranial direct current stimulation (HD-tDCS) is a novel brain stimulation method that has high potential for use in language therapy for speakers with aphasia, due to its safety and focality. This study aimed to obtain foundational data on using HD-tDCS to modulate language processing in healthy speakers. Participants received stimulation either of Broca’s area or of the left angular gyrus (20 min of anodal, cathodal, and sham stimulation on separate days), followed by naming and lexical decision tasks with single-word verb and noun stimuli. We found that cathodal stimulation over both Broca’s area and the left angular gyrus increased naming speed for both verbs and nouns, challenging the traditional view of cathodal stimulation as suppressive or leading to decreased performance. The effect did not extend to the lexical decision task. Additionally, effects of specific stimulation types depended on the order of their administration, suggesting possible physiological carry-over and/or task novelty effects. These results are relevant to the application of HD-tDCS to enhance and direct neural plasticity in patients with neurogenic language disorders.

Are abstract and concrete concepts organized differently? Evidence from the blocked translation paradigm

ABSTRACTUsing the blocked-translation paradigm with healthy participants, we examined Crutch and Warrington's hypothesis that concrete and abstract concepts are organized by distinct principles: concrete concepts by semantic similarities and abstract ones by associations. In three experiments we constructed two types of experimental blocking (similar vs. associative) for both abstract and concrete words. In Experiment 1, we first attempted to transfer previous findings observed in patients by Crutch and Warrington with semantic impairment to healthy participants. In Experiment 2 only noun stimuli were used, and we further included two semantically categorical conditions that differed by a degree of semantic similarity (close vs. distant). In Experiment 3, verbs were used exclusively. Consistent results were obtained across all three experiments: Significant interference effects were observed for abstract items that were blocked by an associative relationship and by a semantic similarity, and for concrete items that were blocked by a semantic similarity (category) but not when they were blocked by an association. The effect of similarity-close was greater than that of similarity-distant in the noun experiment. We argue that the results are in conflict with Crutch and Warrington's proposals, and can be accommodated by a theory of cooperating similarity and association connections for concrete and abstract concepts, with the association bearing more weight for abstract concepts.

Item Retrieval and Competition in Noun and Verb Generation: An fMRI Study

Selection between competing responses and stimulus-response association strength is thought to affect performance during verb generation. However, the specific contribution of these two processes remains unclear. Here we used fMRI to investigate the role of selection and association within frontal and BG circuits that are known to be involved in verb production. Subjects were asked to generate verbs from nouns in conditions requiring either high or low selection, but with constant association strength, and in conditions of weak or strong association strength, now with constant selection demands. Furthermore, we examined the role of selection and association during noun generation from noun stimuli. We found that the midpart of the left inferior frontal gyrus was more active in conditions requiring high compared with low selection, with matched association strength. The same left inferior frontal region activated irrespective of verb or noun generation. Results of ROI analyses showed effects of association strength only for verb generation and specifically in the anterior/ventral part of the left inferior frontal gyrus. Moreover, the BG were more active when weakly associated verbs had to be produced relative to weakly associated nouns. These results highlight a functional segregation within the left inferior frontal gyrus for verb generation. More generally, the findings suggest that both factors of selection between competing responses and association strength are important during single-word production with the latter factor becoming particularly critical when task-irrelevant stimuli interfere with the current task (here nouns during verb production), triggering additional activation of the BG.

Phonological Regularities and Grammatical Gender Retrieval in Spoken Word Recognition and Word Production

Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun's phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun's gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected. The noun stimuli could either belong to the gender class predicted by their ending (congruent) or they could belong to the gender class that was different from the predicted gender (incongruent). Gender decisions were made significantly faster for congruent nouns than for incongruent nouns, relative to a (lexical decision) baseline task. In Experiment 2, participants named pictures of the same materials as used in Experiment 1 with noun phrases consisting of a gender-marked determiner, a gender-marked adjective and a noun. In this Experiment, no effect of congruency, relative to a (bare noun naming) baseline task, was observed. Thus, the results show an effect of phonological information on the retrieval of gender-marked elements in spoken word recognition, but not in word production.

Learning about Different Ways of Expressing Number in the Development of Palestinian Arabic

The paper describes the acquisition of three number categories - sound feminine noun plurals, duals, collectives - in a dialect of Palestinian Arabic spoken in the north of Israel. The study population consisted of 58 children aged 3;6-4;6, 5;0-6;0, 6;0-7;0, and 7;0-8;0, all monolingual speakers of Palestinian Arabic as their mother tongue. Thirty noun stimuli denoting fruits and vegetables familiar to young children were presented in pictures to elicit plural, dual and collective forms. Analysis of the correct results showed two different acquisition patterns: clear development in production of sound feminine nouns and dual nouns, and no increase above the initial 50% in producing collective nouns. Dual contexts elicited constructions preceded by the numeral `two'. Collectives and sound feminine plurals tended to replace each other. The study highlights children's perception of noun reference through their learning of how to express number distinctions in a sparsely investigated language that challenges its speakers by marking number in multiple and often opaque ways.

From good and bad to can and must: subjective necessity of acts associated with positively and negatively valued stimuli

AbstractIn Study 1, 24 participants generated sentences expressing ways of dealing with positively and negatively valued noun stimuli (objects and humans). They were instructed to begin each sentence with One + auxiliary verb. The auxiliary was to be selected from a set including auxiliaries expressing high (must) and low (can) necessity. As predicted on the basis of a minimal nonsocial model of behavioral adaptation, higher necessity was associated with negative stimuli than with positive stimuli. In Study 2, this effect was replicated using trait adjectives as stimuli. Consistent with the model, the effect was produced by stimulus valences belonging to an approach‐avoidance related evaluative dimension ‘other‐profitability’. However, additional effects, involving an alternative evaluative dimension ‘self‐profitability’, were not fully accounted for by the model. They suggested that genuine social factors were involved that, however, were only required to explain some marginal effects. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Phonological and form class relations in the lexicon

Two experiments were conducted to examine the structure of the mental lexicon. A lexical search of American English, using the Brown corpus (Francis and Kucera, 1982), revealed a skewed, frequency-dependent distribution in which the syntactic classes of noun and verb are distinguished in terms of the phonological classification of their vowels. Among high-frequency words, nouns are more likely to have back vowels (57%) rather than front vowels (43%) and verbs more likely to have front vowels (62%) than back vowels (38%). This distribution, however, does not hold for low-frequency nouns and verbs in the language. Noun and verb stimuli containing front and back vowels were examined in both an auditory noun/verb categorization task and an auditory lexical decision task. In general, the phonotactic composition of nouns and verbs in the lexicon was shown to have perceptual consequences. Listeners seem to be differentially sensitive to incoming sound patterns on the basis of distributional properties of the lexicon.

The “Mind's Eye” and Metered-Memory Search

Abstract The effects of imagery value of noun stimuli were investigated in a metered-memory search paradigm. A within-subjects design was used with two levels of imagery (high or low) and three transformation levels. Response latency increased significantly with transformation level and was significantly faster when high-imagery nouns composed the memory set. The imagery effect was not found to lead to differential search rates. The hypothesis that metered-memory search would include a component of visually regenerating the memory set and holding it for the actual search was supported. No evidence was found against the notion that the search itself was verbal in nature.

反応時間と連想の構造

A word-association experiment in which the reaction time was controlled was performed to examine how the structure of association changes as a function of reaction time. The main results were as follows. (1) In the case of adjective stimuli, when the reaction time was short, most of the response words belonged to the same grammatical category as the stimulus words; the so-called paradigmatic associations were dominant. When the reaction time was long, the response words were predominantly those that could be syntactically combined with the stimulus words; the so-called syntagmatic associations were dominant. (2) In the case of noun stimuli, regardless of the length of reaction time, the response words were predominantly of the same grammatical category as the stimulus words. That is, the dominant mode of association for the nouns was not syntagmatic but always paradigmatic. The paradigmatic association for the nouns differed in its contents and functions from that for the adjectives.

Influence of Selected Semantic Variables on Word Associations of Aphasics

A word association test consisting of 10 animate noun and 10 inanimate noun stimuli was administered to 30 French-speaking and 30 English-speaking college students, 14 hospitalized non-aphasics, 7 fluent aphasics, and 7 dysfluent aphasics. The purpose of the study was to compare the response types and to investigate the effects of the semantic feature of animacy on response type and response latency. It was found that dysfluent aphasics gave significantly more paradigmatic responses than the hospitalized non-aphasics, and that the aphasics responded much more slowly than the hospitalized non-aphasics. There was no difference between English and French students on the number of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses given; however, the English students responded significantly faster than the French students. Both the college students and the fluent aphasics responded significantly faster to inanimate nouns than to animate nouns. There was no response type-semantic feature interaction found for any of the groups. These findings provided evidence that aphasics do not respond similarly to normals, and that the animacy feature has an influential effect on linguistic performance.

Stimulus imagery effect and the role of imagery in incidental learning

Previous studies employing concrete and abstract noun stimuli showed strong incidental learning imagery effects which were associated with test of recognition but not with test of free recall. Two variables, however, were confounded together: type of memory test, and the degree to which, under these tests, the two kinds of stimuli were differentiated from each other in overall accuracy of recall. To unconfound these variables, independent sets of 21 Ss were allocated randomly to one of two learning instructions (incidental or intentional) and tests of memory (recall or recognition), and paired associate learning procedures were adopted to provide the strongest possible differentiation between stimuli. It was hypothesized that in PA recall the effect found previously for recognition would emerge: the difference in learning between concrete and abstract noun words will be greater in INC as compared with INT learning, this phenomenon occurring for strong but not weak imagers. Results for the 84 Ss tested showed the predicted effect for test of recall but not for test of recognition thus suggesting the particular relevance to past findings of the stimulus differentiation variable.

Individual differences in vividness of imagery and the function of imagery in incidental learning

Abstract Independent sets of 20 good and 20 poor imagers, screened initially on a self-report questionnaire measuring vividness of imagery, were allocated to an incidental (INC) and intentional (INT) verbal learning condition to test the hypothesis that individual differences in vividness of imagery are associated positively with INC learning effects. It was predicted specifically that strong but not weak imagers would recognize more concrete than abstract noun stimuli in INC as compared to INT learning. Results offered partial support for the hypothesis. The two selected imagery groups failed to differ appreciably but the strongest and weakest visual imagers in the sample clearly showed the predicted effect. Sex differences were also indicated; among the vivid imagers the predicted effect was observed for high imaging females but not males.

THE ROLE OF IMAGERY IN INCIDENTAL LEARNING

Incidental (INC) and intentional (INT) subjects were given one of two orientating tasks requiring response to 18 high‐imagery (I) and 18 low‐imagery (N‐I) noun stimuli equated for m and frequency of usage. The subjects either responded with a set to image stimuli at inspection (IMG set) or responded to stimuli in terms of their familiarity (FAM set). Independent groups of 18 subjects were allocated to each of the four experimental conditions and groups were equated for sex of the subject; the subjects were tested for free recall and recognition of I and N‐I stimuli. It was predicted that if imagery plays a special role in INC learning, the difference in recall of I and N‐I words would be greater for INC as compared to INT learning. The hypothesis was supported for FAM set in recognition where I and N‐I stimuli were most differentiated. Type of orientating task was related to the presence or absence of the predicted effect.

Similarity between children's and adults' adjective responses to noun stimuli

This analysis examined similarities between fifth-graders' and adults' sensory-adjective type responses to common noun stimuli. Similarity was determined by the identical and different responses given to each stimulus as well as their respective response strengths. Ninety-nine nouns from Underwood and Richardson's adult norms were presented to 232 fifth-graders. Response hierarchies to each stimulus were obtained and compared with response hierarchies of adults for the same stimulus words. Results showed a moderately high degree of similarity between adults' and children's responses.

Stimulus and response concreteness, imagery, and temporal factors in paired-associate learning

This study investigated the effects of recall rates (2:3-sec vs 2:5-sec vs 2:8-sec), length of between-trial intervals (none vs 10 sec vs 60 sec), and noun concreteness on paired-associate learning. Ss learned a list of concrete-concrete, concrete-abstract, abstract-concrete, and abstract-abstract nouns. The results indicated that concrete nouns, particularly on the stimulus side of pairs, facilitated recall. Intertrial intervals yielded no significant effect on recall. The failure to find significant differences attributable to recall rates was discussed in reference to a previous study which found differences in learning abstract and concrete noun stimuli as a function of duration of input or study intervals.

Concreteness, imagery and temporal factors in paired-associate learning

Ss learned a paired-associate list in which concrete, high imagery and abstract, low imagery nouns served as stimuli for nonsense syllable associates. The lengths of the study-recall intervals and intertrial intervals were varied. Performance improved over trials and was superior for concrete stimuli and longer study-recall intervals. A significant interaction indicated that abstract noun stimuli need longer study periods than concrete noun stimuli for discovery and utilization in learning.