Semantic Distractors Research Articles

Development of selective auditory attention skills in children.

This study investigated the development of selective auditory attention skills of 53 children and 5 through 9 yr. old. Each child was tested individually via headphones at a comfortable listening level. The task required pointing to the appropriate picture of a monosyllabic word presented diotically. The task was presented first in quiet and then under each of three noise (distractor) conditions, white noise (nonlinguistic), speech backwards (linguistic nonsemantic), a speech forward (semantic). Age and type of distractor significantly influenced test scores. The semantic distractor caused the greatest distraction for all children.

Evidence for direct-access and inferential retrieval in question-answering

A popular but implicit distinction between direct-access retrieval and inference was put to explicit experimental test. “Direct-access” and “inferential” questions were constructed and their properties examined in several converging operations. Responses to the questions in a four-alternative multiple-choice test were externalized and rated on a direct-access/inference scale. Reaction times to verify singly presented answers were taken for similar questions. The data empirically validated widely used assumptions about direct and inferential retrieval and yielded some information for each: (1) Inference takes longer than direct-access. (2) When direct-access fails, inference is attempted whether or not the question lends itself to inferential processing. (3) Semantic versus phonetic distractors require an additional 500 milliseconds to reject for inferential questions.

The Differential Effects of Semantic, Acoustic, and Nonverbal Distraction on Korsakoff Patients' Verbal Retention Performance

Korsakoff and alcoholic control patients' verbal retention performance was assessed following either acoustic, semantic, or nonverbal distractor activity. Both patient groups were similarly affected by the degree of relatedness between the distractor and the memoranda. Semantic distraction produced more verbal forgetting than acoustic, which in turn, caused more forgetting than the nonverbal tasks. The Korsakoff patients' verbal retention, however, became increasingly impaired, relative to the controls, as the level of similarity between the distraction and the memoranda increased. These results suggest that Korsakoff patients have difficulty performing verbal analyses which incorporated the distinctive physical, phonemic and semantic features of the memoranda into the development of their verbal memory traces.