Word Fragment Research Articles

Segmentation by lexical subtraction in Hungarian speakers of second-language English

Using cross-modal form priming, we compared the use of stress and lexicality in the segmentation of spoken English by native English speakers (L1) and by native Hungarian speakers of second-language English (L2). For both language groups, lexicality was found to be an effective segmentation cue. That is, spoken disyllabic word fragments were stronger primes in a subsequent visual word recognition task when preceded by meaningful words than when preceded by nonwords: For example, the first two syllables of corridor were a more effective prime for visually presented corridor when heard in the phrase anythingcorri than in imoshingcorri. The stress pattern of the prime (strong-weak vs. weak-strong) did not affect the degree of priming. For L1 speakers, this supports previous findings about the preferential use of high-level segmentation strategies in clear speech. For L2 speakers, the lexical strategy was employed regardless of L2 proficiency level and instead of exploiting the consistent stress pattern of their native language. This is clear evidence for the primacy and robustness of segmentation by lexical subtraction even in individuals whose lexical knowledge is limited.

Effects of divided attention in the word-fragment completion task with unique and multiple solutions

The Identification-Production Hypothesis predicts that the effect of divided attention (DA) at encoding should be larger when priming tasks involve divergent search processes through many different competitors, because they are supposed to place heavier attentional demands on frontal lobe functions (Gabrieli, Vaidya, Stone et al., 1999). This hypothesis was tested in two experiments using the Word Fragment Completion (WFC) task with unique solutions (which relies on convergent lexical search towards single appropriate representations: the identification version of the WFC) or multiple solutions (which implies a competition between equally plausible responses: the production version of the WFC). In Experiment 1 the two versions of the completion task were found to be equally unaffected by the imposition of a short-term memory load at encoding. In Experiment 2 the reduction of target words’ study time (from 2.5 to 1 s), and the use of a blocked (rather than mixed) design, significantly diminished the level of priming in the DA condition: However, contrary to the predictions, the degree of impairment was not greater for multiple-solution fragments. Results are in line with recent failures to support the identification–production hypothesis in normal adults (Geraci, 2006; Prull, 2004).

単語完成課題における環境的文脈依存効果に及ぼす保持期間の影響

The effect of environmental context on performance on a word-fragment completion task, as an implicit memory task, was investigated by varying the retention interval between the encoding and retrieval sessions. In two experiments, 40 to-be-remembered items were presented incidentally to participants before they engaged in a word fragment task. The retention interval was one week in Experiment 1 and 10 minutes in Experiment 2. Except for an environmental context cue of odor, the environmental contexts of the encoding and retrieval sessions in both experiments were different. Reinstatement of the environmental context cue of odor facilitated performance in Experiment 1 only. This result suggests that when the effectiveness of item cues such as word fragments is reduced by a long retention interval, the environmental cues can facilitate performance in word-fragment task.

The solution effects of initial fragments on perceptual interference in Chinese characters

A large word fragment (e.g., "r__ i__rop") is harder to solve when disclosed piecemeal from a smaller fragment (e.g., "r_____p") than when shown all at once. This perceptual interference has been found to decrease with the number of solutions to the initial fragments. In the present study, 2 experiments manipulated the number of solutions (1 vs. at least 3) to examine this solution effect using a fragment completion task with Chinese characters. The results revealed a solution effect and showed for the first time no interference in the multiple-solution condition. These findings provide evidence against a competition explanation, which attributes interference to activations of incorrect hypotheses in an early presentation, and in favor of a mismatch explanation, which attributes interference to an enduring inhibition of the correct hypothesis regarding stimulus identity after a mismatch is detected between the hypothesis and the stimulus early in the presentation sequence.

Correcting Arabic OCR Errors Using Improved Topic-Based Language Models

The OCR output of scanned document images suffers from recognition errors especially when dealing with languages that are characterized by particularities and rich morphology such as the Arabic language, thus an effective error correction model is greatly needed. This paper focuses on three aspects of post-processing correction. First, improving the alignment and error n-gram models by adding correction rules based on character meta-classes rather than on specific characters, which is more suitable for the Arabic language. Second, using the language models to understand and correct the Arabic word fragment resulting from agglutinated affixes or isolated letters. The last will concern improving the language models by adding semantic information to the correction process, by using the bidirectional n-grams, stemming and removing stop words, which gives higher weights to n-grams sharing semantic meanings. In addition, we use a topic corpus, not a global one for a better probability distribution. The proposed model is effective in correcting the lexical errors and covered the semantic ones, that were not frequently reported by OCRs and are corrected after a manual proofreading. The proposed method shows an increase in the correction rate of almost 13% especially in meaningful terms.

Priming Letters by Colors: Evidence for the Bidirectionality of Grapheme–Color Synesthesia

In synesthesia, stimulation of one sensory modality leads to a percept in another nonstimulated modality, for example, graphemes trigger an additional color percept in grapheme-color synesthesia, which encompasses the variants letter-color and digit-color synesthesia. Until recently, it was assumed that synesthesia occurs strictly unidirectional: Although the perception of a letter induces a color percept in letter-color synesthetes, they typically do not report that colors trigger the percept of a letter. Recent data on number processing in synesthesia suggest, however, that colors can implicitly elicit numerical representations in digit-color synesthetes, thereby questioning unidirectional models of synesthesia. Using a word fragment completion paradigm in 10 letter-color synesthetes, we show here for the first time that colors can implicitly influence lexical search. Our data provide strong support for a bidirectional nature of grapheme-color synesthesia and, in general, may allude to the mechanisms of cross-modality interactions in the human brain.

Lateral inferior prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex are engaged at different stages in the solution of insight problems

Two studies used puzzles that required participants to find a word that satisfied a set of constraints. The first study used a remote-association task, where participants had to find a word that would form compound words with 3 other words. The second study required participants to complete a word fragment with an associate of another word. Both studies produced distinct patterns of activity in the lateral inferior prefrontal cortex (LIPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Activation in the LIPFC rose only as long as the participants were trying to retrieve the solution and dropped off as soon as the solution was obtained. However, activation in the ACC increased upon the retrieval of a solution, reflecting the need to process that solution. The data of the second experiment are fit by an information-processing model that interprets the activity in the LIPFC as reflecting retrieval operations and the activity in the ACC as reflecting subgoal setting.

テストリストにおける学習項目の割合が線画完成課題に及ぼす影響

The ratio of studied to non-studied words on a test list is called the proportion overlap. Fujita (1994) reported that the proportion overlap affected the availability of conceptually driven processing, but not data-driven processing, on a word fragment completion test. In this experiment, we sought to extend the finding of the proportion overlap effect to a non-verbal implicit memory test. Participants previously studied either a list of pictures or words and then were presented with a picture fragment completion task. The proportion of studied items on the test was 20% or 80%. In the picture-study condition, perceptual priming occurred, and the amount of priming was not different between the 20% and 80% conditions. In the word-study condition, however, cross-form priming occurred only in the 80% condition, but not in the 20% condition. These results are consistent with the findings from the word fragment completion test, and suggest the generality of the proportion overlap effect on the data-driven implicit memory test.

It's the thought that counts: The role of hostile cognition in shaping aggressive responses to social exclusion.

Prior research has confirmed a casual path between social rejection and aggression, but there has been no clear explanation of why social rejection causes aggression. A series of experiments tested the hypothesis that social exclusion increases the inclination to perceive neutral information as hostile, which has implications for aggression. Compared to accepted and control participants, socially excluded participants were more likely to rate aggressive and ambiguous words as similar (Experiment 1a), to complete word fragments with aggressive words (Experiment 1b), and to rate the ambiguous actions of another person as hostile (Experiments 2-4). This hostile cognitive bias among excluded people was related to their aggressive treatment of others who were not involved in the exclusion experience (Experiments 2 and 3) and others with whom participants had no previous contact (Experiment 4). These findings provide a first step in resolving the mystery of why social exclusion produces aggression.

Interference Effects and the Consequences of Recognition Failures and Successes

This investigation examined the contribution of memory awareness to interference, conceptualized as response competition that arises from the encoding of materials similar in appearance. Subjects performed incidental encoding tasks (counting vowels, counting syllables, and word association) on targets and non-targets that were orthographically similar (experimental condition) or dissimilar (control condition). The tasks were intended to make the memories of the studied words at test more or less accessible to subjects' awareness. During the test, fragments of the targets were intermixed with fragments of nonstudied words, and the task was to complete fragments with studied words or, in the absence of such memories, with the first words that came to mind. Response competition was expected to produce a blocking effect, consisting of fewer correct completions and more intrusions (or null responses) in the experimental condition than in the control condition. When the overall accessibility of the studied, orthographically similar words was optimized by the semantic association task, responses recognized as studied exhibited both more intrusions and fewer correct completions than in the control condition. When the accessibility of these words was curtailed by the vowel counting task, only unrecognized correct completions after the proactive interference treatment tended to be lower than in the control condition. These results suggest that memory awareness can modulate interference conceptualized as response competition.

Preserved priming but insensitivity to perceptual fluency on recognition judgments in Alzheimer's disease

AbstractBackground: Previous research on Alzheimer's disease (AD) has not yielded a consensus regarding the preservation of automatic memory processes, although there is a consensus that conscious recollection processes are impaired in AD.Methods: In the present study, we examined perceptual specificity effects (PSEs) in word recognition judgments (explicit memory task; Experiment 1) and word fragment completion (implicit memory task; Experiment 2) performed by individuals with mild AD and elderly adults without dementia (controls).Results: In recognition judgments, control subjects, but not individuals with AD, demonstrated PSEs (Experiment 1). In contrast, neither group showed PSEs on word fragment completion and their priming magnitudes were comparable (Experiment 2).Conclusions: The findings suggest that perceptually automatic processes in explicit memory judgments and implicit memory processes are different and that the former are specifically impaired in AD.

Study effort versus distinctiveness in the recollection of veridical and illusory memories

In past research, stimulus distinctiveness and study effort have been claimed to promote the development of distinctive memories, which in turn have been considered critical for enhancing veridical recollection and reducing illusory memory experiences. In the present investigation, stimulus distinctiveness, obtained by displaying text-redundant pictorial information at study, was pitted against study effort to determine whether either factor would be more beneficial to veridical recall and more detrimental to illusory recall than the other. Subjects first completed word fragments with or without the aid of an image of each word's referent and then performed a recall test. It was found that when images were useful to the encoding task (fragment completion), their presence at study enhanced veridical recall and reduced illusory memories more than any additional encoding effort.

On fragments of words over a q-ary alphabet

We consider several combinatorial problems concerning fragments of words over a q-ary alphabet. We obtain a number of new facts, some of them being previously known in the binary case only.

Electrophysiological indices of word fragment priming allow characterizing neural stages of speech recognition

Spoken word onset syllables (prime fragments) have been used to track neurophysiological processing of following written words (targets). Between 300 and 400 ms event-related potentials (ERPs) over the left hemisphere were more positive for targets that did not match their preceding prime fragments (e.g., hun-dragon) compared to matching targets (e.g., dra-dragon). This P350 effect has been related to the activation of modality independent neural word form representations. In the present experiment we set out to characterize neural word processing specific to the auditory domain. Spoken word onset syllables (prime fragments) were followed by spoken words (targets). Reduced amplitudes for matching targets were found for the N100 and the T-complex (100–300 ms), for the P350 (300–400 ms) and for a central negativity starting at 300 ms. The early potentials possibly index the priming of speech sound processing. The P350 replicates previous work with written words. This constitutes further evidence for shared neural word form representations in auditory and visual word recognition. The central negativity might be related to the rapid phonological matching of prime and target; or to the immediate testing of phonological expectations in speech recognition.

Review of Implicit measures of attitudes.

Implicit Measures of Attitudes, by Bernd Wittenbrink & Norbert Schwarz (Eds.). The Guilford Press, 2007, 294 pages (ISBN-10: 1-59385-402-1, ISBN-13: 978-1-59385-402-7, US $38.00 Hardcover) Reviewed by STEVEN M. SMITH DOI : 10.1037/0708-5591.49.2.177 Well before the concept of was first articulated by social psychologists, people expended tremendous energy trying to understand and assess people's opinions of many different topics. Almost immediately after the development of formal attitude measures, there was recognition that at times people may be unwilling or unable to express their true attitudes toward certain topics. For example, if a person is asked about potentially embarrassing topics or topics where social desirability factors may play a role, they may misrepresent their attitude. Alternatively, people may simply be unaware of their true opinion on an issue. Thus, in addition to direct or measures of attitudes (e.g., self-report and surveys or interviewbased measures), we have seen the development of more indirect or measures of attitudes. However, because many early implicit measures were cumbersome (such as the Thematic Apperception Test) and/or had reliability or validity issues, explicit measures of attitudes became dominant. Despite the fact that explicit measures provided a cheap, simple, reliable and valid way to assess attitudes, the limitations of these measures remained an issue. With the advent of computerbased testing and other high-tech methodologies, there has been a dramatic resurgence of the use of implicit attitude measures in the last two decades. Thus it is clear that Bernd Wittenbrink and Norbert Schwarz have produced a very timely volume. The stated goals of Wittenbrink and Schwarz's book are to educate the reader about the value of implicit measures of attitudes, as well as to provide a handbook of sorts for the neophyte wanting to learn how to use the variety of implicit attitude measures available. In addition, the editors want to provide a critical assessment of the state of implicit attitude measurement in terms of the very definition of an implicit measure, as well as the general reliability and validity of these measures. Finally, the editors want to provide directions for future research in the area of implicit attitude measurement. As such, Wittenbrink and Schwarz hope that this text will be a resource book for both new graduate students and established researchers in the field. In general, I believe the editors have accomplished their goals. After the editors' introductory chapter, which gives an overview of the development of implicit attitude measurement as well as an overview of the rest of the volume, the book is broken down into two sections: Procedures and Their Implementation and Critical Perspectives. The procedures and implementation section includes chapters on the most popular implicit measures currently in use. Wittenbrink begins by exploring work that has been done on attitude priming; the procedure that initiated the resurgence of implicit attitude measurement in the 1980s and 1990s. The next chapter, authored by Kristin Lane, Mahzarin Banaji, Brian Nosek, and Anthony Greenwald covers the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is clearly the most popular implicit attitude measurement procedure currently in use. Patrick Vargas, Denise Sekaquaptewa and William von Hippel follow with a chapter on lowtech paper and pencil implicit measures. For me, this chapter was the most pleasantly surprising in the book. It provides many cheap and accessible methods to measure implicit attitudes, and barkens back to the early days of implicit measures, making the distinction between and deliberative measures. Furthermore, the authors describe a number of implicit measures that do not require spontaneous responses (such as Word Fragment Completion, paper and pencil versions of the IAT, and the information error test) which highlights one of the issues surrounding the definition of measures of attitudes. …

Implicit Proactive Interference, Age, and Automatic Versus Controlled Retrieval Strategies

We assessed the extent to which implicit proactive interference results from automatic versus controlled retrieval among younger and older adults. During a study phase, targets (e.g., "ALLERGY") either were or were not preceded by nontarget competitors (e.g., "ANALOGY"). After a filled interval, the participants were asked to complete word fragments, some of which cued studied words (e.g., "A_L_ _GY"). Retrieval strategies were identified by the difference in response speed between a phase containing fragments that cued only new words and a phase that included a mix of fragments cuing old and new words. Previous results were replicated: Proactive interference was found in implicit memory, and the negative effects were greater for older than for younger adults. Novel findings demonstrate two retrieval processes that contribute to interference: an automatic one that is age invariant and a controlled process that can reduce the magnitude of the automatic interference effects. The controlled process, however, is used effectively only by younger adults. This pattern of findings potentially explains age differences in susceptibility to proactive interference.

Aging and the revelation effect.

Previous research by M. W. Prull, L. L. Light, M. E. Collett, and R. F. Kennison (1998) has shown that older adults are not susceptible to a memory illusion referred to as the revelation effect. The authors examined the robustness of Prull et al.'s findings by having participants solve a word fragment (Experiment 1) or an anagram (Experiment 2) prior to the recognition memory decision. In both experiments, younger and older adults showed a reliable revelation effect. These results simultaneously challenge both the conclusion that older adults are not vulnerable to the revelation effect and the conclusion that aging is associated with increasing susceptibility to memory illusions.

Effects of Word and Fragment Writing During L2 Vocabulary Learning

This study examined how writing (copying) target words and word fragments affects intentional second language (L2) vocabulary learning. English‐speaking first‐semester learners ofSpanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish nouns via word‐picture repetition in three conditions: (1) word writing, (2) fragment writing, and (3) no writing. After the learning phase, the participants completed productive (picture‐to‐L2) and recpectively oriented (L2‐to‐first language) posttests. Vocabulary learning scores in the no‐writing condition were higher than in the other two conditions and higher in the word‐writing condition than in the fragment‐writing condition. These fmdings provide new evidence on how forced Output without access to meaning can detract from early word learning by exhausting processing resources needed to encode new word forms. The pedagogical implications of the study call for language instructors to rethink the practice of encouraging students to write down a word to remember it.

A Comparison of Implicit Memory Tests in Schizophrenic Patients and Normal Controls

The objective of the current study was to compare the performance of schizophrenic patients and normal controls on implicit memory tests. Two neuropsychological tasks were administered to 29 patients and normal participant samples. The implicit tests were: Word fragment completion and Word production from semantic categories. The priming score was the variable of interest. Priming effects are obtained in normal subjects and schizophrenia patients, regardless of the implicit test used. However, a dissociation in priming between normal and patient groups was observed, depending on the test used. For word fragment test, priming was identical between the two groups. However, for word production, priming obtained in schizophrenics was lower than priming in normal controls. Results confirm a dissociation effect in implicit memory tests. These results could be explained in the context of the Roediger and Blaxton (1987) distinction between data-driven and conceptually-driven processing. This evidence suggests that a complete neuropsychological assessment of memory in schizophrenia should include different kinds of implicit memory tests (procedural, perceptual, and conceptual tasks).

When do primes go bad? A corpus of orthographically related primes that inhibit fragment completion

The memory block effect (MBE) occurs when orthographically similar words inhibitretrieval. Previous studies have published 55 different stimuli that produce the MBE in word fragment completion. This small number of stimuli constrains experimental designs, presents serious obstacles for using neuroimaging to elucidate neural substrates of blocking, and raises concern that the MBE is limited to a particular group of words. A pool of 315 stimulus words was tested in a traditional MBE paradigm, and the results demonstrated that the MBE generalizes to other stimuli. This study also expands the number of stimuli that produce the MBE because 185 new stimuli produced blocking effects. As a result, the current list of 240 MBE stimuli can be used for word fragment research including cognitive neuroscience investigations of retrieval inhibition. A table of MBE stimuli is available in an archived appendix that can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.