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18265 papers
Numerous word recognition studies conducted over the past 2 decades are examined. These studies manipulated lexical familiarity by presenting words of high versus low printed frequency and most reported an interaction between printed frequency and one of several second variables, namely, orthographic regularity, semantic concreteness, or polysemy. However, the direction of these interactions was inconsistent from study to study. Six new experiments clarify these discordant results. The first two demonstrate that words of the same low printed frequency are not always equally familiar to subjects. Instead, subjects' ratings of "experimental familiarity" suggest that many of the low-printed-frequency words used in prior studies varied along this dimension. Four lexical decision experiments reexamine the prior findings by orthogonally manipulating lexical familiarity, as assessed by experiential familiarity ratings, with bigram frequency, semantic concreteness, and number of meanings. The results suggest that of these variables, only experiential familiarity reliably affects word recognition latencies. This in turn suggests that previous inconsistent findings are due to confounding experiential familiarity with a second variable.
Ratings of associative strength between members of pairs of categorically related words were obtained for children from Grades 3,4,6, and 8 and for college adults. Correlations of ratings were high among the five grade levels, indicating that associative relations are an early form of semantic representation that change minimally in development.
An instrumental cigarette smoke monitor (CSM) system designed for human smoking studies has been developed and validated using a smoking machine as a human surrogate. The cigarette holder contains both smoke-mixing and flow-measurement orifices and a smoke-concentration sensor. Smoke flow through the holder and smoke concentration in the holder are determined simultaneously. The two signals are multiplied electronically and the product signal integrated. The integrated response is directly proportional to the amount of particulate matter collected immediately downstream of the holder, regardless of cigarette type or the particular way in which the cigarette is smoked. The CSM is sufficiently sensitive to quantitatively determine the amount of smoke TPM generated from cigarettes in the 1-mg Federal Trade Commission tar-delivery category.
Abstract The effects and aftereffects of noise on human performance and affective state were investigated in two experiments. In the first, 48 undergraduate university students completed five paper-and-pencil performance tests in a noisy (85 dBA) and/or quiet (45 dBA) environment. In the second experiment, 24 students completed two mood-and four environment-rating scales under the same conditions as in experiment 1. There were statistically reliable noise effects and aftereffects on the subjects’ affective ratings but none on their performance.
It was hypothesised that the effect of outgroup members' speech style on attitudes toward them varies according to observers' norms for ingroup vs. outgroup speech. Further, ethnocentrism and exposure to outgroup members were not only expected to affect attitudes directly, but to control speech norms, which themselves underlie intergroup perceptions. This may be particularly important in bicultural contexts where increased exposure to outgroup members makes speech style crucial to attitude formation. Language norms, ethnocentrism, attitudes toward Hispanics and Spanish language, and exposure to Hispanics were measured among 13-year-old Anglophone students in a school containing a Spanish bilingual programme. Subjects responded to speech samples containing Standard English, and syntactic, phonemic and lexical intrusions from Spanish. These varieties had differential effects on normative judgements and evaluations of the speaker. Further, measures of speech norms were shown to have adequate internal and test-retest reliability. More ethnocentric subjects and, in particular, those with less contact with Hispanics showed negative attitudes towards Hispanics generally, and toward the speakers specifically. These relationships were partially mediated by speech norms, although both intergroup contact and speech norms made significant independent contributions to the prediction of outgroup attitudes. Thus, individual differences in speech norms are important to understanding the effect of speech on intergroup attitudes.
The ACLTRANS ANSI FORTRAN IV program transforms the 300 adjectives on the Adjective Check List (Gough, 1950. 1960) into 37 raw and T-standard psychological scales. This program has three advantages over scoring based ob theAdjective Check List Manual (Gough & Heilbrun, 1965, 1980, 1983): ease and speed of computing the raw scale scores; exact partialing of number of adjectives checked from standardized scale scores; and choice of parameter norms for standardization. By using the ACLTRANS program, the researcher can be confident of quick and accurate scoring, as well as appropriate standardization.
The present study tested effects of subject anticipatory interpersonal trust, therapist age, and interview structure on satisfaction with therapist and on mood states. Male college students (N = 120), dichotomized as low-trust and high-trust subjects on Rotter's Interpersonal Trust Scale (ITS), were assigned to listen to one of two simulated initial interview audiotapes characterized by low or high interview structure. Half of each group saw a photo of an older "therapist"; the remainder, a younger "therapist." Eight cells contained 15 independent subjects each. Subjects reported reactions on the Profile of Mood States, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, and a Therapist Rating Scale. Analyses were performed on full sample and extreme groups scores: The latter compared upper and lower thirds (ITS scores) of subjects to increase statistical sensitivity. Anticipatory trust, alone, did not affect ratings of satisfaction with therapist. Only anger, of seven mood states, distinguished trust groups regardless of interview structure; low trusters reported greater anger (p <.05). Under the low-structure condition, low-trust extreme group subjects reported greater state anxiety, depression, and confusion (p <.05). Anticipatory trust was found to correlate negatively with trait anxiety (p <.001). Overall, subjects reported greater satisfaction with the older therapist (p <.01) and when the interview structure was low (p <.05). In conclusion, low-trusters appear to be slightly more mood reactive than high-trusters, particularly in low-structure conditions. The discrepancy, found under some conditions, between mood disturbance and satisfaction with the therapist may result either from rationalization in rating satisfaction or from dishonest self-reports. Reports of less mood disturbance under high structure conditions suggest preoccupation with cognitions. Preference for the older therapist possibly originates in transference or in estimate of expertise based on age. Subject anticipation of exploitation by the younger therapist was apparently evoked by interview conditions rather than subject trust level and suggests a transference reaction. Results suggest an initial advantage for older therapists: Their subjects may be more tolerant of discomfort-producing therapist behavior. Training of young therapists in interview techniques which produce a relaxed, open style may be most conducive to engaging the client in therapy.
Abstract A sample drawn from the population of Tucson, Arizona, rated slides of forest scenes for scenic quality and acceptability for recreation. The scenes showed ponderosa pine areas that were unburned or had had light or severe fire 1 to 5 years previously. Participants also read brochures about fire effects, and took a post test that measured both fire knowledge and attitude. Their ratings of the slides indicated that scenic quality was improved by light fires but diminished by severe burns. Acceptability ratings for recreation differed with the kind of recreation contemplated, with camping showing the greatest sensitivity to fire effects. With slight variation by type of presentation, the brochures increased respondents' knowledge and tolerance of fire but did not affect ratings of scenic or recreational quality. Overall, respondents supported prescribed burning.
This paper presents an overview of the Natural Language Technology Project which is being carried out at the University of Nijmegen since the end of 1982. A sketch of the project's main goals is followed by a description of the state-of-the-art as of March 1984. The principles underlying the design of the various linguistic modules (morphological and syntactic parsers, morphological and syntactic generators, a large lexical database, an object-oriented knowledge representation system based on LISP) are explained. An integrated design is proposed for a natural language dialogue system sharing many components with an "author system", i.e., with a software tool capable of assisting authors in preparing and editing documents on the basis of built-in linguistic knowledge.
An experiment assessed the effect of subliminally embedded, visual material on an auditory detection task. 22 women and 19 men were presented tachistoscopically with words designated as “emotional” or “neutral” on the basis of prior GSRs and a Word Rating List under four conditions: (a) Unembedded Neutral, (b) Embedded Neutral, (c) Unembedded Emotional, and (d) Embedded Emotional. On each trial subjects made forced choices concerning the presence or absence of an auditory tone (1000 Hz) at threshold level; hits and false alarm rates were used to compute non-parametric indices for sensitivity (A′) and response bias (B″). While over-all analyses of variance yielded no significant differences, further examination of the data suggests the presence of subliminally “receptive” and “non-receptive” subpopulations.
Abstract Student dormitory advisors (n = 16) made trait/situation attributions to themselves and also identified three friends and three acquaintances. Friends (n = 41) and acquaintances (n = 43) then made attributions to themselves along with attributions and familiarity ratings of the advisors who identified them. The actor‐observer effect was obtained for situational but not for trait attributions, both when advisors' self‐attributions were compared to attributions made about them by friends and acquaintances (common target) and when the latter's self attributions were compared to their target attributions (common rater). Among friends and acquaintances, target familiarity was positively related to trait attributions and was negatively related to uncertainty attributions. Also, familiarity was positively related to the validity of situational but not of trait attributions. It was concluded that familiarity appears to influence the process of attribution, but differentially for dispositional vs. situational attributions and for actor‐observer differences vs. observer variations in attributions. Moreover, increased information about the actor as a result of greater familiarity may lead to both more accurate and more favorable attributions.
Synopsis 48 subjects (23 male, 25 female) rated the familiarity of 10 odors varying in chemical complexity from single odorous materials to complex perfumes. The results of these ratings were compared with the results of two experiments in which the same subject judged the perceived complexity of the odors and their pleasantnesusing a paired comparison method. Five of the odors used had also been used in a previous study of similar design. The ranking of perceived complexity of these 5 was highly correlated to the ranking obtained in the previous study, confirming that perceived complexity is a meaningful and measurable concept with untrained respondents. In men but not in women, there was a significant negative correlation between perceived complexity and preference. In women but not in men, preference was positively correlated with familiarity. Familiarity and perceived complexity were unrelated both in men and in women. Women discriminated more strongly between the stimuli in terms of complexity, and their perceived complexity rankings were more highly correlated to chemical complexity than the men's. All of these findings confirmed the findings of the earlier study. A different group of 47 respondents (23 male, 24 female) participated in a parallel experiment of identical design in which the 10 odors were incorporated in a cosmetic cream. Rank order correlations between perceived complexity of the same stimuli in creams and in odorless solvent solutions were positive but not significant; the same was true for the preference ratings. Only between the familiarity ratings of the same stimuli in creams and in solutions were the rank order correlations positive and significant. No significant correlations were found between familiarity, pleasantness, and complexity in creams.
Poetry is a form of linguistic behaviour that deviates from the norm and that breaks the rules set up by the code established by society, which is tolerated, accepted and even extolled. In fact, poetic creation is regarded as the highest outcome of the symbolic activity of the human mind, a real act of civilization, indeed. Linguistic norm is thus violated systematically and theories have been built upon this deviation like Brecht's Entfremdung and Shklovskij's Ostranenie. Contemporary poetry has come to the point of building up a sort of antilanguage as a means to express linguistic alienation; it is a language deprived of the usual connotations - the meanings attached to symbols - of the usual denotation - the meanings attached to the signs. and of the usual referents - the objects related to the signs. Poetry means in that it is the expression of social pathologies and is nonetheless accepted as an anti-formal message. The status of poetry and of other artistic contemporary expressions is thus intrinsically ambiguous, deviating and intentionally abnormal; but its acceptability is warranted by its being a code endowed with an aesthetic function. The rules are thus reverted: the elements of expression must be new, unforeseeable, unpredictable, at the antipodes of the communicative function of linguistic praxis in usual everyday social intercourses. The aim is to stun the reader in order to release his imagination from the fetters imposed by common coding-decoding linguistic processes.
Male students ( n =95) and female students ( n =77) in their penultimate year at a metropolitan high school completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) to provide masculinity (M) and femininity (F) scores and also nominated their choices of ideal and realistic occupations, the former being the occupation they would most prefer to work in and the latter the occupation that they realistically expected to choose. They then rated each choice for male dominance and status or prestige. Those subjects who indicated that they would not continue in the realistically chosen occupation until retirement also rated the likelihood that each of 10 reasons would be their reason for leaving. Results indicated strong gender effects for the male dominance ratings, males preferring gender‐congruent ideal and realistic occupations more than females. Strong gender effects also occurred from the analyses of the likelihood ratings for some of the reasons. Effects involving masculinity (M) and femininity (F) scores and their joint classification (androgynous, masculine, feminine, undifferentiated) were mostly non‐significant but the significant effects that did emerge were theoretically meaningful, especially those that concerned reasons for quitting the realistic occupation. Results were taken as support for the view that the effects of sex‐role expectations and attitudes should be distinguished from the effects of instrumental and expressive personality traits when occupational choices are considered.
Summary The following were investigated in a series of studies on 366 college students: (a) individual differences associated with horoscope reading habits, (b) the reliability and validity of daily and monthly horoscope forecasts and astrologically based personality descriptions, and (c) the effects of knowing the zodiac sign on the perception of the usefulness of horoscope forecasts and on the accuracy of astrologically based personality descriptions. Results indicate that females were more likely to read their horoscopes. Although locus of control was unrelated to horoscope reading habits, Neuroticism on the EPI was closely related. Daily and monthly forecasts were shown to be unreliable and invalid. Astrologically based personality descriptions were found to have some reliability. Knowledge of zodiac sign was found to affect ratings of horoscope usefulness and accuracy of astrologically based personality descriptions. Such personality descriptions, even when not identified by zodiac sign, were shown to have some validity, at least in the eyes of readers. These results are explained by familiarity effects and by the “Barnum effect.”
ABSTRACT The present study explored the feasibility of using temperature measurement from a non‐genital location to assess sexual arousal. Based upon analyses conducted with thermographic techniques, it was hypothesized that abdominal skin cooling would occur during sexual arousal. In 2 sessions, 6 male subjects were shown low, moderate, and high arousing erotic films. Simultaneous measures of abdominal temperature, penile circumference, and subjective arousal were taken. Results indicate that while decreases in skin temperature were seen during arousal, thermister data did not correlate well with tumescence or subjective arousal ratings. It would appear that thermography and temperature measurement might be most fruitfully employed to explore basic physiological processes involved in sexual arousal, since continuous temperature measures do not appear sensitive enough for use in typical sex research paradigms.
Contextual theories of judgment assume that the psychological impression of any particular stimulus depends upon its relative position in a context of similar stimuli. According to these theories, the impression of a neutral stimulus would be favorable when viewed in the context of very stimuli and unfavorable in the context of very stimuli. The neutralpoint anchoring demonstrated in this study contradicts this generalization. Contextual manipulations did affect ratings of the and negativeness of personality-trait words, but the neutral-point anchor (the descriptively neutral personality trait) was judged to be neutral in all contexts. Contextual manipulations caused stimuli to vary in their positiveness and stimuli to vary in their negativeness, but shifts across the neutral-point did not occur. These findings contradict both the adaptation-level premise that ratings vary as a function of shifts in the stimulus judged to be neutral and the range-theory assumption that ratings are formed in relation to the most extreme stimuli in the immediate context. The findings are consistent with a variation of the range theory that assumes that the neutral-point anchor is always judged to be neutral. Psychological impressions are relativistic. Stimuli are judged to be positive or negative (big or small, pleasant or unpleasant, heavy or light, etc.) in comparison with some frame of reference or standard of comparison. In some instances, as with judgments of socially relevant stimuli, the frame of reference is based largely upon previous experience; in other situations, as with psychophysical tasks in which stimuli vary along a single physical dimension, this basis is the immediate context formed by the other stimuli. For example, subjects asked to judge the goodness or badness of a moral act bring some frame of reference to the task, but subjects asked to judge the largeness or smallness of an isolated square must be exposed to the different sizes of squares in the experiment before a stable frame of
SYNOPSIS This study was designed to measure the validity of two variations of a self‐report pain intensity scale. Sixteen children aged 9‐17, suffering from migraine headaches and one parent of each child recorded headache intensity daily at fixed intervals for four weeks in headache diaries. Half of the children used a pain intensity scale with behavioral descriptors of pain severity accompanied by numbers zero to five; the remainder used a scale that was identical except for the addition of subjective pain descriptors. Validity was determined by assessing the degree of inter‐rater concordance between the child's rating of intensity of head pain and the parent's independent rating of the same phenomenon. Concordance values, determined by weighted kappa, ranged from slight to almost perfect and all but one were significant, r<.05, providing evidence for the validity of this scale. Percentage agreement and weighted percentage agreement were also calculated and indicated high levels of concordance. Inclusion of subjective descriptors did not significantly affect ratings.
Various methods of assessing color vision are discussed. The anomaloscope is concluded to be the best of these, but it is not widely used because of complexity and cost considerations. The design of a portable, solid-state anomaloscope that uses tristate light-emitting diodes is described. This device has many of the desirable features of the standard Nagel-type anomaloscope and can be constructed at a fraction of the price.
The question examined here is how a linguistic change takes place in the behavior of the individual speaker. Examples are chosen primarily from lexical change, though phonological and semantic changes are also mentioned. The opinion is expressed that every speaker has a (usually unconscious) norm against which variants operate, change taking place in two steps: (1) when one variant is promoted to tolerated deviation, (2) when a tolerated deviation replaces the earlier norm (called here KYRIOLEXIA in the case of lexical change). The topic of gradual change is also touched upon.
Labov 1981 argues that, in principle, sound changes may be implemented in two ways: through lexical diffusion (when the change is phonetically discrete), or by gradual sound change. It is contended here that although lexical diffusion is an important process, one must also account for discrete sound changes without such diffusion. The mode of progress of such changes is shown to involve an interplay between the production and the perception of the language user. Further, it is demonstrated that gradual sound change can be studied in perception, and that the relation between production and perception in gradual change is in some ways similar to that in discrete change. In both cases, the change in production norm is crucial.
Single-letter statistical measures providing values for each letter-position and word-length combination are too unwieldy for use in working letter-recognition models; more compact tables are needed. Compact tables collapsing word length to short or long words and letter positions to first, last, or middle letters are presented for the frequency and versatility of single letters. Letter-position and word-size differences are preserved in this reduced format. To test awareness of these values, subjects rate the commonness of letters in each letter position. Their responses indicate high intersubject agreement and correlate highly with the frequency and versatility measures. A LISP program that translates the letter knowledge for each letter into a corresponding knowledge for each feature in a feature set is described. Distinctiveness values for each feature (see Shimron & Navon, 1981) are computed.
For classifying wine amphoras used at the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the Empire (the so-called Dressel 2–4), we present a typological approach which combines a classification algorithm with the archeological reasoning. At the first step, clusters contain only nuclei based on the different production areas. To assign a corpus of artifacts to them, it is divided for each cluster into a context (artifacts which certainly do not belong to the cluster) and a residue. For each cluster, we built characteristic definitions with logical discriminant function of morphological attributes. Each definition cuts the residue in two classes: one containing the artifacts assigned to the cluster by the definition and the complementary one in the residue. Assignment and choices of cluster definitions and context remain with the archeological expert, who submits those typological constructions to a validation process founded on archeological knowledge. Such an approach focuses on a very common situation in human sciences: the construction of a cognitive typology beginning with a partially clustered set. Clustering must be done with descriptive attributes, without knowing if they can be connected with the wanted cluster.
Some researchers interpret the "Doctor Fox" studies as the most serious threat to the validity of student ratings of teaching effectiveness. The Doctor Fox effect has two premises. First, lecturer expressiveness is the determining factor in student ratings. Second, ratings cannot differentiate between lectures with different amounts of content when lectures are delivered in a highly expressive manner. The implication of the Doctor Fox effect is that student ratings are not accurate. This study investigated the effects of expressiveness, frequency of lecturer behavior, and prior knowledge of items on student ratings of lectures. The following research questions were asked: (1) Does lecturer expressiveness affect ratings? (2) Does lecturer expressiveness differentially affect ratings on low-inference and high-inference items? (3) Are students' reports of the occurrence of lecturer behaviors affected by expressiveness? (4) Does prior knowledge of rating items influence ratings? The four videotapes developed for the study differed along two dimensions: expressiveness and frequency of several lecturer behaviors. The research design was a three-factor experiment with two levels of each factor. The factors were expressiveness (high and low), frequency of behavior (high and low), and prior knowledge of rating items (none and prior). Two hundred students, 25 per group, rated the videotaped lectures on eight low-inference and eight high-inference items. A series of t tests indicated that students gave better ratings to high-expressive lectures on all high-inference items and five of the low-inference items. An analysis of variance indicated that the effects of expressiveness were greater for high-inference items, although both item types were affected by expressiveness. A series of t tests on the low-inference items indicated that ratings reflected the frequency with which behaviors occurred. Prior knowledge of rating items did not affect ratings. The results were consistent with prior studies in that expressiveness had strong and consistent effects on ratings. However, ratings accurately reflected the frequency of lecturer behaviors. Students were not overwhelmed by expressiveness, nor did they report that the lecturer engaged in behaviors solely on the basis of an expressive lecturing style.
A software package that can be used for the generation of line drawings on CRTs is discussed. The pictures obtained are stored as sets of coordinates of line segments. Complex pictures consist of sets of subpictures. In this way, pictures, or parts of pictures, can be easily manipulated (e.g., rotated, translated, scaled) and can be displayed on different types of display systems.
Subjects’ estimates of the frequency of occurrence of the letters of the alphabet were compared with previously reported letter-frequency counts. The results indicated an overall good relationship between actual and judged rank, but there were consistent letter-specific under- and overestimations. These inaccuracies were not accounted for by letter versatility, first-position frequency, or order in the alphabet. There was evidence that subject-derived estimates of letter frequency were somewhat better predictors of reaction time performance on letter-processing tasks.