Remo Job

Naming times and standardized norms for the italian PD/DPSS set of 266 pictures: Direct comparisons with American, English, French, and Spanish published databases

The present study provides Italian normative measures for 266 line drawings belonging to the new set of pictures developed by Lotto, Dell’Acqua, and Job (in press). The pictures have been standardized on the following measures: number of letters, number of syllables, name frequency, within-category typicality, familiarity, age of acquisition, name agreement, and naming time. In addition to providing the measures, the present study focuses on indirect and direct comparisons (i.e., correlations) of the present norms with databases provided by comparable studies in Italian (in which normative data were collected with Snodgrass & Vanderwart’s set of pictures; Nisi, Longoni, & Snodgrass, 2000), in British English (Barry, Morrison, & Ellis, 1997), in American English (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980; Snodgrass & Yuditsky, 1996), in French (Alario & Ferrand, 1999), and in Spanish (Sanfeliu & Fernandez, 1996).

Accessing lexical ambiguity: Effects of context and dominance

SummaryThe paper examines the effects of sentential context and frequency of meaning (dominance) on the lexical access of ambiguous words. Two experiments were carried out using Swinneys (1979) cross-modal paradigm. The sentential contexts were constructed in such a way as to make salient the most characteristic features of either the dominant (Experiment 1) or the secondary (Experiment 2) meaning of the ambiguous word. The claim was that if context is sufficiently constraining selective access of the congruent meaning can be obtained. Consistent with this prediction, context biasing the dominant meaning facilitated lexical decision only on target words related to the dominant meaning. When context biased the secondary meaning, both context and dominance produced a facilitation effect.

Category-specific form-knowledge deficit in a patient with herpes simplex virus encephalitis

Abstract In-depth case study of a herpes simplex virus encephalitis patient who presents with a relatively clear knowledge disorder and anterograde amnesia in the absence of any other major cognitive deficit. The main neuropsychological feature is a category-specific impairment restricted to living things. The patient misnamed pictures of animals and vegetables, could not accurately draw animals from memory or verbally describe their visual appearance, and was not accurate in sorting pictures of real animals from pictures of unreal animals; conversely, in the same tasks her performance with artifactual objects was either errorless or superior to that with animals. We interpret the patients category-specific deficit as due to a selective disturbance within the structural description system, rather than a deficit in low-level visual processing or semantic memory. From this case study and a review of other reported cases we claim that such deficit of form-knowledge is a consequence of the extensive lesions ...

AN INVESTIGATION OF LATE CLOSURE : THE ROLE OF SYNTAX, THEMATIC STRUCTURE,AND PRAGMATICS IN INITIAL AND FINAL INTERPRETATION

Four reading-time experiments investigated the application of the late closure principle in Italian. The experiments tested the principle governing the initial attachment of different types of modifiers (relative clause, adjectival phrase, and prepositional phrase) to a complex noun phrase. By manipulating the type of preposition within the complex noun phrase, the authors investigated the role of the thematic structure in initial and final parsing. The results show that the late closure principle applies to initial parsing in Italian without being affected by the thematic structure of the complex noun phrase. Final interpretation, however, shows an effect of pragmatic preference and an effect of thematic structure on syntactic revisions. The results are discussed in terms of a parsing model that adopts syntactic parsing strategies and makes modular use of linguistic information. The purpose of this research was to assess whether late closure, an assumed universal sentence parsing principle (Frazier, 1978), applies in Italian. In this article we study the attachment of different types of modifiers to complex noun phrases, drawing a distinction between initial and final interpretation and trying to identify what variables (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) affect what stage in the comprehension process. The results of four on-line experiments conducted in Italian are presented. Kimball (1973) and Frazier and Fodor (1978) proposed strategies that apply to the initial parsing of a sentence as soon as each word is perceived. Some examples of such strategies are right association (Kimball, 1973), minimal attachment and late closure (Frazier & Fodor, 1978), superstrategy (Fodor, 1979), recent filler strategy (Frazier, Clifton, & Randall, 1983), active filler strategy (Frazier, 1987), and the minimal chain principle (De Vincenzi, 1991). The basic idea in all of these strategies is that they are directly derived from a simple principle: Choose to do whatever costs the least effort in terms of computation to interpret the incoming linguistic input before it decays. This choice is motivated by a basic cognitive reason, namely, the restrictions on short-term memory in terms of memory and computational space and the fact that

Differences in the perception and time course of syntactic and semantic violations.

A reading time and an ERP experiment conducted in Italian investigated the parsers responses to a syntactic violation (subject-verb number agreement) and to a semantic violation (subject-verb selectional restriction), examining the time course of comprehension processes until sentence end. The reading-time data showed that the syntactic violation was detected earlier than the semantic one and that the two violations differed in the time-course. The ERP data fully supported the reading time data: Syntactic anomalies elicited a left anterior negativity (LAN) and a P600. Semantic anomalies elicited a N400 centred on the parietal sites which started 90 ms later (latency 430 ms) than the LAN. Furthermore, the N400 evoked by the words that followed the target word continued and increased until sentence end. The results are discussed with respect to the hypotheses that the parser constructs distinct syntactic and semantic analyses of a sentence and that this characteristic holds cross-linguistically. The appropriateness of different methodologies to the study of sentence processing is also evaluated.

Some observations on the universality of the late-closure strategy

Two questionnaire studies and a reading time experiment investigated the application of the late-closure principle in Italian, a Romance language which contrasts with English with respect to several linguistic properties. All the studies addressed interpretation preferences in sentences containing a complex NP followed by a relative clause (e.g....the son of the woman who arrived yesterday...). While the questionnaires investigated final preferences, the reading time experiment addressed also the principle governing the initial attachment of a relative clause to a complex NP. Furthermore, through a manipulation of the type of preposition within the complex NP, we investigated the role of the thematic structure of the complex NP in initial and final parsing. The results showed that the late-closure principle applies in Italian to the initial parsing without being affected by the thematic structure of the complex NP. Final interpretation instead shows an effect of pragmatic preference and an effect of thematic structure on syntactic revisions. The results are discussed in terms of a parsing model that adopts syntactic parsing strategies and makes modular use of linguistic information. Some implications for the relationship between syntactic theories and the human parser are also addressed.

A deeper reanalysis of a superficial feature: An ERP study on agreement violations

A morphosyntactic agreement violation during reading elicits a well-documented biphasic ERP pattern (LAN+P600). The cognitive variables that affect both the amplitude of the two components and the topography of the anterior negativity are still debated. We studied the ERP correlates of the violation of a specific agreement feature based on the phonology of the critical word. This was compared with the violation of a lexical feature, namely grammatical gender. These two features are different both in the level of representation involved in the agreement computation and in terms of their role in establishing structural relations with possible following constituents. The ERP pattern elicited by the two agreement violations showed interesting dissociations. The LAN was distributed ventrally for both types of violation, but showed a central extension for the gender violation. The P600 showed an amplitude modulation: this component was larger for phonotactic violations in its late time window (700-900 ms). The former result is indicative of a difference in the brain structures recruited for the processing of violations at different levels of representation. The P600 effect is interpreted assuming a hierarchical relation among features that forces a deeper reanalysis of the violation involving a word form property. Finally the two features elicit distinct end-of-sentence wrap-up effects, consistent with the different roles they play in the processing of the whole sentence.

Category-specific naming impairments? Yes.

Recently, Stewart, Parkin, and Hunkin (1992) have questioned previously reported cases of selective damage in processing items from categories of animate objects, arguing that there has been a lack of adequate control for visual familiarity, visual complexity, and name frequency of the stimuli employed. When re-testing Michelangelo (see Sartori & Job, 1988), one of the patients cited by Stewart et al. (1992), with a set of materials matched on all three factors, the asymmetry in naming animal and artefact items still remains. An analogous pattern is obtained when–-in addition to such factors–-the visual similarity within the sub-sets of animals and artefacts is taken into account. These results constitute empirical evidence for category-specific impairments and cannot be interpreted as being due to isolated or conjoint effects of visual familiarity, visual complexity, or name frequency.

The Picture-Word Interference Effect Is Not a Stroop Effect

A psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm was used to isolate the locus of the picture—word interference effect along the chain of processes subtended in name production. Two stimuli were presented sequentially on each trial, separated by a varying stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). The first stimulus, S1, was a tone that required a manual response. The second stimulus, S2, was a picture—word stimulus associated with picture naming. The distractor word was conceptually related to the picture on half of the trials, and unrelated in the other trials. A picture—word interference effect was found at long SOA, but not at short SOA. Such underadditive interaction between SOA and semantic relatedness suggests strongly that the locus of the picture—word interference effect is functionally earlier than the PRP effect locus. The results are discussed in relation to models of word production suggesting the involvement of central mechanisms in the selection of lexical output.

Morphological decomposition: Evidence from crossed phonological dyslexia

In this paper we report some clinical data relevant to the issue of whether or not words are decomposed into their constituent morphemes prior to lexical access during reading. The data were obtained from a crossed phonological dyslexic patient who produced many derivational errors in reading aloud. The experimental investigation consisted of a series of tests requiring either reading words and non-words aloud or lexical decision tasks. The results are interpreted as supporting decomposition models of lexical access. In particular, a revised version of the logogen model—which postulates visual recognizers for affixes—seems to fit the data very well.