Samuel Fillenbaum

Base rate effects on the interpretations of probability and frequency expressions.

Abstract Two studies were run to determine whether the interpretations of statements or forecasts using vague probability and frequency expressions such as likely, improbable, frequently, or rarely, were sensitive to the base rates of the events involved. In the first experiment, professional weather forecasters judged event probabilities in situations drawn from a medical context. In the second experiment, students judged matched forecast scenarios of common semantic content that differed only in prior probability (as determined by an independent group of subjects). Results were (a) the interpretations of forecasts using neutral (e.g., possible) and high probability or frequency terms (e.g., usually) were strong, positive functions of base rate, while the interpretations of forecasts using low terms (e.g., rarely) were much less affected by base rates; (b) in the second experiment interpretations of forecasts appeared to represent some kind of average of the meaning of the expression and the base rate.

Inducements: On the phrasing and logic of conditional promises, threats, and warnings

SummaryThis study examines the purposive-causal use of IF in inducements (conditional threats and promises). It is shown that subjects are sensitive to the relations obtaining among conditional threats and promises phrased in IF, AND, and OR, and to the inferences that may be drawn from conditional threats and promises. It is demonstrated that the relation between conditionals and disjunctives and between IF NOT and UNLESS statements is affected by the sign of the consequences, i.e., whether a threat or promise is involved, and that subjects are very prone in the context of inducements to accept the obverse of a proposition as following from it, thus committing the “fallacy” of the negated antecedent. An analysis is provided seeking to account for these effects in terms of pragmatic factors involved in the conversational use of the conditional in inducements.

If: Some uses

SummaryIt is shown 1. that subjects are sensitive to appropriateness conditions governing the use of IF sentences, 2. that different sorts of IF sentences elicit quite different distributions of paraphrases, and 3. that subjects often accept the obverse of a conditional as following from it and IF NOT propositions as following from their mates phrased in UNLESS (and conversely), and that these effects too are conditioned by conceptual properties of the propositions related in the conditional. Insofar as the paraphrase of a sentence or the inferences drawn from it may be revealing of the way in which it is understood and used, such results suggest that IF sentences may be rather differently employed as a function of conceptual properties of the elementary propositions related in the conditional. Such findings read a clear lesson: it is not reasonable to suppose that the conditional has some unique cognitive representation, and the meaning and generalizability of any results obtained by relating arbitrarily chosen propositions of a particular conceptual kind in a conditional must be called into question.

The predictability of words and their grammatical classes as a function of rate of deletion from a speech transcript

Summary The “cloze” procedure, which requires raters to fill in words deleted from a transcript and provides a measure of the predictability of speech, was used to study the predictability of the various grammatical classes and of specific items drawn from them, and changes in such predictability with systematic variation in rate of textual deletion (from every second item deleted to every sixth item deleted). A transcript of running speech elicited by TAT cards constituted the text and two measures were obtained indicating success in verbatim identification (V) and success in form-class identification (FC); the relation between these two measures was also examined. The main findings are (a) that success both in FC and V completion increases moderately with decreasing frequency of deletion, but that raters do fairly well, particularly for FC scores, even when every second item is deleted; (b) that there are considerable differences in performance between grammatical classes both for FC and V scores, these differences being less for the former scores than the latter; and (c) that within any given grammatical class there are still substantial differences among the items with regard to both verbatim and form-class predictability. It was argued that the determinants of FC and V predictability are rather different, FC predictability being more dependent upon the relatively close grammatical environment whereas V predictability depends more on both close and remote topical content or semantic features of discourse. It was also suggested that these determinants may vary with the particular grammatical class under consideration. While grammatical or form-class contraints are tighter than contraints on specific identification it was suggested that the V or V/FC measure provides an underestimate of the actual predictability of the sense of the discourse, and that the communicative significance of a particular level of V or V/FC success may vary with the grammatical class involved, being greater for semantic than for syntactic items.

Some effects of vocabulary and communication task on the understanding and use of vague probability expressions

How is the understanding and use of vague probability expressions affected by the availability of other expressions and the particular communication task involved? As represented by membership functions the meanings of core terms were not affected by the presence or absence of modified or anchor expressions. However, the core terms rated best at each presented probability in the baseline condition were rated lower in the presence of modified or anchor expressions. The effects of communication task were substantial, in that membership functions were more frequently monotonic, broader, and located closer to the center of the probability interval for expressions that were received and evaluated than for ones that were selected

Mind Your p's and q's: The Role of Content and Context in Some Uses of and, or, and If1

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses various uses of connectives and examines whether such uses are content- and context-sensitive. It is clear that a monologic account of propositional thinking related to truth-functional logic, which has been the favored approach of psychologists, is insufficient if one considers the uses of the connectives in everyday speech. In addition, a dialogic—a rhetorical approach—that focuses on the speech act and considers what the speaker means by relevant interpersonal context is necessary. Such an account provides an analysis of the way people manage to go beyond what is explicitly said to understand the communications addressed to them. Apart from this, the conceptual apparatus for an account of indirect communication includes a theory of speech that relates with the principles of cooperative conversation, mutually shared background information, and the ability of the addressee to make inferences. The chapter constitutes a study of lexical semantics that demonstrates the contextual control of word use and understanding.

Grammatical contingencies in word association

With the aim of providing a broader normative base for association data, the contingencies between the grammatical class of a stimulus and that of its associative response were examined. The stimuli were very frequently occurring words, sampled from a variety of grammatical classes. Differences among grammatical classes were found in the degree of concentration of associations; there were also differences in the form-class distributions of the associations. For all grammatical classes (except articles) the modal response class was the same as that of the stimulus, but with considerable differences in the popularity of the modal response class. The implication of the finding that grammatical classes differ noticeably in their associative patterning is discussed, and some comment is made on the uses of word-association data.

Some Linguistic Features of Speech from Aphasic Patients

The free speech of each of twelve adult aphasic patients was examined with reference particularly to (1) the distribution of words according to grammatical function, (2) sequential dependencies in form-class usage, and (3) stereotypy in vocabulary. The majority of the aphasic records departed considerably from normal usage (as defined by analysis of twelve control records), with similarity among some patients in the pattern of divergence. The measures used appear to be of particular value in revealing (i) semantic difficulties in word selection and (ii) difficulties in the sequencing of speech that occur along with syntactic losses.

Verbal satiation and changes in meaning of related items

Summary Four experiments were carried out in an investigation of the co-satiating effects of verbal repetition, and in an examination of the semantic relation of synonymity by use of a verbal satiation technique. In every experiment, and for every analysis, synonym-satiated items yielded less common associations than self-satiated items or control items satiated on unrelated words, with self-satiated items either yielding results no different from those for the control condition, or results intermediate between those for the other two conditions. In interpreting the above finding, which was taken to indicate that synonym satiation resulted in the greatest net change or loss in meaning, it was suggested that for the case of self-satiated items sensitization to some specific features of the word might work against the loss of meaning effect when S was required to give his association. No such counteracting circumstances would operate in the case of synonym-satiated words, and these might therefore be expected to yield less common associations than self-satiated items, as was found to be the case. A fifth experiment, with a very brief repetition period lasting only 4 sec, was run. Now the condition of synonym repetition did not yield less common associations than those obtained in the control condition (repetition of an unrelated word), and the condition of item repetition or self-satiation resulted in associations more common than those found in the other two conditions. These findings were regarded as consistent with the general interpretation offered above.

Verbs of judging, judged: A case study

Fillmore (1969) has offered a semantic “role” analysis for some verbs of judging. In the present case study, we subject Fillmores own similarity judgments for a set of verbs of judging to structural analysis, employing nonmetric multidimensional scaling and hierarchical clustering techniques. We compare the results with those yielded by more ordinary subjects and seek to assess the revealingness of the hierarchical solution relative to the distinctions made by Fillmore in his theoretical analysis. A number of methodological issues are discussed, perhaps most important whether subjects can consistently employ the same similarity criterion throughout their judgments, or whether, at least for some semantic domains, they may rather use a series of different criteria, with particular pairs or subsets of terms selecting now one criterion, now another. The latter procedure, which was employed here by Fillmore, raises some serious problems with regard to the interpretation of the results of structural analyses of similarity data.