Zofia Kaminska

Repetition of previously novel melodies sometimes increases both remember and know responses in recognition memory.

Recognition memory for previously novel melodies was tested in three experiments in which subjects usedremember andknow responses to report experiences of recollection, or of familiarity in the absence of recollection, for each melody they recognized. Some of the melodies were taken from Polish folk songs and presented vocally, but without the words. Others were taken from obscure pieces of classical music, presented as single-line melodies. Prior to the test, the melodies were repeated for varying numbers of study trials. Repetition of the Polish melodies increased both remember and know responses, while repetition of classical melodies increased remember but not know responses. When subjects were instructed to report guesses, guess responses were inversely related to remember and know responses and there were more guesses to lures than to targets. These findings establish that remembering and knowing are fully independent functionally and, by the same token, they provide further evidence against the idea that response exclusivity causes increases in remembering to force decreases in knowing. The findings also suggest that simultaneous increases in remembering and knowing occurred because the Polish melodies came from a genre for which the subjects had relatively little previous experience.

Is it misspelled or is it mispelled? The influence of fresh orthographic information on spelling

The effect of exposure to incorrectly and correctly spelled words on subsequent spelling performance was examined as a function of spelling proficiency and of time lapse between exposure and test. Spelling accuracy was found to be respectively depressed and enhanced by such exposure, relative to performance on unexposed control words. The effect was persistent and pervasive, obtaining at both immediate and one-week delayed testing and in both good and poor spellers. The findings indicate that fresh orthographic information exerts an influence on pre-existing abstract orthographic representations, rather than establishing new episodic traces, and that this process takes place implicitly.

Recognition memory and awareness for famous and obscure musical themes

Abstract In each of two experiments, subjects listened to a set of famous and obscure musical themes. In later recognition tests in which these themes were re-presented along with a set of similar themes, subjects had to identify the themes they had heard earlier in the experiment. In addition, for each theme that subjects so identified, they reported whether they consciously recollected its earlier occurrence (“remember”) or knew that it had occurred earlier because it was familiar in the experimental context (“know”). Subjects were much more likely to recognise the famous themes as having occurred earlier in the experiment and this effect appeared in “remember” but not in “know” responses. Moreover, whereas subjects made far more “remember” than “know” responses for the famous themes, they tended, if anything, to make more “know” than “remember” responses for the obscure themes. The results were attributed to the relative ease with which subjects could encode famous themes in an elaborative, associative...

Verbal transformation: habituation or spreading activation?

Experiment 1 tested the habituation hypothesis of the Verbal Transformation Effect, an auditory illusion in which a repeating verbal stimulus undergoes perceptual transformation, by varying stimulus dimensions which might be expected to retard habituation. Transformations were found to increase as a function of imagery value and word length, failing to support the habituation hypothesis. Experiment 2, in which transformations were found to vary as a function of number of activated semantic representations of a physically invariant homophone stimulus, provided support for a new dual-process explanation of the Transformation effect, based on spreading activation between cognitive representations.

Casting a spell with witches and broomsticks: Direct and associative influences on nonword orthography

Abstract This study investigated direct and associative lexical priming of nonword spelling in adults and children. Two possible alternative orthographies of each nonword were targeted under both direct and associative priming conditions. It was found that both direct and associative priming manipulations were effective in influencing the choice of spelling pattern of nonwords, with both children and adults showing the effect. Levels of priming in children were lower, though not significantly lower, than those in adults. Direct priming was significantly stronger than associative priming for both subject groups, with the size of this differential being reduced in children. The differences between the types of priming are seen as speaking to a multiple-activation model of the orthographic lexicon, whereas those between age groups as pointing to a differential functional organisation of the lexicon.

Transformation, migration and restoration

The traditional dichotomy between speech and non-speech sounds was questioned. The fate of musical stimuli was explored in three illusion-producing paradigms: ‘transformation’ of veridical perception under conditions of invariant stimulus input, ‘migration’ of extraneous sounds revealing cognitive re-structuring of the linear input, and ‘restoration’ of absent sounds. These effects, arising from the low correspondence between physical input and conscious representation characteristic of speech perception, are considered to be speech-specific. Experiment 1 revealed musical sounds to be as susceptible to perceptual transformations as speech. Experiment 2 demonstrated cognitively imposed structuring in music evidenced by migration of extraneous sounds. Experiments 3 and 4 provided evidence of perceptual restoration of missing fragments of music. These parallels between music and speech in terms of deviation of the psychological representation from the underlying signal suggest that listening to music is far ...

Little Frog and Toad: Interaction of orthography and phonology in Polish spelling

The interaction of lexical and non-lexicalprocesses in spelling was investigated throughlexical priming of non-lexical spelling, inPolish, a language in whose relativelytransparent orthography lexical informationmight be expected to play a less influentialrole than in English. Orthographic choice fornonwords was assessed under free and primedspelling conditions for both adults andchildren using direct and associative priming.The findings indicated that lexical orthographyinfluences resolution of nonlexical phonologyin spelling and identified two sources ofinfluence: one in unprimed spelling, wherelong-standing orthographic knowledge affectednonword orthographic choice so that it was notdetermined solely by phonology, the other inprimed spelling, where orthographic solutionsto nonwords were influenced by the covertorthography of the prime. The most powerfulevidence for lexical influence comes from thefinding that lexical orthography not onlyinforms resolution of phonology in cases ofambiguity, but overrides phonology whenresolution is unambiguous.

Changing words and changing sounds: A change of tune for verbal transformation theory?

The verbal transformation effect, an auditory illusion in which physically invariant repetitive verbal input undergoes perceptual transformation, has traditionally been interpreted as a speech-specific phenomenon. Experiment 1 showed that the effect is not limited to speech, but occurs in non-speech categories such as music and other complex everyday sounds, with transformations being comparable in nature and number to those in speech. Experiment 2 provided evidence for an alternative, broader-based view of the phenomenon, involving spreading activation through a multidimensional associative network of mental representations, by demonstrating that creating or activating pre-existing links between a single complex non-verbal stimulus and other representations by priming led to an increase in transformations.