S1 (FriAM 1-65) - The Psychonomic Society

Friday Noon Posters 2008–2014
speed (Prinzmetal, McCool, & Park, 2005). Uninformative gaze cues
(Experiment 1) and arrow cues (Experiment 2) were presented centrally
to participants in a peripheral letter-discrimination task. For
both cue types, compatible cues were found to facilitate reaction time
but not error rate, demonstrating that gaze and arrow cues affect response
speed but not perceptual accuracy. This dissociation between
reaction time and error effects indicates that both gaze and arrow cues
generate reflexive shifts of attention.
(2008)
Predicting Preference From Fixations. MACKENZIE G. GLAHOLT
& EYAL M. REINGOLD, University of Toronto, Mississauga—We
extended work by Shimojo, Simion, Shimojo, and Scheier (2003), and
measured the strength of the association between fixation duration
and preference. Participants selected the most attractive of eight stimuli
arranged in a grid. Eye fixations correlated with selection, as well
as with explicit attractiveness ratings, and also predicted selection on
a trial-by-trial basis. By ranking features on the basis of fixation time,
we were able to successfully predict participants’ preferences for
novel feature combinations in a two-alternative forced choice task.
Theoretical and applied implications are discussed.
(2009)
Visual Marking of Emotionally Valenced Face Stimuli. ELISABETH
BLAGROVE & DERRICK G. WATSON, University of Warwick—
Visual marking (Watson & Humphreys, 1997) increases search efficiency
for new items via deprioritization of old (previewed) items already
in the field (the preview benefit). We examined whether a preview
benefit arises with schematic face stimuli and the extent to which
their emotional valence modulates these effects. Three experiments
investigated the ability to ignore neutral, positive, or negative valenced
faces. In all cases, a partial preview benefit was obtained and negative
faces were detected more efficiently than positive faces. However,
there was a trend for previewed negative faces to be less easily suppressed
than were positive faces. The results extend our understanding
of when preferential processing of negative valenced stimuli occurs
and are interpreted in terms of the ecological properties and
constraints of time-based visual selection.
• LANGUAGE PRODUCTION •
(2010)
Sentence Production in Monologue and Dialogue: The Scope of
Planning. BENJAMIN SWETS, RICHARD J. GERRIG, MATTHEW E.
JACOVINA, & WILLIAM G. WENZEL, Stony Brook University (sponsored
by Richard J. Gerrig)—Little is known about the differences between
planning speech in monologue (speech without an addressee)
versus dialogue (speech with an addressee). Here, we test the hypothesis
that the pressure on speakers to respond in a timely fashion
should render high-level utterance planning more incremental (i.e.,
advanced planning should be less extensive) in dialogue than in monologue.
In our study, participants produced brief utterances to describe
visual displays. We complicated utterance planning by including tangram
figures that prohibited easy lexicalization. Participants completed
the task in circumstances of monologue or dialogue, and also
under circumstances of natural or explicit time pressure. We examined
the time course with which participants planned upcoming tangrams
and proceeded with articulation as a function of addressee presence
and time pressure. We suggest that speech production is quite adaptable
to its circumstances, and that its resources are strategically deployed
depending on the environment in which they are used.
(2011)
Assessing the Role of Morphological Marking in Subject–Verb
Gender Agreement: Evidence From Hebrew. AVITAL DEUTSCH &
MAYA DANK, Hebrew University of Jerusalem—The present study
investigated the role of morphological markedness on the implementation
of subject–predicate agreement in language production. This
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study was conducted in Hebrew, using a sentence completion task, and
focused on gender agreement. In Hebrew, masculine forms are usually
morphologically unmarked, whereas feminine forms are morphologically
marked. Although it is generally consistent, the system
includes examples of feminine forms which are not inflected for feminine
suffixes—that is, unmarked feminine forms. Furthermore, there
are particular suffixes that denote masculine and feminine plurals.
However, there are many examples of masculine plurals which are inflected
irregularly, by a feminine suffix. We took advantage of these
characteristics to manipulate morphological factors in the process of
agreement production. The results suggest that gender agreement cannot
be explained solely in terms of overt inflectional morphology;
however, it is subjected to morphophonological influence. Furthermore,
the results suggest the possible involvement of derivational
morphology in syntactic agreement.
(2012)
Working Memory and Oral Fluency During Spontaneous Language
Production. IRENA O’BRIEN & DEBRA A. TITONE, McGill University,
DAVID MCFARLAND, University of Montreal, CAROLINE
PALMER, McGill University, & NATALIE PHILLIPS, Concordia
University—Models of spontaneous language production propose
that speech planning occurs incrementally (Bock, 1982; Levelt, 1989).
Within this conceptual framework, working memory would be crucial
to appropriate speech planning. The present study investigated
whether individual differences in working memory were related to
various aspects of speech production. Working memory measures,
using a modified listening span (Waters & Caplan, 1996) and backward
digit span tasks, and spontaneous speech recordings were obtained
from 44 native English speakers. In addition to final word recall,
the listening span task also measured sentence judgment times.
Multiple regression analyses revealed that speakers with higher backward
digit span performance spoke with longer runs and shorter
pauses. In addition, speakers with shorter sentence judgment times in
the listening span task spoke faster and exhibited fewer hesitations.
These results offer preliminary evidence that working memory may
facilitate language production by allowing more efficient incremental
planning.
(2013)
Working Memory and the Production of Metaphors. RUSSELL
PIERCE, University of California, Riverside, & CANDACE STUTE,
THERESA FRASER, MICHELLE RIFI, ELIZABETH UBIDES, &
DAN CHIAPPE, California State University, Long Beach—We examined
the role of working memory (WM) in metaphor production.
We administered to participants the operation span, word span, and
listening span tasks as measures of WM. For the metaphor production
task, participants were given topics (e.g., “billboards ____”) plus a
property that had to be attributed (e.g., “billboards are something noticeable
and unattractive”). For each item, they had to provide a vehicle
term (e.g., “warts”) that can be used to attribute the property. Difficulty
of the items was manipulated by varying their conventionality
(i.e., whether the properties are conventionally associated with a vehicle
term) and aptness (i.e., whether the properties being attributed
are a good fit with the topic). We recorded time to generate vehicles,
and rated the quality of the vehicles. WM measures predicted the quality
of metaphor vehicles produced regardless of difficulty, but did not
predict time to generate those vehicles.
(2014)
The Phrase As a Minimal Planning Scope in Sentence Production.
JASON E. CROWTHER & RANDI C. MARTIN, Rice University—
In a sentence production study, subjects described the arrangement of
three stationary pictures using sentences such as “The foot is above
the candle and the faucet” or “The foot and the candle are above the
faucet.” Complexity of the initial phrase (i.e., one vs. two nouns) and
word frequency and name agreement for the first two nouns were manipulated.
Onset latencies for each noun were measured. Replicating