Abstracts 2005 - The Psychonomic Society

Friday Afternoon Papers 91–97
with the aid of mathematical formulations. We present a subtractive
method where video recordings of human actions are progressively reduced
into displays that show only the motion of simple geometric
shapes. It is the focus of our study to extract the mechanisms, both visual
and cognitive, at the root of this perception. We will present empirical
data showing that subjects can differentiate the intentions of dyads
in various animacy displays. Results shall be discussed in terms of the
relationship and kinematics of one agent to another in the displays.
3:10–3:25 (91)
A Preference-Scaling Analysis of the Link Between Eating Disorders
and Self-Perception. TERESA A. TREAT, Yale University, RICHARD
J. VIKEN, Indiana University, SHIRLEY S. WANG, Yale University,
RICHARD M. MCFALL, Indiana University, & MARIANN R.
WEIERICH, Yale University—Preference-scaling methods were used
to examine (1) women’s utilization of body size, facial affect, and attractiveness,
as well as their preferred values along these dimensions,
when defining their real self, their ideal self, and their perception of
men’s ideal, and (2) the links between these processing characteristics,
gender, and eating disorder symptoms. Three hundred college
women viewed all possible pairs of 24 photos of undergraduate
women three times, rapidly selected one woman in response to particular
questions (e.g., “Which woman is more like you?”; “Which
woman do you think men would find more attractive?”), and then
completed assessments of eating disorder symptoms. Fifty-three college
males completed a preference task in which they indicated which
woman was more attractive on each trial. As was expected, dimensional
utilization and preferred values varied with rating condition,
gender, and eating disorder symptoms. These findings highlight the
utility of preference-scaling models for the evaluation of individual
differences in socially relevant information processing.
Sentence Processing
Civic Ballroom, Friday Afternoon, 1:30–4:10
Chaired by David N. Caplan, Massachusetts General Hospital
1:30–1:45 (92)
Task Effects on BOLD Signal Correlates of Syntactic Processing.
DAVID N. CAPLAN, Massachusetts General Hospital, EVAN CHEN,
University of Pennsylvania, & GLORIA S. WATERS, Boston University—Behavioral
and BOLD signal measures were obtained while 16
participants performed two tasks when presented with sentences with
more complex subject–object relative clauses and less complex object–
subject relative clauses. In Task 1 (plausibility judgment), participants
read sentences and made speeded judgments regarding the plausibility
of each sentence. In Task 2 (nonword detection), participants read sentences
and made speeded judgments regarding whether the sentence contained
a nonword. The behavioral and neurovascular results indicate that
the comprehension of a sentence is affected by the ease of thematic role
assignment and the syntactic structure of a sentence and that the effects
of these factors are increased when subjects make conscious decisions
about sentence meaning. The results also bear on the neural location of
operations involved in assigning the syntactic structure of sentences and
the interaction of these processes with thematic role assignment.
1:50–2:05 (93)
External/Internal Status Explains Neither the Frequency of Occurrence
Nor the Difficulty of Comprehending Reduced Relative
Clauses. MARY L. HARE, Bowling Green State University, MICHAEL
K. TANENHAUS, University of Rochester, & KEN MCRAE, University
of Western Ontario—McKoon and Ratcliff (Psychological Review,
2003) argue that reduced relatives (RRs), such as “The horse raced
past the barn fell,” are incomprehensible because the meaning of the
RR construction requires a verb with an event template that includes
an external cause (EC). Thus, RRs with internal cause (IC) verbs such
as race are “prohibited.” Their corpus analyses showed that RRs are
common with EC but rare with IC verbs. Alternatively, RRs may be
15
rare with IC verbs because few of these occur in the passive. Those
that do, however, should make acceptable RRs, with ease of comprehension
related to difficulty of ambiguity resolution, rather than to the
IC/EC distinction. In two experiments, we show that English speakers
willingly produce RRs with IC verbs and judge their acceptability
on the basis of factors known to influence ambiguity resolution. Moreover,
a regression model demonstrates that frequency of the passive,
not IC/EC status, predicts RR frequency in parsed corpora.
2:10–2:25 (94)
Syntactic Priming in Comprehension. MATTHEW J. TRAXLER,
University of California, Davis, MARTIN J. PICKERING, University of
Edinburgh, & KRISTEN TOOLEY, University of California, Davis—
A series of eye-tracking experiments investigated syntactic priming in
comprehension. Prior experiments indicated that sentences containing
reduced relative clauses are processed more easily when they follow
sentences with the same syntactic structure and the same past participle.
In addition, syntactic priming effects occur when local structural
relations are preserved but aspects of global structure are
changed. In Experiment 1, the past participle in the prime and the target
sentences were identical or were synonyms. Priming was observed
only for the repeated past participle. In Experiment 2, reduced relative
primes were contrasted with pluperfect primes, and only the former
type facilitated target sentence processing. We conclude that the
source of priming is the repeated past participle, together with its implicit
argument structure.
2:30–2:45 (95)
The Order of Modifiers in Noun Phrases. EDWARD J. WISNIEWSKI,
University of North Carolina, Greensboro, GERT STORMS, University
of Leuven, & PHIL MAGUIRE, University College Dublin—Language
researchers suggest that the adjectives of a noun phrase are ordered
by their intrinsicality with respect to the head noun, such that more
intrinsic adjectives are placed closer to the head noun. On this account,
a speaker would refer to a church that is large and gray as a
“large gray church” because grayness is more intrinsic to a church
than is size. Contextual factors are also important in adjective order.
We examine the generality of these views, for both adjectives and
noun modifiers, and suggest that other factors play an important role
in how modifiers are ordered in a noun phrase.
2:50–3:05 (96)
Online Effects of NP Types on Sentence Complexity. YOONHYOUNG
LEE, MARCUS JOHNSON, PETER C. GORDON, & RANDALL
HENDRICK, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (read by Peter
C. Gordon)—The effect of different types of noun phrases (NPs) on
the ease of understanding complex sentences has been a topic of considerable
recent interest because these effects offer a way of understanding
the nature of the interaction between language and memory.
Research on this topic, using offline methods or online methods with
relatively low temporal resolution, has shown that sentence complexity
effects are maximized when the critical NPs in the sentence are similar,
a result that points to the operation of an interference mechanism
such as that common in many nonlinguistic types of human memory.
The present research uses eye tracking to study how the similarity of
NPs affects the online processing of complex sentences in English and
in Korean. The results from both languages provide evidence that
similarity-based interference occurs as an early online process and
may continue to occur in later stages of sentence comprehension.
3:10–3:25 (97)
Verb Repetition in Distractor Items Affects Structural Priming in
Comprehension. GAIL MAUNER & SUNFA KIM, SUNY, Buffalo—
Readers often garden path on sentences whose main verb is biased toward
a direct object (DO) complement but resolves as a sentential
complement (SC). Experiment 1 demonstrates that garden pathing is
reduced in disambiguating regions when an SC target sentence whose
main verb is biased toward a DO completion is preceded by an SC