An Abundance of Riches: Cross-Task Comparisons of Semantic Richness Effects in Visual Word Recognition

There is considerable evidence (e.g., Pexman et al., 2008) that semantically rich words, which are associated with relatively more semantic information, are recognized faster across different lexical processing tasks. The present study extends this earlier work by providing the most comprehensive evaluation to date of semantic richness effects on visual word recognition performance. Specifically, using mixed effects analyses to control for the influence of correlated lexical variables, we considered the impact of number of features, number of senses, semantic neighborhood density, imageability, and body–object interaction across five visual word recognition tasks: standard lexical decision, go/no-go lexical decision, speeded pronunciation, progressive demasking, and semantic classification. Semantic richness effects could be reliably detected in all tasks of lexical processing, indicating that semantic representations, particularly their imaginal and featural aspects, play a fundamental role in visual word recognition. However, there was also evidence that the strength of certain richness effects could be flexibly and adaptively modulated by task demands, consistent with an intriguing interplay between task-specific mechanisms and differentiated semantic processing

The past tense inflection project (PTIP): speeded past tense inflections, imageability ratings, and past tense consistency measures for 2,200 verbs

Abstract The processes involved in past tense verb generation have been central to models of inflectional morphology. However, the empirical support for such models has often been based on studies of accuracy in past tense verb formation on a relatively small set of items. We present the first largescale study of past tense inflection (the Past Tense Inflection Project, or PTIP) that affords response time, accuracy, and error analyses in the generation of the past tense form from the present tense form for over 2,000 verbs. In addition to standard lexical variables (such as word frequency, length, and orthographic and phonological neighborhood), we have also developed new measures of past tense neighborhood consistency and verb imageability for these stimuli, and via regression analyses we demonstrate the utility of these new measures in predicting past tense verb generation. The PTIP can be used to further evaluate existing models, to provide well controlled stimuli for new studies, and to uncover novel theoretical principles in past tense morphology. Keywords Verb processing . Megastudy . Past tense inflection . Item-level variance . Verb consistency . Verb imageability A long-standing question in language acquisition and inflectional morphology is how individuals produce the past tense form of a verb. Past tense inflection (PTI), like spelling-to-sound conversion in English, is quasiregular, meaning that a set of generally applicable descriptive rules are useful for most verbs (e.g., add -ed to the stem form), but there are also some irregular forms (e.g., dodid) and subregularities (as in the eep-ept past tense family: sleep-slept, weep-wept, keep-kept, etc.). Indeed, past tense inflection has been a central focus of the debate between parallel distributed models Although there has been extensive theoretical work in the area of past tense verb generation, experimental work examining response times (RTs) has been relatively limited. For example, in the stem inflection task, participants are asked to produce the past tense (real or hypothetical) of a target verb or novel nonword (e.g., Only a few previous studies of past tense verb inflection have used RT as a dependent variable: Joanisse and Seidenberg One way to address the discrepancies among previous studies, as well as the limitations associated with factorial designs employing relatively few stimuli, is to sample a much larger set of items from the language. Megastudies include stimuli on the order of thousands, rather than 50 to 100, and allow for the effects of variables to be modeled continuously rather than categorically (see In addition to providing a large database of response latencies and accuracies for past tense verb inflection, we also developed two new measures that are important to consider in past tense inflection, consistency and imageability. Similar to the spelling-to-sound consistency measure that has been well-studied in visual word recognition research The second variable that we measured was imageability. Imageability is a variable that reflects the extent to which 152 Behav Res (2013) 45:151-159 one is able to form a mental image of a word, and indeed many imageability norms are already available (e.g., The present study is based on 89 participants' accuracy and RTs for a past tense inflection task with 2,200 verbs. Each participant produced responses to 888 items. For each verb in the PTIP database, we included measures of RT, accuracy, and regularization errors (e.g., saying GRINDED for GRIND), along with the new imageability and consistency measures described above. The PTIP database is useful in examining the specific effects of predictor variables on RT and accuracy and allows for detailed item-level predictions. It is available as supplementary materials with this article for researchers who plan to examine other theoretical questions about past tense inflection, or are hoping to select well-controlled and well-examined stimuli for new studies. These data will serve as both a reference and an impetus for further research in the domain of past tense inflection. Experiment 1 The first experiment was conducted in order to collect imageability rating norms for the verbs in the PTIP database. Method Participants A group of 218 participants were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT; see Materials The 2,200 words from the PTIP database (see below), plus another 112 words for use in another study, were divided into eight lists of 289 items each. The eight lists were presented as separate jobs in AMT. Procedure Each participant completed one list of the rating task, which was presented in Adobe Flash and appeared after a consent screen in the AMT job description. The instructions were the same as those used in Results The ratings were aggregated across participants for each item (excluding "do not know" responses), so that one mean imageability value was calculated for each verb. These values were used in Experiment 2 (see below). The mean rating across all verbs was 4.28 (SD 0 0.92), and the mean RT across all verbs was 3,191 ms (SD 0 1,695). The overall split-half reliability was r 0 .80, p < .001. Experiment 2 Method Participants A group of 113 native English-speaking college students from the Washington University subject pool participated in Behav Res (2013) 45:151-159 153 the study. After eliminating extreme outliers (less than 80 % accuracy overall; four participants) or participants whose data were subject to recording error (missing sound files from which to code accuracy-20 participants), 89 participants contributed to the final database

New Measure of Insulin Sensitivity Predicts Cardiovascular Disease Better than HOMA Estimated Insulin Resistance

10.1371/journal.pone.0074410PLoS ONE89-POLN

An online parenting intervention to prevent affective disorders in high-risk adolescents : the PIPA trial protocol

Background: Adolescent depression can place a young person at high risk of recurrence and a range of psychosocial and vocational impairments in adult life, highlighting the importance of early recognition and prevention. Parents/carers are well placed to notice changes in their child’s emotional wellbeing which may indicate risk, and there is increasing evidence that modifiable factors exist within the family system that may help reduce the risk of depression and anxiety in an adolescent. A randomised controlled trial (RCT) of the online personalised ‘Partners in Parenting’ programme developed in Australia, focused on improving parenting skills, knowledge and awareness, showed that it helped reduce depressive symptoms in adolescents who had elevated symptom levels at baseline. We have adapted this programme and will conduct an RCT in a UK setting. Methods: In total, 433 family dyads (parents/carers and children aged 11–15) will be recruited through schools, social media and parenting/family groups in the UK. Following completion of screening measures of their adolescent’s depressive symptoms, parents/carers of those with elevated scores will be randomised to receive either the online personalised parenting programme or a series of online factsheets about adolescent development and wellbeing. The primary objective will be to test whether the personalised parenting intervention reduces depressive symptoms in adolescents deemed at high risk, using the parent-reported Short Mood & Feelings Questionnaire. Follow-up assessments will be undertaken at 6 and 15 months and a process evaluation will examine context, implementation and impact of the intervention. An economic evaluation will also be incorporated with cost-effectiveness of the parenting intervention expressed in terms of incremental cost per quality-adjusted life year gained. Discussion: Half of mental health problems emerge before mid-adolescence and approximately three-quarters by mid-20s, highlighting the need for effective preventative strategies. However, few early interventions are family focused and delivered online. We aim to conduct a National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funded RCT of the online personalised ‘Partners in Parenting’ programme, proven effective in Australia, targeting adolescents at risk of depression to evaluate its effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and usability in a UK setting. Trial registration {2a}: ISRCTN63358736. Registered 18 September 2019

Smart Phone, Smart Science: How the Use of Smartphones Can Revolutionize Research in Cognitive Science

Investigating human cognitive faculties such as language, attention, and memory most often relies on testing small and homogeneous groups of volunteers coming to research facilities where they are asked to participate in behavioral experiments. We show that this limitation and sampling bias can be overcome by using smartphone technology to collect data in cognitive science experiments from thousands of subjects from all over the world. This mass coordinated use of smartphones creates a novel and powerful scientific “instrument” that yields the data necessary to test universal theories of cognition. This increase in power represents a potential revolution in cognitive science

A behavioral database for masked form priming

Reading involves a process of matching an orthographic input with stored representations in lexical memory. The masked priming paradigm has become a standard tool for investigating this process. Use of existing results from this paradigm can be limited by the precision of the data and the need for cross-experiment comparisons that lack normal experimental controls. Here, we present a single, large, high-precision, multicondition experiment to address these problems. Over 1,000 participants from 14 sites responded to 840 trials involving 28 different types of orthographically related primes (e.g., castfe–CASTLE) in a lexical decision task, as well as completing measures of spelling and vocabulary. The data were indeed highly sensitive to differences between conditions: After correction for multiple comparisons, prime type condition differences of 2.90 ms and above reached significance at the 5% level. This article presents the method of data collection and preliminary findings from these data, which included replications of the most widely agreed-upon differences between prime types, further evidence for systematic individual differences in susceptibility to priming, and new evidence regarding lexical properties associated with a target word’s susceptibility to priming. These analyses will form a basis for the use of these data in quantitative model fitting and evaluation and for future exploration of these data that will inform and motivate new experiments