Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study.

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1, N = 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2, N = 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words' tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.

Phonological encoding is free from orthographic influence: evidence from a picture variant of the phonological Stroop task.

The phonological Stroop task, in which the participant names the color of written distractors, is being used increasingly to study the phonological encoding process in speech production. A brief review of experimental paradigms used to study the phonological encoding process indicated that currently it is not known whether the onset overlap benefit (faster color naming when the distractor shares the onset segment with the color name) in a phonological Stroop task is due to phonology or orthography. The present paper investigated this question using a picture variant of the phonological Stroop task. Participants named a small set of line drawings of animals (e.g., camel) with a pseudoword distractor printed on it. Picture naming was facilitated when the distractor shared the onset segment with the picture name regardless of orthographic overlap (CUST-camel = KUST-camel < NUST-camel). We conclude that the picture variant of the phonological Stroop task is a useful tool to study the phonological encoding process, free of orthographic influence.

Letter identity and visual similarity in the processing of diacritic letters.

Are letters with a diacritic (e.g., â) recognized as a variant of the base letter (e.g., a), or as a separate letter identity? Two recent masked priming studies, one in French and one in Spanish, investigated this question, concluding that this depends on the language-specific linguistic function served by the diacritic. Experiment 1 tested this linguistic function hypothesis using Japanese kana, in which diacritics signal consonant voicing, and like French and unlike Spanish, provide lexical contrast. Contrary to the hypothesis, Japanese kana yielded the pattern of diacritic priming like Spanish. Specifically, for a target kana with a diacritic (e.g., ガ, /ga/), the kana prime without the diacritic (e.g., カ, /ka/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ガ-ガ = カ-ガ), whereas for a target kana without a diacritic, the kana prime with the diacritic produced less facilitation than the identity prime (e.g., カ-カ < ガ-カ). We suggest that the pattern of diacritic priming has little to do with linguistic function, and instead it stems from a general property of visual object recognition. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis using visually similar letters of the Latin alphabet that differ in the presence/absence of a visual feature (e.g., O and Q). The same asymmetry in priming was observed. These findings are consistent with the noisy channel model of letter/word recognition (Norris & Kinoshita, Psychological Review, 119, 517-545, 2012a).

Mora or more? The phonological unit of Japanese word production in the Stroop color naming task.

In English, Dutch, and other European languages, it is well established that the fundamental phonological unit in word production is the phoneme; in contrast, recent studies have shown that in Chinese it is the (atonal) syllable and in Japanese the mora. The present study investigated whether this cross-language variation in the size of the unit of word production is due to the type of script used in the language (i.e., alphabetic, morphosyllabic, or moraic). Capitalizing on the multiscriptal nature of Japanese, and using the Stroop color naming task, we show that the overlap in the initial mora between the color name and the written distractor facilitates color naming independent of script type. These results confirm the mora as the phonological unit of word production in Japanese, and establish the Stroop color naming task as a useful task for investigating the fundamental (or "proximate") phonological unit used in speech production.

Evidence for cross-script abstract identities in learners of Japanese kana.

The presence of abstract letter identity representations in the Roman alphabet has been well documented. These representations are invariant to letter case (upper vs. lower) and visual appearance. For example, "a" and "A" are represented by the same abstract identity. Recent research has begun to consider whether the processing of non-Roman orthographies also involves abstract orthographic representations. In the present study, we sought evidence for abstract identities in Japanese kana, which consist of two scripts, hiragana and katakana. Abstract identities would be invariant to the script used as well as to the degree of visual similarity. We adapted the cross-case masked-priming letter match task used in previous research on Roman letters, by presenting cross-script kana pairs and testing adult beginning -to- intermediate Japanese second-language (L2) learners (first-language English readers). We found robust cross-script priming effects, which were equal in magnitude for visually similar (e.g., り/リ) and dissimilar (e.g., あ/ア) kana pairs. This pattern was found despite participants' imperfect explicit knowledge of the kana names, particularly for katakana. We also replicated prior findings from Roman abstract letter identities in the same participants. Ours is the first study reporting abstract kana identity priming (in adult L2 learners). Furthermore, these representations were acquired relatively early in our adult L2 learners.

Evidence accumulation in the integrated and primed Stroop tasks.

We report distributional analyses of response times (RT) in two variants of the color-word Stroop task using manual keypress responses. In the classic Stroop task, in which the color and word dimensions are integrated into a single stimulus, the Stroop congruence effect increased across the quantiles. In contrast, in the primed Stroop task, in which the distractor word is presented ahead of colored symbols, the Stroop congruence effect was manifested solely as a distributional shift, remaining constant across the quantiles. The distributional-shift pattern mirrors the semantic-priming effect that has been reported in semantic categorization tasks. The results are interpreted within the framework of evidence accumulation, and implications for the roles of task conflict and informational conflict are discussed.

An RT distribution analysis of relatedness proportion effects in lexical decision and semantic categorization reveals different mechanisms.

The magnitude of the semantic priming effect is known to increase as the proportion of related prime-target pairs in an experiment increases. This relatedness proportion (RP) effect was studied in a lexical decision task at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (240 ms), which is widely assumed to preclude strategic prospective usage of the prime. The analysis of the reaction time (RT) distribution suggested that the observed RP effect reflected a modulation of a retrospective semantic matching process. The pattern of the RP effect on the RT distribution found here is contrasted to that reported in De Wit and Kinoshita's (2014) semantic categorization study, and it is concluded that the RP effect is driven by different underlying mechanisms in lexical decision and semantic categorization.

Visual similarity effects on masked priming.

We investigated the role of the visual similarity of masked primes to targets in a lexical decision experiment. In the primes, some letters in the target (e.g., A in ABANDON) had either visually similar letters (e.g., H), dissimilar letters (D), visually similar digits (4), or dissimilar digits (6) substituted for them. The similarities of the digits and letters to the base letter were equated and verified in a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) perceptual identification task. Using targets presented in lowercase (e.g., abandon) and primes presented in uppercase, visually similar digit primes (e.g., 484NDON) produced more priming than did visually dissimilar digit primes (676NDON), but little difference was found between the visually similar and dissimilar letter primes (HRHNDON vs. DWDNDON). These results were explained in terms of task-driven competition between the target letter and the visually similar letter.

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.

Mirror letter priming is rightward-biased but not inhibitory: Little evidence for a mirror suppression mechanism in the recognition of mirror letters.

Unlike other visual objects which are invariant to the left-right orientation, mirror letters (e.g., b and d) represent different object identities. Previous masked priming lexical decision studies have suggested that the identification of a mirror letter involves suppression of its mirror image counterpart reporting as evidence that a pseudoword prime containing the mirror letter counterpart slowed down the recognition of target word relative to a control prime containing an unrelated letter (e.g., ibea-idea > ilea-idea). Furthermore, it has been reported recently that this inhibitory mirror priming effect is sensitive to the distributional bias of left/right orientation in the Latin alphabet such that only the more dominant (frequent) right-facing mirror letter prime (e.g., b) produced interference. In the present study, we examined mirror letter priming with single letters and nonlexical letter strings with adult readers. In all experiments, relative to a visually dissimilar control letter prime, both the right-facing and left-facing mirror letter prime consistently facilitated, rather than slowed down the recognition of a target letter (e.g., b-d < w-d). Assessed against an identity prime, mirror primes showed a rightward bias, although it was small in magnitude and not always significant within an individual experiment. These results provide no support for a mirror suppression mechanism in the identification of mirror letters, and an alternative interpretation in terms of noisy perception is suggested. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Diacritic priming in novice readers of diacritics.

Recent masked priming studies investigating the recognition of letters with diacritics with native readers of the script have consistently yielded an asymmetric pattern of priming such that a base-letter prime without the diacritic speeds up the recognition of the letter with a diacritic almost as much as an identity prime, but not vice versa (e.g., á-Á ≦ a-Á, but a-A ≪á-A). Here we tested English readers unfamiliar with diacritics in a letter match task using Japanese kana and the vowel letters of the Latin alphabet, and found the asymmetry was reduced to a negligible level (á-Á ≦ a-Á, and a-A ≦ á-A) (Experiments 1 and 2). However, the diacritic novices showed the asymmetric pattern of priming like the diacritic experts when the task condition explicitly required the letters with and without diacritics to be distinguished (Experiments 3 and 4). These results are explained in terms of how expertise moderates an early letter identification process in interpreting a visual feature as noise, or a signal diagnostic of letter identity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Some neighbors are more interfering: Asymmetric priming by stroke neighbors in Chinese character recognition.

Chinese is a visually complex logographic script that consists of square-shaped characters, with each character composed of strokes. Previous masked priming studies using single-character Chinese stroke neighbors (i.e., visually similar characters differing in only one or two strokes, e.g., /) have shown facilitatory or inhibitory priming effects. We tested whether the mixed pattern of stroke neighbor priming might be an instance of asymmetry in priming that has been observed previously with Japanese kana and Latin alphabets. Specifically, a prime lacking a stroke (or line segment) that is present in the target speeds up the recognition of its stroke neighbor almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., - = -), but not the converse (e.g., - >> -). Two experiments, one using a character match task and the second using lexical decision, showed a robust asymmetry in priming by stroke neighbors. The results suggest that the early letter identification process is similar across script types, as anticipated by the Noisy Channel model, which regards the first stage of visual word recognition as a language-universal perceptual process.

Orthographic processing is universal; it's what you do with it that's different.

We agree with Frost that the variety of orthographies in the world's languages complicates the task of "cracking the orthographic code." Frost suggests that orthographic processing must therefore differ between orthographies. We suggest that the same basic orthographic processes are applied to all languages. Where languages differ is in what the reader must do with the results of orthographic processing.

Does the familiarity bias hypothesis explain why there is no masked priming for "NO" decisions?

Traditional "activation" views of masked priming explain the identity priming effect in terms of facilitation due to 'pre-activation' of stored representations. Norris and Kinoshita's (2008) Bayesian Reader theory of masked priming instead explains priming in terms of the evidence that the prime contributes towards the decision required to the target. In support of the Bayesian Reader account, Norris and Kinoshita showed that the absence of priming for nonwords in the lexical decision task and for targets requiring a Different decision in the same-different match task can be explained based on a single principle. Against this, Bowers (2010) argued that the absence of priming should be explained instead by a combination of sublexical priming and "familiarity bias". As evidence, Bowers cited Bodner and Masson's (1997) finding that nonword priming did emerge with targets presented in visually unfamiliar cAsE-AlTeRnAtEd format. We present evidence that this finding was due to the use of an ambiguous letter in case-alternated format; when using unambiguous letters, we consistently failed to find priming of case-alternated nonwords. We suggest that the Bayesian Reader, rather than the familiarity bias hypothesis, explains the absence of priming.

The proximate unit in Korean speech production: Phoneme or syllable?

We investigated the "proximate unit" in Korean, that is, the initial phonological unit selected in speech production by Korean speakers. Previous studies have shown mixed evidence indicating either a phoneme-sized or a syllable-sized unit. We conducted two experiments in which participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed non-words. In English, for this task, when the picture (e.g., dog) and distractor phonology (e.g., dark) initially overlap, typically the picture target is named faster. We used a range of conditions (in Korean) varying from onset overlap to syllabic overlap, and the results indicated an important role for the syllable, but not the phoneme. We suggest that the basic unit used in phonological encoding in Korean is different from Germanic languages such as English and Dutch and also from Japanese and possibly also Chinese. Models dealing with the architecture of language production can use these results when providing a framework suitable for all languages in the world, including Korean.

Reduced Activity of Protein S in Plasma: A Risk Factor for Venous Thromboembolism in the Japanese Population.

The quantitative assay of protein S can help in rapidly identifying carriers of abnormal protein S molecules through a simple procedure (by determining the total protein S mass, total protein S activity, and protein S-specific activity in blood), without genetic testing. To clarify the relationship between venous thromboembolism (VTE) and protein S-specific activity, and its role in the diagnosis of thrombosis in Japanese persons, the protein S-specific activity was measured and compared between patients with thrombosis and healthy individuals. The protein S-specific activity of each participant was calculated from the ratio of total protein S activity to total protein S antigen level. Plasma samples were collected from 133 healthy individuals, 57 patients with venous thrombosis, 118 patients with arterial thrombosis, and 185 non-thrombotic patients. The protein S-specific activity of one-third of the patients with VTE was below the line of Y = 0.85X (-2 S.D.). Most protein S activities in the plasma of non-thrombotic patients were near the Y = X line, as observed in healthy individuals. In conclusion, it was clearly shown that monitoring protein S activity and protein S-specific activity in blood is useful for predicting the onset and preventing venous thrombosis in at least the Japanese population.

Phonological encoding in the oral but not manual Stroop task: Evidence for the role of a speech production process.

The present study investigated how response mode (oral vs. manual) modulates the Stroop effect using a picture variant of the Stroop task in which participants named orally, or identified with a manual keypress, line drawings of animals (e.g., camel). Consistent with previous color-response Stroop studies, relative to the nonlinguistic neutral distractor (a row of "#" symbols), incongruent distractors (e.g., GIRAFFE) interfered with responding to pictures, and that interference was reduced for the manual, compared with the oral, response. Additionally, pseudoword distractors with no phonological overlap with the picture name (e.g., NUST-camel) interfered with the oral, but not the manual, response. The novel finding is that relative to this pseudoword distractor, the oral response was facilitated when the distractor shared the onset segment with the picture name, regardless of orthographic overlap (e.g., CUST-camel = KUST-camel < NUST-camel); in contrast, for the manual response, there was no difference between the three pseudoword distractor conditions. These results are explained in terms of phonological encoding, a speech production process involved in computing a phonetic plan for generating an oral, but not a manual, response. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

On recognizing Japanese katakana words: Explaining the reduced priming with hiragana and mixed-kana identity primes.

The Japanese kana syllabary has 2 allographic forms, hiragana and katakana. As with other allographic variants like the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet, they show robust form-independent priming effects in the allograph match task (e.g., Kinoshita, Schubert, & Verdonschot, 2019), suggesting that they share abstract character-level representations. In direct contradiction, Perea, Nakayama, and Lupker (2017) argued that hiragana and katakana do not share character-level representations, based on their finding of reduced priming with identity prime containing a mix of hiragana and katakana (the mixed-kana prime) relative to the all-katakana identity prime in a lexical-decision task with loanword targets written in katakana. Here we sought to reconcile these seemingly contradictory claims, using mixed-kana, hiragana, and katakana primes in lexical decision. The mixed-kana prime and hiragana prime produced priming effects that are indistinguishable, and both were reduced in size relative to the priming effect produced by the katakana identity prime. Furthermore, this pattern was unchanged when the target was presented in hiragana. The findings are interpreted in terms of the assumption that the katakana format is specified in the orthographic representation of loanwords in Japanese readers. Implications of the account for the universality across writing systems is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

No Negative Priming Effect in the Manual Stroop Task.

The negative priming effect is an increase in interference when the response to the target on the current trial corresponds to the response to the distractor word on a preceding trial. Contrary to the commonly held belief that the negative priming effect is ubiquitous in the Stroop task, in the original study by Neill (1977), negative priming was found only in the oral, and not the manual Stroop task. The present paper makes three empirical observations. First, we replicate the discrepancy in the finding of the negative priming effect in the oral versus manual Stroop tasks tested under identical conditions, where response mode could be the only the causal factor. Second, we point out that previous manual Stroop experiments reporting the negative priming effect confounded the effect of response repetition. Third, we report the analysis of the negative priming effect at the level of whole RT distribution, which revealed that the effect was absent throughout the RT distribution in the manual task, and it was of constant size across the RT distribution in the oral task. Implications of the results for conflict control in the Stroop task is discussed.

Allograph priming is based on abstract letter identities: Evidence from Japanese kana.

It is well-established that allographs like the uppercase and lowercase forms of the Roman alphabet (e.g., a and A) map onto the same "abstract letter identity," orthographic representations that are independent of the visual form. Consistent with this, in the allograph match task ("Are 'a' and 'A' the same letter?"), priming by a masked letter prime is equally robust for visually dissimilar prime-target pairs (e.g., d and D) and similar pairs (e.g., c and C). However, in principle this pattern of priming is also consistent with the possibility that allograph priming is purely phonological, based on the letter name. Because different allographic forms of the same letter, by definition, share a letter name, it is impossible to rule out this possibility a priori. In the present study, we investigated the influence of shared letter names by taking advantage of the fact that Japanese is written in two distinct writing systems, syllabic kana-that has two parallel forms, hiragana and katakana-and logographic kanji. Using the allograph match task, we tested whether a kanji prime with the same pronunciation as the target kana (e.g., - い, both pronounced /i/) produces the same amount of priming as a kana prime in the opposite kana form (e.g., イ- い). We found that the kana primes produced substantially greater priming than the phonologically identical kanji prime, which we take as evidence that allograph priming is based on abstract kana identity, not purely phonology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).