Emotional cues do not increase the likelihood of tip-of-the-tongue states.

In a recent article, Schwartz (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82-87, 2010) reported the effects of emotion on tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs). He found increased TOTs for emotion-inducing questions, as well as a carryover effect in which high TOT rates were observed following emotion-inducing questions. In the present study, we sought to replicate these findings while controlling for word frequency, but we found an increased TOT rate neither for emotion-inducing questions nor following emotion-inducing questions. We report three attempts to replicate Schwartz's (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82-87, 2010) effect that focused on systematic differences in word frequency between stimulus sets in the original study; none of the key findings reported by Schwartz (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82-87, 2010) were found in any of the experiments. These results fail to support prior claims concerning the effects of emotion on TOTs Schwartz (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 17:82-87, 2010). The discussion focuses on the importance of controlling for systematic differences in word characteristics between groups of items.

Phonological Interlopers Tend to Repeat When Tip-of-the-Tongue States Repeat.

We elicited tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states to replicate the finding that TOTs repeat for individual words. Humphreys and colleagues have attributed this error repetition phenomenon to implicit learning of the mappings between the lemma and phonology. We also examined whether or not interlopers - repeated information that persistently comes to mind - repeat during TOT states for individual words, along with the type of interlopers. Participants were given a TOT test and the same TOT test one week later. The test consisted of the presentation of a definition and participants indicated if they knew the word, did not know the word, or if they were in a TOT state. Participants were also given 15 s to think aloud about the target word on both test and retest. We found that information repeats significantly more often for repeated TOT states (26%) than repeated Don't Know states (13%). We also found that participants experienced significantly more repeated phonological interlopers during a repeated TOT state (59%) versus a repeated Don't Know state (12%). Theoretically, the results may suggest that the TOT state is best described as a subthreshold state, and that within this subthreshold state there is a specific erroneous pattern of activation (akin to a local minimum) rather than a non-specific pattern of activation. These findings are an important constraint toward the development of a more formal explanation of recurring TOTs.

Congruency Encoding Effects on Recognition Memory: A Stage-Specific Account of Desirable Difficulty.

Recent research suggests that selectively attending to relevant stimuli while having to ignore or resist conflicting stimuli can lead to improvements in learning. While mostly discussed within a broader "desirable difficulty" framework in the memory and education literatures, some recent work has focused on more mechanistic questions of how processing conflict (e.g., from incongruent primes) might elicit increased attention and control, producing enhanced incidental encoding of high-conflict stimuli. This encoding benefit for high-control-demand or high-difficulty situations has been broadly conceptualized as a task-general property, with no strong prediction of what particular task elements should produce this effect. From stage processing models of single- and dual-task performance, we propose that memory-enhancing difficulty manipulations should strongly depend on inducing additional cognitive control at particular processing stages. Over six experiments, we show that a memory benefit is produced when increased cognitive control (via incongruency priming) focuses additional processing on the core meaning of to-be-tested stimuli at the semantic categorization stage. In contrast, incongruency priming targeted at response selection within the same task produces similar effects on initial task performance, but gives no memory benefit for high-conflict trials. We suggest that a simple model of limited-capacity and stage-specific cognitive control allocation can account for and predict where and when conflict/difficulty encoding benefits will occur, and may serve as a model for desirable difficulty effects more broadly.

A case of foreign accent syndrome resulting in regional dialect.

BACKGROUND: Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a rare acquired syndrome following neurological damage that results in articulatory distortions that are commonly perceived as a "foreign" accent. The nature of the underlying deficit of FAS remains controversial. We present the first reported Canadian case study of FAS following a stroke. We describe a stroke patient, RD, who suffered an acute infarction to the left internal capsule, basal ganglia and frontal corona radiata. She was diagnosed as having FAS without any persistent aphasic symptoms. Family, friends, and health care professionals similarly described her speech as sounding like she had a Canadian East Coast accent, a reported change from her native Southern Ontario accent. METHOD: An investigation of this case was pursued, incorporating neuroimaging, neuropsychological and speech pathology assessments, and formalized linguistic analyses. RESULTS: Linguistic analyses confirmed that RD's speech does in fact have salient aspects of Atlantic Canadian English in terms of both prosodic and segmental characteristics. However, her speech is not entirely consistent with an Atlantic Canadian English accent. INTERPRETATION: The fact that RD's speech is perceived as a regional variant of her native language, rather than the "generic foreign accent" of FAS described elsewhere, suggests that the perceived "foreignness" in FAS is not primarily due to dysfluencies which indicate a non-native speaker, but rather due to very subtle motor-planning deficits which give rise to systemic changes in specific phonological segments. This has implications for the role of the basal ganglia in speech production.

Talking is harder than listening: The time course of dual-task costs during naturalistic conversation.

Many studies have shown that the cognitive demands of language use are a substantial cause of central dual-task costs, including costs on concurrent driving performance. More recently, several studies have considered whether language production or comprehension is inherently more difficult with respect to costs on concurrent performance, with mixed results. This assessment is particularly difficult given the open question of how one should best equate and compare production and comprehension demands and performance. The present study used 2 very different approaches to address this question. Experiment 1 assessed manual tracking performance concurrently with a conventional labouratory task, comparing dual-task costs with comprehension and verification versus production of category items. Experiment 2 adopted an extreme ecological and functional approach to this question by assessing dual-task manual tracking costs concurrent with continuous, naturalistic, 2-way conversation, allowing event-related analysis of continuous tracking relative to onsets and offsets of natural production and comprehension events. Over both experiments, tracking performance was worse with concurrent production versus comprehension demands. We suggest that by at least 1 important functional metric-performance in natural, everyday conversation-talking is indeed harder than listening. (PsycINFO Database Record

Notional number agreement in English.

To investigate the contested role of notional number in English subject-verb agreement, we used a sentence completion task to examine agreement with minimally different subject noun-phrases, such as the gang on the motorcycles and the gang near the motorcycles. These contrasting phrases biased different notional construals of collective nouns, such as gang, which are normally ambiguous between plural (distributed) and singular (collected) construals. With subjects biased toward spatial distribution, such as gang on motorcycles, more plural verbs occurred in speakers' sentence completions than in sentence completions with a bias toward spatial collection, such as gang near motorcycles. This offers strong evidence regarding both the existence and the magnitude of notional effects on subject-verb number agreement in English.

Tip-of-the-tongue states reoccur because of implicit learning, but resolving them helps.

In six experiments, we elicited tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states, to investigate the novel finding that TOTs on particular words tend to recur for speakers, and examine whether this effect can be attributed to implicit learning of the incorrect mapping from a lemma to phonology for that word. We elicited TOTs by asking participants to supply the word that fit a given definition, and then retested participants on those same definitions in a second test. In Experiments 1-3 we investigated the time course of learning that occurs during TOTs, and found that TOTs are likely to recur with a five-minute test-retest interval, that this error learning can still be measured following a one-week interval, and that they recur for both monolingual and bilingual speakers. We also report the novel finding that error learning can be corrected when individuals resolve their TOT, making them less likely to re-experience a TOT for that word on a later test. In Experiment 4 we showed that these learning effects are not modulated by a priori knowledge of future tests. In Experiments 5a and 5b we show that orthographic cues can help individuals resolve their TOTs, and that these cued-resolutions lead to corrective learning in much the same way as self-resolutions. In Experiment 6 we demonstrate that effortful retrieval is critical to finding differences in error learning when manipulating the duration of unresolved TOTs. We conclude that the error-repetition effect is highly robust, and is best explained by implicit learning of the erroneous state. These findings reinforce the notion that the language production system is dynamic, and continually learning from experience, even when that experience is errorful.

Listener vs. speaker-oriented aspects of speech: studying the disfluencies of individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

This study investigates the role of disfluencies such as "um" or "uh" in conversation to discern whether these features of speech serve listener- or speaker-oriented functions by looking at their occurrence (or lack of occurrence) in the speech of participants with autism. Since the characteristic egocentricity of individuals with autism means they should engage in minimal listener-oriented behavior, they are a useful group to differentiate these functions. Transcription, analysis and categorization of 26 spontaneous language samples were derived from age-matched native English-speaking controls and high-functioning individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). Results showed that individuals with ASD produced fewer filled-pause words (ums and uhs) and revisions than controls, but more silent pauses and disfluent repetitions. Filled-pause words therefore appear to be listener-oriented features of speech.

Animacy and word order in individuals with autism spectrum disorders.

Individuals with autism or autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are known to have difficulties discriminating animacy and are less likely to attend to animate stimuli, which may underlie the social deficits of autism. For individuals without ASD, animacy also affects word order choices: speakers choose syntactic structures (active vs. passive) that place animate entities as the grammatical subject, as a result of their conceptual salience. This study tested whether highly verbal adults with ASD would show sensitivity to animacy in a picture description task. Results showed that individuals with ASD were as sensitive to animacy as controls, and overwhelmingly placed animate entities as the grammatical subject. One stimulus proved an exception, where only individuals with ASD placed an inanimate entity (a clock) in subject position in preference to an animate one (a boy), which coincides with previous observations that individuals with autism find clocks highly salient. This study provides converging evidence of the role of conceptual salience in word order choices, and furthermore shows animate entities to be highly salient for individuals with ASD, at least as it pertains to these word order choices.

Phonological facilitation from pictures in a word association task: evidence for routine cascaded processing in spoken word production.

While most authors now agree that the language production system is in principle cascaded, the strength with which cascaded lemma-to-phoneme activation typically occurs is debated. Picture naming has been shown to be facilitated by phonologically related distractor pictures, but no such facilitation from pictures has been shown for word reading. Picture-picture paradigms have recently been suggested to represent an attentionally facilitated and unusually strong case of cascaded phonological facilitation, not typical of a more general weakly cascaded production system. We used a novel procedure based on picture-word interference paradigms, where participants made speeded verbal free association responses to presented words, with irrelevant picture distractors that were phonologically related to their predicted high-associate responses. Phonological facilitation effects from related picture names were observed on free associate verbal production latencies. These findings represent a far more general demonstration of routine cascaded language production and suggest that the strength and extent of cascaded activation is more substantial than that suggested by traditional picture-word paradigms.

Repeated speech errors: evidence for learning.

Three experiments elicited phonological speech errors using the SLIP procedure to investigate whether there is a tendency for speech errors on specific words to reoccur, and whether this effect can be attributed to implicit learning of an incorrect mapping from lemma to phonology for that word. In Experiment 1, when speakers made a phonological speech error in the study phase of the experiment (e.g. saying "beg pet" in place of "peg bet") they were over four times as likely to make an error on that same item several minutes later at test. A pseudo-error condition demonstrated that the effect is not simply due to a propensity for speakers to repeat phonological forms, regardless of whether or not they have been made in error. That is, saying "beg pet" correctly at study did not induce speakers to say "beg pet" in error instead of "peg bet" at test. Instead, the effect appeared to be due to learning of the error pathway. Experiment 2 replicated this finding, but also showed that after 48 h, errors made at study were no longer more likely to reoccur. As well as providing constraints on the longevity of the effect, this provides strong evidence that the error reoccurrences observed are not due to item-specific difficulty that leads individual speakers to make habitual mistakes on certain items. Experiment 3 showed that the diminishment of the effect 48 h later is not due to specific extra practice at the task. We discuss how these results fit in with a larger view of language as a dynamic system that is constantly adapting in response to experience.

Learning to fail: reoccurring tip-of-the-tongue states.

This experiment looked at elicited tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) states to test the hypothesis that making an error once makes people more likely to make it again, via an implicit learning mechanism. We present a methodology that allows us to determine whether error reoccurrences are due to error learning or to the fact that some items tend to pose repeated difficulty to participants. We elicited TOTs by asking participants to supply the word that fitted a given definition. Each time participants indicated that they were experiencing a TOT they were randomly assigned a delay of either 10 or 30 seconds, during which they were asked to keep trying to retrieve the item. After the delay, the correct answer was supplied. We argue that this longer delay in a TOT state amounts to greater implicit learning of the erroneous state. A period of 48 hours later, participants returned to the laboratory and were asked to supply the words for the same definitions as those seen on Day 1. Results showed that TOTs were almost twice as likely to reoccur on words that had elicited a TOT and been followed by a long delay than on those that had been followed by a short delay.

Medicine in the popular press: the influence of the media on perceptions of disease.

In an age of increasing globalization and discussion of the possibility of global pandemics, increasing rates of reporting of these events may influence public perception of risk. The present studies investigate the impact of high levels of media reporting on the perceptions of disease. Undergraduate psychology and medical students were asked to rate the severity, future prevalence and disease status of both frequently reported diseases (e.g. avian flu) and infrequently reported diseases (e.g. yellow fever). Participants considered diseases that occur frequently in the media to be more serious, and have higher disease status than those that infrequently occur in the media, even when the low media frequency conditions were considered objectively 'worse' by a separate group of participants. Estimates of severity also positively correlated with popular print media frequency in both student populations. However, we also see that the concurrent presentation of objective information about the diseases can mitigate this effect. It is clear from these data that the media can bias our perceptions of disease.

The role of medical language in changing public perceptions of illness.

This study was designed to investigate the impact of medical terminology on perceptions of disease. Specifically, we look at the changing public perceptions of newly medicalized disorders with accompanying newly medicalized terms (e.g. impotence has become erectile dysfunction disorder). Does using "medicalese" to label a recently medicalized disorder lead to a change in the perception of that condition? Undergraduate students (n = 52) rated either the medical or lay label for recently medicalized disorders (such as erectile dysfunction disorder vs. impotence) and established medical conditions (such as a myocardial infarction vs. heart attack) for their perceived seriousness, disease representativeness and prevalence. Students considered the medical label of the recently medicalized disease to be more serious (mean = 4.95 (SE = .27) vs. mean = 3.77 (SE = .24) on a ten point scale), more representative of a disease (mean = 2.47 (SE = .09) vs. mean = 1.83 (SE = .09) on a four point scale), and have lower prevalence (mean = 68 (SE = 12.6) vs. mean = 122 (SE = 18.1) out of 1,000) than the same disease described using common language. A similar pattern was not seen in the established medical conditions, even when controlled for severity. This study demonstrates that the use of medical language in communication can induce bias in perception; a simple switch in terminology results in a disease being perceived as more serious, more likely to be a disease, and more likely to be a rare condition. These findings regarding the conceptualization of disease have implications for many areas, including medical communication with the public, advertising, and public policy.