The psychology of saying what you don't mean: Celebrating the research career of Professor Albert Katz.

Public Significance Statement The human capacity for language enables people to routinely produce and comprehend highly contextualized meaning, even when that meaning differs from or is completely opposite to the component words comprising an utterance or sequence of text (e.g., irony, metaphorical or idiomatic language, humor, and other forms of nonliteral language). In a career spanning more than 45 years, Professor Albert Katz of Western University has illuminated through his research the extraordinary ways that people accomplish this neurocognitive feat, which we all take for granted. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Does visualisation help or hinder concrete word processing?

In an iconicity judgement task, participants were asked whether word pairs were iconic (e.g., nose-tongue; joy-sorrow) or reverse-iconic (e.g., tongue-nose; sorrow-joy), and an advantage for abstract word pairs (i.e., joy-sorrow) was found. Malhi and Buchanan proposed that this reverse concreteness, or abstractness, effect was the result of participants taking a visualisation/imagining (time-costly) approach towards the concrete word pairs and an emotional/intuitive (time-efficient) approach towards the abstract word pairs. This study tested this proposal by asking participants questions about strategy use (Experiment 1). In the forced-choice questions, all participants reported using a visualisation/imagining approach towards the concrete word pairs and most participants reported using an emotional/intuitive approach towards the abstract word pairs. In the open-ended responses, visual-spatial reasoning and real-life experience emerged as themes for the concrete word pairs and social norms and values emerged as themes for the abstract word pairs, adding to our understanding of the grounding of abstract words. In Experiment 2, participants were supplied with pictures as an aid to visualisation with the expectation that this would reduce the time required for concrete word processing. Supplying pictures made participants faster and more accurate at completing the task. Experiment 3 manipulated the type of visual aid by also supplying pictures that did not match the orientation of the word pairs. Participants were only more accurate when the pictures were in the correct and iconic spatial arrangement. A flexible abstractness and concreteness effects (FACE) theory is proposed which integrates symbolic and embodied accounts and introduces constructs such as direct and constrained imageability for concrete words and indirect and free imageability for abstract words.

When processing costs impact predictive processing: The case of foreign-accented speech and accent experience.

Listeners use linguistic information and real-world knowledge to predict upcoming spoken words. However, studies of predictive processing have focused on prediction under optimal listening conditions. We examined the effect of foreign-accented speech on predictive processing. Furthermore, we investigated whether accent-specific experience facilitates predictive processing. Using the visual world paradigm, we demonstrated that although the presence of an accent impedes predictive processing, it does not preclude it. We further showed that as listener experience increases, predictive processing for accented speech increases and begins to approximate the pattern seen for native speech. These results speak to the limitation of the processing resources that must be allocated, leading to a trade-off when listeners are faced with increased uncertainty and more effortful recognition due to a foreign accent.

A meta-analysis of task-related influences in prospective memory in traumatic brain injury.

Prospective memory is the ability to remember to do something in the future and it is essential to every-day functional independence. Traumatic brain injury is associated with frequent and persistent prospective memory deficits. This study presents a review and meta-analysis investigating the effects of task parameters on prospective memory performance of individuals with TBI. Individual studies using continuous behavioural measures of prospective memory with a sample of adults with TBI and matched controls were included. Consistent with previous research, a random effects meta-analysis indicated that TBI groups demonstrated lower prospective memory performance than control groups (d = 1.10, SE = 0.12, 95% CI = 0.86-1.34). In addition, we found that type of prospective memory cue, saliency of cues, and complexity of the ongoing task significantly moderated the difference in prospective memory performance between TBI and control groups. These findings suggest that prospective memory task parameters should be considered in the assessment of prospective memory in individuals with cognitive impairment. In addition, considering the influence of these task parameters would be useful to develop effective compensatory strategies to reduce prospective memory failures.

A test of the symbol interdependency hypothesis with both concrete and abstract stimuli.

In Experiment 1, the symbol interdependency hypothesis was tested with both concrete and abstract stimuli. Symbolic (i.e., semantic neighbourhood distance) and embodied (i.e., iconicity) factors were manipulated in two tasks-one that tapped symbolic relations (i.e., semantic relatedness judgment) and another that tapped embodied relations (i.e., iconicity judgment). Results supported the symbol interdependency hypothesis in that the symbolic factor was recruited for the semantic relatedness task and the embodied factor was recruited for the iconicity task. Across tasks, and especially in the iconicity task, abstract stimuli resulted in shorter RTs. This finding was in contrast to the concreteness effect where concrete words result in shorter RTs. Experiment 2 followed up on this finding by replicating the iconicity task from Experiment 1 in an ERP paradigm. Behavioural results continued to show a reverse concreteness effect with shorter RTs for abstract stimuli. However, ERP results paralleled the N400 and anterior N700 concreteness effects found in the literature, with more negative amplitudes for concrete stimuli.

Novel metaphor comprehension: Semantic neighbourhood density interacts with concreteness.

Previous research suggests that metaphor comprehension is affected both by the concreteness of the topic and vehicle and their semantic neighbours (Kintsch, 2000; Xu, 2010). However, studies have yet to manipulate these 2 variables simultaneously. To that end, we composed novel metaphors manipulated on topic concreteness and semantic neighbourhood density (SND) of topic and vehicle. In Experiment 1, participants rated the metaphors on the suitability (e.g. sensibility) of their topic-vehicle pairings. Topic concreteness interacted with SND such that participants rated metaphors from sparse semantic spaces to be more sensible than those from dense semantic spaces and preferred abstract topics over concrete topics only for metaphors from dense semantic spaces. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used presentation deadlines and found that topic concreteness and SND affect the online processing stages associated with metaphor comprehension. We discuss how the results are aligned with established psycholinguistic models of metaphor comprehension.

Semantic Neighborhood Effects for Abstract versus Concrete Words.

Studies show that semantic effects may be task-specific, and thus, that semantic representations are flexible and dynamic. Such findings are critical to the development of a comprehensive theory of semantic processing in visual word recognition, which should arguably account for how semantic effects may vary by task. It has been suggested that semantic effects are more directly examined using tasks that explicitly require meaning processing relative to those for which meaning processing is not necessary (e.g., lexical decision task). The purpose of the present study was to chart the processing of concrete versus abstract words in the context of a global co-occurrence variable, semantic neighborhood density (SND), by comparing word recognition response times (RTs) across four tasks varying in explicit semantic demands: standard lexical decision task (with non-pronounceable non-words), go/no-go lexical decision task (with pronounceable non-words), progressive demasking task, and sentence relatedness task. The same experimental stimulus set was used across experiments and consisted of 44 concrete and 44 abstract words, with half of these being low SND, and half being high SND. In this way, concreteness and SND were manipulated in a factorial design using a number of visual word recognition tasks. A consistent RT pattern emerged across tasks, in which SND effects were found for abstract (but not necessarily concrete) words. Ultimately, these findings highlight the importance of studying interactive effects in word recognition, and suggest that linguistic associative information is particularly important for abstract words.

Pun processing from a psycholinguistic perspective: Introducing the Model of Psycholinguistic Hemispheric Incongruity Laughter (M.PHIL).

Ambiguity processing was examined using a stimulus set consisting of homograph puns in which semantic salience, as measured by semantic co-occurrence, was manipulated. Two lexical decision tasks using puns as primes for ambiguous targets revealed that high co-occurrence meanings were processed faster than low co-occurrence meanings. A divided visual field protocol revealed involvement of both hemispheres, but with the pattern of priming from the right visual field more similar to that of the centrally presented condition than the left visual field pattern. In contrast to the lexical decision data that favoured high co-occurrence targets, data from a forced-choice relatedness task showed an advantage for the low co-occurrence associates. Results from this series of experiments are consistent with Bryden's [(1982). Laterality: Functional asymmetry in the intact brain. New York, NY: Academic Press] proposal that there are several different laterality effects when processing language and emotionally valent stimuli. The results are used to frame a working model of pun processing based on the Graded Salience Hypothesis [Giora, R. (1997). Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics, 8(3), 183-206].

Survival of the grouped, or three's a crowd? Repetition blindness in groups of letters and words.

When stimuli are presented rapidly, repetitions are often undetected--a phenomenon called "repetition blindness" (RB; Kanwisher Cognition, 27, 117-143, 1987). Grouping of nonlinguistic items has been found to prevent RB (Goldfarb & Treisman Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18, 1042-1049, 2011). In order to determine whether this effect could be found with letters and words, participants viewed rapid serial visual presentation and brief simultaneous visual presentation streams containing groups of linguistic stimuli and provided judgments of frequency. The collection of reaction times and an explicit question about strategy use allowed for analyses of the participants' processing strategies. Two groups of participants emerged: one that demonstrated RB for groups of stimuli, and another that demonstrated enhanced perception with stimulus grouping. These participant groups did not appear to differ on the basis of explicit processing strategies or reaction times.

Immune activation and neuropsychiatric symptoms in HIV infection.

This study examined the role of biological processes in the development of specific neuropsychiatric complications in HAART-naive adults with HIV/AIDS. Depressive symptoms were modestly associated with elevated IL-6 mRNA expression (r(s)=0.40, p<0.05) even after removing the influences of other subjective complaints (pr=0.39, p<0.05). Elevated serum neopterin was strongly associated with depressive symptoms in individuals taking antidepressants (r(s)=0.83, p<0.001), though the association was nullified in those not on antidepressants (r(s)=-0.25, p>0.05). Mean neopterin levels were higher in the depressed as compared with nondepressed group but only for those taking antidepressants (F=45.66, df=1, 11, p<0.001). Neuropsychological impairment was not associated with the biological markers. These findings suggest that systemic immune markers (like neopterin) may be useful in differentiating treatment-resistant individuals at greater risk of developing chronic depression.

Grounding co-occurrence: Identifying features in a lexical co-occurrence model of semantic memory.

Lexical co-occurrence models of semantic memory represent word meaning by vectors in a high-dimensional space. These vectors are derived from word usage, as found in a large corpus of written text. Typically, these models are fully automated, an advantage over models that represent semantics that are based on human judgments (e.g., feature-based models). A common criticism of co-occurrence models is that the representations are not grounded: Concepts exist only relative to each other in the space produced by the model. It has been claimed that feature-based models offer an advantage in this regard. In this article, we take a step toward grounding a co-occurrence model. A feed-forward neural network is trained using back propagation to provide a mapping from co-occurrence vectors to feature norms collected from subjects. We show that this network is able to retrieve the features of a concept from its co-occurrence vector with high accuracy and is able to generalize this ability to produce an appropriate list of features from the co-occurrence vector of a novel concept.

An investigation into early acquired dyslexia.

There are several group and case studies that investigate developmental dyslexia in children, and acquired and developmental reading disabilities in adults. To date however, there are few detailed investigations on cases of early acquired dyslexia. The purpose of this study was to examine such a case (participant referred to as SP). The goals of this investigation were to compare SP's reading impairments to the major subtypes of dyslexia, establish SP's specific reading deficits, and consider the neuropsychological variables that may impact on SP's reading disability.

WINDSORS: Windsor improved norms of distance and similarity of representations of semantics.

Lexical co-occurrence models of semantic memory form representations of the meaning of a word on the basis of the number of times that pairs of words occur near one another in a large body of text. These models offer a distinct advantage over models that require the collection of a large number of judgments from human subjects, since the construction of the representations can be completely automated. Unfortunately, word frequency, a well-known predictor of reaction time in several cognitive tasks, has a strong effect on the co-occurrence counts in a corpus. Two words with high frequency are more likely to occur together purely by chance than are two words that occur very infrequently. In this article, we examine a modification of a successful method for constructing semantic representations from lexical co-occurrence. We show that our new method eliminates the influence of frequency, while still capturing the semantic characteristics of words.

Is there an effect of print exposure on the word frequency effect and the neighborhood size effect?

Orthographic and phonological processing skills have been shown to vary as a function of reader skill (Stanovich & West, Reading Research Quarterly, 24, 402-433, 1989; Unsworth & Pexman, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56A, 63-81, 2003). One variable known to contribute to differences between readers of higher and lower skill is amount of print exposure: higher skilled readers read more often than lower skilled readers, and their increased print exposure is associated with faster responding to words and nonwords in lexical decision tasks. The present experiments examined the effect of print exposure on the word frequency effect and neighborhood size effect. We conclude that the different outcomes reported in previous studies (Chateau & Jared, Memory and Cognition, 28, 143-153, 2000; Lewellen, Goldinger, Pisoni, & Greene, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 122, 316-330, 1993) were due to the type of nonwords used in the lexical decision task (regular nonwords versus pseudohomophones). Our results are explained in terms of differences in the reliance on orthographic and phonological information between readers of higher and lower print exposure.

Detecting response bias with performance patterns on an expanded version of the Controlled Oral Word Association Test.

The present study investigated whether speeded word generation performance patterns seen in healthy subjects are also produced in genuine and feigned traumatic brain injury (TBI). An expanded version of the Controlled Oral Word Association Test was administered to healthy controls, TBI patients, simulated malingerers, and probable clinical malingerers. Four performance patterns were operationalized. Three of these patterns were replicated in the healthy control sample and found to be unaltered by genuine TBI. They were then combined into a logistic regression model that discriminated well between examinees who put forth adequate effort and those who evidenced response bias.

Tuning of the human left fusiform gyrus to sublexical orthographic structure.

Neuropsychological and neurophysiological evidence point to a role for the left fusiform gyrus in visual word recognition, but the specific nature of this role remains a topic of debate. The aim of this study was to measure the sensitivity of this region to sublexical orthographic structure. We measured blood oxygenation (BOLD) changes in the brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging while fluent readers of English viewed meaningless letter strings. The stimuli varied systematically in their approximation to English orthography, as measured by the probability of occurrence of letters and sequential letter pairs (bigrams) comprising the string. A whole-brain analysis showed a single region in the lateral left fusiform gyrus where BOLD signal increased with letter sequence probability; no other brain region showed this response pattern. The results suggest tuning of this cortical area to letter probabilities as a result of perceptual experience and provide a possible neural correlate for the 'word superiority effect' observed in letter perception research.

Implicit and explicit processing in deep dyslexia: Semantic blocking as a test for failure of inhibition in the phonological output lexicon.

The failure of inhibition hypothesis posits a theoretical distinction between implicit and explicit access in deep dyslexia. Specifically, the effects of failure of inhibition are assumed only in conditions that have an explicit selection requirement in the context of production (i.e., aloud reading). In contrast, the failure of inhibition hypothesis proposes that implicit processing and explicit access to semantic information without production demands are intact in deep dyslexia. Evidence for intact implicit and explicit access requires that performance in deep dyslexia parallels that observed in neurologically intact participants on tasks based on implicit and explicit processes. In other words, deep dyslexics should produce normal effects in conditions with implicit task demands (i.e., lexical decision) and on tasks based on explicit access without production (i.e., forced choice semantic decisions) because failure of inhibition does not impact the availability of lexical information, only explicit retrieval in the context of production. This research examined the distinction between implicit and explicit processes in deep dyslexia using semantic blocking in lexical decision and forced choice semantic decisions as a test for the failure of inhibition hypothesis. The results of the semantic blocking paradigm support the distinction between implicit and explicit processing and provide evidence for failure of inhibition as an explanation for semantic errors in deep dyslexia.

Verbal mediation and memory for novel figural designs: a dual interference study.

To the extent that all types of visual stimuli can be verbalized to some degree, verbal mediation is intrinsic in so-called "visual" memory processing. This impurity complicates the interpretation of visual memory performance, particularly in certain neurologically impaired populations (e.g., aphasia). The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative contributions of verbal mediation to recognition memory for visual stimuli that vary with respect to their amenability to being verbalized. In Experiment 1, subjects attempted to verbally describe novel figural designs during presentation and then identify them in a subsequent recognition memory test. Verbalizing these designs facilitated memory. Stimuli that were found to be easiest or most difficult to verbalize at the group level were retained for the second study. In Experiment 2, subjects evidenced superior recognition memory for the relatively easy to verbalize items. This advantage was attenuated in subjects who performed a concurrent verbal interference task during encoding, but not in those who performed an analogous visual interference task. These findings provide evidence that impoverished verbal mediation disproportionately impedes memory for visual material that is relatively easy to verbalize. Implications for the clinical assessment of visual memory are discussed.

Semantic ambiguity and the failure of inhibition hypothesis as an explanation for reading errors in deep dyslexia.

We report evidence for dissociation between explicit and implicit access to word representations in a deep dyslexic patient (JO). JO read aloud a series of ambiguous (e.g., bank) and unambiguous (e.g., food) words and performed a lexical decision task using these same items. When required to explicitly access the items (i.e., naming), JO showed relative impairment for ambiguous compared with unambiguous words. In contrast, the same stimuli produced an advantage for ambiguous words in lexical decision. The results are discussed within a framework of deep dyslexia that considers errors in production to arise through a failure to inhibit spuriously activated candidate representations.