Donald G. Mackay

Donald G. Mackay
University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Psychology

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120
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Publications

Publications (120)
Article
This study examined duration judgments for taboo and neutral words in prospective and retrospective timing tasks. In the prospective task, participants attended to time from the beginning and generated shorter duration estimates for taboo than neutral words and for words that they subsequently recalled in a surprise free recall task. These findings...
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How does aging impact relations between emotion, memory, and attention? To address this question, young and older adults named the font colors of taboo and neutral words, some of which recurred in the same font color or screen location throughout two color-naming experiments. The results indicated longer color-naming response times (RTs) for taboo...
Article
Even after his death, the famous amnesic H.M. is revolutionizing our understanding of how memory works and how we maintain it as we age
Article
This review and perspective article outlines 15 observational constraints on theories of errors, error detection, and error correction, and their relation to hippocampal-region (HR) damage. The core observations come from 10 studies with H.M., an amnesic with cerebellar and HR damage but virtually no neocortical damage. Three studies examined the d...
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Although amnesic H.M. typically could not recall where or when he met someone, he could recall their topics of conversation after long interference-filled delays, suggesting impaired encoding for some categories of novel events but not others. Similarly, H.M. successfully encoded into internal representations (sentence plans) some novel linguistic...
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Three studies examined amnesic H.M.'s use of words, phrases, and propositions on the Test of Language Competence (TLC). In Study 1, H.M. used 19 lexical categories (e.g., common nouns, verbs) and one syntactic category (noun phrases) with the same relative frequency as memory-normal controls, he used no lexical or syntactic category with less-than-...
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Describes a theory of cognitive aging, the Transmission Deficit hypothesis, comparing it to other theories and demonstrating its account of evidence relating aging and language. Evidence is presented which indicates that effects of aging on language comprehension vs production are asymmetric. It is argued that although theories of cognitive aging h...
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Three language production studies indicate that amnesic H.M. produces speech errors unlike everyday slips-of-the-tongue. Study 1 was a naturalistic task: H.M. and six controls closely matched for age, education, background and IQ described what makes captioned cartoons funny. Nine judges rated the descriptions blind to speaker identity and gave rel...
Article
People often fail to detect the anomalous word in questions such as How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?, and incorrectly answer “two” despite knowing that Noah rather than Moses launched the Ark. The current study tests an account of this “Moses illusion” in which Moses mistakes reflect miscomprehension of the presented word (M...
Article
MacKay and James (2001) demonstrated greater-than-normal retrograde amnesia (RA) for lexical-semantic information in amnesic H.M., a deficit that worsened with aging or represented supranormal age-linked RA (SARA). The present experiments extend these earlier observations to new types of information. Experiment 1 participants (H.M. and carefully ma...
Article
Two experiments compared the visual cognition performance of amnesic H.M. and memory-normal controls matched for age, background, intelligence, and education. In Experiment 1 H.M. exhibited deficits relative to the controls in detecting "erroneous objects" in complex visual scenes--for example, a bird flying inside a fishbowl. In Experiment 2 H.M....
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To test conflicting hypotheses regarding amnesic H.M.'s language abilities, this study examined H.M.'s sentence production on the Language Competence Test (Wiig & Secord, 198834. Wiig , E. H. and Secord , W. 1988. Test of language competence: Expanded edition, New York: The Psychological Corporation, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc. View all ref...
Article
This study examines sentence-level language abilities of amnesic H.M. to test competing theoretical conceptions of relations between language and memory. We present 11 new sources of experimental evidence indicating deficits in H.M's comprehension and production of non-cliché sentences. Contrary to recent claims that H.M.'s comprehension is unimpai...
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This research demonstrates 3 new age-linked asymmetries between identifying versus retrieving phonological information. Young and older adults read aloud familiar isolated words (e.g., mind) and novel pseudowords (e.g., mond) in a production task and identified lexical status for identical stimuli in a comprehension task. Young adults made fewer er...
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People recall taboo words better than neutral words in many experimental contexts. The present rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) experiments demonstrated this taboo-superiority effect for immediate recall of mixed lists containing taboo and neutral words matched for familiarity, length, and category coherence. Under binding theory (MacKay et...
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This study reports effects of meaning and emotion (taboo vs. neutral words) on an illusory word (IW) phenomenon linked to orthographic repetition blindness (RB). Participants immediately recalled rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) lists consisting of two critical words (C1 and C2) containing shared letters, followed by a word fragment: for exa...
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This study tested the binding hypothesis: that emotional reactions trigger binding mechanisms that link an emotional event to salient contextual features such as event location, a frequently recalled aspect of naturally occurring flash-bulb memories. Our emotional events were taboo words in a Stroop color-naming task, and event location was manipul...
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This article reports five experiments demonstrating theoretically coherent effects of emotion on memory and attention. Experiments 1-3 demonstrated three taboo Stroop effects that occur when people name the color of taboo words. One effect is longer color-naming times for taboo than for neutral words, an effect that diminishes with word repetition....
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To test age-linked predictions of node structure theory (NST) and other theories, young and older adults performed a task that elicited large numbers of phonological and morphological speech errors. Stimuli were visually presented words containing either /p/ or /b/, and participants changed the /p/ to /b/ or vice versa and produced the resulting wo...
Article
This study develops and tests a theory of aging and long-term retrograde amnesia (RA) that extends to word retrieval, including the seemingly simple retrieval task of reading isolated words. Under the theory, transmission deficits due to aging, nonrecent use of connections, and infrequent use of connections over the lifespan cause mild and reversib...
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Roelofs (2002) showed that by-item picture naming latencies in Santiago, MacKay, Palma, & Rho (2000) were linearly related to total number of segments across conditions, suggesting that structural effects of number of syllables and onset complexity might reect a confound with phonological length. However, Roelofs failed to test the statistical reli...
Article
This study develops a new theory of long-term retrograde amnesia that encompasses episodic and semantic memory, including word knowledge. Under the theory, retrograde amnesia in both normal individuals and hippocampal amnesics reflects transmission deficits caused by aging, nonrecent use of connections, and infrequent use of connections over the li...
Article
This note discusses two fundamentally different paradigms or metatheoretical approaches that currently guide cognitive neuropsychology: the Theoretical- vs. Anatomical-paradigms. To illustrate these paradigms, we compare a Theoretical-paradigm paper (MacKay & James, 2001) with an Anatomical-paradigm paper (Schmolck, Stefanacci, & Squire, 2000): The...
Article
We are fortunate that this is an essay review. It would be difficult to write (and read) an ordinary book review for an edited volume of this size (755 pages) and diversity (from neuroanatomy to personality) in a field that Craik and Salthouse claim is beginning to ‘ride off madly in all directions’ (Preface). However, Editor Rogoff gave us a diffe...
Article
In this case study, a "hippocampal amnesic" (H.M.) and memory-normal controls of similar age, background, intelligence, and education read novel sentences aloud in tasks where fast and accurate reading either was or was not the primary goal. In four experiments, H.M. produced more misreadings than normal and cerebellar controls, usually without sel...
Article
This study develops a new theory of the Moses illusion, observed in responses to general knowledge questions such as, "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?" People often respond "two" rather than "zero" despite knowing that Noah, not Moses, launched the Ark. Our theory predicted two additional types of conceptual error demonstra...
Chapter
We live in an ageing society, where people are living longer, and where decreases in the birth rate mean that the proportion of the population above retirement age is steadily increasing. An ageing population has considerable implications for health services and care provision. Consequently there is a growing interest among researchers, medical pra...
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This study examines picture naming latencies for predicted effects of two word retrieval factors: onset complexity and number of syllables. In Experiment 1, naming latency was longer for depicted words with two syllables e.g., demon, than one syllable, e.g., duck, and longer for words beginning with consonant clusters, e.g., drill, than single cons...
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This experiment tested for age-linked asymmetries predicted under Node Structure theory (NST; D. G. MacKay & D. M. Burke, 1990) between detecting versus retrieving orthographic information. Older adults detected that briefly presented words were correctly spelled (e.g., endeavor) or misspelled (e.g., endeavuor) as readily as did young adults. Howev...
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Reports an error in "Age-linked declines in retrieving orthographic knowledge: Empirical, practical, and theoretical implications" by Donald G. MacKay and Lise Abrams (Psychology and Aging, 1998[Dec], Vol 13[4], 647-662). The article contained an error. In Table 1 on page 652, the values for rated spelling ability at age 20 and at current age were...
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This experiment tested for age-linked asymmetries predicted under Node Structure theory (NST; D. G. MacKay & D. M. Burke, 1990) between detecting versus retrieving orthographic information. Older adults detected that briefly presented words were correctly spelled (e.g., endeavor) or misspelled (e.g., endeavuor) as readily as did young adults. Howev...
Article
Despite several positive features, such as extensive theoretical and empirical scope, aspects of Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer's theory can be challenged on theoretical grounds (inconsistent principles for phonetic versus phonological syllables, use of sophisticated homunculi, underspecification, and lack of principled motivation) and empirical grou...
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This study developed and tested a Transmission Deficit hypothesis of how aging affects retrieval of orthographic knowledge. Young, older, and very old adults heard a tape-recorded series of difficult-to-spell words of high and low frequency, spoken slowly, clearly and repeatedly, and wrote down each word at their own pace. With perceptual errors an...
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To test the claim that H.M. exhibits a “pure memory deficit” that has left his language production intact, we compared the language production of H.M. and controls in three studies. In Study 1, participants described the two meanings of visually presented sentences that they knew were ambiguous, and H.M.'s descriptions suggested a semantic-level pr...
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Three studies tested the claim that H.M. exhibits a "pure memory deficit" that has left his ability to comprehend language unimpaired relative to memory-normal controls. In Study 1, H.M. and memory-normal controls of comparable intelligence, education, and age indicated whether sentences were ambiguous or unambiguous, and H. M. detected ambiguities...
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This overview provides both theoretical and empirical reasons for emphasizing practice and familiar skills as a practical strategy for enhancing cognitive functioning in old age. Our review of empirical research on age-related changes in memory and language reveals a consistent pattern of spared and impaired abilities in normal old age. Relatively...
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This comment corrects some inaccuracies, points to some methodological problems, and makes three substantive observations regarding the Altarriba and Soltano (1996) article. First, token individuation theory does not explain what is new and interesting in the Altarriba and Soltano data, namely cross-language semantic facilitation in lists and a lis...
Article
Immediate recall decreases for repeated relative to unrepeated words in rapidly presented spoken lists, a phenomenon known as repetition deafness (RD). The present study examines RD as a test case for a distributed memory account of relations between language and memory. Within the distributed memory framework, general connection-formation processe...
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This study concretely illustrates the Birren-Fisher strategy (1991), the use of well-established aging effects to understand fundamental but poorly understood phenomena in mainstream psychology. Our well-established aging effects included inhibition deficits and new learning deficits, and our poorly understood mainstream phenomenon was repetition d...
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This study tested for predicted effects of syntax on a repetition deficit (RD) known as repetition blindness, the reduced probability of recall for repeated words in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) sentences. The syntactic variable was phrase-congruent versus phrase-incongruent grouping within simultaneous RSVP displays. With phrase-congrue...
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This study tested 2 main hypotheses for explaining repetition blindness (RB), a difficulty in encoding and recalling rapidly presented repeated words in sentences. Under 1 hypothesis, RB reflects an inhibitory process and should be more pronounced in young than in older Ss, who typically exhibit diminished inhibitory processes. Under the second hyp...
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This paper examines how inner theories (coherent sets of propositional beliefs and attitudes) influence lexical choice. Subjects in one study completed auditorily presented sentence fragments, some of which contained nonhuman antecedents such as dog and cat. Subjects were more likely to use human pronouns rather than it for referring to pets (e.g.,...
Article
This study demonstrates a recently predicted cognitive phenomenon known as semantic blindness, an inhibitory effect attributable to concept repetition in the serial recall of rapidly presented sentences. Proficient bilinguals read mixed, Spanish-English sentences, each including a target and a pretarget word. Targets and pretargets were related in...
Article
This research demonstrates a new cognitive phenomenon known as repetition deafness, a difficulty in immediate recall of repeated words in computer-compressed speech Sixty-four subjects heard sentences and lists at four speeded rates 70, 55, 35, and 28 ms/phoneme Each target word in the materials followed a pretarget word that was either identical (...
Article
This paper outlines a detailed theory of relations between word perception and production, and reports five experiments testing prediction, of the theory for the verbal transformation effect (VTE), the perceptual changes that occur when an acoustically presented word is repeated via computer loop for prolonged periods. Within this interactive activ...
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This paper examines the relation between errors and awareness in two recent theories of error detection in speech: Perceptual Loop theory and Node Structure theory. New data and predictions are discussed, together with some nonobvious limitations of these theories. New paradigms for studying speech error detection are also discussed, together with...
Article
The Popperian epistemology underlying Levelt's (1992) commentary and other aspects of contemporary psychology has limited application and, in particular, does not apply to the creation or development of theory, the main goal of MacKay (1992a). This is relevant to Levelt's questions, “What has changed?” and “What is the harvest?”: From a non-Popperi...
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Three interrelated puzzles have been haunting my work on speech errors, almost since it began in 1965. The awareness puzzle is one, and it consists of two parts. Part 1 of the awareness puzzle concerns relations between awareness and the “adjustments” or accommodations that often follow the production of errors. For example, the speaker who misprod...
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This paper develops a new theory of the tip of the tongue (TOT) phenomenon. Within this interactive activation model of speech production, TOTs occur when the connections between lexical and phonological nodes become weakened due to infrequent use, nonrecent use, and aging, causing a reduction in the transmission of priming. Predictions of the theo...
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SUMMARY This chapter describes a detailed theory of perception. production and memory for language and applies it to the problem of cognitive decline in old age. Altering a single parameter in the theory (rate of priming) was shown to account for a wide range of established age differences in cognitive ability. and to suggest an alternative framewo...
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Most chapters of the present book deal with a two-body problem, relations between perception and action. This two-body problem is difficult enough: as Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960, p. 11) point out, the “theoretical vacuum between perception and action” has been the subject of prolonged — and frequently violent — debate. However, two-body pr...
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Is Paradigm a new and general paradigm for psychological inquiry? Read my lips - Volume 12 Issue 4 - Donald G. MacKay
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This article reexamines some important issues raised by Greenwald, Pratkanis, Leippe, and Baumgardner (see record 1986-20964-001) concerning the nature of theory and its role in research progress, practical applications of psychological knowledge, strategies for developing and evaluating theories, and relations between empirical and theoretical ps...
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This paper argues that personification is the prototypical metaphor and that it occurs more frequently than other metaphors, especially during the early stages of child development. The paper also argues that personification comes dis­ guised in many other figurative devices (metonymy, spatial metaphors, and container metaphors) and syntactic expre...
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This paper examines the hypothesis that following activation, the components for producing a skilled behavior undergo a brief period of self- inhibition during which they are difficult to reac­ tivate. Evidence for this self-inhibition hypothesis is reviewed from a wide range of areas: electrophysiology, electromyography, misspellings by dysgraphic...
Chapter
This paper develops a theory for explaining how the components of everyday actions are sequenced and timed (e.g., typing, hammering a nail). Under the theory, a hierarchy of content nodes represents the form of a preplanned action, while an independently stored set of (sequence) nodes codes the serial order rules for the action and determines seque...
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This paper develops Stelmach and Hughes' (this volume) concept of intentions into a theory specifying what intentions are, how they're organized and represented in the brain and how they become activated in the real time control of skilled behavior. Intentions code three types of information in the theory: what one is trying to do (the components o...
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Reviews existing theories of fluency in high-proficiency skills such as speech, and proposes that execution of behavior involves the activation of a hierarchy of nodes in proper serial order within an output system. Activating a node at any level in the system activates its connected nodes, and repeated activation increases the rate of priming per...
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The present study examines several methodological and conceptual problems which in the past have made it difficult to accept the hypothesis that mental practice facilitates behavioral skill. An experiment on skill in speech production is then reported which overcomes the methodological problems. Subjects practice producing a sentence at maximal rat...
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The research investigated the use of human pronouns to refer to nonhuman antecedents. Study I examined a large sample of children's literature and found that authors were more likely to use he or she rather than it for referents with human traits, for unique or named rather than unnamed referents, and for characters central rather than peripheral t...
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This study examines the effects of prescriptive ~ on attitudes toward and compre­ hension of paragraphs. In one experiment, students sympathetic to women's liber­ ation read otherwise identical paragraphs containing either plural they or pre­ scriptive he. Female subjects had lower comprehension and personal relevance scores for~he prescriptive he...
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This paper examines the goals of prescriptive grammar and the causes and consequences of the rift between prescriptive and theoretical linguistics. It also proposes a principle for guiding prescriptive recommendations in the future as well as a theoretical framework and procedure for predicting the consequences of prescriptive recommendations. The...
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Argues that psychology can help to develop principles and procedures for prescriptive grammar. An experimental technique is reported for evaluating the prescription of he to mean "he or she." 10 undergraduates who read textbook paragraphs containing prescriptive he referring to neutral antecedents, such as person, miscomprehended the antecedents...
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Four experiments investigated whether subjects understand the supposedly generic he generically. In Experiment I, subjects responded YES if an auditorily presented sentence could refer to a female and otherwise NO. Responses were 98% correct for sentences containing sex-specific nouns and pronouns, but 87% incorrect (i.e., NO) for sentences contain...
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This study examines the distinction between creative and noncreative behavior as applied to the production of words and sentences. Under one hypothesis words such as governor and government are stored as independent units and produced by rote, but under another these nouns are not produced as fully integrated units but are generated by rules for co...
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Linguists and psychologists have noted the potential value of studying speech errors since the 1890s (Meringer & Mayer 1895; Freud 1938; Fromkin 1973; MacKay 1972). The reasoning has been that involuntary errors may lay bare certain aspects of the speech production system which are hidden in normal, errorless speech. Today we are closer than ever b...
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This study examines two views of lexical storage and word production: a Derivational hypothesis whereby complex nouns such as GOVERNANCE and GOVERNMENT are generated by rules for combining stems and affixes separately stored in the internal lexicon, and an Independent Unit hypothesis whereby GOVERN and GOVERNMENT constitute independent lexical unit...
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This paper examines two rule-based or non-associative alternatives to associative theories of serial order in behavior. Both rule-based models seemed superior to chain association, but one, the CV Organization model, was found to require further development to handle corollary issues associated with serial ordering eg. coarticulation phenomena, seq...
Article
This study examined the retrieval of regular and irregular past tense verbs. Subjects were presented with present tense verbs (e.g., TEACH) and had to produce the past tense form (TAUGHT) as quickly as possible. Reaction times and errors in this task suggested that preterites such as TAUGHT are not stored as separate and independent lexical units b...
Article
It was shown previously that spoonerisms (such as bad goof—gad boof) can be elicited by having subjects articulate a target (bad goof) preceded by bias items which contain at least the initial phoneme (/g/) of the desired error outcome. The present study takes advantage of the fact that two very similar targets such as darn bore and dart board will...
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This paper shows that maximal rate of speech varies as a function of syllable structure. For example, CCV syllables such as [sku] and CVC syllables such as [kus] are produced faster than VCC syllables such as [usk] when subjects repeat these syllables as fast as possible. Spectrographic analyses indicated that this difference in syllable duration w...
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Alternative models have been offered to explain the mechanisms underlying the processing of ambiguous sentences. One model contends that the meanings of an ambiguity are processed one at a time, without interaction between them. A rival model contends that to some extent both meanings of an ambiguity can be processed simultaneously, competing with...
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The speech errors known as synonymic intrusions (e.g., 'sotally,' an inadvertent combination of initial word 'solely' and sequel word 'totally' in 'He was sotally responsible for that') suggest that two or more words can be simultaneously activated, competing for the same position in a sentence. Statistical analysis of 257 such intrusions showed th...
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This paper proposed a two-stage model to capture some basic relations between attention, comprehension and memory for sentences. According to the model, the first stage of linguistic processing is carried out in short-term memory (M1) and involves a superficial analysis of semantic and syntactic features of words. The second stage is carried out in...
Article
Two types of misspellings (phonetically compatible, WERK for WORK; or phonetically incompatible, WARK for WORK) were tachistoscopically presented to 24 subjects. Telling them what word would be misspelled increased the probability of detecting phonetically incompatible misspellings, but not phonetically compatible ones. The findings present difficu...
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This study examines syllabic and morphological determinants of synonymic intrusions such as BEHORTMENT, an inadvertent combination of BEHAVIOR and DEPORTMENT. Statistical analyses of 133 synonymic intrusions in German suggested that syllables are composed of at least three subunits: segments (consonants and vowels), consonant clusters, and a subuni...
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Information theories of stuttering maintain that stuttering is associated with linguistic units which carry high information. Our independent variables were the frequency and transition probability of phonemes in initial positions of words and carefully constructed nonsense syllables. Our experimental controls involved phoneme position, type of pho...
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Homologous intrusions represent a frequent type of error in a task involving synchronous tapping with the fingers of both hands and reflect the incursion of one motor sequence on another in a manner resembling linguistic blends, such as EVOID, an inadvertent combination of EVADE and AVOID.
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Stress pre-entry is the occurrence, before it is due, of the stressed component in a series of rapidly produced movements. The phenomenon appeared in speech (experimentally produced spoonerisms) and in patterns of finger movement: serial-order errors were usually a stressed element entering before its time. The probability of serial-order errors wa...

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