Karin R Humphreys

• Ph.D
• McMaster University

Psycholinguistic and metacognition researchers mostly disagree on what constitutes a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state. Psycholinguists argue that TOT states occur when there is a transmission of activation failure between the lemma and phonology levels of word production (e.g., Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991). Metacognition researchers argue th...

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 process...

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...

Objective The present study examined whether medical terminology impacts self-triage decisions (deciding if and when to seek medical treatment) compared to lay terminology.Methods Undergraduate psychology student participants read 32 hypothetical health scenarios and reported how urgently they would seek care [“In this situation, when would you see...

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...

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...

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This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the cont...

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 replicat...

We made quantitative rhythmic and timing measurements on speech samples obtained a 61 year-old monolingual female En-glish speaker who is reported to have required a rare but possi-ble case of Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS). The phonetic char-acteristics of speech produced by individuals with FAS affects both suprasegmental and segmental properties....

A study showing a detailed phonetic analyses of a 61 year-old monolingual female English speaker is presented. There is considerable variability among reported cases of FAS in terms of phonetic characteristics and impairments. The speaker, LA, is a monolingual English-speaking Canadian Woman and she was 61-year old when the data were collected. One...

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...

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. Pi...

Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a rare acquired syndrome following stroke, manifesting as a perceived change in the speaker's accent. We present acoustic-phonetic analyses of the speech of a patient, RD, with FAS presenting as an apparent accent shift from Southern Ontarian to Atlantic Canadian who was first described in Naidoo, Warriner, Oczkowsk...

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 spe...

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 pla...

Self-triage, or the decision if and when to seek medical care is crucial, but also intrinsically difficult. The current study evaluates how the presence of competing diagnoses with differing severities influences participants' likelihood of seeking care. Participants were healthy undergraduate students from McMaster University. In a within-subjects...

Accurate self-triage is important for both the individual’s health, and the efficacy and efficiency of the health care system. Ambiguity and partial information from sources of questionable fidelity may contribute to the difficulties laypersons experience in making care-seeking decisions. The role of certainty in diagnostic information was investig...

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 patie...

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 repea...

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 ra...

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 disor...

British and American speakers exhibit different verb number agreement patterns when sentence subjects have collective head nouns. From linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of how agreement is implemented, three alternative hypotheses can be derived to explain these differences. The hypotheses involve variations in the representation of notional...

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...

When one word replaces another in a speech error, the two words predominantly share syntactic category membership; this is the syntactic category constraint. Stem exchanges like “trucked the park” appear to violate this constraint, implying either that morphological representations do not include syntactic category information (e.g., Garrett, 1975)...