Greek Nonword Reading
2009/09/05 at 7:39 pm | In Cognition, Research | Leave a CommentThis presentation deeply connects with the orthography-to-phonology correspondence issue which has been broadly investigaged in English literatures but infrequently cared in the other lanaguages. Protopapas was interested in a graphophonemic case of Greek, his native language, that might be stored as a form of cateograical rule in Greek readers’ mind. In addition to 95% of feedforward consistent graphophonemic correspondences, the /i/ in the syllable strucute CiV could be pronunceable or read palatally. Protopapas attempt to confirm wheather the the pronunciation of nonwords reflect the regular rules compromised the real words. This observation would be evident when the nonwords were generally pronunced as /i/ or palatal in consideration of the neighborhood aspects. In the final part, they failed to isolate the regular reading of CiV words and proposed an argument to rethink the theoretical implications of DRC model.
In Protopapas’ corpus survey, there are 79,825 CiV words (by type and by token) which could be pronunced /i/ or palatal. Because it is impossible to figure out which pronunciation pattern is “regular”, he decide the major pronuciation type of a CiV sequence by the type and token frequency (2:1). The principle of DRC would predict both kinds of pronuciations would be the “regular reading” of CiV words: the reading pattern will be consistent with the default pronunciation of source words or the majority pronunciation. His study firstly classifies the CiV words into four groups according to the source words pronunciation ( /i/ or palatal) and the group majority pronuciation (/i/ versus palatal). Then ecah word generates two pronunceable nonwords: one had one letter modified and the other had several letters modified (In his presented case, the letter sequence mapping CiV keeps contant). Therefore, the final stimuli list had 8 groups of 20 nonwords and 40 unrecognizable nonwords from the CiV words without clear major pronunciation pattern (conflict between type and token).
The primary results are the response rates of /i/ for these critical nonwords. The analysis showed no effect of the number of replaced letters, but this factor interact with the other two factors. For the nonwords similar to the source words, the response rate of /i/ is related to the source word pronunciation rather than the group majority pronunciation. However, this tendency was reversed for the nonwords dissimilar to the source words. This means that the pronuncing Greek words may have no determinatic influence from the GPC rules.
I leave three questions and comments for his study:
Q1: why did not he analyze the effect of source word frequency? Is that because the error rates are the only data for his analysis?
Q2: Their analysis focused on the pronunciation of /i/. Did they consider the consistency between the pronunciation pattern and the source word pronunciation?
Q3: Reaction times of reading these nonwords have no difference among these conditions. Why did not they design an experiment for the source words? This may offer a clear picture for their interpretation.
This study also generate some ideas I can test in the Chinese study:
1. The tendency to read nonwords aloud might rely on the clearest orthography-phonology mapping aspects embedded in the word forms.
2. There will be a solid argument about nonword reading if we have a acceptable findings about real words reading.
3. The theoretical thinking of Chinese character reading should consider the aspects about the phonetics.
Thought in Amsterdam
2009/08/04 at 11:09 am | In Cognition, Thought | Leave a CommentAttending a conference for me is like a mid-term exam, a supply, and a oppotunity to realize who I am. This is my third time I attend CogSci, and its variate approaches has been a normal status for me. The cross-disciplines research approach under “cognition” will generate a variate of research topics in this generation. Being a cognitive scientist must remain this in mind seconds and hours. I also break the root caused my frustration in these months.
The university where I am working is a Buddist university which is built on the medical shcool but is unfamilier with the trend of cogntive science. My arrivial is their first time to open a window for this campus to understand what are the cognitive scientists are thinking on this world. These months I found a mistake I had made since I was applied: I am eager to build my lab and push students toward the core of my research. Most people here are blank paper to the cognitive science which is working to speculate human mind in several sophiscated ways to connect the behavioral data and abstract models. Psychologists have took 100 years develop a standard psycho lab working for this goal. I have take more paitient help the people here to realize the trend of cognitive science have came to them. Putting this goal upon the other personnal research plans will help me expand the space in this campus and whole east Taiwan.
I identy myself a psychologist who criticize each issue according to the connections between the theories and the collected experimental data. This is why only three spoken presentations impressed me in the venue. First is Athanassios Protopapas’ Greek nonword reading, and he is the author of CheckVocal. He has attempted to verify if the orthography-to-phonology rules dominates the behavior of reading Greek nonwords, because almost Greek words are consistent in mapping relations. He assumed the Greek readers will pronunce the nonword by rule if the grapheme-phoneme conversion is the matter. Although I have not realized his detail at this moment, he concluded more alternative factors, such as the neighborhood size, decide the experimental results as well. I am fortune had a talk with him before the end of the conference, and I guess he will be a factor when the day the the Chinese case come to the researchers who care the general othrogray-to-phonology issue.
Seidenberg’s crew brought the second impressed presentation about the inspection of matro behavioral reserach, like ELP. I also made a small test like them: to replicate one published study in terms of factorial design. Like their “virtual experiments” show, no experiments could be perfectly “replicated” by any known behavioral database. Task circumstance should be the matter because every reseracher had the specific arrangement of stimuli list, presentation and response procedure, and the instruction, etc. Their work could be a feedback to the pessimistic view of Balota: the factorial design still has its contribution to theories building.
The third one brought by Laurie Feldman wake my “psychonomic” sense up. She puts her focus on the affection of speaker’s accent on the reader’s/participant’s visual reading. Reasonably she compared three groups of participsnts from the US, Japan, and China. All of her participants read English target words after the aditory primes presented in the accent of native language (for participants) or in the accent of second language. If the accent affects the participants lexical processing, the participants will show more interference when they hear the accent of second langauge. Her data show more interference occured to the American participants compared to the Japaness and Chinese participants. Based on this trend, I asked her immediately if she controlled the experience of living with second lanague for each group of participants. She admitted she did not and will think more problem behid this control. Furthermore, I assume the phonological neighbors accross languages would be the matter of this issue.
Among the book salesmen/women, I huntted three books being helpful for my current status: “Cognitive and cultural influences on eye movements” edited by Keith Rayner et al., “Clear and to the point: 8 psychological principles for compelling PowerPoint presentations” wrote by Stephen Kosslyn, and “LOT2″ worte by Jerry Fodor. Rayner’s articles will establish a plot of eyemovement studies in my mind. Kosslyn’s book is helpful to my poor skill of presentation. Jerry Fodor’s new book updates my knowledge about the debate about concepts among researchers. There will cost me much of time to comprehend and refresh my realization of the recent cognitive science. This is the original motivation I want to learn from congitive scientists: a continuous upgrading research individual and group depending on the open attitude to emerge any benefitial perspectives for the investigation of human mind.
After Inaugural Day
2009/01/24 at 8:48 pm | In Cognition, Psychologist, Research, Thought | Leave a CommentJanuary, 20, 2009 is a day remarked the coming of new era for the American people. This year I also experienced the change within the research society I am contacting. At the day after the inaugural day, the top science journal “Nature” published a paper that will challenge the basic assumption accepted by every researchers depending on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dr. Sirotin and Dr. Das proposed the evidence that, in addition to the neural activity, a novel preparatory mechanism in the primates brain bring additional change to blood volume. I wonder the respond of my friends using fMRI as their research responds to this study. This news, in my opinion, is not totally bed for the future of cognitive neuroscience. This is the other opportunity for us to admit the complicated nature of the brain and to think of the bold but naive intention to build the link between brain and mind. The novel mechanism revealed by this study might be a caution for the optimistic views of building the link between behavior and brain function without sufficient understanding of behavioral facts.
The other change I am watching is the raising of the new perspective to the psycholinguists’ analytic tools. In the psycholinguistic studies, the generality of the empirical evidence is constrained by the variation of participants’ performance and the variation of stimuli property. For a group of stimuli with the same property according to a experimental definition, each stimuli usually generate a random effect within a wide variation. This situation increases the difficulty to conclude the effect of stimuli property based on the collected data. For a very long time, psycholinguists like to use by-item analysis for the confirmation of the observed effects. With the thousands of data accumulated, more and more psycholinguists have a thought if this analytic tool is really helpful to make conclusions. We might be expanding the frontier with an inaccurate compass. Keeping this awareness is what we should take care hour and hour in doing the psycholinguistic studies. Further reading about this issue is in the last volume of journal of memory and language, 2008.
New eye to see language
2008/12/11 at 10:30 am | In Cognition, Language, Research, Thought | Leave a CommentLike the color of hairs or the allergy to special substance, language is suggested to be a genetic mechanism created by a long evoluation process. This concept is the agreement for many scientific disciplines that explore human nature being able to communicate with language. As Marc Hauser and Thomas Bever emphasize, human neural system make us learn and use our knowledge of language seperated from the other abilities to communicate. This biological aspect of language surrounds the rules and constraints constituenting a mature individual’s knolwedge of language. All paricipanted scientific disciplines have the tasks to understand the acquisition and the mediation mechanism of these rules and constraints, to isolate the parts sharing with other animals, to trace their evolucation process, and to ask the usage of the knowledge in communicative expression. Hauser and Bever listed some study cases towarding these goals, but there is a far distance because each discipline has to break its boundary before connect with each other.
Take the issue of lexical processing I participant in as an example, there are many interesting topics waiting our investigations. Our goal is to illustrate the temporal relation between the lexical property of words and the reading performance. A pressumption under this goal is that our knowledge of language underlying the processing decides the temporal relation. The known temporal relations just cover parts of rules and constraints identified by linguistists. One reason restricting us to look at a few temporal relation is the structure of exerpimental design. An observed effect on the performance needs an appropriate fit among variables, and the serach of such an effect usually costs a series of experiments. We have broad image to connect our findings and other disciplines, but we have a extraordinary patient to accumulate the knowledge till the break of boundry. After all, the undating of scientific knolwedge is a slow process which most people are hard to understand in their daily life.
Vaule of one word
2008/11/12 at 12:00 am | In Cognition, Language, Thought | 2 Comments“Cultural evoluation has shown us that one word can be worth a thousand genes.” This is the close setnence of the article on Nature 456:7218 that Szathmary and Szamado proposed. Thie title of this article is “Language: a social history of words“. This article beginnes from the common sense ‘ language as communication tool for socialized human being’, and emphasizes the history of language evoluation as long as the development of human societies. This notion leads toward the authors’ main point about the evoluation of human being: every cognitive trait of a human being depends on with each other. They list some cross-discipline studies to demonstrate the involvement of genes in the acquirement of cognitive traits. In the final part of this article , they propose some challenges to ‘Swiss army knife’ view assuming that the brain function underpinning language is independent of the others supporting the other cognitive traits. Research of language impairment has shown that, instead of “specific capicities”, the “intermediate capicities” are the results of evolution after generations of sperad and mutation.
I would say this is a fanstinatic concept to every one. This notion raise from the summarized knowledge of psychological and genetic research. The concern about human society in this article is a point engaging this thinking. In my reasoning, This concept combine the sides of micro-scope research such as psychology and genetics and macro-scope research such as sociology and anthropology. The empirical research they mentioned figure out that they emphasized the side of micro-scope than the side of macro-scope. Indeed, their conclusion is ambitious, but there is a big distance we have not pass if we have a firm empirical fundemental.
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