Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Universal Features In Phonological Neighbor Networks, Kevin S. Brown, Paul D. Allopenna, William R. Hunt, Rachael Steiner, Elliot Saltzman, Ken Mcrae, James S. Magnuson Jul 2018

Universal Features In Phonological Neighbor Networks, Kevin S. Brown, Paul D. Allopenna, William R. Hunt, Rachael Steiner, Elliot Saltzman, Ken Mcrae, James S. Magnuson

Psychology Publications

Human speech perception involves transforming a countinuous acoustic signal into discrete linguistically meaningful units (phonemes) while simultaneously causing a listener to activate words that are similar to the spoken utterance and to each other. The Neighborhood Activation Model posits that phonological neighbors (two forms [words] that differ by one phoneme) compete significantly for recognition as a spoken word is heard. This definition of phonological similarity can be extended to an entire corpus of forms to produce a phonological neighbor network (PNN). We study PNNs for five languages: English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and German. Consistent with previous work, we find that …


Abstract Concepts And Pictures Of Real-World Situations Activate One Another., Ken Mcrae, Daniel Nedjadrasul, Raymond Pau, Bethany Pui-Hei Lo, Lisa King Jul 2018

Abstract Concepts And Pictures Of Real-World Situations Activate One Another., Ken Mcrae, Daniel Nedjadrasul, Raymond Pau, Bethany Pui-Hei Lo, Lisa King

Psychology Publications

Abstract concepts typically are defined in terms of lacking physical or perceptual referents. We argue instead that they are not devoid of perceptual information because knowledge of real-world situations is an important component of learning and using many abstract concepts. Although the relationship between perceptual information and abstract concepts is less straightforward than for concrete concepts, situation-based perceptual knowledge is part of many abstract concepts. In Experiment 1, participants made lexical decisions to abstract words that were preceded by related and unrelated pictures of situations. For example, share was preceded by a picture of two girls sharing a cob of …