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Full-Text Articles in Psychology
On The Disambiguation Of Meaning: The Effects Of Perceptual Focus And Cognitive Load, Lynne Kennette
On The Disambiguation Of Meaning: The Effects Of Perceptual Focus And Cognitive Load, Lynne Kennette
Wayne State University Dissertations
Most research supports a non-selective (or exhaustive) account of activation whereby multiple meanings of a word are initially activated (as discussed in Degani & Tokowicz, 2009). But what happens to the non-selected meaning of an ambigious word (e.g., bark) and how is the decision made to select one meaning over the other? A great deal research by Gernsbacher and colleagues suggests that the non-selected meaning is "discarded" via active suppression, but a competing activation-only account is also proposed by Gorfein's research group. The present dissertation examines meaning-selection in ambiguous words using a word to elicit meaning context (rather than a …
The Effect Of Musical Training On Verbal And Tonal Working Memory, Ching-I Lu
The Effect Of Musical Training On Verbal And Tonal Working Memory, Ching-I Lu
Wayne State University Dissertations
This dissertation explored the translation from print to sound of the tonal language Mandarin versus English versus musical notation in healthy volunteers. The performance of musicians and non-musicians was compared across a variety of reading tasks in an attempt to examine whether musical training can facilitate Mandarin tone or phonological processing. The effects of increasing working memory load on reading performance across tasks were also examined. Results showed that increasing demands on working memory in visual recognition tasks significantly decreased performance accuracy for both musicians and non-musicians across tasks. Significant differences in accuracy rates were observed between musicians and non-musicians. …