scholarly journals On the time it takes to judge grammaticality

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (9) ◽  
pp. 1460-1465 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Mirault ◽  
Jonathan Grainger

The presentation duration of five-word sequences was varied and participants were asked to judge their grammaticality. The five-word sequences were presented for a variable duration randomly selected between 50 and 500 ms with 50-ms steps and were immediately followed by a masking stimulus. Half of the sequences were correct sentences which were randomly intermixed with ungrammatical sequences formed of the same words in scrambled order. We measured the proportion of correct responses for each presentation duration in the grammatical and ungrammatical conditions, and calculated sensitivity and bias from these measures. Both the sensitivity measure ( d′) and the probability correct responses to grammatical and ungrammatical sequences increased as the stimulus duration increased, with a d′ of 2 and an average percent correct close to 87% for the grammatical sequences already attained at 300 ms. The rate of increase in performance diminished beyond 300 ms. Grammatical decision times were faster and more accurate for the grammatically correct sequences, thus indicating that participants were not responding by detecting illegal word combinations in the ungrammatical sequences. On the basis of these findings, we provide an upper estimate of 300 ms as the time it takes to access reliable syntactic information from five-word sequences in French, and we discuss the implications of this constraint for models of reading.

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-274
Author(s):  
Arne D. Teigland ◽  
Wesley R. Wilson

Five adult subjects with normal hearing and vision viewed tachistoscopically projected photographs of a talker uttering six phonemes. Experiment 1 determined discrimination of the visemes as a function of exposure duration (12–14 msec) and demonstrated that recognition of certain lip postures was a direct function of duration whereas for other postures duration appeared to interact with other variables. In Experiment 2, fixed duration stimuli (17 msec) were followed immediately by a variable duration masking stimulus (12–45 msec), and in Experiment 3 the test stimuli varied (22—52 msec) and the masking stimulus was fixed (45 reset). Results showed that under both conditions test stimuli were masked when the masker was at least as long as the test stimuli. In Experiment 4, the test stimuli and masking stimulus were held constant (15 msec and 45 msec, respectively) while a variable (7—37 msec) ISI was interposed. Delaying the masker did not improve recognition scores. Conclusions were (a) lip postures are subject to backward recognition masking and the effect varies in degree; (b) the processing of lip postures begins with a short-term storage of the posture; and (c) the initial stage of perceptual processing requires more than 37 msec. To the extent that this task parallels the speechreading process, the results would not support training procedures based at the level of single visemes.


Perception ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinya Harada ◽  
Hiroyuki Mitsudo

Slant contrast refers to a stereoscopic phenomenon in which the perceived slant of a test object is affected by the disparity of a surrounding inducer object. Slant contrast has been proposed to involve cue conflict, but it is unclear whether this idea is useful in explaining slant contrast at short stimulus presentations (<1 s). We measured both slant contrast and perceived inducer slant while varying the presentation duration (100–800 ms) of stereograms with several spatial configurations. In three psychophysical experiments, we found that (a) both slant contrast and perceived inducer slant increased as a function of stimulus duration, and (b) slant contrast was relatively stable across different test and inducer shapes at each short stimulus duration, whereas perceived inducer slant increased when cue conflict was reduced. These results suggest that at brief, not long stimulus presentations, the cue conflict between disparity and perspective plays a smaller role in slant contrast than other depth cues.


2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (11) ◽  
pp. 2221-2230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Muncer ◽  
David C. Knight

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in various word processing tasks. It has, however, been suggested that syllable effects may be caused by orthographic redundancy. In particular, it has been proposed that the presence of bigram troughs at syllable boundaries cause what are seen as syllable effects. We investigated the bigram trough hypothesis as an explanation of the number of syllables effect for lexical decision in five-letter words and nonwords from the British Lexicon Project. The number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times along with word frequency and orthographic similarity. The presence of a bigram trough did not. For nonwords, the number of syllables made a significant contribution to prediction of lexical decision times only for nonwords with relatively long decision times. The presence of a bigram trough made no contribution. The evidence presented suggests that the bigram trough cannot be an explanation of the syllable number effect in lexical decision. A comparison of the results from words and nonwords is interpreted as providing some support for dual-route models of reading.


Author(s):  
Alicja Urbaniak ◽  
Anna Skarpańska-Stejnborn

Abstract. The aim of the study was to review recent findings on the use of POM supplements in athletes of various disciplines and physically active participants. Eleven articles published between 2010 and 2018 were included, where the total number of investigated subjects was 176. Male participants constituted the majority of the group (n = 155), as compared to females (n = 21). 45% of research described was conducted on athletes, whereas the remaining studies were based on highly active participants. Randomised, crossover, double-blind study designs constituted the majority of the experimental designs used. POM supplementation varied in terms of form (pills/juice), dosage (50 ml–500 ml) and time of intervention (7 days–2 months) between studies. Among the reviewed articles, POM supplementation had an effect on the improvement of the following: whole body strength; feeling of vitality; acute and delayed muscle fatigue and soreness; increase in vessel diameter; blood flow and serum level of TAC; reduction in the rate of increase for HR, SBP, CK and LDH; support in the recovery of post-training CK, LDH, CRP and ASAT to their baseline levels; reduction of MMP2, MMP9, hsCRP and MDA; and increased activity of antioxidant enzymes (glutathione peroxidase and superoxide dismutase). In the majority of reviewed articles POM supplementation had a positive effect on a variety of parameters studied and the authors recommended it as a supplement for athletes and physically active bodies.


Author(s):  
Štěpán Bahník

Abstract. Processing fluency, a metacognitive feeling of ease of cognitive processing, serves as a cue in various types of judgments. Processing fluency is sometimes evaluated by response times, with shorter response times indicating higher fluency. The present study examined existence of the opposite association; that is, it tested whether disfluency may lead to faster decision times when it serves as a strong cue in judgment. Retrieval fluency was manipulated in an experiment using previous presentation and phonological fluency by varying pronounceability of pseudowords. Participants liked easy-to-pronounce and previously presented words more. Importantly, their decisions were faster for hard-to-pronounce and easy-to-pronounce pseudowords than for pseudowords moderate in pronounceability. The results thus showed an inverted-U shaped relationship between fluency and decision times. The findings suggest that disfluency can lead to faster decision times and thus demonstrate the importance of separating different processes comprising judgment when response times are used as a measure of processing fluency.


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