Marking multiple meanings: Salience and context effects.

Katz and Ferretti's, (Discourse Processes, 2003, 36, 19) pioneering paper was the first to address and systematically examine the role of marking (literally speaking, in a manner of speaking, proverbially speaking) during online processing of proverbs (see also Schwint et al., 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society Proceedings, 2006, 768). For Katz and colleagues, such markers function as introductory formulae, signaling to the addressee the intended interpretation of an incoming proverb. Inspired by their work, this paper explores the effects of marking, showing that some markers (literally, in the full sense of the word, double entendre, really) rather than disambiguating an ambiguous utterance, can allow for ambiguation (e.g., S/he is radiant, in the full sense of the word uttered in reference to a smiling person wearing sparkling clothes). Two offline questionnaire studies and one online reading task experiment, all conducted in Hebrew, test the Low-Salience Marking Hypothesis (Givoni, Low-salience marking, 2011; Givoni, Marking multiple meanings, 2020; Givoni, Journal of Pragmatics, 2013, 48, 29). Accordingly, such marking boosts low-salience meanings ("glittery", here the literal meaning) which are less-frequent, less-familiar, less-prototypical, and less-conventionalized (The Graded Salience Hypothesis, see Giora, Cognitive Linguistics, 1997, 8, 183; Giora, On our mind: Salience, context and figurative language, Oxford University Press, 2003; Givoni & Giora, Handbuch Pragmatik, J.B. Metzler, 2018). Marked utterances were embedded in contexts, strongly supportive of the salient meaning of the ambiguities ("happy", here the figurative meaning). Results support the Low-Salience Marking Hypothesis. They show preference for low-salience meanings as well as faster reading times of such meanings following low-salience marking relative to control conditions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Right visual-field advantage in the attentional blink: Asymmetry in attentional gating across time and space.

When two targets are presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), recognition of the second target (T2) is usually reduced when presented 150-500 ms after the first target, demonstrating an attentional blink (AB). Previous studies have shown a left visual-field (LVF) advantage in T2 recognition, when T2 was embedded in one of two streams, demanding top-down attention for its recognition. Here, we explored the impact of bottom-up saliency on spatial asymmetry in the AB. When T2 was spatially shifted outside from the RSVP, creating an abrupt onset of T2, right T2s showed a right visual-field (RVF) advantage. In lag-1 trials, right T2s were not only better recognized, but also showed a low T1-T2 order error rate. In contrast, recognized left T2s exhibited high order error rate. Without abrupt onset, symmetrical AB was found and order error rate was similarly low in both sides. Follow-up experiments showed that, while RVF advantage was related to bottom-up saliency, order errors were affected by T1 mask. The discrepancy between LVF and RVF advantage in the AB could be resolved in terms of two mechanisms of attentional gating: top-down attentional gating, which is biased towards LVF, and bottom-up attentional gating, which is biased towards RVF.

Lexical factors in conceptual processes: The relationship between semantic representations and their corresponding phonological and orthographic lexical forms.

To examine phonological and orthographic effects on semantic processing, the present study utilized a semantic task with nonverbal stimuli. In Experiment 1, Hebrew speakers were asked to decide whether 2 pictorial targets are semantically related or not. In Experiment 2, Hebrew speakers and non-Hebrew speakers were asked to rate the semantic relatedness of the same targets on a 5-point scale. Experiment 3 was identical to the first experiment except that the 2 pictures were presented simultaneously rather than sequentially. In all experiments, we compared responses to semantically unrelated pairs in 2 conditions: In the ambiguous condition, each pair represented 2 distinct meanings of an ambiguous Hebrew word. In the unambiguous condition, the first picture was replaced with an unambiguous control. To disentangle phonological and orthographic effects, three types of Hebrew ambiguous words were used: homonyms, homophones, and homographs. Ambiguous pairs were more difficult to be judged as semantically unrelated in comparison to their unambiguous controls. Moreover, while non-Hebrew speakers did not distinguish between the 2 lexical conditions, Hebrew speakers rated ambiguous pairs as significantly more related than their unambiguous controls. Importantly, in general, the ambiguity effect was stronger for homonyms, where both lexical forms are shared, than for either homophones or homographs, which are only phonologically or orthographically related. Thus, consistent with interactive "triangle" models, the results suggest that (a) conceptual-semantic representations automatically activate both their corresponding phonological and orthographic lexical forms, and (b) these lexical forms, once activated, may in turn affect semantic-conceptual processes via feedback connections.

Neural correlates of auditory repetition priming: reduced fMRI activation in the auditory cortex.

Repetition priming refers to enhanced or biased performance with repeatedly presented stimuli. Modality-specific perceptual repetition priming has been demonstrated behaviorally for both visually and auditorily presented stimuli. In functional neuroimaging studies, repetition of visual stimuli has resulted in reduced activation in the visual cortex, as well as in multimodal frontal and temporal regions. The reductions in sensory cortices are thought to reflect plasticity in modality-specific neocortex. Unexpectedly, repetition of auditory stimuli has resulted in reduced activation in multimodal and visual regions, but not in the auditory temporal lobe cortex. This finding puts the coupling of perceptual priming and modality-specific cortical plasticity into question. Here, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used with environmental sounds to reexamine whether auditory priming is associated with reduced activation in the auditory cortex. Participants heard environmental sounds (e.g., animals, machines, musical instruments, etc.) in blocks, alternating between initial and repeated presentations, and decided whether or not each sound was produced by an animal. Repeated versus initial presentations of sounds resulted in repetition priming (faster responses) and reduced activation in the right superior temporal gyrus, bilateral superior temporal sulci, and right inferior prefrontal cortex. The magnitude of behavioral priming correlated positively with reduced activation in these regions. This indicates that priming for environmental sounds is associated with modification of neural activation in modality-specific auditory cortex, as well as in multimodal areas.

The origins of levels-of-processing effects in a conceptual test: evidence for automatic influences of memory from the process-dissociation procedure.

In three experiments, we explored automatic influences of memory in a conceptual memory task, as affected by a levels-of-processing (LoP) manipulation. We also explored the origins of the LoP effect by examining whether the effect emerged only when participants in the shallow condition truncated the perceptual processing (the lexical-processing hypothesis) or even when the entire word was encoded in this condition (the conceptual-processing hypothesis). Using the process-dissociation procedure and an implicit association-generation task, we found that the deep encoding condition yielded higher estimates of automatic influences than the shallow condition. In support of the conceptual processing hypothesis, the LoP effect was found even when the shallow task did not lead to truncated processing of the lexical units. We suggest that encoding for meaning is a prerequisite for automatic processing on conceptual tests of memory.