Taboo language across the globe: A multi-lab study.

The use of taboo words represents one of the most common and arguably universal linguistic behaviors, fulfilling a wide range of psychological and social functions. However, in the scientific literature, taboo language is poorly characterized, and how it is realized in different languages and populations remains largely unexplored. Here we provide a database of taboo words, collected from different linguistic communities (Study 1, N = 1046), along with their speaker-centered semantic characterization (Study 2, N = 455 for each of six rating dimensions), covering 13 languages and 17 countries from all five permanently inhabited continents. Our results show that, in all languages, taboo words are mainly characterized by extremely low valence and high arousal, and very low written frequency. However, a significant amount of cross-country variability in words' tabooness and offensiveness proves the importance of community-specific sociocultural knowledge in the study of taboo language.

Mirror letter priming is rightward-biased but not inhibitory: Little evidence for a mirror suppression mechanism in the recognition of mirror letters.

Unlike other visual objects which are invariant to the left-right orientation, mirror letters (e.g., b and d) represent different object identities. Previous masked priming lexical decision studies have suggested that the identification of a mirror letter involves suppression of its mirror image counterpart reporting as evidence that a pseudoword prime containing the mirror letter counterpart slowed down the recognition of target word relative to a control prime containing an unrelated letter (e.g., ibea-idea > ilea-idea). Furthermore, it has been reported recently that this inhibitory mirror priming effect is sensitive to the distributional bias of left/right orientation in the Latin alphabet such that only the more dominant (frequent) right-facing mirror letter prime (e.g., b) produced interference. In the present study, we examined mirror letter priming with single letters and nonlexical letter strings with adult readers. In all experiments, relative to a visually dissimilar control letter prime, both the right-facing and left-facing mirror letter prime consistently facilitated, rather than slowed down the recognition of a target letter (e.g., b-d < w-d). Assessed against an identity prime, mirror primes showed a rightward bias, although it was small in magnitude and not always significant within an individual experiment. These results provide no support for a mirror suppression mechanism in the identification of mirror letters, and an alternative interpretation in terms of noisy perception is suggested. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Diacritic priming in novice readers of diacritics.

Recent masked priming studies investigating the recognition of letters with diacritics with native readers of the script have consistently yielded an asymmetric pattern of priming such that a base-letter prime without the diacritic speeds up the recognition of the letter with a diacritic almost as much as an identity prime, but not vice versa (e.g., á-Á ≦ a-Á, but a-A ≪á-A). Here we tested English readers unfamiliar with diacritics in a letter match task using Japanese kana and the vowel letters of the Latin alphabet, and found the asymmetry was reduced to a negligible level (á-Á ≦ a-Á, and a-A ≦ á-A) (Experiments 1 and 2). However, the diacritic novices showed the asymmetric pattern of priming like the diacritic experts when the task condition explicitly required the letters with and without diacritics to be distinguished (Experiments 3 and 4). These results are explained in terms of how expertise moderates an early letter identification process in interpreting a visual feature as noise, or a signal diagnostic of letter identity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Some neighbors are more interfering: Asymmetric priming by stroke neighbors in Chinese character recognition.

Chinese is a visually complex logographic script that consists of square-shaped characters, with each character composed of strokes. Previous masked priming studies using single-character Chinese stroke neighbors (i.e., visually similar characters differing in only one or two strokes, e.g., /) have shown facilitatory or inhibitory priming effects. We tested whether the mixed pattern of stroke neighbor priming might be an instance of asymmetry in priming that has been observed previously with Japanese kana and Latin alphabets. Specifically, a prime lacking a stroke (or line segment) that is present in the target speeds up the recognition of its stroke neighbor almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., - = -), but not the converse (e.g., - >> -). Two experiments, one using a character match task and the second using lexical decision, showed a robust asymmetry in priming by stroke neighbors. The results suggest that the early letter identification process is similar across script types, as anticipated by the Noisy Channel model, which regards the first stage of visual word recognition as a language-universal perceptual process.

Reduced Activity of Protein S in Plasma: A Risk Factor for Venous Thromboembolism in the Japanese Population.

The quantitative assay of protein S can help in rapidly identifying carriers of abnormal protein S molecules through a simple procedure (by determining the total protein S mass, total protein S activity, and protein S-specific activity in blood), without genetic testing. To clarify the relationship between venous thromboembolism (VTE) and protein S-specific activity, and its role in the diagnosis of thrombosis in Japanese persons, the protein S-specific activity was measured and compared between patients with thrombosis and healthy individuals. The protein S-specific activity of each participant was calculated from the ratio of total protein S activity to total protein S antigen level. Plasma samples were collected from 133 healthy individuals, 57 patients with venous thrombosis, 118 patients with arterial thrombosis, and 185 non-thrombotic patients. The protein S-specific activity of one-third of the patients with VTE was below the line of Y = 0.85X (-2 S.D.). Most protein S activities in the plasma of non-thrombotic patients were near the Y = X line, as observed in healthy individuals. In conclusion, it was clearly shown that monitoring protein S activity and protein S-specific activity in blood is useful for predicting the onset and preventing venous thrombosis in at least the Japanese population.

Letter identity and visual similarity in the processing of diacritic letters.

Are letters with a diacritic (e.g., â) recognized as a variant of the base letter (e.g., a), or as a separate letter identity? Two recent masked priming studies, one in French and one in Spanish, investigated this question, concluding that this depends on the language-specific linguistic function served by the diacritic. Experiment 1 tested this linguistic function hypothesis using Japanese kana, in which diacritics signal consonant voicing, and like French and unlike Spanish, provide lexical contrast. Contrary to the hypothesis, Japanese kana yielded the pattern of diacritic priming like Spanish. Specifically, for a target kana with a diacritic (e.g., ガ, /ga/), the kana prime without the diacritic (e.g., カ, /ka/) facilitated recognition almost as much as the identity prime (e.g., ガ-ガ = カ-ガ), whereas for a target kana without a diacritic, the kana prime with the diacritic produced less facilitation than the identity prime (e.g., カ-カ < ガ-カ). We suggest that the pattern of diacritic priming has little to do with linguistic function, and instead it stems from a general property of visual object recognition. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis using visually similar letters of the Latin alphabet that differ in the presence/absence of a visual feature (e.g., O and Q). The same asymmetry in priming was observed. These findings are consistent with the noisy channel model of letter/word recognition (Norris & Kinoshita, Psychological Review, 119, 517-545, 2012a).

Phonological encoding is free from orthographic influence: evidence from a picture variant of the phonological Stroop task.

The phonological Stroop task, in which the participant names the color of written distractors, is being used increasingly to study the phonological encoding process in speech production. A brief review of experimental paradigms used to study the phonological encoding process indicated that currently it is not known whether the onset overlap benefit (faster color naming when the distractor shares the onset segment with the color name) in a phonological Stroop task is due to phonology or orthography. The present paper investigated this question using a picture variant of the phonological Stroop task. Participants named a small set of line drawings of animals (e.g., camel) with a pseudoword distractor printed on it. Picture naming was facilitated when the distractor shared the onset segment with the picture name regardless of orthographic overlap (CUST-camel = KUST-camel < NUST-camel). We conclude that the picture variant of the phonological Stroop task is a useful tool to study the phonological encoding process, free of orthographic influence.

The proximate unit in Korean speech production: Phoneme or syllable?

We investigated the "proximate unit" in Korean, that is, the initial phonological unit selected in speech production by Korean speakers. Previous studies have shown mixed evidence indicating either a phoneme-sized or a syllable-sized unit. We conducted two experiments in which participants named pictures while ignoring superimposed non-words. In English, for this task, when the picture (e.g., dog) and distractor phonology (e.g., dark) initially overlap, typically the picture target is named faster. We used a range of conditions (in Korean) varying from onset overlap to syllabic overlap, and the results indicated an important role for the syllable, but not the phoneme. We suggest that the basic unit used in phonological encoding in Korean is different from Germanic languages such as English and Dutch and also from Japanese and possibly also Chinese. Models dealing with the architecture of language production can use these results when providing a framework suitable for all languages in the world, including Korean.

Phonological encoding in the oral but not manual Stroop task: Evidence for the role of a speech production process.

The present study investigated how response mode (oral vs. manual) modulates the Stroop effect using a picture variant of the Stroop task in which participants named orally, or identified with a manual keypress, line drawings of animals (e.g., camel). Consistent with previous color-response Stroop studies, relative to the nonlinguistic neutral distractor (a row of "#" symbols), incongruent distractors (e.g., GIRAFFE) interfered with responding to pictures, and that interference was reduced for the manual, compared with the oral, response. Additionally, pseudoword distractors with no phonological overlap with the picture name (e.g., NUST-camel) interfered with the oral, but not the manual, response. The novel finding is that relative to this pseudoword distractor, the oral response was facilitated when the distractor shared the onset segment with the picture name, regardless of orthographic overlap (e.g., CUST-camel = KUST-camel < NUST-camel); in contrast, for the manual response, there was no difference between the three pseudoword distractor conditions. These results are explained in terms of phonological encoding, a speech production process involved in computing a phonetic plan for generating an oral, but not a manual, response. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

On recognizing Japanese katakana words: Explaining the reduced priming with hiragana and mixed-kana identity primes.

The Japanese kana syllabary has 2 allographic forms, hiragana and katakana. As with other allographic variants like the uppercase and lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet, they show robust form-independent priming effects in the allograph match task (e.g., Kinoshita, Schubert, & Verdonschot, 2019), suggesting that they share abstract character-level representations. In direct contradiction, Perea, Nakayama, and Lupker (2017) argued that hiragana and katakana do not share character-level representations, based on their finding of reduced priming with identity prime containing a mix of hiragana and katakana (the mixed-kana prime) relative to the all-katakana identity prime in a lexical-decision task with loanword targets written in katakana. Here we sought to reconcile these seemingly contradictory claims, using mixed-kana, hiragana, and katakana primes in lexical decision. The mixed-kana prime and hiragana prime produced priming effects that are indistinguishable, and both were reduced in size relative to the priming effect produced by the katakana identity prime. Furthermore, this pattern was unchanged when the target was presented in hiragana. The findings are interpreted in terms of the assumption that the katakana format is specified in the orthographic representation of loanwords in Japanese readers. Implications of the account for the universality across writing systems is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

No Negative Priming Effect in the Manual Stroop Task.

The negative priming effect is an increase in interference when the response to the target on the current trial corresponds to the response to the distractor word on a preceding trial. Contrary to the commonly held belief that the negative priming effect is ubiquitous in the Stroop task, in the original study by Neill (1977), negative priming was found only in the oral, and not the manual Stroop task. The present paper makes three empirical observations. First, we replicate the discrepancy in the finding of the negative priming effect in the oral versus manual Stroop tasks tested under identical conditions, where response mode could be the only the causal factor. Second, we point out that previous manual Stroop experiments reporting the negative priming effect confounded the effect of response repetition. Third, we report the analysis of the negative priming effect at the level of whole RT distribution, which revealed that the effect was absent throughout the RT distribution in the manual task, and it was of constant size across the RT distribution in the oral task. Implications of the results for conflict control in the Stroop task is discussed.

Transposed letter priming effects and allographic variation in Arabic: Insights from lexical decision and the same-different task.

Reading is resilient to distortion of letter order within a word. This is evidenced in the "transposed-letter (TL) priming effect," the finding that a prime generated by transposing adjacent letters in a word (e.g., jugde) facilitates recognition of the base word (e.g., JUDGE), more than a "substituted-letter" control prime in which the transposed letters are replaced by unrelated letters (e.g., junpe -JUDGE). The TL priming effect is well documented for European languages that are written using the Roman alphabet. Unlike these languages, Arabic has a unique position-dependent allography whereby some letters change shape according to their position within a word. We investigate the TL priming effect using a lexical decision (Experiment 1) and a same-different match task with Arabic words (Experiment 2) and nonwords (Experiment 3). No TL priming effects were found in Experiment 1, suggesting that the lexical-decision task engages lexical access processes that are sensitive to the Semitic nonlinear morphological structure. Experiments 2 and 3 revealed a robust TL priming effect overall. Nonallographic TL primes produced significantly larger facilitation than allographic TL primes, indicating that Arabic readers use allographic variation to resolve the uncertainty in letter order during the early stages of orthographic processing. The implication of these results for current letter position coding models is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Allograph priming is based on abstract letter identities: Evidence from Japanese kana.

It is well-established that allographs like the uppercase and lowercase forms of the Roman alphabet (e.g., a and A) map onto the same "abstract letter identity," orthographic representations that are independent of the visual form. Consistent with this, in the allograph match task ("Are 'a' and 'A' the same letter?"), priming by a masked letter prime is equally robust for visually dissimilar prime-target pairs (e.g., d and D) and similar pairs (e.g., c and C). However, in principle this pattern of priming is also consistent with the possibility that allograph priming is purely phonological, based on the letter name. Because different allographic forms of the same letter, by definition, share a letter name, it is impossible to rule out this possibility a priori. In the present study, we investigated the influence of shared letter names by taking advantage of the fact that Japanese is written in two distinct writing systems, syllabic kana-that has two parallel forms, hiragana and katakana-and logographic kanji. Using the allograph match task, we tested whether a kanji prime with the same pronunciation as the target kana (e.g., - い, both pronounced /i/) produces the same amount of priming as a kana prime in the opposite kana form (e.g., イ- い). We found that the kana primes produced substantially greater priming than the phonologically identical kanji prime, which we take as evidence that allograph priming is based on abstract kana identity, not purely phonology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Orthographic and phonological priming effects in the same-different task.

Masked priming tasks have been used widely to study early orthographic processes-the coding of letter position and letter identity. Recently, using masked priming in the same-different task Lupker, Nakayama, and Perea (2015a) reported finding a phonological priming effect with primes presented in Japanese Katakana, and English target words presented in the Roman alphabet, and based on this finding, suggested that previously reported effects in the same-different task in the literature could be based on phonology rather than orthography. In this article, the authors explain why the design of Lupker et al.'s experiment does not address this question; they then report 2 new experiments that do. The results indicate that the priming produced by orthographically similar primes in the same-different task for letter strings presented in the Roman alphabet is almost exclusively orthographic in origin, and phonology makes little contribution. The authors offer an explanation for why phonological priming was observed when the prime and target are presented in different scripts but not when they are presented in the same script. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Is reading automatic? Are the ERP correlates of masked priming really lexical?

Humans have an almost unbounded ability to adapt their behaviour to perform different tasks. In the laboratory, this flexibility is sometimes viewed as a nuisance factor that prevents access to the underlying cognitive mechanisms of interest. For example, in order to study "automatic" lexical processing, psycholinguists have used masked priming or evoked potentials. However, the pattern of masked priming can be radically altered by changing the task. In lexical decision, priming is observed for words but not for nonwords, yet in a same-different matching task, priming is observed for same responses but not for different responses, regardless of whether the target is a word or a nonword [Norris & Kinoshita, 2008. Perception as evidence accumulation and Bayesian inference: Insights from masked priming. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(3), 434-55. doi:10.1037/a0012799]. Here we show that evoked potentials are equally sensitive to the nature of required decision, with the neural activity normally associated with lexical processing being seen for both words and nonwords on same trials, and for neither on different trials.

Evidence for cross-script abstract identities in learners of Japanese kana.

The presence of abstract letter identity representations in the Roman alphabet has been well documented. These representations are invariant to letter case (upper vs. lower) and visual appearance. For example, "a" and "A" are represented by the same abstract identity. Recent research has begun to consider whether the processing of non-Roman orthographies also involves abstract orthographic representations. In the present study, we sought evidence for abstract identities in Japanese kana, which consist of two scripts, hiragana and katakana. Abstract identities would be invariant to the script used as well as to the degree of visual similarity. We adapted the cross-case masked-priming letter match task used in previous research on Roman letters, by presenting cross-script kana pairs and testing adult beginning -to- intermediate Japanese second-language (L2) learners (first-language English readers). We found robust cross-script priming effects, which were equal in magnitude for visually similar (e.g., り/リ) and dissimilar (e.g., あ/ア) kana pairs. This pattern was found despite participants' imperfect explicit knowledge of the kana names, particularly for katakana. We also replicated prior findings from Roman abstract letter identities in the same participants. Ours is the first study reporting abstract kana identity priming (in adult L2 learners). Furthermore, these representations were acquired relatively early in our adult L2 learners.

The semantic Stroop effect is controlled by endogenous attention.

Using the oral and manual Stroop tasks we tested the claim that retrieval of meaning from a written word is automatic, in the sense that it cannot be controlled. The semantic interference effect (greater interference caused by color-related words than color-neutral words) was used as the index of semantic activation. To manipulate the level of attentional control over the task of reading, the proportion of nonreadable, neutral trials (a row of #s) was varied (75% vs. 25%). In all four experiments a high-neutral proportion magnified the interference caused by word distractors. With the color-associated words presented in incongruent color (e.g., LEMON in blue), the semantic Stroop effect was weak and did not interact with neutral proportion (Experiment 1 and 2). Experiment 3 and 4 used color names (e.g., GREEN) not in the response set, and here the semantic interference effect was more robust, and the effect was magnified in the high-neutral proportion condition. We take these results to argue that semantic retrieval is controlled by endogenous attention in the Stroop task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

What causes the greater perceived similarity of consonant-transposed nonwords?

Nonwords created by transposing two non-adjacent orthographic consonants (CONDISER) have been reported to produce more priming for their baseword (CONSIDER), and to be classified as a nonword less readily than nonwords created by transposing two orthographic vowels (CINSODER). We investigate the origin of this difference and its relevance for theories of letter position coding. In the unprimed versions of the lexical decision and same-different tasks, a consonant-vowel difference was found in the transposition condition, not when those letters are substituted (Experiment 1). We found that when transpositions involved the disruption of a consonant cluster (OPMITAL), reaction times were slowed compared to when transpositions involved only letters that are separated (CHOLOCATE; Experiment 2). As transpositions more frequently disrupt in consonant clusters than vowel clusters, this introduces a confound in studies investigating consonant and vowel transposition effects. Consistent with the idea that letter order is harder to resolve in clusters, the difference between consonants and vowels was eliminated when transpositions involve singleton consonants or vowels rather than those in clusters (Experiment 3). These results suggest that the precision of position coding does not differ between consonants and vowels, but that consonant-vowel status plays a role in structuring orthographic representations.

Mora or more? The phonological unit of Japanese word production in the Stroop color naming task.

In English, Dutch, and other European languages, it is well established that the fundamental phonological unit in word production is the phoneme; in contrast, recent studies have shown that in Chinese it is the (atonal) syllable and in Japanese the mora. The present study investigated whether this cross-language variation in the size of the unit of word production is due to the type of script used in the language (i.e., alphabetic, morphosyllabic, or moraic). Capitalizing on the multiscriptal nature of Japanese, and using the Stroop color naming task, we show that the overlap in the initial mora between the color name and the written distractor facilitates color naming independent of script type. These results confirm the mora as the phonological unit of word production in Japanese, and establish the Stroop color naming task as a useful task for investigating the fundamental (or "proximate") phonological unit used in speech production.

Evaluation of the Predictive Validity of Thermography in Identifying Extravasation With Intravenous Chemotherapy Infusions.

Early detection of extravasation is important, but conventional methods of detection lack objectivity and reliability. This study evaluated the predictive validity of thermography for identifying extravasation during intravenous antineoplastic therapy. Of 257 patients who received chemotherapy through peripheral veins, extravasation was identified in 26. Thermography was performed every 15 to 30 minutes during the infusions. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value using thermography were 84.6%, 94.8%, 64.7%, and 98.2%, respectively. This study showed that thermography offers an accurate prediction of extravasation.