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.

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Sarcastic irony, uttered in four (within and between) gender-based settings, is used here as a tool to diagnose affective attitudes toward women. The kind of sarcasm tested here is an aggressive type of humor, whereby a speaker derides another individual, turning her or him into the victim of the humorous utterance. Finding this kind of irony less or more pleasing allows indexing between-and within-group attitudes. Participants were overall nonsexist, scoring low on sexism scales, but male participants were still more sexist than female participants. Results show that, as predicted by Ariel and Giora (1998), female participants fully adopted a feminine point of view, enjoying sarcastic irony best when it was directed by women at men and least when it was directed by women at women. Being more sexist, our male participants adopted a feminine point of view only partially, enjoying sarcastic irony more when directed at men than directed at women, regardless of the speaker's gender.

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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 Btriangle^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.Keywords Lexical processing . Concepts . Object recognition . Semantic memory . Word production Our ability to comprehend and produce both spoken and written words requires bidirectional links between concepts (meanings) and their corresponding phonological (spoken) and orthographic (written) lexical forms. In language comprehension, words are mapped onto meanings. In language production, meanings are mapped onto words. The present study examined the extent to which these bidirectional mappings occur automatically. Specifically, we asked whether concepts automatically activate their corresponding phonological and orthographic forms, and if so, do these lexical activations modulate conceptual processes via feedback connections.Models of lexical access vary in the way they capture the relationship between conceptual-semantic representations and their associated phonological and/or orthographic lexical codes. Modular, feed-forward models (e.g., Fodor, 1983;Forster, 1979;Levelt, 2001) assume that lexical and conceptual information is processed sequentially via separate mechanisms. According to this serial view, in word comprehension, meanings are accessed only when phonological or orthographic form-based processes are completed. As a result...