A miniprocessor PDP8/e-based system for investigations of on-line language processing: Automated program for psycholinguistic experiments (APPLE)

Onifer, William; Hirshkowitz, Max; Swinney, David

doi:10.3758/bf03205145

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…The placement of the timing signal was performed by moving the tape manually across the tape-recorder head until the onset of the target sound was detected. Signal placements were checked oscilloscopically in a post hoc examinanon to determine placement accuracy, All signal placements were found to be accurate to within 4 msec, with no systematic differences in placement variation existing across experimental conditions (i.e., all placement errors were both small and equally distributed across experimental conditionsj, The presentation and reaction time recording mechanism were under control of a PDP-8/e computer (see Onifer, Hirshkowitz, & Swinney, 1978, for a description of the apparatus and software package). The recorded reaction timeswere accurateto within ±.5 msec.…”

Section: Experiments La Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonemic identification in a phoneme monitoring experiment: The variable role of uncertainty about vowel contexts

Swinney

Prather

1980

Perception & Psychophysics

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Section: Experiments La Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phonemic identification in a phoneme monitoring experiment: The variable role of uncertainty about vowel contexts

Swinney

Prather

1980

Perception & Psychophysics

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Special purpose languages for behavioural experiments

Hale

1981

International Journal of Man-Machine Studies

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The access and processing of idiomatic expressions

Swinney

Cutler

1979

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

585

376

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Two experiments examined the nature of access, storage, and comprehension of idiomatic phrases. In both studies a Phrase Classification Task was utilized. In this, reaction times to determine whether or not word strings constituted acceptable English phrases were measured. Classification times were significantly faster to idiom than to matched control phrases. This effect held under conditions involving different categories of idioms, different transitional probabilities among words in the phrases, and different levels of awareness of the presence of idioms in the materials. The data support a Lexical Representation Hypothesis for the processing of idioms.Investigation of the processes underlying sentence comprehension has tended, understandably enough, to consider the more simple cases which confront the listener. For example, examinations of lexical processing during sentence comprehension have typically employed words with straightforward and easily derived interpretations. While an important exception to this rule is the study of lexical ambiguities, even this work deals with words which possess relatively well-defined literal meanings. There is, however, a large class of items--including idioms, metaphors, and proverbs--which are extraordinarily common in the language but which have been largely ignored in comprehension research; the few attempts to discover how the compre- hension device computes nonliteral meanings for these items have found them to be remarkably intractable. The high frequency of occurrence ofnonliteral materials alone necessitates that the processes responsible for their comprehension be incorporated in any complete comprehension model. Idioms, in particular, present an important challenge to those interested in building a performance model for sentence comprehension, and the purpose of this paper is to examine some of the basic aspects of how we come to understand idiomatic expressions. In order to see the nature of the problems that idioms raise for the comprehension device it is first necessary to consider exactly what constitutes an idiom. In its simplest form an idiom is a string of two or more words for which meaning is not derived from the meanings of the individual words comprising that string. Thus, the idiomatic meaning of "kick the bucket" has little to do with the meanings of either "kick" or "bucket"; similarly, the meaning of "by and large" has little to do with the meanings of either "large" or "by."Thus, by and large, idioms defy traditional concepts of syntactic and semantic analysis,

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A miniprocessor PDP8/e-based system for investigations of on-line language processing: Automated program for psycholinguistic experiments (APPLE)

Cited by 5 publications

References 3 publications

Phonemic identification in a phoneme monitoring experiment: The variable role of uncertainty about vowel contexts

Phonemic identification in a phoneme monitoring experiment: The variable role of uncertainty about vowel contexts

Special purpose languages for behavioural experiments

The access and processing of idiomatic expressions

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