Publications

Abstract

This study sought to identify tumor characteristics that associate with regional lymph node metastases in squamous cell carcinomas originating in the upper gingiva.

Abstract

In English, Dutch, and other Germanic languages the initial phonological unit used in word production has been shown to be the phoneme; conversely, others have revealed that in Chinese this is the atonal syllable and in Japanese the mora. The current paper is, to our knowledge, the first to report chronometric data on Vietnamese phonological encoding. Vietnamese, a tonal language, is of interest as, despite its Austroasiatic roots, it has clear similarities with Chinese through extended contact over a prolonged period. Four experiments (i.e., masked priming, phonological Stroop, picture naming with written distractors, picture naming with auditory distractors) have been conducted to investigate Vietnamese phonological encoding. Results show that in all four experiments both onset effects as well as whole syllable effects emerge. This indicates that the fundamental phonological encoding unit during Vietnamese language production is the phoneme despite its apparent similarities to Chinese. This result might have emerged due to tone assignment being a qualitatively different process in Vietnamese compared to Chinese.

Abstract

For native (L1) English readers, masked presentations of past-tense verb primes (e.g., fell and looked) produce faster lexical decision latencies to their present-tense targets (e.g., FALL and LOOK) than orthographically related (e.g., fill and loose) or unrelated (e.g., master and bank) primes. This facilitation observed with morphologically related prime-target pairs (morphological priming) is generally taken as evidence for strong connections based on morphological relationships in the L1 lexicon. It is unclear, however, if similar, morphologically based, connections develop in non-native (L2) lexicons. Several earlier studies with L2 English readers have reported mixed results. The present experiments examine whether past-tense verb primes (both regular and irregular verbs) significantly facilitate target lexical decisions for Japanese-English bilinguals beyond any facilitation provided by prime-target orthographic similarity. Overall, past-tense verb primes facilitated lexical decisions to their present-tense targets relative to both orthographically related and unrelated primes. Replicating previous masked priming experiments with L2 readers, orthographically related primes also facilitated target recognition relative to unrelated primes, confirming that orthographic similarity facilitates L2 target recognition. The additional facilitation from past-tense verb primes beyond that provided by orthographic primes suggests that, in the L2 English lexicon, connections based on morphological relationships develop in a way that is similar to how they develop in the L1 English lexicon even though the connections and processing of lower level, lexical/orthographic information may differ. Further analyses involving L2 proficiency revealed that as L2 proficiency increased, orthographic facilitation was reduced, indicating that there is a decrease in the fuzziness in orthographic representations in the L2 lexicon with increased proficiency.

Abstract

Common wisdom has it that Buddhism enhances compassion and self-other integration. We put this assumption to empirical test by comparing practicing Taiwanese Buddhists with well-matched atheists. Buddhists showed more evidence of self-other integration in the social Simon task, which assesses the degree to which people co-represent the actions of a coactor. This suggests that self-other integration and task co-representation vary as a function of religious practice.

Abstract

Curiosity is one of the most basic biological drives in both animals and humans, and has been identified as a key motive for learning and discovery. Despite the importance of curiosity and related behaviors, the topic has been largely neglected in human neuroscience; hence little is known about the neurobiological mechanisms underlying curiosity. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate what happens in our brain during the induction and subsequent relief of perceptual curiosity. Our core findings were that (1) the induction of perceptual curiosity, through the presentation of ambiguous visual input, activated the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), brain regions sensitive to conflict and arousal; (2) the relief of perceptual curiosity, through visual disambiguation, activated regions of the striatum that have been related to reward processing; and (3) the relief of perceptual curiosity was associated with hippocampal activation and enhanced incidental memory. These findings provide the first demonstration of the neural basis of human perceptual curiosity. Our results provide neurobiological support for a classic psychological theory of curiosity, which holds that curiosity is an aversive condition of increased arousal whose termination is rewarding and facilitates memory.

Abstract

In a long-lag morphological priming experiment, Dutch (L1)-English (L2) bilinguals were asked to name pictures and read aloud words. A design using non-switch blocks, consisting solely of Dutch stimuli, and switch-blocks, consisting of Dutch primes and targets with intervening English trials, was administered. Target picture naming was facilitated by morphologically related primes in both non-switch and switch blocks with equal magnitude. These results contrast some assumptions of sustained reactive inhibition models. However, models that do not assume bilinguals having to reactively suppress all activation of the non-target language can account for these data. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract

Four experiments investigated the role of the syllable in Chinese spoken word production. Chen, Chen and Ferrand (2003) reported a syllable priming effect when primes and targets shared the first syllable using a masked priming paradigm in Chinese. Our Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Chen et al.'s (2003) Experiment 3 employing CV (e. g., /ba2.ying2/, strike camp) and CVG (e. g., /bai2.shou3/, white haired) syllable types. Experiment 2 tested the syllable priming effect using different syllable types: e. g., CV (/qi4.qiu2/, balloon) and CVN (/qing1.ting2/, dragonfly). Experiment 3 investigated this issue further using line drawings of common objects as targets that were preceded either by a CV (e. g., /qi3/, attempt), or a CVN (e. g., /qing2/, affection) prime. Experiment 4 further examined the priming effect by a comparison between CV or CVN priming and an unrelated priming condition using CV-NX (e. g., /mi2.ni3/, mini) and CVN-CX (e. g., /min2.ju1/, dwellings) as target words. These four experiments consistently found that CV targets were named faster when preceded by CV primes than when they were preceded by CVG, CVN or unrelated primes, whereas CVG or CVN targets showed the reverse pattern. These results indicate that the priming effect critically depends on the match between the structure of the prime and that of the first syllable of the target. The effect obtained in this study was consistent across different stimuli and different tasks (word and picture naming), and provides more conclusive and consistent data regarding the role of the syllable in Chinese speech production.

Abstract

The process of reading aloud bare nouns in alphabetic languages is immune to semantic context effects from pictures. This is accounted for by assuming that words in alphabetic languages can be read aloud relatively fast through a sub-lexical grapheme-phoneme conversion (GPC) route or by a direct route from orthography to word form. We examined semantic context effects in a word-naming task in two languages with logographic scripts for which GPC cannot be applied: Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi. We showed that reading aloud bare nouns is sensitive to semantically related context pictures in Japanese, but not in Chinese. The difference between these two languages is attributed to processing costs caused by multiple pronunciations for Japanese kanji. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.