Publications

Displaying 1 - 69 of 69
  • Ameka, F. K. (1990). [Review of Robert Burchfield (ed.) Studies in lexicography]. Studies in Language, 14(2), 479-489.
  • Bowerman, M. (1990). Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules? Linguistics, 28, 1253-1290. doi:10.1515/ling.1990.28.6.1253.

    Abstract

    In recent theorizing about language acquisition, children have often been credited with innate knowledge of rules that link thematic roles such as agent and patient to syntactic functions such as subject and direct object. These rules form the basis for the hypothesis that phrase-structure rules are established through 'semantic bootstrapping', and they are also invoked to explain the acquisition of verb subcategorization frames (for example, Pinker 1984). This study examines two versions of the hypothesis that linking rules are innate, pitting them against the alternative hypothesis that linking patterns are learned (as proposed, for example, by Foley and Van Valin 1984). The first version specifies linking rules through paired thematicsyntactic role hierarchies, and the second characterizes them as a function of verb semantic structure. When predictions of the two approaches are drawn out and tested against longitudinal spontaneous speech data from two children learning English, no support is found for the hypothesis that knowledge of linking is innate; ironically, in fact, the children had more trouble with verbs that should be easy to link than with those that should be more difficult. In contrast, the hypothesis that linking rules are learned is supported: at a relatively advanced age, the children began to produce errors that are best interpreted as overregularizations of a statistically predominant linking pattern to which they had become sensitive through linguistic experience.
  • Bowerman, M., & Eling, P. (1983). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report nr. 4 1983. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.
  • Bowerman, M. (1983). How do children avoid constructing an overly general grammar in the absence of feedback about what is not a sentence? Papers and Reports on Child Language Development, 22, 23-35.

    Abstract

    The theory that language acquisition is guided and constrained by inborn linguistic knowledge is assessed. Specifically, the "no negative evidence" view, the belief that linguistic theory should be restricted in such a way that the grammars it allows can be learned by children on the basis of positive evidence only, is explored. Child language data are cited in order to investigate influential innatist approaches to language acquisition. Baker's view that children are innately constrained in significant ways with respect to language acquisition is evaluated. Evidence indicates that children persistently make overgeneralizations of the sort that violate the constrained view of language acquisition. Since children eventually do develop correct adult grammar, they must have other mechanisms for cutting back on these overgeneralizations. Thus, any hypothesized constraints cannot be justified on grounds that without them the child would end up with overly general grammar. It is necessary to explicate the mechanisms by which children eliminate their tendency toward overgeneralization.
  • Bowerman, M., & Perdue, C. (1990). Introduction to the special issue. Linguistics, 28(6), 1131-1133. doi:10.1515/ling.1990.28.6.1131.

    Abstract

    This thematic issue contains 11 papers first presented at a conference on The Structure of the Simple Clause in Language Acquisition', held at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen from November 9-13, 1987. The issue concentrates on first-language acquisition. Papers on developmental dysphasia. creolization, and adult language acquisition were also presented at the conference and are being published elsewhere.
  • Brown, P. (1983). [Review of the book Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized communication situations and prepatterned speech ed. by Florian Coulmas]. Language, 59, 215-219.
  • Brown, P. (1983). [Review of the books Mayan Texts I, II, and III ed. by Louanna Furbee-Losee]. International Journal of American Linguistics, 49, 337-341.
  • Brown, P. (1990). Gender, politeness and confrontation in Tenejapa. Discourse Processes, 13, 123-141.

    Abstract

    This paper compares some features of the interactional details of a Tenejapan (Mexico) court case with the features of social interaction characteristic of ordinary, casual encounters in this society. It is suggested that courtroom behaviour in Tenejapa is a very special form of interaction, in a context that uniquely allows for direct face-to-face confrontation in a society where a premium is placed on interactional restraint. Courtroom speech in Tenejapa directly contraverts norms and conventions that operate in other contexts, and women’s conventionalized polite ‘ways of putting things’ are here used sarcastically to be impolite. Thus, in this society, gender operates across contexts as a ‘master status’, but with gender meanings transformed in the different contexts: forms associated with superficial cooperation and agreement being used to emphasize lack of cooperation, disagreement, and hostility. The implications of this Tenejapan phenomenon for our understanding of the nature of relations between language and gender are explored.
  • Cutler, A., Mehler, J., Norris, D., & Segui, J. (1983). A language-specific comprehension strategy [Letters to Nature]. Nature, 304, 159-160. doi:10.1038/304159a0.

    Abstract

    Infants acquire whatever language is spoken in the environment into which they are born. The mental capability of the newborn child is not biased in any way towards the acquisition of one human language rather than another. Because psychologists who attempt to model the process of language comprehension are interested in the structure of the human mind, rather than in the properties of individual languages, strategies which they incorporate in their models are presumed to be universal, not language-specific. In other words, strategies of comprehension are presumed to be characteristic of the human language processing system, rather than, say, the French, English, or Igbo language processing systems. We report here, however, on a comprehension strategy which appears to be used by native speakers of French but not by native speakers of English.
  • Cutler, A. (1979). Contemporary reaction to Rudolf Meringer’s speech error research. Historiograpia Linguistica, 6, 57-76.
  • Cutler, A., & Butterfield, S. (1990). Durational cues to word boundaries in clear speech. Speech Communication, 9, 485-495.

    Abstract

    One of a listener’s major tasks in understanding continuous speech in segmenting the speech signal into separate words. When listening conditions are difficult, speakers can help listeners by deliberately clear speech. We found that speakers do indeed attempt to makr word boundaries; moreover, they differentiate between word boundaries in a way which suggest they are sensitive to listener needs. Application of heuristic segmentation strategies makes word boundaries before strong syllables easiest for listeners to perceive; but under difficult listening conditions speakers pay more attention to marking word boundaries before weak syllables, i.e. they mark those boundaries which are otherwise particularly hard to perceive.
  • Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Robinson, K. (1990). Elizabeth and John: Sound patterns of men’s and women’s names. Journal of Linguistics, 26, 471-482. doi:10.1017/S0022226700014754.
  • Cutler, A., & Ladd, D. R. (Eds.). (1983). Prosody: Models and measurements. Heidelberg: Springer.
  • Cutler, A., & Scott, D. R. (1990). Speaker sex and perceived apportionment of talk. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11, 253-272. doi:10.1017/S0142716400008882.

    Abstract

    It is a widely held belief that women talk more than men; but experimental evidence has suggested that this belief is mistaken. The present study investigated whether listener bias contributes to this mistake. Dialogues were recorded in mixed-sex and single-sex versions, and male and female listeners judged the proportions of talk contributed to the dialogues by each participant. Female contributions to mixed-sex dialogues were rated as greater than male contributions by both male and female listeners. Female contributions were more likely to be overestimated when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably female than when they were speaking a dialogue part perceived as probably male. It is suggested that the misestimates are due to a complex of factors that may involve both perceptual effects such as misjudgment of rates of speech and sociological effects such as attitudes to social roles and perception of power relations.
  • Dittmar, N., Reich, A., Skiba, R., Schumacher, M., & Terborg, H. (1990). Die Erlernung modaler Konzepte des Deutschen durch erwachsene polnische Migranten: Eine empirische Längsschnittstudie. Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache: Info DaF, 17(2), 125-172.
  • Friederici, A., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1990). Spatial reference in weightlessness: Perceptual factors and mental representations. Perception and Psychophysics, 47, 253-266.

    Abstract

    The role of gravity in spatial coordinate assignment and the mental representation of space were studiedin three experiments, varying different perceptual cues systematically: the retinal, the visual background, the vestibular, and proprioceptive information. Verbal descriptions of visually presented arrays were required under different head positions (straight/tilt) and under different gravitational conditions (gravity present/gravity absent). The results of two experiments conducted with 2 subjects who participated in a space flight revealed that subjects are able to adequately assign positions in space in the absence of gravitational information, and that they do this by using their head—retinal coordinates as primary references. This indicates that they cognitively adapted to the perceptually new situation.The findings from a third experiment conducted with a larger group of subjects under a condition in which the gravitational information was present but irrelevant to the task being solved (subjects were in a-horizontal 8upine-position) show that subjects, in general, are flexible in using cues other than gravitational ones as references when the latter cannot serve as a referential system. These findings, together with the observation that consistent spatial assignment is possible evenimmediately after first exposure to the perceptually totally novel situation of weightlessness, seem to suggest that the mental representation of space, onto which given perceptual information is mapped, is independent of a particular percept.
  • Hagoort, P. (1990). [Review of the book Neurolinguistics and linguistic aphasiology: An introduction by David Caplan]. Linguistics, 5, 1069-1073.
  • Kempen, G. (1990). Een slordig gestapeld servies [Review of the book Tranen van de krokodil by Piet Vroon]. Intermediair, 26(17), 67-69.
  • Kempen, G. (1990). Microcomputers en cognitiewetenschap. SURF: Tijdschrift over Computerdienstverlening in het Hoger Onderwijs en Onderzoek, 4(3), 2.
  • Kempen, G., & Jongen-Janner, E. (1990). Naar een flexibele methode voor algoritmisch grammatica- en spellingonderwijs. Pedagogisch Tijdschrift, 15, 280-289.
  • Kempen, G. (1979). La mise en paroles, aspects psychologiques de l'expression orale. Études de Linguistique Appliquée, 33, 19-28.

    Abstract

    Remarques sur les facteurs intervenant dans le processus de formulation des énoncés.
  • Kempen, G. (1979). Psychologie van de zinsbouw: Een Wundtiaanse inleiding. Nederlands Tijdschrift voor de Psychologie, 34, 533-551.

    Abstract

    The psychology of language as developed by Wilhelm Wundt in his fundamental work Die Sprache (1900) has a strongly mentalistic character. The dominating positions held by behaviorism in psychology and structuralism in linguistics have overruled Wundt’s language theory to the effect that it has remained relatively unknown. This situation has changed recently under the influence of transformational linguistics and cognitive psychology. The paper discusses how Wundt applied the basic psychological concepts of apperception and association to language behavior, in particular to the construction and production of sentences during unprepared speech. The final part of the paper is devoted to the work, published in 1917, of the Dutch linguistic scholar Jacques van Ginneken, who elaborated Wundt’s ideas towards an explanation of some syntactic phenomena during the language acquisition of children.
  • Kempen, G. (1990). Representation in memory: Volume 2, chapter 8, pp. 511–587 by David E. Rumelhart and Donald A. Norman [Book review]. Acta Psychologica, 75, 191-192. doi:10.1016/0001-6918(90)90107-Q.
  • Kempen, G. (1990). Taaltechnologie en de toekomst van tekstautomatisering. Informatie, 32, 724-727.
  • Kempen, G., & Huijbers, P. (1983). The lexicalization process in sentence production and naming: Indirect election of words. Cognition, 14(2), 185-209. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(83)90029-X.

    Abstract

    A series of experiments is reported in which subjects describe simple visual scenes by means of both sentential and non-sentential responses. The data support the following statements about the lexicalization (word finding) process. (1) Words used by speakers in overt naming or sentence production responses are selected by a sequence of two lexical retrieval processes, the first yielding abstract pre-phonological items (Ll -items), the second one adding their phonological shapes (L2-items). (2) The selection of several Ll-items for a multi-word utterance can take place simultaneously. (3) A monitoring process is watching the output of Ll-lexicalization to check if it is in keeping with prevailing constraints upon utterance format. (4) Retrieval of the L2-item which corresponds with a given LI-item waits until the Ld-item has been checked by the monitor, and all other Ll-items needed for the utterance under construction have become available. A coherent picture of the lexicalization process begins to emerge when these characteristics are brought together with other empirical results in the area of naming and sentence production, e.g., picture naming reaction times (Seymour, 1979), speech errors (Garrett, 1980), and word order preferences (Bock, 1982).
  • Kempen, G. (1983). Wat betekent taalvaardigheid voor informatiesystemen? TNO project: Maandblad voor toegepaste wetenschappen, 11, 401-403.
  • Kempen, G. (1979). Woordwaarde. De Psycholoog, 14, 577.
  • Klein, W. (1990). A theory of language acquisition is not so easy. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 12, 219-231. doi:10.1017/S0272263100009104.
  • Klein, W. (1990). Einleitung. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik; Metzler, Stuttgart, 20(78), 7-8.
  • Klein, W. (1979). Einleitung. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik; Metzler, Stuttgart, 9(33), 7-8.
  • Klein, W., & Dittmar, N. (1979). Developing grammars. Berlin: Springer.
  • Klein, W. (1990). Comments on the papers by Bierwisch and Zwicky. Yearbook of Morphology, 3, 217-221.
  • Klein, W. (1979). Wegauskünfte. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 33, 9-57.
  • Klein, W. (1990). Überall und nirgendwo: Subjektive und objektive Momente in der Raumreferenz. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 78, 9-42.
  • Klein, W. (1983). Vom Glück des Mißverstehens und der Trostlosigkeit der idealen Kommunikationsgemeinschaft. Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 50, 128-140.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1990). Are multilayer feedforward networks effectively turing machines? Psychological Research, 52, 153-157.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1983). Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cognition, 14, 41-104. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(83)90026-4.

    Abstract

    Making a self-repair in speech typically proceeds in three phases. The first phase involves the monitoring of one’s own speech and the interruption of the flow of speech when trouble is detected. From an analysis of 959 spontaneous self-repairs it appears that interrupting follows detection promptly, with the exception that correct words tend to be completed. Another finding is that detection of trouble improves towards the end of constituents. The second phase is characterized by hesitation, pausing, but especially the use of so-called editing terms. Which editing term is used depends on the nature of the speech trouble in a rather regular fashion: Speech errors induce other editing terms than words that are merely inappropriate, and trouble which is detected quickly by the speaker is preferably signalled by the use of ‘uh’. The third phase consists of making the repair proper The linguistic well-formedness of a repair is not dependent on the speaker’s respecting the integriv of constituents, but on the structural relation between original utterance and repair. A bi-conditional well-formedness rule links this relation to a corresponding relation between the conjuncts of a coordination. It is suggested that a similar relation holds also between question and answer. In all three cases the speaker respects certain Istructural commitments derived from an original utterance. It was finally shown that the editing term plus the first word of the repair proper almost always contain sufficient information for the listener to decide how the repair should be related to the original utterance. Speakers almost never produce misleading information in this respect. It is argued that speakers have little or no access to their speech production process; self-monitoring is probably based on parsing one’s own inner or overt speech.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1990). On learnability, empirical foundations, and naturalness [Commentary on Hanson & Burr]. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13(3), 501. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00079887.
  • Levelt, W. J. M., & Cutler, A. (1983). Prosodic marking in speech repair. Journal of semantics, 2, 205-217. doi:10.1093/semant/2.2.205.

    Abstract

    Spontaneous self-corrections in speech pose a communication problem; the speaker must make clear to the listener not only that the original Utterance was faulty, but where it was faulty and how the fault is to be corrected. Prosodic marking of corrections - making the prosody of the repair noticeably different from that of the original utterance - offers a resource which the speaker can exploit to provide the listener with such information. A corpus of more than 400 spontaneous speech repairs was analysed, and the prosodic characteristics compared with the syntactic and semantic characteristics of each repair. Prosodic marking showed no relationship at all with the syntactic characteristics of repairs. Instead, marking was associated with certain semantic factors: repairs were marked when the original utterance had been actually erroneous, rather than simply less appropriate than the repair; and repairs tended to be marked more often when the set of items encompassing the error and the repair was small rather than when it was large. These findings lend further weight to the characterization of accent as essentially semantic in function.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1983). Wetenschapsbeleid: Drie actuele idolen en een godin. Grafiet, 1(4), 178-184.
  • Levelt, W. J. M. (1979). On learnability: A reply to Lasnik and Chomsky. Unpublished manuscript.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1979). Activity types and language. Linguistics, 17, 365-399.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1990). Pragmatics [Japanese translation]. Tokyo: Kenkyusha.
  • Levinson, S. C. (1990). Pragmatik [German translation of Pragmatics]. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

    Abstract

    This is the German translation of Stephen C. Levinson's »Pragmatics«.
  • Meyer, A. S. (1990). The time course of phonological encoding in language production: The encoding of successive syllables of a word. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 524-545. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(90)90050-A.

    Abstract

    A series of experiments was carried out investigating the time course of phonological encoding in language production, i.e., the question of whether all parts of the phonological form of a word are created in parallel, or whether they are created in a specific order. a speech production task was used in which the subjects in each test trial had to say one out of three or five response words as quickly as possible. In one condition, information was provided about part of the forms of the words to be uttered, in another condition this was not the case. The production of disyllabic words was speeded by information about their first syllable, but not by information about their second syllable. Experiments using trisyllabic words showed that a facilitatory effect could be obtained from information about the second syllable of the words, provided that the first syllable was also known. These findings suggest that the syllables of a word must be encoded strictly sequentially, according to their order in the word.
  • Schriefers, H., & Meyer, A. S. (1990). Experimental note: Cross-modal, visual-auditory picture-word interference. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 28, 418-420.
  • Schriefers, H., Meyer, A. S., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1990). Exploring the time course of lexical access in language production: Picture-word interference studies. Journal of Memory and Language, 29(1), 86-102. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(90)90011-N.

    Abstract

    According to certain theories of language production, lexical access to a content word consists of two independent and serially ordered stages. In the first, semantically driven stage, so-called lemmas are retrieved, i.e., lexical items that are specified with respect to syntactic and semantic properties, but not with respect to phonological characteristics. In the second stage, the corresponding wordforms, the so-called lexemes, are retrieved. This implies that the access to a content word involves an early stage of exclusively semantic activation and a later stage of exclusively phonological activation. This seriality assumption was tested experimentally, using a picture-word interference paradigm in which the interfering words were presented auditorily. The results show an interference effect of semantically related words on picture naming latencies at an early SOA (− 150 ms), and a facilitatory effect of phonologically related words at later SOAs (0 ms, + 150 ms). On the basis of these results it can be concluded that there is indeed a stage of lexical access to a content word where only its meaning is activated, followed by a stage where only its form is activated. These findings can be seen as empirical support for a two-stage model of lexical access, or, alternatively, as putting constraints on the parameters in a network model of lexical access, such as the model proposed by Dell and Reich.
  • Senft, G. (1990). [Review of the book Intergrammar by H. Arndt, & R.W. Janney]. System, 18(1), 112-114. doi:10.1016/0346-251X(90)90036-5.
  • Senft, G. (1990). [Review of the book Noun classes and categorization ed. by Colette Craig]. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia, 22, 173-180.
  • Senft, G. (1990). Yoreshiawes Klagelied anläßlich des Todes seiner kleinen Tochter. Forschungsstelle für Humanethologie in der MPG. Berichte und Mitteilungen; 1/90, 23-24.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1990). Burton-Roberts on presupposition and negation. Journal of Linguistics, 26(2), 425-453. doi:10.1017/S0022226700014730.

    Abstract

    In his paper ‘On Horn's dilemma: presupposition and negation’ Burton-Roberts (1989a) presents an ambitious programme, formulated right at the outset. He seeks to establish three points: (i) Under the ‘standard logical definition of presupposition’ a pre-suppositional semantics is INCOMPATIBLE with a SEMANTICALLY AMBIGUOUS NEGATION operator (SAN), on pain of the theory being rendered ‘empirically empty and theoretically trivial’,. (ii) From this it follows that the one unambiguous negation is presupposition preserving. Cases that have been identified as presupposition-cancelling negation should be re-analysed as ‘instances of a pragmatic phenomenon’, not unlike what has been proposed in Horn (1985), that is as METALINGUISTIC NEGATION (MN). (iii) This pragmatic analysis of MN ‘itself implies a presuppositional semantics’, that is to say ‘a presuppositional theory of truth-value gaps’.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1990). [Review of the book A life for language: A biographical memoir of Leonard Bloomfield by Robert A. Hall]. Linguistics, 29(4), 753-757. doi:10.1515/ling.1991.29.4.719.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1979). [Review of the book Approaches to natural language ed. by K. Hintikka, J. Moravcsik and P. Suppes]. Leuvense Bijdragen, 68, 163-168.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1983). [Review of the book The inheritance of presupposition by J. Dinsmore]. Journal of Semantics, 2(3/4), 356-358. doi:10.1093/semant/2.3-4.356.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1990). [Review of the book The limits to debate: A revised theory of presupposition by N. Burton-Roberts]. Linguistics, 28(3), 503-516. doi:10.1515/ling.1990.28.3.503.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1983). [Review of the book Thirty million theories of grammar by J. McCawley]. Journal of Semantics, 2(3/4), 325-341. doi:10.1093/semant/2.3-4.325.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1990). Filosofie van de taalwetenschappen. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1983). In memoriam Jan Voorhoeve. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 139(4), 403-406.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1979). Meer over minder dan hoeft. De Nieuwe Taalgids, 72(3), 236-239.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1963). Naar aanleiding van Dr. F. Balk-Smit Duyzentkunst "De Grammatische Functie". Levende Talen, 219, 179-186.
  • Seuren, P. A. M., & Mufwene, S. S. (1990). Introduction. Linguistics, 28(4), 641-643. doi:10.1515/ling.1990.28.4.641.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1983). Overwegingen bij de spelling van het Sranan en een spellingsvoorstel. OSO, 2(1), 67-81.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1990). Still no serials in Seselwa: A Reply to "Seselwa Serialization and its Significance" by Derek Bickerton. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, 5(2), 271-292.
  • Seuren, P. A. M. (1990). Verb syncopation and predicate raising in Mauritian Creole. Linguistics, 28(4), 809-844. doi:10.1515/ling.1990.28.4.809.
  • Swinney, D. A., & Cutler, A. (1979). The access and processing of idiomatic expressions. Journal of Verbal Learning an Verbal Behavior, 18, 523-534. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(79)90284-6.

    Abstract

    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.
  • Van de Geer, J. P., & Levelt, W. J. M. (1963). Detection of visual patterns disturbed by noise: An exploratory study. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 15, 192-204. doi:10.1080/17470216308416324.

    Abstract

    An introductory study of the perception of stochastically specified events is reported. The initial problem was to determine whether the perceiver can split visual input data of this kind into random and determined components. The inability of subjects to do so with the stimulus material used (a filmlike sequence of dot patterns), led to the more general question of how subjects code this kind of visual material. To meet the difficulty of defining the subjects' responses, two experiments were designed. In both, patterns were presented as a rapid sequence of dots on a screen. The patterns were more or less disturbed by “noise,” i.e. the dots did not appear exactly at their proper places. In the first experiment the response was a rating on a semantic scale, in the second an identification from among a set of alternative patterns. The results of these experiments give some insight in the coding systems adopted by the subjects. First, noise appears to be detrimental to pattern recognition, especially to patterns with little spread. Second, this shows connections with the factors obtained from analysis of the semantic ratings, e.g. easily disturbed patterns show a large drop in the semantic regularity factor, when only a little noise is added.
  • Van de Geer, J. P., Levelt, W. J. M., & Plomp, R. (1962). The connotation of musical consonance. Acta Psychologica, 20, 308-319.

    Abstract

    As a preliminary to further research on musical consonance an explanatory investigation was made on the different modes of judgment of musical intervals. This was done by way of a semantic differential. Subjects rated 23 intervals against 10 scales. In a factor analysis three factors appeared: pitch, evaluation and fusion. The relation between these factors and some physical characteristics has been investigated. The scale consonant-dissonant showed to be purely evaluative (in opposition to Stumpf's theory). This evaluative connotation is not in accordance with the musicological meaning of consonance. Suggestions to account for this difference have been given.
  • Zwitserlood, P. (1990). Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics: Annual Report Nr.11 1990. Nijmegen: MPI for Psycholinguistics.

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