We investigated whether levels of reading ability attained through formal literacy are related to anticipatory language-mediated eye movements. Indian low and high literates listened to simple spoken sentences containing a target word (e.g., "door") while at the same time looking at a visual display of four objects (a target, i.e. the door, and three distractors). The spoken sentences were constructed in such a way that participants could use semantic, associative, and syntactic information from adjectives and particles (preceding the critical noun) to anticipate the visual target objects. High literates started to shift their eye gaze to the target objects well before target word onset. In the low literacy group this shift of eye gaze occurred only when the target noun (i.e. "door") was heard, more than a second later. Our findings suggest that formal literacy may be important for the fine-tuning of language-mediated anticipatory mechanisms, abilities which proficient language users can then exploit for other cognitive activities such as spoken language-mediated eye gaze. In the conclusion, we discuss three potential mechanisms of how reading acquisition and practice may contribute to the differences in predictive spoken language processing between low and high literates.

Greenhouse experiments were conducted to assess the effects of soil salinity on emergence, growth, water status, proline content and mineral accumulation of seedlings of Holoptelea integrifolia (Roxb.) Planch (Ulmaceae). NaCl was added to the soil and salinity was maintained at 0.3, 3.9, 6.0, 7.9, 10.0, 12.1 and 13.9 dS/m. Salinity caused reduction in water potential of tissues, which resulted in internal water deficit to plants. Consequently, seedling growth significantly decreased with increase in soil salinity. Proline content in tissues increased with increase in soil salinity. There were no effective mechanisms to control net uptake of Na transport to shoot tissue. Potassium content increased in leaves to avoid Na toxicity to this tissue. Nitrogen content significantly increased in tissues in response to salinity. Phosphorus, calcium and magnesium content in tissues significantly decreased as salinity increased. Changes in tissues and whole-plant accumulation patterns of other nutrients, as well as possible mechanisms to avoid Na toxicity in this species in response to salinity, are discussed.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Consumer psychology has always been the centre of concern for the marketers from the old time and understanding the underlying aspects leads to effective decision making. The present study elicits the concept of post purchase cognitive dissonance in the consumers and embraces its implications in studying the consumer behaviour. A survey was conducted and well framed questionnaire was constructed covering various dimensions of variables studied. Some of the underlying dimensions of cognitive dissonance have been rigorously discussed and statistically tested in this study. Specifically, the impact of product involvement, time taken to make a purchase decision and level of information search on the cognitive dissonance have been analysed that provides really significant benefits to the marketers.

No abstract

The scrambling complexity hypothesis based on working memory or locality accounts as well as syntactic accounts have proposed that processing a scrambled structure is difficult. However, the locus of this difficulty in sentence processing remains debatable. Several studies on multiple languages have explored the effect of scrambling on sentence processing and not all languages have shown an advantage for the canonical word order. Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we studied the effect of scrambling on semantic anomaly detection in Hindi sentence comprehension employing three word order types. Reading times on critical verbs, judgment latency, and error rates showed significant effect of word order type. The results further revealed significant interactions between word order and anomaly type. The patterns of results suggest that the canonical word order does not necessarily have a processing advantage in terms of speed and accuracy over non-canonical orders and do not provide support to sentence processing accounts that assume an advantage for canonical structures. The results indicate that processing speed depends on the distance between the subject and the verb, thus supporting a locality dependent working memory based model of sentence processing. The results provide evidence for the role of specific cognitive processes in Hindi sentence processing with further implications for language and literacy acquisition in Hindi.