This article argues that, across different psychological contexts, the methods of data collection, treatment, and analysis in word association tests have hitherto been inconsistent. We demonstrate that this inconsistency has resulted from inadequate control, in previous studies, of certain important variables including the basis of norm comparisons, and we present a principled method for collecting, scoring, and analysing association responses, to address these issues. The method is evaluated using test and retest data sets from 16-year-old and over-65-year-old twins (n = 636), which enable us to (a) compare samples matched for key environmental variables, (b) assess the transferability of norming information between age cohorts, and (c) evaluate the reliability of the scoring protocols. We find systematic differences in the association behaviour of the two age cohorts, indicating the importance of evaluating data only against norms lists that are matched to the target population. Individual association behaviour is found to be consistent across test times, both in terms of response stereotypy and response type.

Acronyms are an idiosyncratic part of our everyday vocabulary. Research in word processing has used acronyms as a tool to answer fundamental questions such as the nature of the word superiority effect (WSE) or which is the best way to account for word-reading processes. In this study, acronym naming was assessed by looking at the influence that a number of variables known to affect mainstream word processing has had in acronym naming. The nature of the effect of these factors on acronym naming was examined using a multilevel regression analysis. First, 146 acronyms were described in terms of their age of acquisition, bigram and trigram frequencies, imageability, number of orthographic neighbors, frequency, orthographic and phonological length, print-to-pronunciation patterns, and voicing characteristics. Naming times were influenced by lexical and sublexical factors, indicating that acronym naming is a complex process affected by more variables than those previously considered.

No abstract

(2016). Are word association responses really the first words that come to mind? Applied Linguistics.

This paper describes longitudinal testing of two Semantic Dementia (SD) cases. It is common for patients with SD to present with deficits in reading aloud irregular words (i.e. surface dyslexia), and in lexical decision. Theorists from the connectionist tradition (e.g. Woollams et al., 2007) argue that in SD cases with concurrent surface dyslexia, the deterioration of irregular word reading and recognition performance is related to the extent of the deterioration of the semantic system. The Dual Route Cascaded model (DRC; Coltheart et al., 2001) makes no such prediction. We examined this issue using a battery of cognitive tests and two structural scans undertaken at different points in each cases time course. Across both cases, our behavioural testing found little evidence of a key putative link between semantic impairment and the decline of irregular word reading or lexical decision. In addition, our neuroimaging analyses suggested that it may be the emergence of atrophy to key neural regions both inside and outside the anterior temporal lobes that may best capture the emergence of impairments of irregular word reading, and implicated inferior temporal cortex in surface dyslexia.

This paper describes the progressive performance of JD, a patient with semantic dementia, on acronym categorisation, recognition and reading aloud over a period of 18 months. Most acronyms have orthographic and phonological configurations that are different from English words (BBC, DVD, HIV). While some acronyms, the majority, are regularly pronounced letter by letter, others are pronounced in a more holistic, and irregular, way (NASA, AWOL). Semantic dementia at its moderate stage shows deficits in irregular word reading while reading accuracy for regular words and novel words is preserved. Nothing is known about acronym comprehension and reading ability in semantic dementia. Thus, in this study we explore for the first time the impact that semantic decline has on acronym recognition and reading processes. The decline in JD's semantic system led to increasingly impaired semantic categorisation and lexical decision for acronyms relative to healthy controls. However, her accuracy for reading aloud regular acronyms (i.e. those pronounced letter by letter such as BBC) remained near ceiling while reading irregular acronyms (i.e. those pronounced as mainstream words such as NASA) demonstrated impairment. It is therefore argued that consequences of semantic impairment vary across acronym types, a finding that informs our understanding of any reading account of this growing class of words.Dear Editor-in-Chief, Please find enclosed our revised manuscript, "Are acronyms really irregular? Preserved acronym reading in a case of semantic dementia" by David Playfoot, Cristina Izura and Jeremy Tree, which we would like to resubmit for publication in Neuropsychologia.We appreciate the time that the reviewers have spent considering our work, and have addressed the issues that they had raised in our resubmission. We thank them for their helpful comments and believe that the paper is stronger for their input. Below we detail our response to each individual comment. The material that we have added is indicated in bold in the manuscript to make it easier for the reviewers to see what we have done. All authors have approved the revised manuscript and agree with its submission to Neuropsychologia. Please address all correspondence to: Dr David Playfoot, Department of Psychology, Southampton Solent University, Above Bar Street, Southampton, SO14 7NN.We look forward to hearing from you at the earliest possible convenience. For instance, an interesting finding of the authors is that as soon as the orthographic rules are violated in a number of words, the patient seems to rely on the letter-by-letter rule, even for words that could be read differently. Indeed, the case could be made that this is the easiest way of pronouncing letter sequences. There is some evidence that acronyms are stored phonologically as sequences of letter names (Brysbaert, Slattery). Response:As recommended by Reviewer 1, Marc Brysbaert, a more precise view and therefore definition of regular/ irregular acronyms is provided in the last paragraph of page 5...

Over the last decade there has been a shift in emphasis from interface usability to interface appeal. Very few studies, however, have examined the link between the two. The current study examined the possibility that aesthetic appeal may affect user performance. In a visual search task designed to mimic user searches of interface displays, participants were asked to search for a target icon in an array of distractors. Target icons were varied orthogonally along two dimensions, complexity (which is known to affect visual search for icons in displays) and aesthetic appeal. The results showed that visually simple icons were found faster than visually complex icons, replicating previous findings. More importantly, aesthetic appeal interacted with icon complexity, significantly reducing search times for complex but not simple icons. These findings provide empirical evidence to support the idea that aesthetic appeal can influence performance.

In the field of cognitive neuropsychology of phonological short-term memory (pSTM), a key debate surrounds the issue of how impairment on tasks deemed to tap this system imply a dissociable phonological input and output buffer system, with the implication that impairments can be fractionated across disruption to separate functional components (Nickels, Howard & Best, 1997). This study presents CT, a conduction aphasic who showed no impairment on basic auditory discrimination tasks, but had very poor nonword repetition. Clear-cut examples of such cases are very rare (see Jacquemot, Dupoux & Bachoud-Levi, 2007), and we interpret the case with reference to a pSTM model that includes input and output buffers. The dissociation between performance on auditory phonological tasks and visual phonological tasks we interpret as consistent with disruption to the link from input buffer to output buffer without concurrent damage to connections from output to input. Previous research has also shown that patients with impairments of pSTM can make visual confusions with orthographically presented items in tasks seeking to tap this mechanism (Warrington & Shallice, 1972), which might stem from having an incomplete pSTM loop. In light of this we examined whether CT's ability on tests of ISR was affected by visual orthographic similarity among list items, and this is indeed what we observed. On balance then, CT's overall profile is considered best interpreted with respect to a dual buffer pSTM model (e.g., Vallar & Papagno, 2002).