Volume 17 (2013): Issue 1 (June 2013)

We examined possible congruence and contrast effects during affective priming of linguistic and musical stimuli. In Experiment 1, when two words were presented auditorily, participants judged the affective content of the second item (happy or sad) faster when the affects matched (congruency), as expected. In Experiment 2, however, a contrast effect was observed with melodies, with slower responses in the matched conditions. In Experiment 3, two words, two melodies, or one of each were presented. A congruency effect was observed when the target was a musical stimulus (regardless of the prime type) but a contrast effect was observed when the target was a linguistic stimulus (again, regardless of the prime type). The results show that affective properties can influence the priming in both music and language. However, such priming is sensitive to the type of task, and strategic/expectancy effects play a large role when stimulus types are mixed.

The study investigated the relationship between the efficiency of switching languages and non-linguistic tasks in non-proficient Polish-English bilinguals. The participants performed picture naming that involved switching between L1 and L2 in both directions and a shape or color decision on visually presented figures, which required switching and mixing two different tasks. No relationship between the efficiency in switching languages and non-linguistic tasks was observed. However, increased language switching efficiency was related to high task mixing efficiency, indicating that maintaining two languages and two non-linguistic tasks active is mediated by equivalent control processes. Also, switching from L2 to L1 was more time-consuming than in the opposite direction and participants with the greatest L1 switching disadvantage were the fastest task switchers. These findings suggest that nonproficient bilinguals inhibit their stronger language while switching between L1 and L2 and equivalent inhibitory mechanisms can be responsible for the facilitation of their task switching performance.

The current study was targeted at investigating the relationship between translation students’ personality types and the quality of their English-to-Persian translations with respect to different text types. To this aim, 35 undergraduate senior students of translation were randomly sampled. To obtain some demographic information about the participants, the researchers used a background questionnaire. The participants were given three different text types for the translation task. An advertisement, a scientific text and a narrative text were chosen to serve Reiss’ text typology (1971) including operative, informative and expressive texts, respectively. The students were also provided with retrospective questionnaires to shed light on their performance in the act of translating. Subsequently, once the participants’ personality types were determined via the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) anchored in Jung’s psychological theory, their dominant mental functions involving intuition, sensation, feeling and thinking were identified. To analyze the data, the One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) procedure and post-hoc analysis were employed. The results of the study indicated that the only dichotomy showing a significant difference was that of intuition versus sensation. Simply put, the intuitors outperformed their sensor counterparts in the translation of the expressive text. Taking into account the findings of the current study, the researchers suggest some pedagogical guidelines too.

The study focused on Avoidant Addresses (AAs) in Japanese families and investigated the links between daily use of AAs in the family and family conflicts. The participants were 329 Japanese college students. They reported forms of address used daily among each of their family members. They also rated the frequency of conflicts among each of their family members. The results show that parent-child relationships with AAs experienced significantly higher frequency of parent-child conflicts than those without. The families with AAs also experienced a higher frequency of family conflicts than those without. Use of AAs might be unacceptable in Japanese families and reflect parent-child and family conflicts.

The present study compared utterance texts of healthy individuals and individuals suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, by using a purpose-built Grammatico-Semantic Acceptability Quotient which examined the degree of linguistic acceptability of analyzed sentences. The study involved 130 hospitalized psychiatric patients diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and 130 healthy individuals. The study yielded the biggest so far corpus of marked utterance texts of schizophrenic patients in the Polish language. A total of 11,414 sentences were isolated, 7,180 of which were produced by individuals suffering from schizophrenia. The level of their acceptability was found to be considerably lower, especially in the case of sentences produced by patients with positive type schizophrenia.

Differences in semantic clustering and switching were examined in men with frontal lobe lesions, men with schizophrenia and healthy men. Men with frontal lobe lesions and men with schizophrenia generated fewer words than healthy men and presented intact clustering, but decreased switching during the semantic fluency task. However, after controlling for the number of words produced, between-group differences in switching disappeared. These findings suggest that all three groups used similar strategies of clustering and switching during the semantic fluency task, although men with frontal lobe lesions and men with schizophrenia did it less efficiently than healthy men.