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Biomedical subjects

C Clifton

Publications and source records attributed to C Clifton.

28 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1983

Latency of sequential eye movements: implications for reading.

The best available estimates indicate that the average minimum latency of saccadic eye movements (175-200 msec) approaches the mean duration of fixations in reading (200-250 msec). This fact presents a problem for models of reading which assume that an eye movement is initiated only after substantial information is processed on a fixation. Three experiments are reported that support earlier estimates of saccadic latency; the experiments were conducted under conditions in which the length of measured latencies could not reflect a motoric refractory period, spatial uncertainty, or temporal uncertainty.

Eye Movements↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Indirect assessment of memory for music during anesthesia.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: To obtain evidence for intraoperative registration of auditory information in patients undergoing elective surgery. DESIGN: Within-subject design with three levels of frequency of exposure to music. SETTING: A university hospital and a university language laboratory. PATIENTS: Thirty-four patients scheduled for elective surgery and 20 healthy undergraduate psychology students. INTERVENTIONS: Selections of instrumental ethnic music were played to patients for 0, 3, or 12 exposures in one experiment and for 0, 6, or 24 exposures in another study. The undergraduates heard 0, 3, or 12 exposures of the music while awake. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Forty-eight hours after hearing the music, all subjects were tested on their preference for the selections they had heard as well as selections they had not heard. For the patients, the mean preference ratings (in millimeters, mm) on a visual analog scale following 0, 3, and 12 exposures were 73.3 mm, 74.0 mm, and 65.1 mm, respectively, a nonsignificant difference. For the patients who were exposed to the music 0, 6, and 24 times, the mean preference ratings were 64.4 mm, 66.1 mm, and 70.6 mm, respectively, a nonsignificant difference. For the waking participants, the mean preference ratings following 0, 3, and 12 exposures were 55 mm, 66.2 mm, and 62.5 mm, respectively, a significant difference (p less than 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The anesthetized patients did not exhibit indirect memory for music played intraoperatively, at least to the extent required to demonstrate an exposure effect.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Relative clause interpretation preferences in Spanish and English.

Five experiments measured reading time for Spanish and English sentences containing a complex NP followed by a relative clause (e.g., ... "the daughter of the colonel who had an accident"). As has been previously reported, Spanish sentences were read more rapidly when the content of the relative clause forced it to modify the first of the two NPs in the complex NP ("the daughter") than when it modified the second NP ("the colonel"). Their English translations showed no difference in reading time. This preference to take the first noun as a host for the relative clause in Spanish occurred whether the relative clause was disambiguated by morphological gender marking or by its content. The results are generally consistent with the claim that the Late Closure parsing strategy does not apply universally across languages. However, we propose an alternative hypothesis, namely, that the Late Closure parsing strategy fails to apply across all phrase types within a language, and applies to relative clauses in neither English nor Spanish. Instead, a different principle, which we term the "construal hypothesis", accounts for processing of phrases such as relative clauses which do not play the role of a "primary relation" within a sentence.

Association↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Focus, accent, and argument structure: effects on language comprehension.

Four experiments investigated the effect of syntactic argument structure on the evaluation and comprehension of utterances with different patterns of pitch accents. Linguistic analyses of the relation between focus and prosody note that it is possible for certain accented constituents within a broadly focused phrase to project focus to the entire phrase. We manipulated focus requirements and accent in recorded question-answer pairs and asked listeners to make linguistic judgments of prosodic appropriateness (Experiments 1 and 3) or to make judgments based on meaningful comprehension (Experiments 2 and 4). Naive judgments of prosodic appropriateness were generally consistent with the linguistic analyses, showing preferences for utterances in which contextually new noun phrases received accent and old noun phrases did not, but suggested that an accented new argument NP was not fully effective in projecting broad focus to the entire VP. However, the comprehension experiments did demonstrate that comprehension of a sentence with broad VP focus was as efficient when only a lexical argument NP received accent as when both NP and verb received accent. Such focus projection did not occur when the argument NP was an "independent quantifier" such as nobody or everything. The results extend existing demonstrations that the ease of understanding spoken discourse depends on appropriate intonational marking of focus to cases where certain structurally-defined words can project focus-marking to an entire phrase.

Humans↗