Month: June 2019

Rationalization and Reflection Differentially Modulate Prior Attitudes Toward the Purity Domain

Abstract Outside Western, predominantly secular‐liberal environments, norms restricting bodily and sexual conduct are widespread. Moralization in the so‐called purity domain has been treated as evidence that some putative violations are victimless. However, respondents themselves disagree: They often report that private yet indecent acts incur self‐harm, or harm to one’s family and the wider community—a result […]

Published on June 16, 2019

When Stronger Knowledge Slows You Down: Semantic Relatedness Predicts Children’s Co‐Activation of Related Items in a Visual Search Paradigm

Abstract A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co‐activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by which semantic knowledge influences […]

Published on June 16, 2019

Effects of Case and Transitivity on Processing Dependencies: Evidence From Niuean

Abstract We investigate the processing of wh questions in Niuean, a VSO ergative–absolutive Polynesian language. We use visual‐world eye tracking to examine how preference for subject or object dependencies is affected (a) by case marking of the subject (ergative vs. absolutive) and object (absolutive vs. oblique), and (b) by the transitivity of the verb (whether […]

Published on June 16, 2019