Effects of repeated testing in a pen-and-paper test of selective attention (FAIR-2)

The FAIR-2 (‘Frankfurter Aufmerksamkeitsinventar’) is a pen-and-paper test of visual attention in which participants have to search for targets among distractors. For similar pen-and-paper tests of attention (e.g., d2), the repetition of the test causes large improvements in performance that threaten both its (retest) reliability and validity. We investigated the size and possible sources of practice effects in the FAIR-2 in three experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were tested twice using the original FAIR-2. We compared how performance changed after 2 weeks (Experiment 1) or 3 months (Experiment 2), when the test was repeated (complete repetition), or when targets and distractors changed their roles (test reversal). For Experiment 3, we used self-constructed versions of the FAIR that allowed for a third neutral condition (complete alternation) without any stimulus overlap between the two tests. The complete repetition condition produced strong performance gains (25–35%) that persisted for 3 months. For the complete-alternation condition, we observed small to moderate improvements, suggesting that stimulus-independent learning had occurred in session 1. Finally, performance did not differ between test reversal and complete alternation, therefore, suggesting that improvements in target processing had caused the large improvements in the complete-repetition condition.

Accountability and alternation. How wholesale and partial alternation condition retrospective voting

Holding the government accountable is a crucial function of elections. The extent to which voters can actually do so depends on the political system. One element that may influence the likelihood that voters hold the government accountable is the difference between wholesale and partial alternation. Prominent political scientists like Mair, Bergman and Strøm and Pellegata and Quaranta propose that in countries with wholesale alternation voters are better able to hold governments accountable because in essence voters have the choice to keep their current government or ‘throw the rascals out’. However, this relationship has not been tested. We examine the relationship between partial and wholesale alternation and retrospective voting in a large-N cross-country study. We show that the association between government satisfaction and vote choice is stronger in countries with wholesale alternation than in systems with partial alternation.

The Revised Alternation Condition in Lexical Phonology

The present paper makes a case for retention of the (Revised) Alternation Condition in Lexical Phonology, a theory in which any single rule which presebts beytralizing, lexical effects restricted to derived forms along with allophonic, derivationally unterstricted dffects is cominally impossible. However, Korean obstruent palatalization does display both of these properties, whereby /t, th/ neutralize with /ĉ, ĉh/ before [i], but only if the [i] occurs in another morpheme (cf. /path + i/→ [paĉhi] ‘field-SUBJ’ vs. monomorphemic [pathi] ‘endure’), whereas / s / acquires the palatal allophone [∫[ before [i] both within ([∫i] ‘poem’) and between (/os + i/→ [o∫i] ‘cloth-SUBJ’) morphemes. The Revised Alternation Condition alone imposes just this restriction on a single palatalization rule functioning both lexically and post-lexically in Korean, which suggests that its removal from the theory is premature.

Toward concreteness in the description of Early Modern English vowel alternations

In the dialects of Early Modern English (ENE) described by John Hart (c.1550) and John Wallis (c.1680), as in contemporary American and British English, a number of vowel nuclei alternate in quality and segmental composition, depending on the specification for the feature [+tense]. These alternations have motivated analyses in Chomsky and Halle 1968 (SPE) in which the abstractness of underlying representations, the arbitrariness of diacritically used feature specifications, and the limited scope of some rules, motivate a search for analyses which are preferable in terms of applicable evaluation criteria such as the simplicity metric and the Weak Alternation Condition. Furthermore, the SPE analysis of Hart's system accounts for a version of the phonetic facts which in some respects are inconsistent with Hart's descriptions. In §§ 3 and 4, we will see that, by proceeding from the phonetic facts and not, as did Chomsky and Halle, from an assumption about the underlying representations, we may indeed propose phonological subcomponents which, as § 6 concludes, are more highly valued than their SPE counterparts, described in § 5. In § 7 it will be seen that the present interpretation of the phonetic facts described by John Hart is a more faithful version of that description, and it will be concluded that this fact adds support to the present analysis of Hart's vowel alternations. Historical claims made by Chomsky and Halle will be examined in § 8.