The Ending Effect in the Domain of Gambling: The Effect of Gain-Loss Status on Economic Decision-Making

Previous studies have shown that people prefer risk-taking at the end of gambles, a phenomenon called the ending effect. By using the Guess Gambling Game, we investigated the impact of gain-loss status on the ending effect (Experiment 1) and whether and how this effect may be affected by time reference (Experiment 2) and gender (Experiment 1&2). In Experiment 1, we observed the ending effect only in the gain group. Furthermore, gender differences exist in the loss group behavior, females were more risk-averse than males, and males tend to investment more initially and then reduce their investment in a U-shaped pattern (Experiment 1&2). Next, in Experiment 2, the findings indicated that participants in the gain group made riskier decisions and were willing to allocate more money for additional decision opportunities, irrespective of the time conditions. Additionally, under time-limited condition, participants tended to make more decisions in the final round, aiming to maximize their choices times within the limited time. These results contribute to a better understanding of the boundary conditions surrounding the ending effect in risky decision-making and may offer a scientific basis for mitigating and intervening in irrational decision-making.

Production of time reference in Turkish Broca's aphasia: The effect of morphological complexity

In PWA (people with aphasia) difficulties with sentences that refer to the past compared to non-past time reference have been shown for many languages, including Turkish. However, the impact of morphological complexity on past time reference ability in production has not yet been reported for Turkish-speaking PWA. Turkish, where verb forms have complex inflectional paradigms and exhibit overt and non-overt morphology, facilitates the examination of the effects of morphological complexity. The current study has two objectives: 1) to investigate whether the morphological complexity of the verb form affects time reference production of Turkish-speaking PWA and 2) to provide analysis for the error patterns discovered. Seventeen Turkish individuals with Broca's aphasia who were matched in age with a control group of 17 neurologically intact Turkish individuals were tested with a picture sentence completion task. Test conditions were present progressive, simple past, past perfect, past progressive, and future tense. The task required the participants to complete each sentence frame with a verb. Our findings show that Turkish-speaking PWA were more successful in producing verb forms referring to non-past than verb forms referring to the past time reference. The current study supports previous findings that past is more difficult than non-past time reference for Turkish-speaking PWA. In terms of morphological complexity, we find that PWA were more impaired when producing morphologically complex verb forms rather than morphologically simple forms. We argue that these impairments lie in the realization of overt morphology.

Losing track of time? Processing of time reference inflection in agrammatic and healthy speakers of German

BACKGROUND

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia (IWAs) have problems with grammatical decoding of tense inflection. However, these difficulties depend on the time frame that the tense refers to. Verb morphology with reference to the past is more difficult than with reference to the non-past, because a link needs to be made to the past event in discourse, as captured in the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH; Bastiaanse, R., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C., Lee, J., Yarbay Duman, T., Thompson, C. K., 2011. Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study. J. Neurolinguist. 24, 652-673). With respect to reference to the (non-discourse-linked) future, data so far indicate that IWAs experience less difficulties as compared to past time reference (Bastiaanse, R., Bamyaci, E., Hsu, C., Lee, J., Yarbay Duman, T., Thompson, C. K., 2011. Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study. J. Neurolinguist. 24, 652-673), supporting the assumptions of the PADILIH. Previous online studies of time reference in aphasia used methods such as reaction times analysis (e.g., Faroqi-Shah, Y., Dickey, M. W., 2009. On-line processing of tense and temporality in agrammatic aphasia. Brain Lang. 108, 97-111). So far, no such study used eye-tracking, even though this technique can bring additional insights (Burchert, F., Hanne, S., Vasishth, S., 2013. Sentence comprehension disorders in aphasia: the concept of chance performance revisited. Aphasiology 27, 112-125, doi:10.1080/02687038.2012.730603).

AIMS

This study investigated (1) whether processing of future and past time reference inflection differs between non-brain-damaged individuals (NBDs) and IWAs, and (2) underlying mechanisms of time reference comprehension failure by IWAs.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

A visual-world experiment combining sentence-picture matching and eye-tracking was administered to 12 NBDs and 6 IWAs, all native speakers of German. Participants heard German sentences with periphrastic future ('will+V') or periphrastic past ('has+V-d') verb forms while they were presented with corresponding pictures on a computer screen.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

NBDs scored at ceiling and significantly higher than the IWAs. IWAs had below-ceiling performance on the future condition, and both participant groups were faster to respond to the past than to the future condition. These differences are attributed to a pre-existing preference to look at a past picture, which has to be overcome. Eye movement patterns suggest that both groups interpret future time reference similarly, while IWAs show a delay relative to NBDs in interpreting past time reference inflection. The eye tracking results support the PADILIH, because processing reference to the past in discourse syntax requires additional resources and thus, is problematic and delayed for people with aphasia.

Understanding discourse-linked elements in aphasia: a threefold study in Russian

BACKGROUND

Agrammatic speakers have problems with grammatical encoding and decoding. However, not all syntactic processes are equally problematic: present time reference, who questions, and reflexives can be processed by narrow syntax alone and are relatively spared compared to past time reference, which questions, and personal pronouns, respectively. The latter need additional access to discourse and information structures to link to their referent outside the clause (Avrutin, 2006). Linguistic processing that requires discourse-linking is difficult for agrammatic individuals: verb morphology with reference to the past is more difficult than with reference to the present (Bastiaanse et al., 2011). The same holds for which questions compared to who questions and for pronouns compared to reflexives (Avrutin, 2006). These results have been reported independently for different populations in different languages. The current study, for the first time, tested all conditions within the same population.

AIMS

We had two aims with the current study. First, we wanted to investigate whether discourse-linking is the common denominator of the deficits in time reference, wh questions, and object pronouns. Second, we aimed to compare the comprehension of discourse-linked elements in people with agrammatic and fluent aphasia.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Three sentence-picture-matching tasks were administered to 10 agrammatic, 10 fluent aphasic, and 10 non-brain-damaged Russian speakers (NBDs): (1) the Test for Assessing Reference of Time (TART) for present imperfective (reference to present) and past perfective (reference to past), (2) the Wh Extraction Assessment Tool (WHEAT) for which and who subject questions, and (3) the Reflexive-Pronoun Test (RePro) for reflexive and pronominal reference.

OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

NBDs scored at ceiling and significantly higher than the aphasic participants. We found an overall effect of discourse-linking in the TART and WHEAT for the agrammatic speakers, and in all three tests for the fluent speakers. Scores on the RePro were at ceiling.

CONCLUSIONS

The results are in line with the prediction that problems that individuals with agrammatic and fluent aphasia experience when comprehending sentences that contain verbs with past time reference, which question words and pronouns are caused by the fact that these elements involve discourse linking. The effect is not specific to agrammatism, although it may result from different underlying disorders in agrammatic and fluent aphasia.

Production and Comprehension of Time Reference in Korean Nonfluent Aphasia

Objectives

Individuals with nonfluent agrammatic aphasia show impaired production and comprehension of time reference via verbal morphology. However, cross-linguistic findings to date suggest inconsistent evidence as to whether tense processing in general is impaired or time reference to the past is selectively difficult in this population. This study examined production and comprehension of time reference via verb morphology in Korean-speaking individuals with nonfluent aphasia.

Methods

A group of 9 healthy controls and 8 individuals with nonfluent aphasia (5 for the production task) participated in the study. Sentence priming production and auditory sentence to picture matching tasks were used, parallel with the previous cross-linguistic experiments in English, Chinese, Turkish, and others.

Results

The participants with nonfluent aphasia showed different patterns of impairment in production and comprehension. In production, they were impaired in all time references with errors being dominated by substitution of incorrect time references and other morpho-phonologically well-formed errors, indicating a largely intact morphological affixation process. In comprehension, they showed selective impairment of the past, consistent with the cross-linguistic evidence from English, Chinese, Turkish, and others.

Conclusion

The findings suggest that interpretation of past time reference poses particular difficulty in nonfluent aphasia irrespective of typological characteristics of languages; however, in production, language-specific morpho-semantic functions of verbal morphology may play a significant role in selective breakdowns of time reference.

Time reference in agrammatic aphasia: A cross-linguistic study

It has been shown across several languages that verb inflection is difficult for agrammatic aphasic speakers. In particular, Tense inflection is vulnerable. Several theoretical accounts for this have been posed, for example, a pure syntactic one suggesting that the Tense node is unavailable due to its position in the syntactic tree (Friedmann & Grodzinsky, 1997); one suggesting that the interpretable features of the Tense node are underspecified (Burchert, Swoboda-Moll, & De Bleser, 2005; Wenzlaff & Clahsen, 2004, 2005); and a morphosemantic one, arguing that the diacritic Tense features are affected in agrammatism (Faroqi-Shah & Dickey, 2009; Lee, Milman, & Thompson, 2008). However recent findings (Bastiaanse, 2008) and a reanalysis of some oral production studies (e.g. Lee et al., 2008; Nanousi, Masterson, Druks, & Atkinson, 2006) suggest that both Tense and Aspect are impaired and, most importantly, reference to the past is selectively impaired, both through simple verb forms (such as simple past in English) and through periphrastic verb forms (such as the present perfect, 'has V-ed', in English). It will be argued that reference to the past is discourse linked and reference to the present and future is not (Zagona, 2003, in press). In-line with Avrutin's (2000) theory that suggests discourse linking is impaired in Broca's aphasia, the PAst DIscourse LInking Hypothesis (PADILIH) has been formulated. Three predictions were tested: (1) patients with agrammatic aphasia are selectively impaired in use of grammatical morphology associated with reference to the past, whereas, inflected forms which refer to the present and future are relatively spared; (2) this impairment is language-independent; and (3) this impairment will occur in both production and comprehension. Agrammatic Chinese, English and Turkish speakers were tested with the Test for Assessing Reference of Time (TART; Bastiaanse, Jonkers, & Thompson, unpublished). Results showed that both the English and Turkish agrammatic speakers performed as hypothesized, showing a selective deficit for production of inflected forms referring to the past, despite the typological difference between the languages. The Chinese agrammatic speakers were poor in reference to the past as well, but reference to the present and future also was severely impaired. For comprehension, the results were strikingly similar for the three languages: reference to the past was impaired for all. These results confirmed our hypothesis that reference to the past is discourse linked and, therefore, grammatical morphology used for reference to the past is impaired in agrammatic aphasia, whether this is done through Tense and/or Aspect markers.