Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by "elicited production." Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim…

In our article, "Syntactic complexity effects in sentence production" [Scontras, Badecker, Shank, Lim, & Fedorenko, 2015 (EJ1057757)], we reported two elicited production experiments and argued that there is a cost associated with planning and uttering syntactically complex, object-extracted structures that contain a non-local…

Kousta, Vigliocco, Del Campo, Vinson, and Andrews (2011) questioned the adequacy of dual coding theory and the context availability model as explanations of representational and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. They proposed an alternative approach that focuses on the role of emotional content in the processing of…

We argue that the nativist-empiricist debate in developmental psychology is distorted, both theoretically and methodologically, by a shared framework of assumptions concerning the nature of representation. In particular, both sides of the debate assume models of representation that make the emergence of representation impossible. This, in turn,…

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.'s Letter to the Editor of "Cognitive Science". We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from "normal" (i.e.,…

Elliot et al. (2010) reported multiple experimental findings that the color red modified women's ratings of attractiveness, sexual desirability, and status of a photographed man. An analysis of the reported statistics of these studies indicates that the experiments lack sufficient power to support these claims. Given the power of the experiments,…

Noles and Gelman (2012) attempt to critically reevaluate the claim that linguistic labels affect children's judgments of visual similarity. They report results of an experiment that used a modified version of Sloutsky and Fisher's (2004) task and conclude that "labels do not generally affect children's perceptual similarity judgments; rather,…

In this commentary, the authors discuss the topic of ostracism--being ignored and excluded--as a painful social phenomenon that most individuals have experienced at least once in their lives, and sometimes daily. The harmful power of ostracism is not short-lived; data suggest that participants asked to relive ostracism by writing an…

The target paper by Barba (2012) raises issues that were the focus of the author's first two publications on operant variability. The author will describe the main findings in those papers and then discuss Barba's specific arguments. Barba has argued against the operant nature of variability. (Contains 2 figures.)

In his article, the author claimed that studies of operant variability that use a lag-"n" or threshold procedure and measure the obtained variability through the change in U value fail to provide direct evidence that variability is an operant dimension of behavior. To do so, he adopted Catania's (1973) concept of the operant, which takes the…

Skidmore and Thompson (this issue of "Educational Researcher") imply that a graph was changed with the intent to promote more experimental research in education. In this response, the author presents evidence that challenges this implication and concludes that the changed graph does not accurately capture the "declining" trend of experimental…

Sloutsky and Fisher (2012) attempt to reframe the results presented in Noles and Gelman (2012) as a pure replication of their original work validating the similarity, induction, naming, and categorization (SINC) model. However, their critique fails to engage with the central findings reported in Noles and Gelman, and their reanalysis fails to…

In this latest in a series of articles on the innovative use of experimental business laboratories for high-expectation entrepreneurs, the authors focus on the networking benefits of business lab experiments. Distinguishing between "Robinson Crusoe" types, whose tendency is to operate in isolation, and "Lemuel Gulliver" types, who rely on…

Koen and Yonelinas (2010; K&Y) reported that mixing classes of targets that had short (weak) or long (strong) study times had no impact on zROC slope, contradicting the predictions of the encoding variability hypothesis. We show that they actually derived their predictions from a mixture unequal-variance signal detection (UVSD) model, which…

Most biological scientists conduct experiments to look for effects, and test the results statistically. One of the commonly used test is Student's t test. However, this test concentrates on a very limited question. The authors assume that there is no effect in the experiment, and then estimate the possibility that they could have obtained these…