What's wrong with American scientists?

A friend just got back from a computational linguistics conference in the U.S. She commented that she and her colleague had noticed that the best talks came from European labs, and that Europeans seemed more open to exchange of ideas than American researchers. This observation precisely matches my own experience and opinions.

In general, it seems to me that American researchers have little interest in any ideas but their own. All of their energy is spent churning out papers to further their careers. I think that this is due to the extreme competitiveness of the funding situation here. It results in thrashing - scientists spend all of their time maneuvering to get funding, based on safe incremental changes to their previously funded work. Anything not directly related to funding for their own research is of no use; it is as if they have blinders on. As a result, cronyism rules; established researchers will only help other researchers if there's something in it for them. If a new researcher independently generates original ideas, it is impossible to get ahead based solely on the quality of those ideas.

That's why the U.S. is losing its pre-eminence in science and Europe is gaining, as shown by an NSF study of where the leading papers in a variety of fields are being generated.

SOLAR Model - Davis & Bowers (2006) in JEP:HPP

For five-letter targets in lexical decision, the authors compare primes of the form 1d345 vs. 13d45. The SOLAR model predicts stronger priming for 1d345. In the original specification of the SERIOL model, open-bigram activation decreased with increasing string position. Under this assumption, the SERIOL model predicts stronger priming for 13d45. Davis and Bowers found stronger priming for 1d345 than 13d45, and concluded that the SERIOL model is inconsistent with their experimental results.

However, the conclusions of Davis and Bowers (2006) are based on an obsolete parameterization of the SERIOL model. In my 2004 dissertation, the assumption that bigram activation depends on string position was dropped; bigram activations now depend only on the separation between the constituent letters. As a result, the SERIOL model, like the SOLAR model, predicts stronger priming for 1d345 than 13d45. Thus the priming results do not actually differentiate between the two models. (For a discussion of why the positional variation was originally included, why it was dropped, and how the model now accounts for the phenomenon originally explained by the positional variation, see Whitney (in press, LC&P) ).

Despite the fact that a primary focus of Davis and Bowers (2006) was to compare the SERIOL and SOLAR models, JEP:HPP did not invite me to review their article. Hence, their article includes claims that are no longer accurate. (It also includes a claim that is outright incorrect - that even if the positional variation were dropped, the SERIOL model would still be inconsistent with their results.) Nor would JEP:HPP allow me to publish a reply. Fortunately, I found a fairer venue, and my reply to Davis and Bowers (2006) is now in press at Brain and Language.

Briefly, the main points of the response are:

• The SERIOL model is consistent with the results of Davis & Bowers (2006).
• SOLAR's lexical activation function is not biologically plausible.
• A recent re-parameterization of the SOLAR model leads a contradiction of Davis and Bower's core claim that contiguity matters.
• Experimental comparisons between models should test inherent aspects of the models and not depend on particular parameterizations.
• A critical comparison is presented. That is, I specify a pair of primes for which the two models inherently make different predictions. (Colin Davis agrees with this analysis.)
  

An anti-rant

In the last post, I ranted about unfair treatment by TICS. I do want to say that, for the most part, I've been treated very fairly by reviewers and editors, with respect to my own publications and being asked to review others' publications. I greatly appreciate this fair treatment. TICS and JEP:HPP (more on JEP in later posts) are the notable exceptions. I guess the highest-status journals only care about status. Makes sense, I suppose.

I also greatly appreciate how I am treated by most European colleagues. For example, at ESCOP I talked with a number of people who were not aware that I do not have a research position. When I told them that I do not, it did not seem to diminish their interest in my work at all.

Goswami & Ziegler (2006) in TICS

In their TICS Letter, Goswami and Ziegler rightly argue that the sub-lexical, phonological route must also be considered in proposals for how letter-order is encoded. They point out that open-bigrams are not suitable for sub-lexical processing, as they are not phonologically relevant units.

However, in the extended SERIOL model (Whitney & Cornelissen, 2005), the serial encoding of individual letters provides input to both the ventral (lexical) and dorsal (sub-lexical) routes. On the ventral route, the letters activate open-bigrams, which activate visual word forms. On the dorsal route, the letter sequence is parsed into a grapho-phonological representation. Thus the serial encoding provides a location-invariant encoding of individual letters, which of course provides suitable input for either route.

Despite the suitability of SERIOL’s representations for the demands of phonological processing, Goswami and Ziegler (2006) argued that “This solution ignores data showing that phonology affects the lexical route, such as body-neighborhood effects in lexical decision (Ziegler & Perry, 1998)”. It is unclear what they could mean by this statement.

• First, Whitney (2004) specifically discussed the data presented by Ziegler and Perry (1998), showing in detail how the SERIOL model explains their findings.
  
• Second, the general issue of interaction between the lexical and sub-lexical routes is orthogonal to the question of how letter order is encoded. Presumably, the lexical and sub-lexical routes converge onto the same lexical representations. Feedback from the lexical representations to letters and phonemes would then cause interaction between the routes. This connectivity pattern is independent of how letter position is encoded.

And now for a rant. Despite the fact that Goswami and Ziegler's Letter and Dehaene's article on the LCD model both focus on the open-bigram representation and I was the first to propose such a representation (Whitney & Berndt, 1998), I was not asked by TICS to review either article. I do know that a co-author was asked to review Goswami and Ziegler. To ask this person and not me is ludicrous, as their Letter focused on my idea. It is just one example of how status trumps accomplishment in science. Apparently, having a research position (as does my co-author) is more important to TICS than ownership of ideas. (Due to geographic constraints and lack of connections in the U.S., I have been unable to obtain a research position; I work independently and collaborate on experiments.)