School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

Abstract: This paper presents new homogeneous series on top shares of income and wages from 1913 to 1998 in the United States using individual tax returns data. Top income and wages shares display a U-shaped pattern over the century. Our series suggest that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the Great Depression and World War II have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes. We argue that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks. Top wage shares were flat before World War II, dropped precipitously during the war, and did not start to recover before the late 1960s but are now higher than before World War II. As a result, the working rich have replaced the rentiers at the top of the income distribution.

Abstract: This paper attempts to test the hypothesis that utility depends on income relative to a ‘comparison’ or reference level. Using data on 5,000 British workers, it provides two findings. First, workers' reported satisfaction levels are shown to be inversely related to their comparison wage rates. Second, holding income constant, satisfaction levels are shown to be strongly declining in the level of education. More generally, the paper tries to help begin the task of constructing an economics of job satisfaction.

Abstract: Four-day-old French and 2-month-old American infants distinguish utterances in their native languages from those of another language. In contrast, neither group gave evidence of distinguishing utterances from two foreign languages. A series of control experiments confirmed that the ability to distinguish utterances from two different languages appears to depend upon some familiarity with at least one of the two languages. Finally, two experiments with low-pass-filtered versions of the samples replicated the main findings of discrimination of the native language utterances. These latter results suggest that the basis for classifying utterances from the native language may be provided by prosodic cues.

Abstract: Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

Abstract: Visual words that are masked and presented so briefly that they cannot be seen may nevertheless facilitate the subsequent processing of related words, a phenomenon called masked priming It has been debated whether masked primes can activate cognitive processes without gaining access to consciousness Here we use a combination of behavioural and brain-imaging techniques to estimate the depth of processing of masked numerical primes Our results indicate that masked stimuli have a measurable influence on electrical and haemodynamic measures of brain activity When subjects engage in an overt semantic comparison task with a clearly visible target numeral, measures of covert motor activity indicate that they also unconsciously apply the task instructions to an unseen masked numeral A stream of perceptual, semantic and motor processes can therefore occur without awareness