语音回路和视空间模板对音位流畅性和语义流畅性的影响

采用双任务范式,通过四种次任务考察了工作记忆两个子系统－语音回路和视空间模板对音位流畅性和语义流畅性的影响。实验1表明,主动产生系列发音和被动聆听声音判断对音位流畅性影响更大,表明音位流畅性更依赖于语音回路。实验2表明,字形匹配和字形旋转判断对语义流畅性影响更大,表明语义流畅性更依赖于视空间模板。研究还表明,被试完成音位流畅性任务的策略更易受语言的特点影响,完成语义流畅性任务的策略更易受概念系统的特性影响     

注意控制和短时存储对音位流畅性和语义流畅性的影响

工作记忆的中央执行系统具有注意控制和短时存储的功能。采用双任务范式,探讨了中央执行系统的注意控制和短时存储对言语流畅性的影响。实验1考察了中央执行系统的转换和抑制功能对音位流畅性和语义言语流畅性的影响。结果表明,中央执行系统的转换和抑制功能对两种言语流畅性的影响相当。实验2考察了中央执行系统的注意控制资源和短时存储资源对两种言语流畅性的影响。结果表明,语义流畅性更依赖于短时存储资源,音位流畅性更依赖于注意控制资源。研究还发现,被试完成语义流畅性任务的策略更易受概念系统的特性影响,完成音位流畅性任务的策略更易受语言的特点影响。在实验研究的基础上,作者提出了工作记忆影响言语流畅性的理论模型     

流畅性对再认的影响:实验证据及理论解释

流畅性可以影响再认,而且仅影响熟悉性加工的观点已得到大量研究的证实。近年一些研究者采用掩蔽启动范式并结合修改的R/K范式、独立判断的R/K范式等实验范式,操控测验项目的流畅性,发现流畅性影响的可能是猜测或者回想加工,因而质疑这个结论。为解释流畅性对再认的影响,流畅性归因理论侧重对流畅性的归因、冲突-归因理论侧重期待流畅性和实际流畅性之间的冲突、预激活-适应模型侧重启动刺激引起的神经活动激活或适应、线索-学习理论侧重流畅性线索的有效性。未来研究应关注流畅性对来源和联结记忆的影响,并考察流畅性对再认的影响在不同年龄人群或遗忘症人群中的表现是否一致。     

The informative value of type of repetition: Perceptual and conceptual fluency influences on judgments of truth

We contrast the effects of conceptual and perceptual fluency resulting from repetition in the truth effect. In Experiment 1, participants judged either verbatim or paraphrased repetitions, which reduce perceptual similarity to original statements. Judgments were made either immediately after the first exposure to the statements or after one week. Illusions of truth emerged for both types of repetition, with delay reducing both effects. In Experiment 2, participants judged verbatim and paraphrased repetitions with either the same or a contradictory meaning of original statements. In immediate judgments, illusions of truth emerged for repetitions with the same meaning and illusions of falseness for contradictory repetitions. In the delayed session, the illusion of falseness disappeared for contradictory statements. Results are discussed in terms of the contributions of recollection of stimulus details and of perceptual and conceptual fluency to illusions of truth at different time intervals and judgmental context conditions.     

加工流畅性和提取流畅性与学习不良儿童学习判断的关系

流畅性是个体做学习判断（Judgements of Learning, JOLs）时的重要线索,主要包括加工流畅性和提取流畅性。实验采用联想字对作为实验材料,把做JOLs的时间分为即刻JOLs (Immediate:I)（学习完一个项目立即判断）,短时延迟JOLs（Delay condition: D1）和长时延迟JOLs（D2）,考察不同JOLs时间条件下,流畅性线索对学习不良儿童和一般儿童的JOLs的不同预测模式。被试为普通小学五年级学习不良和一般儿童各20名,结果发现,一般儿童在I条件下主要利用加工流畅性,在D条件下主要利用提取流畅性做JOLs,而学习不良儿童无论在I还是D条件下均主要利用提取流畅性线索做JOLs。加工流畅性在I条件下效度较高,提取流畅性在D条件下效度较高     

Behavioral fluency and mathematics intervention research: A review of the last 20 years

Behavioral fluency refers to the relationship between the achievement of performance standards, or frequency ranges of behavior, and critical learning outcomes. Over the past 20 years, Precision Teaching and related research have contributed a number of studies examining behavioral fluency. The subsequent review investigates the empirical evidence from mathematics intervention research. Several studies suggest numerical markers that best support behavioral fluency. Results indicate that fluency interventions set to performance standards increased behavioral fluency and associated critical learning outcomes; however, more research is warranted to operationalize and standardize each outcome to the principles of behavior and numerical markers that constitute behavioral fluency.     

The Name-Pronunciation Effect: Further Evidence from Chinese

This study examined the Chinese name-pronunciation effect. The easy-to-pronounce and difficult-to-pronounce Chinese names were created using the same characters in order to control for visual perceptual and conceptual fluency. In Experiment 1, participants rated each name in terms of liking, electability as a state leader, income level, and baby name preference. An additional rating of prevalence was used to estimate familiarity. In Experiment 2, participants did not read the name aloud before rating and performed intentional recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, the easy-to-pronounce names were rated higher than difficult-to-pronounce names on liking. This effect generalized to judgments of electability and baby name preference but not to prevalence and income level. There were no differences in memory performances between the two types of names. Results are discussed in terms of the boundary condition of the name-pronunciation effect and the advantage of using Chinese names to study this effect.     

Limitations in Verbal Fluency Following Heavy Burdens of Early Childhood Diarrhea in Brazilian Shantytown Children

The effects of heavy burdens of diarrhea in the first 2 years of life on specific executive control function like verbal fluency are not well understood. In previous studies, we have shown associations of early childhood diarrhea (ECD) with nonverbal intelligence and school functioning. Therefore, we postulated that ECD might affect early neuropsychological development leading to long-term deficits in normal cognitive development. Based on our extensive 14-year prospective cohort studies of early childhood diarrheal illnesses in a Brazilian shantytown community, we examined ECD correlations between specific impairments of higher mental function and executive skills in shantytown children 5–10 years later (now at 6–12) years of age. Specifically we examined whether heavy diarrheal illnesses correlate with reduced performance on selected tests of executive function. Our study, for the first time, suggests a disproportional impairment in semantic but not phonetic fluency in a subset of children with heavy burdens of diarrhea in their first 2 years of life even when controlling for maternal education, breastfeeding, and child schooling. Similar semantic decrements have been associated with impaired recovery from brain injury. These exploratory studies suggest the importance of verbal fluency tests to assess executive functioning in children challenged by poor nutrition and diarrhea in early life. In addition, our unique findings show the potential influences of early childhood diarrhea on language development that is so critical to productive adulthood and potentially set a foundation for new neuropsychological approaches, which assess early burdens of enteric illnesses on childhood development.     

Default spacing is the optimal spacing for word reading

Increased interletter spacing is thought to reduce crowding effects and to enhance fluent reading. Several studies have shown beneficial effects of increased interletter spacing on reading speed and accuracy, especially in poor readers. Therefore, increased interletter spacing appears to be a relatively easy way to enhance reading performance. However, in adult readers reading speed was shown to be impeded with increased interletter spacing. Thus, findings on interletter spacing are still inconclusive. In the current study we examined the effect of a range of interletter spacings (?0.5, default, 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2) on naming fluency of monosyllabic and bisyllabic words in beginning (Grade 2) and more advanced (Grade 4) readers. Additionally we tested the effects of spacing in a subsample of poor readers. In contrast to previous findings, neither beginning nor advanced readers benefited from an increase in interletter spacing. However, they did show reduced reading fluency when letter spacing was smaller than the default spacing, which may be indicative of a crowding effect. Poor readers showed a similar pattern. We conclude that an increase in interletter spacing has no effect on word naming fluency.     

Swedish norms for word fluency tests: FAS, animals and verbs

Verbal fluency tests are useful measures of acquired language impairment and cognitive decline of various etiologies. The aim of this study was to provide normative data for the Swedish population on the three verbal fluency tests, FAS, Animals and Verbs. A group of 165 healthy participants ranging from 16 to 89 years of age were assessed with the verbal fluency tests and tests of level of intellectual functioning. The sample was stratified by education, age and gender. Level of education had a substantial influence on the performance on verbal fluency, most clearly so in FAS and Verbs. Intellectual level had a positive and significant correlation with all measures of word fluency. Moreover, there was an interaction between age and gender such that women aged between 30 and 64 years outperformed elderly men on FAS and Verbs. Guidelines for instructions and scoring in Swedish are given in the article.     

Action verbal fluency normative data for the elderly

An emerging body of literature points to the prominent role of the frontal lobes in the retrieval of verbs, whereas production of common and proper nouns arguably is mediated primarily by posterior and anterior temporal regions, respectively. Although the majority of studies examining the neuroanatomic distinctions between verb and noun retrieval have relied on action naming tasks (naming depicted activities, e.g., running) as indicators of verb retrieval abilities, recent studies have utilized an action (verb) verbal fluency measure, the Action Fluency Test (AFT), to assess verb retrieval. Findings from these studies suggest that action fluency is sensitive to the integrity of fronto-subcortical neural circuitry and that it is a valid measure of executive and language functions. The AFT is an easily administered executive function measure, but no normative data for the AFT or other action fluency tasks has been published. This study was undertaken to provide initial AFT normative data for a sample of 145 healthy elderly subjects. As education is significantly correlated with AFT scores, the normative data are stratified by educational level.     

On the use of fluency training in the behavioral treatment of autism: a commentary

The substantial demand for behavior-analytic treatment of early childhood autism has been associated with rapid dissemination of treatment procedures to practitioners and caregivers. This level of demand could plausibly induce premature dissemination of treatments that do not yet have sufficient empirical support. We argue that this might have happened with the use of fluency training for learners with autism and identify four areas of research that are necessary to ensure that dissemination efforts are better matched to the available empirical support for this instructional strategy.     

Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: Discrepantly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that discrepancies in processing fluency influence the perceived wrongness of moral violations. Participants were presented with numerous moral violations in easy or difficult to read font. For some violations experienced perceptual fluency was consistent with the fluency associated with previous violations, whereas for others it was more fluent or more disfluent. Results show that, across multiple vignettes, participants rated moral violations that were processed with discrepant fluency as less morally wrong than those processed with discrepant disfluency. The current work highlights the importance of metacognitive experiences in moral judgment and contributes to the emerging literature on the role of experiential factors in moral judgment.     

The bilingual effects of linguistic distances on episodic memory and verbal fluency

The impact of linguistic distance or the relatedness between two languages, on bilinguals’ episodic memory performance and verbal fluency is an understudied area. Thus, the purpose of this study was to determine if differences in linguistic distances have differential effects on these abilities. Measures of episodic recognition, categorical fluency, and global cognitive functioning were also considered in the analyses. Two matched samples with participants living and educated in Sweden were drawn from the Betula Prospective Cohort Study. Results showed that bilinguals who speak linguistically similar languages (Swedish and English), performed significantly better than monolinguals on both episodic memory recall and letter fluency, while bilinguals who speak two languages that are more distant (Swedish and Finnish), showed no advantages compared to their monolingual counterparts. For both tasks, however, a linear trend was observed indicative of better performance for the Swedish-English group compared to the Finnish-Swedish group, and for the Swedish-Finnish group compared to the monolinguals group. As expected, no differences between groups were found in any of the other cognitive tasks. Overall, results suggest that the impact of linguistic distances should be explored in more detail in the future.     

Age-related differences in word-retrieval but not in meaning generation

ABSTRACT

This study examines age-associated changes in retrieval on a picture-naming task, phonemic and semantic fluency tasks, and the Homophone Meaning Generation Test (HMGT). The sample included 152 Hebrew-speaking adults, half young (mean age 22.75) and half old (mean age 76.05). Groups differed on the picture-naming task and on both verbal fluency tasks, but not on the HMGT. Age explained a greater share of the variance than did education level on these three tests, whereas the opposite pattern of results was seen on the HMGT. We suggest that age-related word finding difficulties are attenuated when performance allows for semantic rather than phonological access.     

Distinguishing familiarity from fluency for the compound word pair effect in associative recognition

We examined whether processing fluency contributes to associative recognition of unitized pre-experimental associations. In Experiments 1A and 1B, we minimized perceptual fluency by presenting each word of pairs on separate screens at both study and test, yet the compound word (CW) effect (i.e., hit and false-alarm rates greater for CW pairs with no difference in discrimination) did not reduce. In Experiments 2A and 2B, conceptual fluency was examined by comparing transparent (e.g., hand bag) and opaque (e.g., rag time) CW pairs in lexical decision and associative recognition tasks. Lexical decision was faster for transparent CWs (Experiment 2A) but in associative recognition, the CW effect did not differ by CW pair type (Experiment 2B). In Experiments 3A and 3B, we examined whether priming that increases processing fluency would influence the CW effect. In Experiment 3A, CW and non-compound word pairs were preceded with matched and mismatched primes at test in an associative recognition task. In Experiment 3B, only transparent and opaque CW pairs were presented. Results showed that presenting matched versus mismatched primes at test did not influence the CW effect. The CW effect in yes-no associative recognition is due to reliance on enhanced familiarity of unitized CW pairs.     

加工流畅性的作用机制：双系统模型及其应用

加工流畅性在近二十年来引发了大量的研究,这些研究对人们深入了解认知-情绪的相互作用机制很有价值,与决策、直觉、审美等领域的研究也有密切的关系。流畅性-归因模型和流畅性-情绪联结模型是解释加工流畅性效应的两个竞争模型,笔者分析与评价了这两个模型的观点与证据,提出了建立双系统模型的初步设想,并对未来如何根据双系统模型的观点进一步开展加工流畅性的作用机制研究进行了展望。     

THREE VERSUS SIX REREADINGS OF PRACTICE PASSAGES

Although the literature clearly demonstrates that repeated readings result in immediate effects on students' performance on the intervention materials as well as long‐term benefits, data are less promising regarding its immediate generalization effects to similar materials. Using an alternating treatments design, the current study evaluated the effects of a multicomponent repeated reading intervention on generalization passages after students had read a passage three versus six times. Results indicated improvements in fluency as a result of both interventions, with slightly greater maintenance effects when students were given six opportunities to read passages.     

Children's word fluency strategies

Two word fluency tasks, the FAS letter fluency task and the "animal" semantic fluency task, were administered to 130 healthy Swedish-speaking children between 6 and 15 years of age. The main aim was to gather normative data on these word fluency tasks for Swedish-speaking children. Another purpose was to examine the switching and clustering strategies used, along with the occurrence of erroneous responses, in relation to demographic data and number of words retrieved. Both phonological and semantic analyses of switching and clustering were conducted. Higher age was found to be related to a more effective use of phonological and semantic switching and clustering strategies. The reference data resulting from this study may be of clinical value in examinations of children with various diagnoses, including language impairment.