The lexical bias effect in bilingual speech production: Evidence for feedback between lexical and sublexical levels across languages

The lexical bias effect (LBE) is the tendency for phonological substitution errors to result in existing words (rather than nonwords) at a rate higher than would be predicted by chance. This effect is often interpreted as revealing feedback between the phonological and lexical levels of representation during speech production. We report two experiments in which we tested for the LBE (1) in second-language production (Experiment 1) and (2) across the two languages of a bilingual (Experiment 2). There was an LBE in both situations. Thus, to the extent that the LBE reveals the presence of interactivity between the phonological and the lexical levels of representation, these effects suggest that there is feedback in second-language production and that it extends across the two languages of a bilingual.     

A virtual reality scenario for all seasons: the virtual classroom

Treatment and rehabilitation of the cognitive, psychological, and motor sequelae of central nervous system dysfunction often relies on assessment instruments to inform diagnosis and to track changes in clinical status. Typically, these assessments employ paper-and-pencil psychometrics, hands-on analog/computer tests, and rating of behavior within the context of real-world functional environments. Virtual reality offers the option to produce and distribute identical "standard" simulation environments in which performance can be measured and rehabilitated. Within such digital scenarios, normative data can be accumulated for performance comparisons needed for assessment/diagnosis and for treatment/rehabilitation purposes. In this manner, reusable archetypic virtual environments constructed for one purpose can also be applied for applications addressing other clinical targets. This article will provide a review of such a retooling approach using a virtual classroom simulation that was originally developed as a controlled stimulus environment in which attention processes could be systematically assessed in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. This system is now being applied to other clinical targets including the development of tests that address other cognitive functions, eye movement under distraction conditions, social anxiety disorder, and the creation of an earthquake safety training application for children with developmental and learning disabilities.     

Emotion regulation and its effects on mood improvement in response to an in vivo peer rejection challenge

This study examined children's spontaneous use of behavioral emotion regulation (ER) strategies and their effects on subsequent mood change in response to an in vivo peer rejection manipulation. Participants (N = 186), ranging between 10 and 13 years of age, played a computer game based on the television show Survivor and were randomized to either peer rejection (being voted out of the game) or nonrejection control. In response to rejection, more than one third of the participants (38%) displayed a marked worsening (i.e., reliable change) in state mood. After receiving feedback, time spent on several behavioral ER strategies during a 5-minute postfeedback period was assessed. At the end of the postfeedback period, children's cognitive activity was also assessed. More time spent on behavioral distraction was positively linked to subsequent increases in positive affect, whereas the reverse pattern was found for disengagement/passive behavior. Moreover, higher endorsement ratings for the strategy of "cognitive analysis" were associated with stronger increases in negative affect.     

Manipulating inattentional blindness within and across sensory modalities

People often fail to consciously perceive visual events that are outside the focus of attention, a phenomenon referred to as inattentional blindness or IB (i.e., Mack & Rock, 1998). Here, we investigated IB for words within and across sensory modalities (visually and auditorily) in order to assess whether dividing attention across different senses has the same consequences as dividing attention within an individual sensory modality. Participants were asked to monitor a rapid stream of pictures or sounds presented concurrently with task-irrelevant words (spoken or written). A word recognition test was used to measure the processing for unattended words compared to word recognition levels after explicitly monitoring the word stream. We were able to produce high levels of IB for visually and auditorily presented words under unimodal conditions (Experiment 1) as well as under crossmodal conditions (Experiment 2). A further manipulation revealed, however, that IB is less prevalent when attention is divided across modalities than within the same modality (Experiment 3). These findings are explained in terms of the attentional load hypothesis and suggest that, contrary to some claims, attention resources are to a certain extent shared across sensory modalities.     

Spoonish spanerisms: A lexical bias effect in Spanish

Lexical bias is the tendency for phonological errors to form existing words at a rate above chance. This effect has been observed in experiments and corpus analyses in Germanic languages, but S. del Viso, J. M. Igoa, and J. E. García-Albea (1991) found no effect in a Spanish corpus study. Because lexical bias plays an important role in the debate on interactivity in language production, the authors reconsidered its absence in Spanish. A corpus analysis, which considered relatively many errors and which used a method of estimating chance rate that is relatively independent of total error number, and a speech-error elicitation experiment provided converging evidence for lexical bias in Spanish. The authors conclude that the processing mechanisms underlying this effect hold cross-linguistically.     

Children's coping with in vivo peer rejection: an experimental investigation

We examined children's behavioral coping in response to an in vivo peer rejection manipulation. Participants (N=186) ranging between 10 and 13 years of age, played a computer game based on the television show Survivor and were randomized to either peer rejection (i.e., being voted out of the game) or non-rejection control. During a five-min. post-feedback waiting period children's use of several behavioral coping strategies was assessed. Rejection elicited a marked shift toward more negative affect, but higher levels of perceived social competence attenuated the negative mood shift. Children higher in depressive symptoms were more likely to engage in passive and avoidant coping behavior. Types of coping were largely unaffected by gender and perceived social competence. Implications are discussed.     

Gaze avoidance in social phobia: Objective measure and correlates

Gaze aversion could be a central component of the physiopathology of social phobia. The emotions of the people interacting with a person with social phobia seem to model this gaze aversion. Our research consists of testing gaze aversion in subjects with social phobia compared to control subjects in different emotional faces of men and women using an eye tracker. Twenty-six subjects with DSM-IV social phobia were recruited. Twenty-four healthy subjects aged and sex-matched constituted the control group. We looked at the number of fixations and the dwell time in the eyes area on the pictures. The main findings of this research are: confirming a significantly lower amount of fixations and dwell time in patients with social phobia as a general mean and for the 6 basic emotions independently from gender; observing a significant correlation between the severity of the phobia and the degree of gaze avoidance. However, no difference in gaze avoidance according to subject/picture gender matching was observed. These findings confirm and extend some previous results, and suggest that eye avoidance is a robust marker of persons with social phobia, which could be used as a behavioral phenotype for brain imagery studies on this disorder.