Syntactic processing in bilinguals: an fNIRS study

The study of the neural basis of syntactic processing has greatly benefited from neuroimaging techniques. Research on syntactic processing in bilinguals has used a variety of techniques, including mainly functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP). This paper reports on a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) study on syntactic processing in highly proficient young adult speakers of Portuguese (mother tongue) (L1) and French (second language) (L2). They made a syntactic judgment of visually presented sentences, which either did or did not contain noun-verb agreement violations. The results showed that syntactic processing in both languages resulted in significant activation in anterior frontal regions of the left hemisphere and in the temporal superior posterior areas of the right hemisphere, with a more prominent activation for L2 in some areas. These findings corroborate previously reported neuroimaging evidence, showing the suitability of fNIRS for the study of syntactic processing in the bilingual brain.     

Bewitched to Be Happy? The Impact of Pretend Play on Emotion Regulation of Expression in 3- to 6-Year-Olds

Abstract

As a means of psychological distancing, pretend play may facilitate emotion regulation. Up to now, however, the empirical evidence for a relation between these two is not consistent. The present study examines the impact of pretend play on reflective emotion regulation of expression with a disappointing gift task using the strategy of role-taking. Fifty-two children aged 3 to 6?years were motivated to deceive the experimenter volitionally by false smiling, regardless of whether they received an attractive gift, an unattractive gift, or no gift. Twenty-five of the children accomplished the task in the context of a pretend play where they were playfully guided to take on a role assumed to facilitate reflective emotion regulation of expression. The other 27 children received only a direct verbal instruction. As an indication of successful reflective emotion regulation of expression, twelve adult naïve observers judged children’s videotaped behavior according to the quality of emotion that the children seemed to experience. This impression analysis showed no impact of experimental variation and thus no facilitating effect of pretend play with a given task-convenient role. While happiness ratings in the pretend play group did not correlate to children’s quality of play, they positively correlated to children’s joy of playing.     

EXAMINING THE USE OF PHOTO ESSAYS ON STUDENTS’ WRITING ABILITY

This study examined the use of a visual approach as an organizing framework for the planning and execution for the writing of various discourse styles. Low literacy achievement students in 6th and 7th grade showed increased competence in different writing styles when they planned, photographed, and “story‐boarded” photo essays as compared to situations when they merely wrote on assigned topics. Analysis for the 69 students in this study was done by repeated measures design. Three raters evaluated students’ compositions using the Diederich Rating Scale. There were consistent findings of nonsignificant main effects, while there were significant interactions of writing scores with time of treatment for the areas of content, mechanics, and total composition score