Adults and toddlers systematically associate pseudowords such as “bouba” and “kiki” with round and spiky shapes, respectively, a sound symbolic phenomenon known as the “bouba‐kiki effect”. To date, whether this sound symbolic effect is a property of the infant brain present at birth or is a learned aspect of language perception remains unknown. Yet, solving this question is fundamental for our understanding of early language acquisition. Indeed, an early sensitivity to such sound symbolic associations could provide a powerful mechanism for language learning, playing a bootstrapping role in the establishment of novel sound–meaning associations. The aim of the present meta‐analysis (SymBouKi) is to provide a quantitative overview of the emergence of the bouba‐kiki effect in infancy and early childhood. It allows a high‐powered assessment of the true sound symbolic effect size by pooling over the entire set of 11 extant studies (six published, five unpublished), entailing data from 425 participants between 4 and 38 months of age. The quantitative data provide statistical support for a moderate, but significant, sound symbolic effect. Further analysis found a greater sensitivity to sound symbolism for bouba‐type pseudowords (i.e., round sound‐shape correspondences) than for kiki‐type pseudowords (i.e., spiky sound‐shape correspondences). For the kiki‐type pseudowords, the effect emerged with age. Such discrepancy challenges the view that sensitivity to sound symbolism is an innate language mechanism rooted in an exuberant interconnected brain. We propose alternative hypotheses where both innate and learned mechanisms are at play in the emergence of sensitivity to sound symbolic relationships. 相似文献
In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant–vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools. 相似文献
Although psychopathy has historically been associated with a lack of emotion, recent research has suggested that psychopathy may represent a tendency to externalize the experience of unpleasant emotions, including shame, which could be seen as an adaptive strategy within an evolutionary framework. However, more empirical research is needed to build on this argument. This study tested a novel evolutionary-based model involving pathways associating the impact of harsh rearing experiences (warmth and safeness experiences and traumatic shameful experiences) with psychopathic traits as well as the indirect effects of external shame and shame coping strategies in this association. This study also tested the invariance of this model across gender. A youth community sample (N = 703; 58.9% girls) completed self-report questionnaires on the impact of harsh rearing experiences, external shame, shame coping strategies, and psychopathic traits. The results suggested that the impact of harsh rearing experiences was directly and indirectly (through external shame and shame coping strategies) associated with psychopathic traits. The model partially explained the endorsement of psychopathic traits in boys and girls, although gender differences were found in some of the pathways. These findings offer support for conceptualizing psychopathic traits as an adaptive strategy to cope with the impact of harsh rearing experiences, opening new perspectives for prevention and treatment.
Research on autobiographical memory has focused on whether memories are coded as specific (i.e., describe a single event that happened at a particular time and place). Although some theory and research suggests that the amount of detail in autobiographical memories reflects a similar underlying construct as memory specificity, past research has not investigated whether these variables converge. Therefore, the present study compared the proportion of specific memories and the amount of detail embedded in memory responses to cue words. Results demonstrated that memory detail and proportion of specific memories were not correlated with each other and showed different patterns of association with other conceptually relevant variables. When responses to neutral cue words were examined in multiple linear and logistic regression analyses, the proportion of specific memories uniquely predicted less depressive symptoms, low emotional avoidance, lower emotion reactivity, better executive control and lower rumination, whereas the amount of memory detail uniquely predicted the presence of depression diagnosis, as well as greater depressive symptoms, subjective stress, emotion reactivity and rumination. Findings suggest that the ability to retrieve specific memories and the tendency to retrieve detailed personal memories reflect different constructs that have different implications in the development of emotional distress. 相似文献
Looking at another person’s facial expression of emotion can trigger the same neural processes involved in producing the expression, and such responses play a functional role in emotion recognition. Disrupting individuals’ facial action, for example, interferes with verbal emotion recognition tasks. We tested the hypothesis that facial responses also play a functional role in the perceptual processing of emotional expressions. We altered the facial action of participants with a gel facemask while they performed a task that involved distinguishing target expressions from highly similar distractors. Relative to control participants, participants in the facemask condition demonstrated inferior perceptual discrimination of facial expressions, but not of nonface stimuli. The findings suggest that somatosensory/motor processes involving the face contribute to the visual perceptual—and not just conceptual—processing of facial expressions. More broadly, our study contributes to growing evidence for the fundamentally interactive nature of the perceptual inputs from different sensory modalities. 相似文献
We tested age effects on repetition blindness (RB), defined as the reduced probability of reporting a target word following presentation of the same word in a rapidly presented list. We also tested age effects on homophone blindness (HB), in which the first word is a homophone of the target word rather than a repeated word. Thirty young and 28 older adults viewed rapidly presented lists of words containing repeated, homophone, or unrepeated word pairs and reported all of the words immediately after each list. Older adults exhibited a greater degree of RB and HB than young adults using a conditional scoring method that provides certainty that blindness has occurred. The existence of RB and HB for both age groups, and increased blindness for older compared to young adults, supports predictions of a binding theory that has successfully accounted for a wide range of phenomena in cognitive aging. 相似文献
Empathy is the heightened ability to cognitively perceive and/or affectively share the emotions of others, which has been consistently associated with desirable social interactions. This paper aimed to test the bi-factorial structure of a Portuguese version of the Basic Empathy Scale and examine its variation by gender and age using a large community sample (n = 1029) of adolescents. The two-factor model, originally developed and supported by other cross-cultural validations, presented good fit indicators which was similar across genders and adolescent age groups. Girls were more empathic than boys and younger adolescents were more empathic than the older ones. Further support for the validity of the new scale comes from its relations to measures of social skills and aggression which were similar to theoretical predictions. In conclusion, the Portuguese version of the BES is a consistent and valid instrument for the assessment of empathy in samples of adolescents aged 12–18 years old in Portugal, which can now be used in cross-cultural studies of this important psychological construct. 相似文献
AbstractThis study investigates the interplay between family risk and the quality of classroom interactions and their impact on self-regulation skills in two groups of children—children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds (at-risk) and non-risk children. Participants included 485 children (N = 93 classrooms)—233 (N = 47 classrooms) of which were from socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. Temperament was measured using teacher report. Trained observers rated classroom quality via live observations of a typical preschool day. Behavioral regulation was assessed using direct measures and emotional regulation was assessed using a teacher report. Analyses using multiple group structural equation modeling showed that at-risk children had lower levels of cool behavior regulation than non-risk children. In addition, classroom quality was positively linked to cool behavioral self-regulation. Moderating effects were additionally found between family risk and classroom quality on both hot behavioral regulation and emotional regulation. Classroom quality served as a protective factor for children exposed to more risk factors. Results showed complex associations between individual characteristics, classroom quality, and family risk, indicating a need to further explore the interplay among these variables. 相似文献