The processing of rhythmic structures in music and prosody by children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder

Rhythm perception seems to be crucial to language development. Many studies have shown that children with developmental dyslexia and developmental language disorder have difficulties in processing rhythmic structures. In this study, we investigated the relationships between prosody and musical processing in Italian children with typical and atypical development. The tasks aimed to reproduce linguistic prosodic structures through musical sequences, offering a direct comparison between the two domains without violating the specificities of each one. About 16 Typically Developing children, 16 children with a diagnosis of Developmental Dyslexia, and 16 with a diagnosis of developmental language disorder (age 10–13 years) participated in the experimental study. Three tasks were administered: an association task between a sentence and its humming version, a stress discrimination task (between couples of sounds reproducing the intonation of Italian trisyllabic words), and an association task between trisyllabic nonwords with different stress position and three‐notes musical sequences with different musical stress. Children with developmental language disorder perform significantly lower than Typically Developing children on the humming test. By contrast, children with developmental dyslexia are significantly slower than TD in associating nonwords with musical sequences. Accuracy and speed in the experimental tests correlate with metaphonological, language, and word reading scores. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed within a multidimensional model of neurodevelopmental disorders including prosodic and rhythmic skills at word and sentence level.     

Strong and Weak Readings in the Domain of Worlds: A Negative Polar Modal and Children’s Scope Assignment

This study investigates children’s interpretation of sentences with two logical operators: Dutch universal modal hoeven and negation (niet). In adult Dutch, hoeven is an NPI that necessarily scopes under negation, giving rise to a not > necessary reading. The findings from a hidden-object task with 5- and 6-year-old children showed that children’s performance is suggestive of an interpretation of sentences with hoeft niet in which the modal scopes over negation (necessary > not). This is in line with the Semantic Subset Principle that dictates that children should opt for the strongest possible reading in case of potential scope ambiguities. The full pattern of results, however, seems to be determined, in addition, by a particular strategy children use when facing uncertainty called Premature Closure.     

Olfactory-tactile compatibility effects demonstrated using a variation of the Implicit Association Test

We investigated whether the crossmodal associations between olfaction and touch reported previously in studies involving subjective report measures could also be demonstrated using an indirect measure of crossmodal association. To this end, we used a modified version of the Implicit Association Test. The participants had to make speeded discrimination responses to a series of unimodally presented olfactory (lemon vs. animal odour) or tactile stimuli (soft vs. rough fabric) using two response keys. In compatible blocks of trials, the olfactory and tactile stimuli that were mapped onto the same response key were considered to share a stronger association (e.g., the lemon odour and the soft fabric) than those that were combined onto the same response key in the incompatible blocks of trials (e.g., the animal odour and the soft fabric). The results showed that the participants responded significantly more rapidly in the compatible response mapping blocks than in the incompatible blocks, thus confirming the existence of associations between the stimuli that were considered to be compatible. These results provide the first empirical evidence that olfactory-tactile crossmodal associations are stable enough to influence performance even when not directly relevant to a participant’s task.     

The auditory redundant signals effect: An influence of number of stimuli or number of percepts?

In two experiments, we examined simple reaction times (RTs) for detection of the onsets and offsets of auditory stimuli. Both experiments assessed the redundant signals effect (RSE), which is traditionally defined as the reduction in RT associated with the presentation of two redundant stimuli, rather than a single stimulus. In Experiment 1, with two identical tones presented via headphones to the left ear, right ear, or both, no RSE was found in responding to tone onsets, but a large RSE was found in responding to their offsets. In Experiment 2, with a pure tone and white noise as the two stimulus alternatives, RSEs were found for responding to both onsets and offsets. The results support the notion that the occurrence of an RSE depends on the number of percepts, rather than the number of stimuli, and on the requirement to respond to stimulus onsets versus offsets. The parallel grains model (Miller & Ulrich, 2003) provides one possible account of this pattern of results.     

Seven-month-olds detect ordinal numerical relationships within temporal sequences

Previous evidence has shown that 11-month-olds represent ordinal relations between purely numerical values, whereas younger infants require a confluence of numerical and non-numerical cues. In this study, we show that when multiple featural cues (i.e., color and shape) are provided, 7-month-olds detect reversals in the ordinal direction of numerical sequences relying solely on number when non-numerical quantitative cues are controlled. These results provide evidence for the influence of featural information and multiple cue integration on infants’ proneness to detect ordinal numerical information.     

Immigrant Participation in the Transnational Era: Latin Americans' Experiences with Collective Organising in Toronto

This paper examines the challenges migrant groups that are new and internally diverse face to participate and build community in host societies today. Qualitative research findings on Latin American migrants' experiences in Toronto, Canada, reveal that the group's participation is the result of a complexity of social and spatial processes. The paper contributes to current debates on the study of immigrant integration in three ways: (1) by focusing on immigrants' collective forms of organising, (2) by responding to ongoing calls for a closer examination of intra-group diversity, and (3) by drawing on transnationalism research to avoid the use of essentialising categories in the study of immigrant groups that are internally diverse.     

SUPERVISION: A CONTAINERÆCONTAINED APPROACH

The authors illustrate an approach to the supervisory process as a learning experience for both supervisee and supervisor built on the containment of unconscious anxieties. It is argued that a core function of psychoanalytic supervision is to help contain the emotional turbulence and the unconscious anxieties arising and evolving in the two interacting domains of the analytic and the supervisory sessions. From this perspective, the analyst-patient interaction and that of the supervisee and supervisor can be understood as twin, tiered transformational arenas, the supervisory one being at the service of holding and grasping the roles the supervisee/analyst goes through as part of the analytic process. On the basis of detailed clinical material from a disturbed 7-year-old girl, the authors explore the interrelated issues and difficulties in containing anxieties and turbulence in both the analytic and the supervisory situation. When emotional containment is adequately handled, the supervision helps the understanding and development of the supervisee's use of his/her own personality as a treatment instrument, as advocated by Fleming and Benedek decades ago. The supervisory session thus furthers the resolution of clinical issues through symbol-formation, clinical sessions and supervision being twin domains for recording and understanding emotional evolution.     

What makes a word so attractive? Disclosing the urge to read while bisecting

Expert readers have been repeatedly reported to misperceive the centre of visual stimuli, shifting systematically to the left the bisection of any lines (pseudoneglect) while showing a cross-over effect while bisecting different types of orthographic strings (Arduino et al., 2010, Neuropsychologia, 48, 2140). This difference has been attributed to asymmetrical allocation of attention that visuo-verbal material receives when lexical access occurs (e.g., Fischer, 2004, Cognitive Brain Research, 4, 163). The aim of this study was to further examine which visual features guide recognition of potentially orthographic materials. To disentangle the role of orthography, heterogeneity, and visuo-perceptual discreteness, we presented Italian unimpaired adults with four experiments exploiting the bisection paradigm. The results showed that a cross-over effect emerges in most discrete strings, especially when their internal structure, that is being composed of heterogeneous elements, is suggestive of orthographically relevant material. Interestingly, the cross-over effect systematically characterized the processing of letter strings (Experiment 2) and words (Experiments 3 and 4), whether visually discrete or not. Overall, this pattern of results suggests that neither discreteness nor heterogeneity per se are responsible for activating visual scanning mechanisms implied in text exploration, although both contribute to increasing the chance of a visual stimulus undergoing a perceptual analysis dedicated to pre-lexical processing.