Cognates interfere with language selection but enhance monitoring in connected speech

The current study investigated the contribution of phonology to bilingual language control in connected speech. Speech production was elicited by asking Mandarin–English bilinguals to read aloud paragraphs either in Chinese or English, while six words were switched to the other language in each paragraph. The switch words were either cognates or noncognates, and switching difficulty was measured by production of cross-language intrusion errors on the switch words (e.g., mistakenly saying 巧克力 (qiao3-ke4-li4) instead of chocolate). All the bilinguals were Mandarin-dominant, but produced more intrusion errors when target words were written in Chinese than when written in English (i.e., they exhibited robust reversed dominance effects). Most critically, bilinguals produced significantly more intrusions on Chinese cognates, but also detected and self-corrected these same errors more quickly than with noncognates. Phonological overlap boosts dual-language activation thus leading to greater competition between languages, and increased response conflict, thereby increasing production of intrusions but also facilitating error detection during speech monitoring.     

Children's Adjustment in a Climate of Political Violence: Comparing Mother and Child Reports

There is a dearth of research on parent and child reports regarding a parent’s parenting and its contribution to a child’s adjustment. Therefore, the current study examined: (a) the differences between mother and child reports of aspects of maternal parenting (i.e., care and control), among both boys and girls; (b) which parenting report (i.e., mother’s or child’s) makes a stronger contribution to mother and child reports of the child’s adjustment in the context of political violence. One hundred and twenty-one mother-child dyads (children aged seven to 12 years old (M?=?10.02, SD?=?1.03)), who were exposed to prolonged political violence, participated in this study. Maternal care and control were assessed by mother and child reports on the Parental Bonding Instrument. Child’s adjustment was assessed both by mother’s report of child’s total difficulties and child’s self-report of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS). Results revealed that both the mothers of girls and the girls themselves reported higher care, in comparison to mothers of boys and the boys themselves, while mothers of boys and the boys themselves reported higher control. Higher maternal control, as reported by the child, was associated with the child’s self-reported PTSS. Higher maternal control, as reported by the mother, was associated with the child’s total difficulties, as reported by the mother. However, maternal care, whether reported by mother or child, was not found to be associated with the child’s adjustment. School-aged children and their mothers were in agreement regarding maternal dimensions and their contribution to children’s adjustment.     

Locomotion, assessment, and regulatory fit: Value transfer from “how” to “what”

Regulatory fit is experienced when people pursue a goal in a manner that sustains their regulatory orientation. Previous research on promotion and prevention orientations has found that regulatory fit increases people’s perception that a decision they made was “right,” which in turn transfers value to the decision outcome, including being willing to pay more for a product than those who chose the same product without regulatory fit (Higgins, 2000; Higgins et al., in press). We predicted that the effect of regulatory fit on monetary value could be generalized to locomotion and assessment orientations. Participants were willing to pay over 40% more for the same book-light when it was chosen with a strategy that fit their regulatory orientation (assessment/“full evaluation”; locomotion/“progressive elimination”) than when it was chosen with a non-fit strategy.     

Do production patterns influence the processing of speech in prelinguistic infants?

The headturn preference procedure was used to test 18 infants on their response to three different passages chosen to reflect their individual production patterns. The passages contained nonwords with consonants in one of three categories: (a) often produced by that infant (‘own’), (b) rarely produced by that infant but common at that age (‘other’), and (c) not generally produced by infants. Infants who had a single ‘own’ consonant showed no significant preference for either ‘own’ (a) or ‘other’ (b) passages. In contrast, infants’ with two ‘own’ consonants exhibited greater attention to ‘other’ passages (b). Both groups attended equally to the passage featuring consonants rarely produced by infants of that age (c). An analysis of a sample of the infant-directed speech ruled out the mothers’ speech as a source of the infant preferences. The production-based shift to a focus on the ‘other’ passage suggests that nascent production abilities combine with emergent perceptual experience to facilitate word learning.     

Cross-language intrusion errors in aging bilinguals reveal the link between executive control and language selection

Bilinguals outperform monolinguals on measures of executive control, but it is not known how bilingualism introduces these advantages. To address this question, we investigated whether language-control failures increase with aging-related declines in executive control. Eighteen younger and 18 older Spanish-English bilinguals completed a verbal-fluency task, in which they produced words in 18 categories (9 in each language), and a flanker task. Performance on both tasks exhibited robust effects of aging, but cross-language and within-language errors on the verbal-fluency task differed in a number of ways. Within-language errors occurred relatively often and decreased with higher levels of education in both younger and older bilinguals. In contrast, cross-language intrusions (e.g., inadvertently saying an English word on a Spanish-language trial) were rarely produced, were not associated with education level, and were strongly associated with flanker-task errors in older but not younger bilinguals. These results imply that executive control plays a role in maintaining language selection, but they also suggest the presence of independent forces that prevent language-selection errors.     

Representation and theory of mind development

This longitudinal study investigated the relation between children's early use of symbols and their later understanding of representation and metarepresentation. The performance of 64 children on DeLoache's (1987) scale model task was measured at 30, 36, and 42 months, and their false belief understanding was measured at 42 and 48 months. Language and executive function measures were taken at each time point. Scale model performance was related to concurrent and subsequent false belief understanding, and scale model performance both predicted and was predicted by language across time. Language predicted false belief within and across time, and with increasing age it mediated the relation between success on the scale model task and false belief understanding. Although executive function was related to performance on scale model and theory of mind tasks, it did not mediate the relation between these. This study provides evidence suggesting that symbolic functioning, language, and theory of mind may form part of a single skill set underlying symbolic representation.     

The Self as a Moral Agent: Preschoolers Behave Morally but Believe in the Freedom to Do Otherwise

Recent work suggests a strong connection between intuitions regarding our own free will and our moral behavior. We investigate the origins of this link by asking whether preschool-aged children construe their own moral actions as freely chosen. We gave children the option to make three moral/social choices (avoiding harm to another, following a rule, and following peer behavior) and then asked them to retrospect as to whether they were free to have done otherwise. When given the choice to act (either morally or immorally), children avoided harm and abided by rules, but they endorsed their freedom to have done otherwise. When choice was restricted by adult instruction, children did not endorse their free choice and indicated feeling constrained by moral obligation in their explanatory responses. These results suggest that children believe that their moral actions afford free will, but this belief is dependent on their experience of choice.