Kristina Kasparian  Francesco Vespignani  Karsten Steinhauer 《Cognitive Science》2017,41(7):1760-1803

First language (L1) attrition in adulthood offers new insight on neuroplasticity and the role of language experience in shaping neurocognitive responses to language. Attriters are multilinguals for whom advancing L2 proficiency comes at the cost of the L1, as they experience a shift in exposure and dominance (e.g., due to immigration). To date, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying L1 attrition are largely unexplored. Using event‐related potentials (ERPs), we examined L1‐Italian grammatical processing in 24 attriters and 30 Italian native‐controls. We assessed whether (a) attriters differed from non‐attriting native speakers in their online detection and re‐analysis/repair of number agreement violations, and whether (b) differences in processing were modulated by L1‐proficiency. To test both local and non‐local agreement violations, we manipulated agreement between three inflected constituents and examined ERP responses on two of these (subject, verb , modifier ). Our findings revealed group differences in amplitude, scalp distribution, and duration of LAN/N400 + P600 effects. We discuss these differences as reflecting influence of attriters’ L2‐English, as well as shallower online sentence repair processes than in non‐attriting native speakers. ERP responses were also predicted by L1‐Italian proficiency scores, with smaller N400/P600 amplitudes in lower proficiency individuals. Proficiency only modulated P600 amplitude between 650 and 900 ms, whereas the late P600 (beyond 900 ms) depended on group membership and amount of L1 exposure within attriters. Our study is the first to show qualitative and quantitative differences in ERP responses in attriters compared to non‐attriting native speakers. Our results also emphasize that proficiency predicts language processing profiles, even in native‐speakers, and that the P600 should not be considered a monolithic component.  相似文献   

    

Monica Consonni  Stefania Rossi  Chiara Cerami  Alessandra Marcone  Sandro Iannaccone  Stefano Francesco Cappa  Daniela Perani 《Journal of Neuropsychology》2017,11(1):74-90

The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) is widely used in clinical practice to evaluate verbal episodic memory. While there is evidence that RAVLT performance can be influenced by executive dysfunction, the way executive disorders affect the serial position curve (SPC) has not been yet explored. To this aim, we analysed immediate and delayed recall performances of 13 non‐demented amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients with a specific mild executive dysfunction (ALSci) and compared their performances to those of 48 healthy controls (HC) and 13 cognitively normal patients with ALS. Moreover, to control for the impact of a severe dysexecutive syndrome and a genuine episodic memory deficit on the SPC, we enrolled 15 patients with a diagnosis of behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and 18 patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD). Results documented that, compared to cognitively normal subjects, ALSci patients had a selective mid‐list impairment for immediate recall scores. The bvFTD group obtained low performances with a selectively increased forgetting rate for terminal items, whereas the AD group showed a disproportionately large memory loss on the primary and middle part of the SPC for immediate recall scores and were severely impaired in the delayed recall trial. These results suggested that subtle executive dysfunctions might influence the recall of mid‐list items, possibly reflecting deficiency in control strategies at retrieval of word lists, whereas severer dysexecutive syndrome might also affect the recall of terminal items possibly due to attention deficit or retroactive interference.  相似文献   

    

Maria Caterina Silveri  Francesco Incordino  Rita Lo Monaco  Alessandra Bizzarro  Carlo Masullo  Francesca Piludu  Cesare Colosimo 《Journal of Neuropsychology》2017,11(3):450-457

We describe a patient with progressive disorder of speech, without language impairment (opercular syndrome). Morphometric analysis confirmed asymmetric volume reduction of the precentral areas (>left). Diffusion imaging showed significant white matter changes in the left frontal lobe, with specific involvement of the left corticobulbar tract and connections between supplementary/pre‐supplementary motor areas and the frontal operculum (frontal aslant tract). We suggest that the organization of expressive language includes a ‘low level’ motor system principally distributed in the left hemisphere that shows specific susceptibility to neurodegeneration, distinct from neural systems subtending praxic, and cognitive aspects of language.  相似文献   

    

Grazia I. Continisio  Francesco Nunziata  Clara Coppola  Dario Bruzzese  Maria I. Spagnuolo  Alfredo Guarino 《Scandinavian journal of psychology》2021,62(1):58-63

We tested the hypothesis that a narrative approach may enhance a bio‐psycho‐social model (BPS) in caring for chronically ill children. Forty‐eight narratives were collected from 12 children with six different medical conditions, their mothers, physicians, and nurses. By a textual analysis, narratives were classified on their predominant focus as disease (biological focus), illness (psychologic focus), or sickness (social focus). Sixty‐one percent of narrative’ text were classified as illness, 28% as disease and 11% as sickness. All narratives had a degree of illness focus. Narratives by patients and physicians on the one hand, and nurses’ and mothers’ on the other were disease focused. Narratives were also evaluated with respect to the type of medical condition: Illness was largely prevalent in all but Crohn’s disease and HIV infection, the latter having a predominance of sickness most probably related to stigma. Narrative exploration proved a valuable tool for understanding and addressing the needs of children with complex conditions. Narrative approaches allow identification of the major needs of different patients according to health conditions and story tellers. In the narratives, we found a greater illness and disease focus and surprisingly a low sickness focus, except with HIV stories. Narrative medicine provides a tool to strengthen the BPS model in health care.  相似文献   

    

Antonio Benítez-Burraco  Francesco Ferretti  Ljiljana Progovac 《Cognitive Science》2021,45(6):e12987

As proposed for the emergence of modern languages, we argue that modern uses of languages (pragmatics) also evolved gradually in our species under the effects of human self-domestication, with three key aspects involved in a complex feedback loop: (a) a reduction in reactive aggression, (b) the sophistication of language structure (with emerging grammars initially facilitating the transition from physical aggression to verbal aggression); and (c) the potentiation of pragmatic principles governing conversation, including, but not limited to, turn-taking and inferential abilities. Our core hypothesis is that the reduction in reactive aggression, one of the key factors in self-domestication processes, enabled us to fully exploit our cognitive and interactional potential as applied to linguistic exchanges, and ultimately to evolve a specific form of communication governed by persuasive reciprocity—a trait of human conversation characterized by both competition and cooperation. In turn, both early crude forms of language, well suited for verbal aggression/insult, and later more sophisticated forms of language, well suited for persuasive reciprocity, significantly contributed to the resolution and reduction of (physical) aggression, thus having a return effect on the self-domestication processes. Supporting evidence for our proposal, as well as grounds for further testing, comes mainly from the consideration of cognitive disorders, which typically simultaneously present abnormal features of self-domestication (including aggressive behavior) and problems with pragmatics and social functioning. While various approaches to language evolution typically reduce it to a single factor, our approach considers language evolution as a multifactorial process, with each player acting upon the other, engaging in an intense mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Moreover, we see language evolution as a gradual process, continuous with the pre-linguistic cognitive abilities, which were engaged in a positive feedback loop with linguistic innovations, and where gene-culture co-evolution and cultural niche construction were the main driving forces.  相似文献   

    

Francesco Sella  Emily Slusser  Darko Odic  Attila Krajcsi 《Child Development Perspectives》2021,15(4):265-273

Learning the meaning of number words is a lengthy and error-prone process. In this review, we highlight outstanding issues related to current accounts of children’s acquisition of symbolic number knowledge. We maintain that, despite the ability to identify and label small numerical quantities, children do not understand initially that number words refer only to sets of discrete countable items, not to other nonnumerical dimensions. We question the presence of a sudden change in children’s understanding of cardinality, and we report the limits of the give-a-number task. We also highlight that children are still learning the directional property of the counting list, even after acquiring the cardinality principle. Finally, we discuss the role that the Approximate Number System may have in supporting the acquisition of symbolic numbers. We call for improvements in methodological tools and refinement in theoretical understanding of how children learn natural numbers.  相似文献   

    

Francesca Scafuto  Francesco La Barbera 《Journal of community & applied social psychology》2016,26(6):481-495

The ‘Land of Fires’ is a district in Italy characterized by illegal waste disposal, waste burning, and citizen protests over contamination. This study investigates the relevance of several psycho‐social factors that predict citizens' intention to protest, taking into account different research traditions. In addition, we hypothesize the effect of protest antecedents to be moderated by past participation behaviour (i.e. the level of activism). Hence, our study is a first attempt to explore the effect of protest antecedents as a function of the individual level of activism through a cross‐sectional survey study (N = 306). The results show significant effects of collective identity, sense of injustice, costs of protest, and perceived risk (cognitive dimension) on intention to protest. The effects of collective efficacy and perceived risk (affective dimension) are moderated by participants' level of activism, and these effects are significant only for non‐activists. The relevance of this new approach is discussed, as well as practical implications and possible further developments. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.  相似文献   

    

Francesco Sella  Ilaria Berteletti  Daniela Lucangeli  Marco Zorzi 《Developmental science》2016,19(2):329-337

A wealth of studies have investigated numerical abilities in infants and in children aged 3 or above, but research on pre‐counting toddlers is sparse. Here we devised a novel version of an imitation task that was previously used to assess spontaneous focusing on numerosity (i.e. the predisposition to grasp numerical properties of the environment) to assess whether pre‐counters would spontaneously deploy sequential (item‐by‐item) enumeration and whether this ability would rely on the object tracking system (OTS) or on the approximate number system (ANS). Two‐and‐a‐half‐year‐olds watched the experimenter performing one‐by‐one insertion of ‘food tokens’ into an opaque animal puppet and then were asked to imitate the puppet‐feeding behavior. The number of tokens varied between 1 and 6 and each numerosity was presented many times to obtain a distribution of responses during imitation. Many children demonstrated attention to the numerosity of the food tokens despite the lack of any explicit cueing to the number dimension. Most notably, the response distributions centered on the target numerosities and showed the classic variability signature that is attributed to the ANS. These results are consistent with previous studies on sequential enumeration in non‐human primates and suggest that pre‐counting children are capable of sequentially updating the numerosity of non‐visible sets through additive operations and hold it in memory for reproducing the observed behavior.  相似文献   

    

Francesco Veri 《Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism》2016,16(1):3-19

This article explores the way in which the Australian Republican Movement (ARM) in the 1990s considered the meaning of citizenship and national identity. We seek to demonstrate that ARM's citizenship ideal was minimalist because it largely ignored legal and normative notions of citizenship for pragmatic, political, and theoretical reasons. First, we will explore the meaning of citizenship in the Australian institutional context in order to explain the differences between the legal exclusive notion and the normative inclusive understanding of citizenship. Later, we will focus our analysis specifically on ARM's political debate during the 1990s. From this point of view, ARM only portrayed an unattractive normative vision of Australian citizenship which relied on universal civic values based on civic‐territorial and egalitarian ideas of citizenship adaptable to any political system. ARM's minimalist constitutional proposal hardly had an impact on national identity because it was not designed to harbour an inclusive normative vision of citizenship. ARM had an opportunity to advance a new conception of citizenship which would have advanced a more attractive definition of national identity. ARM's minimalist approach also negatively influenced the 1999 republican referendum outcome.  相似文献   

    

Valeria Natali  Francesco S. Marucci  Serena Mastroberardino 《Applied cognitive psychology》2012,26(5):730-736

Previous studies conducted on adults and children found that closing the eyes while recalling an event increased memory accuracy for both free and cued recall. One possible explanation to this phenomenon is that eye closure increases the amount of cognitive resources devoted to the task reducing external stimulation, but it is still not clear whether the beneficial effect is only due to a better focus on the task or to a better encoding of the material leading to an advantage over time. In this study, we evaluated the effect of eye closure instruction on children memory accuracy for a short clip in an immediate and delayed recall. We observed that asking participants to close their eyes while performing a memory task helped them to remember more details and that this effect persisted after a time delay. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.  相似文献