Age-related changes in the appreciation of novel metaphoric semantic relations

ABSTRACT

In the present study we tested the possibility that older adults differ from younger adults in their appreciation of metaphoric semantic relations, and that age-related changes occur due to the perception of novel metaphors. In the first experiment 35 younger (mean age?=?23.1) and 35 older adults (mean age?=?75.3) were asked to rate the plausibility of metaphoric, literal, and unrelated word pairs. Relative to young participants, older participants rated fewer expressions as metaphorically plausible. The second experiment was conducted to examine whether the findings of the first experiment could be accounted for by an age-associated difference in the appreciation of metaphors with different levels of familiarity. In the second experiment, 25 younger (mean age?=?24.4) and 25 older adults (mean age?=?77.5) were asked to rate the familiarity level of the plausible metaphoric expressions. Relative to young participants, older participants rated fewer expressions as novel and more expressions as familiar. The results suggest that novelty plays an important role in appreciating the plausibility of semantic relationships, and age-related changes are associated with the appreciation of the novelty of expressions.     

Relationships Between Need for Cognition,Knowledge, and Verbal Ability

The authors investigated the relationships between need for cognition. knowledge, and verbal ability. Participants completed scales that measured their need for cognition, verbal ability, and knowledge about people and events that occurred during the Vietnam War era. Correlational analyses showed that the participants' need for cognition scores were modestly but positively correlated with verbal ability and knowledge and that verbal ability and knowledge were also positively correlated. The correlation between need for cognition and knowledge was small but significant when verbal ability was controlled. The conclusion drawn from these results is that need for cognition contributes to the acquisition of knowledge beyond the contribution of verbal ability.     

The Contribution of Executive Skills to Reading Comprehension

Although word recognition deficits (WRD) are a known cause of reading comprehension deficits (RCD), other contributions to RCD, including executive function (EF), have not been fully explored. We examined the contribution of EF (working memory and planning), along with attention, decoding, fluency, and vocabulary to reading comprehension in 60 children (including 16 WRD and 10 RCD), ages 9–15 years. After controlling for commonly accepted contributors to reading comprehension (i.e., attention, decoding skills, fluency, and vocabulary), EF continued to make a significant contribution to reading comprehension but not to word recognition skills. These findings highlight the need for consideration of the role of EF in RCD.     

Recognition of Affective Speech Prosody and Facial Affect in Deaf Children with Unilateral Right Cochlear Implants

Cochlear implant (CI) devices provide the opportunity for children who are deaf to perceive sound by electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve, with the goal of optimizing oral communication. One part of oral communication concerns meaning, while another part concerns emotion: affective speech prosody, in the auditory domain, and facial affect, in the visual domain. It is not known whether childhood CI users can identify emotion in speech and faces, so we investigated speech prosody and facial affect in children who had been deaf from infancy and experienced CI users. METHOD: Study participants were 18 CI users (ages 7–13 years) who received right unilateral CIs and 18 age- and gender-matched controls. Emotion recognition in speech prosody and faces was measured by the Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy. RESULTS: Compared to controls, children with right CIs could identify facial affect but not affective speech prosody. Age at test and time since CI activation were uncorrelated with overall outcome measures. CONCLUSION: Children with right CIs recognize emotion in faces but have limited perception of affective speech prosody.     

Moral Virtue and Practical Wisdom: Theme Comprehension in Children,Youth, and Adults

The authors tested 3 hypotheses about the relation of moral comprehension to prudential comprehension by contrasting comprehension of themes in moral stories with comprehension of themes in prudential stories among third-grade, fifth-grade, and college students (n = 168) in Study 1, and among college students, young and middle-aged adults, and older adults (n = 96) in Study 2. In both studies, all groups were statistically significantly better at moral theme comprehension than prudential theme comprehension, suggesting that moral comprehension may develop prior to prudential comprehension. In Study 2, all groups performed equally on moral theme generation whereas both adult groups were significantly better than college students on prudential theme generation. Overall, the findings of these studies provide modest evidence that moral and prudential comprehension each develop separately, and that the latter may develop more slowly.     

The relationship between emotional-state language and emotion understanding: A study with school-age children

We carried out an investigation with primary-school children on the relationship between both use and comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding. Participants were 100 students between 7 and 10 years old (mean age=8 years and 10 months; SD=15.3 months), equally divided by gender. They completed four tests evaluating their language ability, use of emotional-state language, comprehension of emotional-state language and emotion understanding (EU) respectively. Significant correlations were found between both use and comprehension of emotional-state talk and children's EU. In addition, regression analyses showed that comprehension of emotional-state language, rather than its use, plays a significant role in explaining children's emotion understanding.     

The use of visual context during the production of referring expressions

Most theories of reference assume that a referent's saliency in the linguistic context determines the choice of referring expression. However, it is less clear whether cognitive factors relating to the nonlinguistic context also have an effect. We investigated whether visual context influences the choice of a pronoun over a repeated noun phrase when speakers refer back to a referent in a preceding sentence. In Experiment 1, linguistic mention as well as visual presence of a competitor with the same gender as the referent resulted in fewer pronouns for the referent, suggesting that both linguistic and visual context determined the choice of referring expression. Experiment 2 showed that even when the competitor had a different gender from the referent, its visual presence reduced pronoun use, indicating that visual context plays a role even if the use of a pronoun is unambiguous. Thus, both linguistic and nonlinguistic information affect the choice of referring expression.     

Homophonic context effects when naming Japanese kanji: evidence for processing costs?

The current study investigated the effects of phonologically related context pictures on the naming latencies of target words in Japanese and Chinese. Reading bare words in alphabetic languages has been shown to be rather immune to effects of context stimuli, even when these stimuli are presented in advance of the target word (e.g., Glaser & Düngelhoff, 1984 Glaser, W. R. and Düngelhoff, F. J. 1984. The time course of picture–word interference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10: 640–654. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Roelofs, 2003 Roelofs, A. 2003. Goal-referenced selection of verbal action: Modeling attentional control in the Stroop task. Psychological Review, 110: 88–125. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). However, recently, semantic context effects of distractor pictures on the naming latencies of Japanese kanji (but not Chinese hànzì) words have been observed (Verdonschot, La Heij, & Schiller, 2010 Verdonschot, R. G., La Heij, W. and Schiller, N. O. 2010. Semantic context effects when naming Japanese kanji, but not Chinese hànzì. Cognition, 115: 512–518. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). In the present study, we further investigated this issue using phonologically related (i.e., homophonic) context pictures when naming target words in either Chinese or Japanese. We found that pronouncing bare nouns in Japanese is sensitive to phonologically related context pictures, whereas this is not the case in Chinese. The difference between these two languages is attributed to processing costs caused by multiple pronunciations for Japanese kanji.     

Differential impacts of age of acquisition on letter and semantic fluency in Alzheimer's disease patients and healthy older adults

The degree to which the typical age of acquisition (AoA) of words and word frequency have separable influences on verbal production tasks has been strongly debated. To examine the overlap between these factors in verbal fluency tasks, the performance of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients (N?=?34) and normal elderly controls (N?=?36) was compared on semantic (e.g., vegetables) and letter (e.g., words that begin with F) fluency tasks. These comparisons revealed that words generated for the semantic fluency task had an earlier AoA while words generated for the letter fluency task had a higher word frequency. Differences in AoA between AD patients and controls were larger for semantic than letter fluency. These results suggest that AoA has an effect on verbal production that is independent of word frequency and that AoA has a semantic locus.