A preliminary investigation of within-year growth patterns in reading and mathematics curriculum-based measures

This study examined patterns of growth across benchmark assessments for curriculum-based measures (CBM) over 2 academic years, with the twofold purpose of replicating earlier findings of growth patterns on R-CBM and conducting a preliminary investigation of growth patterns on M-CBM and CBM-Maze. The sample included 898 cases from 3rd through 5th grade over 2 academic years from one elementary school in the rural Midwest. All students participated in tri-annual benchmark assessments in which they were administered R-CBM, CBM-Maze, and M-CBM. Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to examine patterns of growth for all three measures. Students demonstrated greater R-CBM weekly growth during winter-to-spring than fall-to-winter across grade levels. Patterns for CBM-Maze and M-CBM were somewhat inconsistent across school years and grade levels. Results are discussed in terms of contextual variables that may impact within-year growth patterns and technical characteristics of CBM slopes.     

Semantic asymmetries are modulated by phonological asymmetries: Evidence from the disambiguation of homophonic versus heterophonic homographs

The present study investigated cerebral asymmetries in accessing multiple meanings of two types of homographs: homophonic homographs (e.g., bank) and heterophonic homographs (e.g., tear). Participants read homographs preceded by either a biasing or a non-biasing sentential context and performed a lexical decision on lateralized targets presented 150 ms after onset of the sentence-final ambiguous prime. Targets were either related to the dominant or the subordinate meaning of the preceding homograph or were unrelated to it. In the case of homophonic homographs – our results converge with previous findings: both activation and selection processes are faster in the LH than in the RH. Importantly, however, in the case of heterophonic homographs – opposite asymmetries were found. These results suggest that semantic asymmetries are modulated by phonology. They are discussed in the context of a model of functional architecture of reading in the two hemispheres in which orthography, phonology and semantics are fully interconnected in the LH, whereas in the RH, orthography and phonology are not directly connected, such that phonological processes are mediated by semantics.     

Labels as features (not names) for infant categorization: a neurocomputational approach

A substantial body of experimental evidence has demonstrated that labels have an impact on infant categorization processes. Yet little is known regarding the nature of the mechanisms by which this effect is achieved. We distinguish between two competing accounts: supervised name-based categorization and unsupervised feature-based categorization. We describe a neurocomputational model of infant visual categorization, based on self-organizing maps, that implements the unsupervised feature-based approach. The model successfully reproduces experiments demonstrating the impact of labeling on infant visual categorization reported in Plunkett, Hu, and Cohen (2008) . It mimics infant behavior in both the familiarization and testing phases of the procedure, using a training regime that involves only single presentations of each stimulus and using just 24 participant networks per experiment. The model predicts that the observed behavior in infants is due to a transient form of learning that might lead to the emergence of hierarchically organized categorical structure and that the impact of labels on categorization is influenced by the perceived similarity and the sequence in which the objects are presented. The results suggest that early in development, say before 12 months old, labels need not act as invitations to form categories nor highlight the commonalities between objects, but they may play a more mundane but nevertheless powerful role as additional features that are processed in the same fashion as other features that characterize objects and object categories.     

Prescriptive Analysis: Further Individualization of Hypothesis Testing in Brief Experimental Analysis of Reading Fluency

Brief experimental analyses (BEA) have been used to identify effective individualized interventions for improving reading fluency with school-age children. Interventions involving incentives, modeling, repeated reading, and error correction are most often tested in a BEA. However, these interventions are rarely modified according to individual student needs. The current study examined the effects of varied levels of modeling (passage, sentence, word) and varied contingencies (tracking and fluency) on fluency in non-treated high-word overlap passages and general outcome measure passages. BEA-identified interventions were effective for improving reading fluency on non-treated passages for both second grade students and the third grade student. Notably, the effects reversed when intervention was withdrawn with one of the second grade students. Results are discussed in terms of considerations in the application of BEA technology in the schools.     

Perceptual Bias in Speech Error Data Collection: Insights from Spanish Speech Errors

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one Romance language (Spanish). Unlike findings in the Germanic languages, Spanish speech errors show many patterns which run contrary to those expected from bias: (1) more phonological errors occur between words than within word; (2) word-initial consonants are less likely to participate in errors than word-medial consonants, (3) errors are equally likely in stressed and in unstressed syllables, (4) perseverations are more frequent than anticipations, and (5) there is no trace of a lexical bias. We present a new corpus of Spanish speech errors collected by many theoretically naïve observers (whereas the only corpus available so far was collected by two highly trained theoretically informed observers), give a general overview of it, and use it to replicate previous reports. In spite of the different susceptibility of these methods to bias, results were remarkably similar in both corpora and again contrary to predictions from bias. As a result, collecting speech errors “in the wild” seems to be free of bias to a reasonable extent even when using a multiple-collector method. The observed contrasting patterns between Spanish and Germanic languages arise as true cross-linguistic differences.     

Processing of Syllables in Production and Recognition Tasks

Empirical evidence for a functional role of syllables in visual word processing is abundant, however it remains rather heterogeneous. The present study aims to further specify the role of syllables and the cognitive accessibility of syllabic information in word processing. The first experiment compared performance across naming and lexical decision tasks by manipulating the number of syllables in words and non-words. Results showed a syllable number effect in both the naming task and the lexical decision task. The second experiment introduced a stimulus set consisting of isolated syllabic and non-syllabic trigrams. Syllable frequency was manipulated in a naming and in a decision task requiring participants to decide on the syllabic status of letter strings. Results showed faster responses for syllables than for non-syllables in both tasks. Syllable frequency effects were observed in the decision task. In summary, the results from these manipulations of different types of syllable information confirm an important role of syllabic units in both recognition and production.     

Spoken and gestural production in a naming task by young children with Down syndrome

Lexical production in children with Down syndrome (DS) was investigated by examining spoken naming accuracy and the use of spontaneous gestures in a picture naming task. Fifteen children with DS (range 3.8-8.3 years) were compared to typically developing children (TD), matched for chronological age and developmental age (range 2.6-4.3 years). Relative to TD children, children with DS were less accurate in speech (producing a greater number of unintelligible answers), yet they produced more gestures overall and of these a significantly higher percentage of iconic gestures. Furthermore, the iconic gestures produced by children with DS accompanied by incorrect or no speech often expressed a concept similar to that of the target word, suggesting deeper conceptual knowledge relative to that expressed only in speech.     

Diversity not quantity in caregiver speech: Using computational modeling to isolate the effects of the quantity and the diversity of the input on vocabulary growth

Children who hear large amounts of diverse speech learn language more quickly than children who do not. However, high correlations between the amount and the diversity of the input in speech samples makes it difficult to isolate the influence of each. We overcame this problem by controlling the input to a computational model so that amount of exposure to linguistic input (quantity) and the quality of that input (lexical diversity) were independently manipulated. Sublexical, lexical, and multi-word knowledge were charted across development (Study 1), showing that while input quantity may be important early in learning, lexical diversity is ultimately more crucial, a prediction confirmed against children’s data (Study 2). The model trained on a lexically diverse input also performed better on nonword repetition and sentence recall tests (Study 3) and was quicker to learn new words over time (Study 4). A language input that is rich in lexical diversity outperforms equivalent richness in quantity for learned sublexical and lexical knowledge, for well-established language tests, and for acquiring words that have never been encountered before.     

The informative value of type of repetition: Perceptual and conceptual fluency influences on judgments of truth

We contrast the effects of conceptual and perceptual fluency resulting from repetition in the truth effect. In Experiment 1, participants judged either verbatim or paraphrased repetitions, which reduce perceptual similarity to original statements. Judgments were made either immediately after the first exposure to the statements or after one week. Illusions of truth emerged for both types of repetition, with delay reducing both effects. In Experiment 2, participants judged verbatim and paraphrased repetitions with either the same or a contradictory meaning of original statements. In immediate judgments, illusions of truth emerged for repetitions with the same meaning and illusions of falseness for contradictory repetitions. In the delayed session, the illusion of falseness disappeared for contradictory statements. Results are discussed in terms of the contributions of recollection of stimulus details and of perceptual and conceptual fluency to illusions of truth at different time intervals and judgmental context conditions.     

The ghost of Christmas future: didn't Scrooge learn to be good? Commentary on Magnuson,McMurray, Tanenhaus,and Aslin (2003)

Magnuson, McMurray, Tanenhaus, and Aslin [Cogn. Sci. 27 (2003) 285] suggest that they have evidence of lexical feedback in speech perception, and that this evidence thus challenges the purely feedforward Merge model [Behav. Brain Sci. 23 (2000) 299]. This evidence is open to an alternative explanation, however, one which preserves the assumption in Merge that there is no lexical–prelexical feedback during on‐line speech processing. This explanation invokes the distinction between perceptual processing that occurs in the short term, as an utterance is heard, and processing that occurs over the longer term, for perceptual learning.