Does visual experience influence the spatial distribution of auditory attention?

Sighted individuals are less accurate and slower to localize sounds coming from the peripheral space than sounds coming from the frontal space. This specific bias in favour of the frontal auditory space seems reduced in early blind individuals, who are particularly better than sighted individuals at localizing sounds coming from the peripheral space. Currently, it is not clear to what extent this bias in the auditory space is a general phenomenon or if it applies only to spatial processing (i.e. sound localization). In our approach we compared the performance of early blind participants with that of sighted subjects during a frequency discrimination task with sounds originating either from frontal or peripheral locations. Results showed that early blind participants discriminated faster than sighted subjects both peripheral and frontal sounds. In addition, sighted subjects were faster at discriminating frontal sounds than peripheral ones, whereas early blind participants showed equal discrimination speed for frontal and peripheral sounds. We conclude that the spatial bias observed in sighted subjects reflects an unbalance in the spatial distribution of auditory attention resources that is induced by visual experience.     

Relating numeric cognition and language processing: Do numbers and words share a common representational platform?

Numerical processing and language processing are both grounded in space. In the present study we investigated whether these are fully independent phenomena, or whether they share a common basis. If number processing activates spatial dimensions that are also relevant for understanding words, then we can expect that processing numbers may influence subsequent lexical access to words. Specifically, if high numbers relate to upper space, then they can be expected to facilitate understanding of words such as bird that are having referents typically found in the upper vertical space. The opposite should hold for low numbers. These should facilitate the understanding of words such as ground referring to entities with referents in the lower vertical space. Indeed, in two experiments we found evidence for such an interaction between number and word processing. By eliminating a contribution of linguistic factors gained from additional investigations on large text corpora, this strongly suggests that understanding numbers and language is based on similar modal representations in the brain. The implications of these findings for a broader perspective on grounded cognition will be discussed.     

Automatic perceptual simulation of first language meanings during second language sentence processing in bilinguals

Research supports the claim that, when understanding language, people perform mental simulation using those parts of the brain which support sensation, action, and emotion. A major criticism of the findings quoted as evidence for embodied simulation, however, is that they could be a result of conscious image generation strategies. Here we exploit the well-known fact that bilinguals routinely and automatically activate both their languages during comprehension to test whether this automatic process is, in turn, modulated by embodied simulatory processes. Dutch participants heard English sentences containing interlingual homophones and implying specific distance relations, and had to subsequently respond to pictures of objects matching or mismatching this implied distance. Participants were significantly slower to reject critical items when their perceptual features matched said distance relationship. These results suggest that bilinguals not only activate task-irrelevant meanings of interlingual homophones, but also automatically simulate these meanings in a detailed perceptual fashion. Our study supports the claim that embodied simulation is not due to participants' conscious strategies, but is an automatic component of meaning construction.     

Does knowing speaker sex facilitate vowel recognition at short durations?

A man, woman or child saying the same vowel do so with very different voices. The auditory system solves the complex problem of extracting what the man, woman or child has said despite substantial differences in the acoustic properties of their voices. Much of the acoustic variation between the voices of men and woman is due to changes in the underlying anatomical mechanisms for producing speech. If the auditory system knew the sex of the speaker then it could potentially correct for speaker sex related acoustic variation thus facilitating vowel recognition. This study measured the minimum stimulus duration necessary to accurately discriminate whether a brief vowel segment was spoken by a man or woman, and the minimum stimulus duration necessary to accuately recognise what vowel was spoken. Results showed that reliable vowel recognition precedesreliable speaker sex discrimination, thus questioning the use of speaker sex information in compensating for speaker sex related acoustic variation in the voice. Furthermore, the pattern of performance across experiments where the fundamental frequency and formant frequency information of speaker's voices were systematically varied, was markedly different depending on whether the task was speaker-sex discrimination or vowel recognition. This argues for there being little relationship between perception of speaker sex (indexical information) and perception of what has been said (linguistic information) at short durations.     

Co-speech iconic gestures and visuo-spatial working memory

Three experiments tested the role of verbal versus visuo-spatial working memory in the comprehension of co-speech iconic gestures. In Experiment 1, participants viewed congruent discourse primes in which the speaker's gestures matched the information conveyed by his speech, and incongruent ones in which the semantic content of the speaker's gestures diverged from that in his speech. Discourse primes were followed by picture probes that participants judged as being either related or unrelated to the preceding clip. Performance on this picture probe classification task was faster and more accurate after congruent than incongruent discourse primes. The effect of discourse congruency on response times was linearly related to measures of visuo-spatial, but not verbal, working memory capacity, as participants with greater visuo-spatial WM capacity benefited more from congruent gestures. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants performed the same picture probe classification task under conditions of high and low loads on concurrent visuo-spatial (Experiment 2) and verbal (Experiment 3) memory tasks. Effects of discourse congruency and verbal WM load were additive, while effects of discourse congruency and visuo-spatial WM load were interactive. Results suggest that congruent co-speech gestures facilitate multi-modal language comprehension, and indicate an important role for visuo-spatial WM in these speech–gesture integration processes.     

On French listeners’ ability to use stress during spoken word processing

Previous studies have suggested that French listeners experience difficulties when they have to discriminate between words that differ in stress. A limitation is that these studies used stress patterns that do not respect the rules of stress placement in French. In this study, three stress patterns were tested on bisyllabic words (1) the legal stress pattern in French, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), (2) an illegal stress location pattern, namely words that bore primary stress on their first syllable compared to words that bore primary stress on their last syllable (/’?u?i/-/?u’?i/) and (3) an illegal pattern that involves an unstressed word, namely words that were unstressed compared to words that bore primary stress on their first syllable (/?u?i/-/’?u?i/). In an ABX task, participants heard three items produced by three different speakers and had to indicate whether X was identical to A or B. The stimuli A and B varied in stress (/?u’?i/-/?u?i/-/?u’?i/), in one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u’???/-/?u’?i/) or in both stress and one phoneme (/?u’?i/-/?u???/-/?u’?i/). The results showed that French listeners are fully able to discriminate between two words differing in stress provided that the stress pattern included an unstressed word. More importantly, they suggest that the French listeners’ difficulties mainly reside in locating stress within words.     

追踪手势对视空间学习的增强作用

本研究采用地图学习任务范式考察了追踪手势对视空间学习的影响和增强, 并试图从追踪手势的角度寻找能够有效促进操作者视空间学习的方法。实验1探究了产生追踪手势对视空间学习的增强作用; 实验2采用遮挡范式考察了产生追踪手势增强视空间学习的作用机制, 发现产生追踪手势所提供的视觉信息和感觉运动信息共同作用于视空间学习过程; 实验3从具身认知的视角探索了基于追踪手势的视空间学习增强方式, 发现以自我为参照产生追踪手势可以更好地增强个体的视空间学习。本研究结果很好地支持并补充了手势的具身认知理论。     

A parent intervention with a growth mindset approach improves children's early gesture and vocabulary development

Socioeconomic disparities in children's early vocabulary skills can be traced back to disparities in gesture use at age one and are due, in part, to the quantity and quality of communication children are exposed to by parents. Further, parents' mindsets about intelligence contribute to their interactions with their children. We implemented a parent gesture intervention with a growth mindset component with 47 parents of 10‐month‐olds to determine whether this approach would increase parents' use of the pointing gesture, infants' use of pointing, and child vocabulary growth. The intervention had an effect on parent gesture such that by child age 12‐months, parents who received the intervention increased in their pointing more than parents in the control condition. Importantly, the intervention also had a significant effect on child gesture use with parents. There was no main effect of the intervention on child vocabulary. Further, the effect of the intervention on pointing was stronger for parents who endorsed fixed mindsets at baseline, and had an added benefit of increased vocabulary growth from 10–18 months for children of those parents who endorsed fixed mindsets. Incorporating growth mindset approaches into parenting interventions is encouraged.     

交流手势的认知特征

手势是语言交流过程中的一种重要的非语言媒介, 其不仅与语言互动间的关系密切, 而且具有不同的交流认知特征。文章重点归纳和述评了手势和语言交流的关系, 手势相对独立的交流特征, 教育情境中的手势交流。文章具体提出：首先, 手势和语言的共同表达促进了语言的发生和语言的理解、整合和记忆; 其次, 手势一定程度上具有独立的交流性, 手势和语言的“不匹配性”反映了交流信息的变化和交流认知的改变; 最后, 教育情境中教师的手势表达可以引导学生的注意并澄清语言信息, 学生的手势交流有助于促进学习认知过程。未来研究需要进一步探讨手势对于语言交流功能的影响, 语言交流过程中手势交流的优势特征和认知机制, 教育情境中手势交流高效性的认知机制, 手势交流的影响因素、一般特征和个体差异。