One country,two cultures: Implicit space–time mappings in Southern and Northern Vietnamese

What determines how people implicitly associate the “past” and “future” with “front” and “back”? According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH), people's cultural attitudes toward time influence their implicit space–time mappings. However, previous research mainly used cross‐cultural comparison in which the cultures compared differ not only in attentional focus on temporal events, but may also differ in other cultural values. Thus, the specific role of cultural attitudes toward time has not been tested. In the current study, we compared Southern and Northern Vietnamese who have many aspects in common but demonstrate cultural differences in attitudes toward the past and future. The results showed that the two groups of participants tended to think about time according to their temporal focus. Taken together, this pattern of results showed that within‐cultural differences in temporal focus can also predict variation in space–time mappings, which provides further supporting evidence for the TFH.     

Wednesday's Meeting Really Is on Friday: A Meta‐Analysis and Evaluation of Ambiguous Spatiotemporal Language

Experimental work has shown that spatial experiences influence spatiotemporal metaphor use. In these studies, participants are asked a question that yields different responses depending on the metaphor participants use. It has been claimed that English speakers are equally likely to respond with either variant in the absence of priming. Related studies testing non‐spatial experiences demonstrate varied results with a wide range of primes. Here, the effects of eye movement and stimuli presentation modality on comprehension of this question are investigated in different formats. In addition, the results of prior reported controls are re‐analyzed in a meta‐analysis to verify reliable ambiguity of the test question. Results suggest that English speakers have a baseline preference for the Moving Ego metaphor variant, with a stronger preference in verbal rather than written presentation. The findings have implications both for (re)interpretation of prior studies' results and future study designs.     

Using Statistical Models of Morphology in the Search for Optimal Units of Representation in the Human Mental Lexicon

Determining optimal units of representing morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon is a central question in psycholinguistics. Here, we utilize advances in computational sciences to study human morphological processing using statistical models of morphology, particularly the unsupervised Morfessor model that works on the principle of optimization. The aim was to see what kind of model structure corresponds best to human word recognition costs for multimorphemic Finnish nouns: a model incorporating units resembling linguistically defined morphemes, a whole‐word model, or a model that seeks for an optimal balance between these two extremes. Our results showed that human word recognition was predicted best by a combination of two models: a model that decomposes words at some morpheme boundaries while keeping others unsegmented and a whole‐word model. The results support dual‐route models that assume that both decomposed and full‐form representations are utilized to optimally process complex words within the mental lexicon.     

Improving compliance with medical fitness to drive reviews: The role of behaviourally-optimised letters

To manage the increased crash risk posed by drivers with medical conditions and impairments, many licensing authorities ask high-risk drivers to undergo medical fitness to drive assessments. Maximising drivers’ compliance and satisfaction with these assessments is an ongoing challenge for these authorities. This study tested whether drivers’ compliance and satisfaction with a licensing authority’s request to provide a medical report could be improved by incorporating two applied behaviour change principles – simplified messaging and procedural fairness – into the authority’s request letter. Drivers undergoing medical review (N = 876) were assigned to receive either a standard request letter currently used by the authority, or a revised letter that incorporated simplified messaging and procedural fairness amendments. Drivers who received the revised letter were significantly more likely to submit a medical report by the due date. Additionally, of the drivers who submitted the report, those who received the revised letter submitted the report an average of four days faster than those who received the standard letter. These findings demonstrate that optimising letters using behavioural principles can improve compliance with licensing authorities’ requests, resulting in substantial time and cost savings for licensing authorities, possible road safety benefits, and potential reductions in the number of licences suspended for failure to provide a report.     

Are belief‐based justifications associated with metalinguistic awareness? A cross‐sectional study in school‐age children

Previous research has consistently demonstrated that false‐belief (FB) understanding correlates with and predicts metalinguistic ability in preschoolers. Surprisingly, however, there is scant evidence on the question of whether this relation persists at later ages. The present cross‐sectional study sought to fill this gap by examining the association between FB understanding, belief‐based justifications and metalinguistic awareness. A sample of 150 children primary‐school children between 8 and 11 years of age were administered a test of receptive language, a second‐order theory‐of‐mind task and a comprehensive metalinguistic battery. The results of correlational and regression analyses showed that explicit metalinguistic awareness (in particular, performance in the Ambiguity and Phonemic Segmentation subtests) was significantly predicted by children's belief‐based responses to the justification question in the theory of mind task but only for children with small receptive vocabularies; in contrast, FB understanding made no independent contribution (either alone or in interaction with other measures). These findings complement and advance existing data by showing that, in school‐age children, the association between the 2 domains involves more mature, verbally explicit levels of FB understanding and metalinguistic awareness.

Highlights

• We examined the relation between metalinguistic awareness and theory‐of‐mind in primary‐school children.
• Metalinguistic awareness was associated to belief‐based justifications, but only for children with small vocabulary.
• In school‐age children the ability to provide verbal justifications plays a key role in the relation between theory‐of‐mind and metalinguistic awareness.

     

Playing with fire: effects of negative mood induction and working memory on vocabulary acquisition

We investigated the impact of emotions on learning vocabulary in an unfamiliar language to better understand affective influences in foreign language acquisition. Seventy native English speakers learned new vocabulary in either a negative or a neutral emotional state. Participants also completed two sets of working memory tasks to examine the potential mediating role of working memory. Results revealed that participants exposed to negative stimuli exhibited difficulty in retrieving and correctly pairing English words with Indonesian words, as reflected in a lower performance on the prompted recall tests and the free recall measure. Emotional induction did not change working memory scores from pre to post manipulation. This suggests working memory could not explain the reduced vocabulary learning in the negative group. We argue that negative mood can adversely affect language learning by suppressing aspects of native-language processing and impeding form-meaning mapping with second language words.     

Temporal focus,temporal distance,and mind-wandering valence: Results from an experience sampling and an experimental study

When mind-wandering, people may think about events that happened in the past, or events that may happen in the future. Using experience sampling, we first aimed to replicate the finding that future-oriented thoughts show a greater positivity bias than past-oriented thoughts. Furthermore, we investigated whether there is a relation between the temporal distance of past- and future-oriented thoughts and the frequency of positive thoughts, a factor that has received little attention in previous work. Second, we experimentally investigated the relation between temporal focus, temporal distance, and thought valence. Both studies showed that future-oriented thoughts were more positive compared to past-oriented thoughts. Regarding temporal distance, thoughts about the distant past and future were more positive than thoughts about the near past and future in the experiment. However, the experience sampling study did not provide clear insight into this relation. Potential theoretical and methodological explanations for these findings are discussed.