High second‐language proficiency protects against the effects of reverberation on listening comprehension

The purpose of this experiment was to investigate whether classroom reverberation influences second‐language (L2) listening comprehension. Moreover, we investigated whether individual differences in baseline L2 proficiency and in working memory capacity (WMC) modulate the effect of reverberation time on L2 listening comprehension. The results showed that L2 listening comprehension decreased as reverberation time increased. Participants with higher baseline L2 proficiency were less susceptible to this effect. WMC was also related to the effect of reverberation (although just barely significant), but the effect of WMC was eliminated when baseline L2 proficiency was statistically controlled. Taken together, the results suggest that top‐down cognitive capabilities support listening in adverse conditions. Potential implications for the Swedish national tests in English are discussed.     

Eye Movements Reveal the Dynamic Simulation of Speed in Language

This study investigates how speed of motion is processed in language. In three eye‐tracking experiments, participants were presented with visual scenes and spoken sentences describing fast or slow events (e.g., The lion ambled/dashed to the balloon). Results showed that looking time to relevant objects in the visual scene was affected by the speed of verb of the sentence, speaking rate, and configuration of a supporting visual scene. The results provide novel evidence for the mental simulation of speed in language and show that internal dynamic simulations can be played out via eye movements toward a static visual scene.     

Typhoid Pollyanna: The effect of category valence on retrieval order of positive and negative category members

Previous research suggests that people process pleasant information more efficiently than unpleasant information. This phenomenon has been illustrated in a variety of contexts and paradigms, and is frequently referred to as the Pollyanna principle. One important aspect of the Pollyanna principle is that people tend to retrieve pleasant members of a category from semantic memory prior to unpleasant members of the same category. However, we propose that the retrieval advantage of favourably viewed category members holds only for positive categories and that prototypicality of category members might be a better predictor of ease of retrieval than favourability. These possibilities were tested in two studies. In Study 1, favourability effects on retrieval order were observed for positive categories but not for neutral or negative categories. In Study 2, prototypical category members were retrieved before less prototypical category members for both positive and negative categories. These results suggest that the Pollyanna principle might be the result of a confound between favourability and prototypicality for members of favourable categories.     

Associative priming and orthographic choice in nonword spelling

Abstract

An experiment is reported in which adult English-speaking subjects wrote nonwords to dictation in a free (unprimed) condition and in a primed condition in which the nonword was preceded by a word that was an associate of a word that rhymed with the nonword target (e.g. vatican—(pope)→ bope vs detergent—(soap)→boap). Choice of orthographic patterns in nonword spelling was additively influenced by the associative priming and by sound-spelling contingency (the proportion of words in the lexicon containing the critical pattern). However, an analysis of unprimed spellings suggested that contingency was no more than a partial determinant of orthographic choice. Some implications for models of spelling storage and retrieval are discussed.     

Understanding action language modulates oscillatory mu and beta rhythms in the same way as observing actions

The mu rhythms (8–13 Hz) and the beta rhythms (15 up to 30 Hz) of the EEG are observed in the central electrodes (C3, Cz and C4) in resting states, and become suppressed when participants perform a manual action or when they observe another’s action. This has led researchers to consider that these rhythms are electrophysiological markers of the motor neuron activity in humans. This study tested whether the comprehension of action language, unlike abstract language, modulates mu and low beta rhythms (15–20 Hz) in a similar way as the observation of real actions. The log-ratios were calculated for each oscillatory band between each condition and baseline resting periods. The results indicated that both action language and action videos caused mu and beta suppression (negative log-ratios), whereas abstract language did not, confirming the hypothesis that understanding action language activates motor networks in the brain. In other words, the resonance of motor areas associated with action language is compatible with the embodiment approach to linguistic meaning.     

Test anxiety,sentence comprehension,and recognition memory

Abstract

The present study explored the relationships between trait and state test anxiety of students, and comprehension and recognition memory for sentences. The results demonstrated that test anxiety effects could be found in comprehension-based recognition memory for sentences under conditions that minimized complex retrieval operations. Comprehension was related to the test anxiety deficit, supporting the hypothesis that anxiety-recognition relations were mediated by anxiety-comprehension and comprehension-recognition relations. However, a partial correlation analysis suggested that this comprehension-deficit hypothesis is not adequate to explain the total deficit. Elaborative processes were suggested as a potential contributor to the findings.     

句子加工中核心名词动物性效应及其认知机制

动物性核心名词在语言认知中有着重要的作用.基于句子产生和句子理解两方面的研究表明,句式选择、语态运用、词序排列、论元建构、格标记使用及从句加工等诸多方面都显著的受到句中核心名词动物性的影响.就该效应的来源及其作用机制,生命性名词表征特异性理论、词汇概念通达可及性层级理论、动物性名词句法突出性特征理论、基于频率分布的语言经验理论从不同的方面进行了分析.最后,就名词动物性效应的存在本质、作用机理以及文化和语境的影响等方面展开了评价和展望.