Writing,Reading, and Listening Differentially Overload Working Memory Performance Across the Serial Position Curve

Previous research has assumed that writing is a cognitively complex task, but has not determined if writing overloads Working Memory more than reading and listening. To investigate this, participants completed three recall tasks. These were reading lists of words before recalling them, hearing lists of words before recalling them, and hearing lists of words and writing them as they heard them, then recalling them. The experiment involved serial recall of lists of 6 words. The hypothesis that fewer words would be recalled overall when writing was supported. Post-hoc analysis revealed the same pattern of results at individual serial positions (1 to 3). However, there was no difference between the three conditions at serial position 4, or between listening and writing at positions 5 and 6 which were both greater than recall in the reading condition. This suggests writing overloads working memory more than reading and listening, particularly in the early serial positions. The results show that writing interferes with working memory processes and so is not recommended when the goal is to immediately recall information.     

汉语阅读中词N+2的预视对高频词N+1加工影响的眼动研究

本研究采用边界范式,控制单字词N+1的预视加工负荷和词N+2首字的预视信息类型,探讨了汉语阅读中词N+2的预视对高频单字词N+1加工产生的影响。结果发现,当词N+1的预视为低加工负荷时,词N+2首字的预视对词N+1的加工产生了显著的影响;当词N+2首字的预视字与词N+1正字法相似,并且只呈现在副中央凹中时,显著的阻碍了词N+1随后的加工。结果表明,副中央凹中词N+2能够获得预视加工,可能获得正字法预视信息并对随后词N+1的加工产生了影响,并且这种影响受词N+1的预视加工负荷的调节。实验结果符合注意梯度指引模型的假设。     

Why is number word learning hard? Evidence from bilingual learners

Young children typically take between 18 months and 2 years to learn the meanings of number words. In the present study, we investigated this developmental trajectory in bilingual preschoolers to examine the relative contributions of two factors in number word learning: (1) the construction of numerical concepts, and (2) the mapping of language specific words onto these concepts. We found that children learn the meanings of small number words (i.e., one, two, and three) independently in each language, indicating that observed delays in learning these words are attributable to difficulties in mapping words to concepts. In contrast, children generally learned to accurately count larger sets (i.e., five or greater) simultaneously in their two languages, suggesting that the difficulty in learning to count is not tied to a specific language. We also replicated previous studies that found that children learn the counting procedure before they learn its logic – i.e., that for any natural number, n, the successor of n in the count list denotes the cardinality n + 1. Consistent with past studies, we found that children’s knowledge of successors is first acquired incrementally. In bilinguals, we found that this knowledge exhibits item-specific transfer between languages, suggesting that the logic of the positive integers may not be stored in a language-specific format. We conclude that delays in learning the meanings of small number words are mainly due to language-specific processes of mapping words to concepts, whereas the logic and procedures of counting appear to be learned in a format that is independent of a particular language and thus transfers rapidly from one language to the other in development.     

A development of Freudian metapsychology for schizophrenia

The author states that psychoanalysis has much to contribute to schizophrenia. Beginning with a development of Freudian metapsychology, he addresses the in‐depth psychopathological study of a session (the first on the couch) with a schizophrenic patient who hears voices and feels that he is being watched. Since the symptoms appear at the level of the heard word and the visual image – key to Freudian metapsychology – he delineates a circuit for the word and one for the image, describing a blockage in both and the consequences of these. Furthermore, with regard to the patient's progress, he demonstrates first a quantitative improvement in symptoms, and later qualitative changes in his functioning. He shows how, over a time, functioning is improved in a once‐a‐week on‐the‐couch setting after two years of face‐to‐face treatment.     

Specific phonological impairments in dyslexia revealed by eyetracking

Phonological deficits in dyslexia are typically assessed using metalinguistic tasks vulnerable to extraneous factors such as attention and memory. The present work takes the novel approach of measuring phonology using eyetracking. Eye movements of dyslexic children were monitored during an auditory word recognition task in which target items in a display (e.g., candle) were accompanied by distractors sharing a cohort (candy) or rhyme (sandal). Like controls, dyslexics showed slower recognition times when a cohort distractor was present than in a baseline condition with only phonologically unrelated distractors. However, unlike controls, dyslexic children did not show slowed recognition of targets with a rhyme distractor, suggesting they had not encoded rhyme relationships. This was further explored in an overt phonological awareness test of cohort and rhyme. Surprisingly, dyslexics showed normal rhyme performance but poorer judgment of initial sounds on these overt tests. The results implicate impaired knowledge of rhyme information in dyslexia; however they also indicate that testing methodology plays a critical role in how such problems are identified.     

Eye movements of monkey observers viewing vocalizing conspecifics

Primates, including humans, communicate using facial expressions, vocalizations and often a combination of the two modalities. For humans, such bimodal integration is best exemplified by speech-reading - humans readily use facial cues to enhance speech comprehension, particularly in noisy environments. Studies of the eye movement patterns of human speech-readers have revealed, unexpectedly, that they predominantly fixate on the eye region of the face as opposed to the mouth. Here, we tested the evolutionary basis for such a behavioral strategy by examining the eye movements of rhesus monkeys observers as they viewed vocalizing conspecifics. Under a variety of listening conditions, we found that rhesus monkeys predominantly focused on the eye region versus the mouth and that fixations on the mouth were tightly correlated with the onset of mouth movements. These eye movement patterns of rhesus monkeys are strikingly similar to those reported for humans observing the visual components of speech. The data therefore suggest that the sensorimotor strategies underlying bimodal speech perception may have a homologous counterpart in a closely related primate ancestor.     

Effect of temporal constraints on hemispheric asymmetries during spatial frequency processing

Studies on functional hemispheric asymmetries have suggested that the right vs. left hemisphere should be predominantly involved in low vs. high spatial frequency (SF) analysis, respectively. By manipulating exposure duration of filtered natural scene images, we examined whether the temporal characteristics of SF analysis (i.e., the temporal precedence of low on high spatial frequencies) may interfere with hemispheric specialization. Results showed the classical hemispheric specialization pattern for brief exposure duration and a trend to a right hemisphere advantage irrespective of the SF content for longer exposure duration. The present study suggests that the hemispheric specialization pattern for visual information processing should be considered as a dynamic system, wherein the superiority of one hemisphere over the other could change according to the level of temporal constraints: the higher the temporal constraints of the task, the more the hemispheres are specialized in SF processing.     

Hemispheric predominance assessment of phonology and semantics: a divided visual field experiment

The aim of the present behavioural experiment was to evaluate the most lateralized among two phonological (phoneme vs. rhyme detection) and the most lateralized among two semantic ("living" vs. "edible" categorization) tasks, within the dominant hemisphere for language. The reason of addressing this question was a practical one: to evaluate the degree of the hemispheric lateralization for several language tasks, by using the divided visual presentation of stimuli, and then choose the most lateralized semantic and phonological for mapping language in patients by using fMRI in future studies. During the divided visual field experiment by using words (semantic tasks) and pseudo-words (phonological tasks) as stimuli, thirty-nine right-handed participants were examined. Our results have shown that all tasks were significantly left hemisphere lateralized. Furthermore, the rhyme was significantly more lateralized than phoneme detection and "living" was significantly more lateralized than "edible" categorization. The rhyme decision and "living" categorization will be used in future fMRI studies for assessing hemispheric predominance and cerebral substrate for semantics and phonology in patients. Our results also suggest that the characteristics of stimuli could influence the degree of the hemispheric lateralization (i.e., the emotional charge of stimuli for words and the position of the phoneme to be detected, for pseudo-words).     

Assigning Grammatical Gender During Word Production

The present study was designed to examine the processes by which grammatical gender is assigned during word production. French words varied in strength of sublexical cues, based on whether the word ending was typical for one gender rather than neutral about gender, and lexical cues, derived from the associated definite article being uninformative about gender for words beginning with a vowel, but informative for words beginning with a consonant. In Experiment 1, when native French speakers classified the gender of mentally evoked names of pictures, no effects of these cues were obtained. Experiment 2 used an improved methodology, with participants classifying the gender of words translated from English. English-speaking learners of French were influenced strongly by lexical and sublexical cues, while French speakers showed a weaker influence. However, for both speaker groups, words whose gender was classified slowly during recognition were also classified slowly during production, and error rates were similarly correlated across tasks. The conclusion was that gender is not equally available for all words once the associated “lemma” is accessed. Current models of language production may have to incorporate mechanisms allowing differential speed of access to gender information depending on a word’s formal properties.