Phonological Awareness of Bilingual and Monolingual Chinese Children.

The effect of bilingualism on the development of phonological awareness of Chinese children was investigated in 2 studies comparing bilingual speakers of both Cantonese and Mandarin with monolingual speakers of Mandarin. Cantonese-speaking children had developed more advanced onset and rime awareness by 2nd grade as they learned Mandarin in school and became bilingual. Bilingualism seemed to accelerate the development of phonological awareness. But the advantage had mostly disappeared by 4th grade. On the other hand, in the 1st grade, Cantonese-speaking children had more advanced tone awareness than Mandarin-speaking children. This was likely because Cantonese has a more complicated tone system than Mandarin. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Meeting Mr. Farmer Versus Meeting a Farmer: Specific Effects of Aging on Learning Proper Names.

Previous research testing age-related learning and memory problems specific to proper names has yielded mixed results. In the present experiments, young and older participants saw faces of previously unknown people identified by name and occupation. On subsequent presentations of each picture, participants attempted to recall the pictured person's name and occupation. Young and older adults made more name errors (the occupation was recalled but not the correct name) than occupation errors (the name was recalled but not the correct occupation), and older adults made relatively more name but not occupation errors than young adults. This specific age-related deficit in proper-name learning is explained within an interactive-activation model of memory and language that has been extensively applied to cognitive aging and proper-name retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of bilingualism, aging, and semantic relatedness on memory under divided attention.

We examined how encoding and retrieval processes were affected by manipulations of attention, and whether the degree of semantic relatedness between words in the memory and distracting task modulated these effects. We also considered age and bilingual status as mediating factors. Monolingual and bilingual younger and older adults studied a list of words from a single semantic category presented auditorily, and later free recalled them aloud. During either study or retrieval, participants concurrently performed a distracting task requiring size decisions to words from either the same or a different semantic category as the words in the memory task. The greatest disruptions of memory from divided attention (DA) were for encoding rather than retrieval. The effect of semantic relatedness was significant only for DA at encoding. Older age and bilingualism were associated with lower recall scores in all conditions, but these factors did not influence the magnitude of memory interference. The results suggest that encoding is more sensitive to semantic similarity in a distracting task than is retrieval. The role of attention at encoding and retrieval is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Caffeine, Priming, and Tip of the Tongue: Evidence for Plasticity in the Phonological System.

A study was performed involving phonological priming and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) in which participants took either 200 mg of caffeine or placebo. Results show a clear positive priming effect produced for the caffeine group when primed with phonologically related words. When primed with unrelated words, the caffeine subgroup produced a significant increase in the number of TOTs. This contrasting effect provides evidence that the positive priming of caffeine was not a result of caffeine's well-known alertness effects. For placebo, a significant negative effect occurred with the related-word priming condition. The results support the novel hypothesis that the blocking of A, adenosine receptors by caffeine induces an increased short-term plasticity effect within the phonological retrieval system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of bilingualism and computer video game experience on the Simon task.

A group of 97 participants who were monolingual or bilingual and who had extensive practice playing computer video games or not completed two Simon tasks. The tasks were presented in two conditions that manipulated the number of response switches required in each block of trials. Bilingualism and video-game experience each influenced a different aspect of performance: Video-game players were faster in most conditions, including control conditions that did not include conflict from irrelevant position; bilinguals were faster only in a condition that required the most controlled attention to resolve conflict from the position and the stimulus. The results show the potential of experience to modify performance and point to subtle processing differences in various versions of the Simon task. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bilingual Hispanic children's performance on the English and Spanish versions of the Cognitive Assessment System.

This study compared the performance of referred bilingual Hispanic children on the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous, Successive (PASS) theory as measured by English and Spanish versions of the Cognitive Assessment System (CAS; Naglieri & Das, 1997a). The results suggest that students scored similarly on both English and Spanish versions of the CAS. Within each version of the CAS, the bilingual children earned their lowest scores in Successive processing regardless of the language used during test administration. Small mean differences were noted between the means of the English and Spanish versions for the Simultaneous and Successive processing scales; however, mean Full Scale scores were similar. Specific subtests within the Simultaneous and Successive scales were found to contribute to the differences between the English and Spanish versions of the CAS. Comparisons of the children's profiles of cognitive weakness on both versions of the CAS showed that these children performed consistently despite the language difference. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of hunger on the learning and recall of food related words.

To test the effect of drive state on learning in humans, Ss were presented with paired associates consisting of food and nonfood words, either before or after the evening meal. It was found that the premeal group learned faster, particularly when the paired associates was a food word, and the premeal group recalled food words, but failed to recall nonfood words. The effect of drive on learning was demonstrated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of Alzheimer's disease on the recognition of novel versus familiar words: Neuropsychological and clinico-metabolic data.

This study explored recognition memory performance for novel versus familiar words in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and normal controls (NCs), using an adaptation of E. Tulving and N. Kroll's (1995) procedure. Results showed that both groups exhibited more hits and more false alarms for familiar than for novel words. The groups did not differ in the recognition of familiar words, reflecting preserved familiarity processes in AD. However, AD patients made more false alarms than NCs in the recognition of novel words, reflecting impairment of recollection processes in AD. A positron emission tomography analysis of clinico-metabolic correlations in AD patients showed a correlation between recognition of novel words and right hippocampal activity, whereas recognition of familiar words was more related to metabolic activity in the left posterior orbitofrontal cortex. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Are phonological representations of printed and spoken language isomorphic? Evidence from the restrictions on unattested onsets.

Are the phonological representations of printed and spoken words isomorphic? This question is addressed by investigating the restrictions on onsets. Cross-linguistic research suggests that onsets of rising sonority are preferred to sonority plateaus, which, in turn, are preferred to sonority falls (e.g., bnif, bdif, lbif). Of interest is whether these grammatical preferences constrain the recognition of auditory and printed words by speakers of English--a language in which such onsets are unattested. Five experiments compare phonological lexical decision responses to nonwords, including unattested onsets, through either aural or visual presentation. Results suggest that both hearers and readers are sensitive to the phonotactics of unattested onsets. However, the phonotactic generalizations of hearers and readers differ on their scope and source. Hearers differentiated all three types of onsets (e.g., bnif, bdif, and lbif), and their behavior implicated both grammatical and statistical constraints. In contrast, readers were able to differentiate only those structures similar to attested English onsets from dissimilar structures (i.e., bnif vs. bdif or lbif), and their preferences reflected statistical knowledge alone. These findings suggest that the phonological representations informing lexical decision to spoken and printed words are not isomorphic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivation and attention: Incongruent effects of feedback on the processing of valence.

Four experiments investigated the relation between outcome-related motivational states and processes of automatic attention allocation. Experiments 1-3 analyzed influences of feedback on evaluative decisions. Words of opposite valence to the feedback were processed faster, indicating that it is easier to allocate attention to the valence of an affectively incongruent word. Experiment 4 replicated the incongruency effect with interference effects of word valence in a grammatical-categorization task, indicating that the effect reflects automatic attentional capture. In all experiments, incongruent effects of feedback emerged only in a situation involving an attentional shift between words that differed in valence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of concomitant colored and uncolored pictorial representations on the learning of stimulus words.

To study the effect of varying degrees of compounding signs of objects denoted by the words, twenty-five stimulus words were presented under three learning conditions: (a) Words alone, (b) words with their uncolored pictures, (c) words with their colored pictures. It was concluded that support was given the hypothesis that "with the number of presentations… held constant, the number of… words recalled by Ss should vary positively within limits with the number of simultaneously presented additional signs." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conscious and preconscious influences on recall: Another example of the restricting effects of awareness.

2 groups of 34 and 36 Ss were asked to recall a list of 27 words—10 associates to the word cheese, 10 unrelated words matched for frequency, 6 buffer words, and the stimulus word "Cheese," embedded in the center of the list. The pattern of recall was studied (a) before "Cheese" was recalled, (b) after "Cheese" was recalled, and (c) when "Cheese" was forgotten. As predicted, a significantly greater number of associates than control words were recalled before "Cheese" was recalled; after "Cheese" was recalled and when "Cheese" was forgotten, an equal number of associates and control words were recalled. Findings were substantially the same in the 2 groups of Ss. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The influence of linguistic experience on the cognitive processing of pitch in speech and nonspeech sounds.

In the present experiment, the authors tested Mandarin and English listeners on a range of auditory tasks to investigate whether long-term linguistic experience influences the cognitive processing of nonspeech sounds. As expected, Mandarin listeners identified Mandarin tones significantly more accurately than English listeners; however, performance did not differ across the listener groups on a pitch discrimination task requiring fine-grained discrimination of simple nonspeech sounds. The crucial finding was that cross-language differences emerged on a nonspeech pitch contour identification task: The Mandarin listeners more often misidentified flat and falling pitch contours than the English listeners in a manner that could be related to specific features of the sound structure of Mandarin, which suggests that the effect of linguistic experience extends to nonspeech processing under certain stimulus and task conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sociocultural influences on the development of verbal mediation: Private speech and phonological recoding in Saudi Arabian and British samples.

Cross-national stability in private speech (PS) and short-term memory was investigated in Saudi Arabian (n=63) and British (n=58) 4- to 8-year-olds. Assumed differences in child-adult interaction between the 2 nationality groups led to predictions of Gender × Nationality interactions in the development of verbal mediation. British boys used more self-regulatory PS than British girls, whereas there was no such difference for the Saudi group. When age, verbal ability, and social speech were controlled, boys used slightly more self-regulatory PS than girls. Self-regulatory PS was related to children's use of phonological recoding of visually presented material in a short-term memory task, suggesting that PS and phonological recoding represent different facets of a domain-general transition toward verbal mediation in early childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characterizing the Motor Execution Stage of Speech Production: Consonantal Effects on Delayed Naming Latency and Onset Duration.

The research described in this article had 2 aims: to permit greater precision in the conduct of naming experiments and to contribute to a characterization of the motor execution stage of speech production. The authors report an exhaustive inventory of consonantal and postconsonantal influences on delayed naming latency and onset acoustic duration, derived from a hand-labeled corpus of single-syllable consonant-vowel utterances. Five talkers produced 6 repetitions each of a set of 168 prepared monosyllables, a set that comprised each of the consonantal onsets of English in 3 vowel contexts. Strong and significant effects associated with phonetic characteristics of initial and noninitial phonemes were observed on both delayed naming latency and onset acoustic duration. Results are discussed in terms of the biomechanical properties of the articulatory system that may give rise to these effects and in terms of their methodological implications for naming experiments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)