Stress assignment in reading Italian polysyllabic pseudowords.

In four naming experiments we investigated how Italian readers assign stress to pseudowords. We assessed whether participants assign stress following distributional information such as stress neighborhood (the proportion and number of existent words sharing orthographic ending and stress pattern) and whether such distributional information affects naming speed. Experiments 1 and 2 tested how readers assign stress to pseudowords. The results showed that participants assign stress on the basis of the pseudowords\u27 stress neighborhood, but only when this orthographic/phonological information is widely represented in the lexicon. Experiments 3 and 4 tested the naming speed of pseudowords with different stress patterns. Participants were faster in reading pseudowords with antepenultimate than with penultimate stress. The effect was not driven by distributional information, but it was related to the stage of articulation planning. Overall, the experiments showed that, under certain conditions, readers assign stress using orthographic/phonological distributional information. However, the distributional information does not speed up pseudoword naming, which is affected by stress computation at the level of the articulation planning of the stimulus. It is claimed that models of reading aloud and speech production should be merged at the level of phonological encoding, when segmental and metrical information are assembled and articulation is planned

Dissociation in optokinetic stimulation sensitivity between omission and substitution reading errors in neglect dyslexia

Although omission and substitution errors in neglect dyslexia (ND) patients have always been considered as different manifestations of the same acquired reading disorder, recently, we proposed a new dual mechanism model. While omissions are related to the exploratory disorder which characterizes unilateral spatial neglect (USN), substitutions are due to a perceptual integration mechanism. A consequence of this hypothesis is that spe- cific training for omission-type ND patients would aim at restoring the oculo-motor scanning and should not improve reading in substitution-type ND. With this aim we administered an optokinetic stimulation (OKS) to two brain-damaged patients with both USN and ND, MA and EP, who showed ND mainly characterized by omissions and substitutions, respectively. MA also showed an impairment in oculo-motor behavior with a non-reading task, while EP did not. The two patients presented a dissociation with respect to their sensitivity to OKS, so that, as expected, MA was positively affected, while EP was not. Our results confirm a dissociation between the two mechanisms underlying omission and substitution reading errors in ND patients. Moreover, they suggest that such a dissociation could possibly be extended to the effectiveness of rehabilitative procedures, and that patients who mainly omit contralesional-sided letters would benefit from OKS

Sex Differences in Tobacco Abstinence: Effects on Executive Functioning

Aims. Several studies suggested that both sex and tobacco abstinence influence some cognitive processes such as memory and attention. However, very few studies have investigated whether males and females differ in executive functions in relation to tobacco abstinence. We investigated the effects of nicotine abstinence on executive functions in both males and females by using a virtual reality task (JEF). Design. A 2x2x8 mixed ANOVA was performed, with the percentages of task’s scores as dependent variable. Condition (Smoking and Abstinence) and Construct [Planning, Prioritization, Selective Thinking, Creative Thinking, Adaptive Thinking, Action Based Prospective Memory (ABPM), Event Based Prospective Memory (EBPM), Time Based Prospective Memory (TBPM)] as within subjects independent variables and Sex as between subject independent variable. Setting. Department of Human Sciences, Lumsa University in Rome. Participants. Thirty adults smokers, all University students, participated in the study (half females) (M age = 24.53; range = 18 – 35). Measurement. The Virtual Reality task (JEF), which assesses eight cognitive constructs. Findings. The main effect of Construct was significant (p< .0001) as the interaction between Sex and Construct (p<.01); post-hoc analysis showed that females obtained the lowest score in creative thinking while males obtained the lowest score in action-based prospective memory. More importantly, the interaction between Condition and Sex was also significant (p<.05) and post-hoc analysis indicated that males’ performance improved in the abstinence condition, whereas females’ performance remained quite stable across them. In both groups, event-based and time-based prospective memories obtained the highest scores. Conclusion. The results of this study partly confirmed previous findings about sex differences in cognitive processes and how tobacco abstinence may differently affect males and females. However, the use of a more sensitive ecological tool has permitted to capture isolated elements of executive functioning that reflect theories of fractionated executive processes and better clarify the effects of smoking and sex differences

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Two different mechanisms for omission and substitution errors in neglect dyslexia

Neglect dyslexia is a reading disorder often associated with right-sided brain lesions. In reading single words, errors are mostly substitutions or omissions of letters that occupy the left-sided positions. Typically, these errors have been thought to depend on a single mechanism. Conversely, we propose that they are due to different mechanisms. In particular, a visuo-spatial mechanism is responsible for omissions and a perceptual integration process for substitution errors. We measured the performance of six patients with both neglect and neglect dyslexia, analyzing their reading errors as a function of letter spacing. According to our conjecture, letter spacing should increase omissions by moving part of the string further in the unattended space, while it should reduce substitutions by restoring the integration processes. Furthermore, we predict that letter spacing should be more effective with pseudowords compared to words, in that in this latter case lexical effects are supposed to influence attentional and perceptual processes. Accordingly, we found that for pseudowords only the two types of errors are differently affected by this manipulation and only omissions correlate with the severity of the disorder in visuo-spatial tasks

The Timing of Semantic Processing in the Parafovea: Evidence from a Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Study

In the present investigation we adopted the Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Paradigm with the aim of studying the timing of parafoveal semantic processing. The paradigm consisted in the simultaneous presentation of couple of words, one in fovea (W1) and one in parafovea (W2). In three experiments, we manipulated word frequency, semantic relatedness between the two words and the effect of stimulus duration (150, 100, 50 ms). Accuracy on W2 was higher when W1 and W2 were both of high-frequency and when they were semantically related. W1 reading times were faster when both words were highly-frequent but only when the two words were semantically related (150 ms); when W2 was highly frequent and semantically related to the foveal word (100 ms). When the stimuli were presented for 50 ms, the reading times were reduced when W1 was highly frequent and, crucially, in case of a semantic relation between the two words. Our results suggest that it is possible to extract semantic information from the parafovea very fast (within 100 ms) and in parallel to the processing of the foveal word, especially when the cognitive load required for the latter is reduced, as is the case for high-frequency words. We discuss the resulting data in terms of word recognition and eye movements&rsquo; models

Combining language and space: Sentence bisection in unilateral spatial neglect

In line bisection right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect show a rightward deviation, with respect to the line's physical center. In word bisection ortho-phonological features of the stimulus' final (right-sided) part modulate performance of both patients and healthy participants (Veronelli, Vallar, Marinelli, Primativo, & Arduino, 2014). We investigated the role of linguistic factors in sentence bisection, in patients with and without neglect, and control participants. The effects of information in the right-sided part of the sentence (Experiment #1), and of lexical and syntactic violations (Experiment #2) were assessed. Neglect patients showed an overall rightward bias, larger than those of patients without neglect and controls. The neglect patients' bias was modulated by stimulus type, decreasing from lines, to letter strings and to all types of sentences. In sum, in visuo-manual sentence bisection a basic linguistic mechanism, such as sentence readability, brings about a more leftward appreciation of the stimulus, reducing the neglect patients' rightward bias. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Cultural and biological factors modulate spatial biases over development

Increasing evidence supports the contribution of both biological and cultural factors to visuospatial processing. The present study adds to the literature by exploring the interplay of perceptual and linguistic mechanisms in determining visuospatial asymmetries in adults (Experiment 1) and children (Experiment 2). In particular, pre-schoolers (3 and 5 year-olds), school-aged children (8 year-old), and adult participants were required to bisect different types of stimuli, that is, lines, words, and figure strings. In accordance with the literature, results yielded a leftward bias for lines and words and a rightward bias for figure strings, in adult participants. More critically, different biases were found for lines, words, and figure strings in children as a function of age, reflecting the impact of both cultural and biological factors on the processing of different visuospatial materials. Specifically, an adult-like pattern of results emerged only in the older group of children (8 year-old), but not in pre-schoolers. Results are discussed in terms of literacy, reading habits exposure, and biological maturation

The effects of crowding on eye movement patterns in reading

Crowding is a phenomenon that characterizes normal periphery limiting letter identification when other letters surround the signal. We investigated the nature of the reading limitation of crowding by analyzing eyemovement patterns. The stimuli consisted of two items varying across trials for letter spacing (spaced, unspaced and increased size), lexicality (words or pseudowords), number of letters (4, 6, 8), and reading modality (oral and silent). In Experiments 1 and 2 (oral and silent reading, respectively) the results show that an increase in letter spacing induced an increase in the number of fixations and in gaze duration, but a reduction in the first fixation duration. More importantly, increasing letter size (Experiment 3) produced the same first fixation duration advantage as empty spacing, indicating that, as predicted by crowding, only center-to-center letter distance, and not spacing per se, matters. Moreover, when the letter size was enlarged the number of fixations did not increase as much as in the previous experiments, suggesting that this measure depends on visual acuity rather than on crowding. Finally, gaze duration, ameasure ofword recognition, did not changewith the letter size enlargement. No qualitative differences were found between oral and silent reading experiments (1 and 2), indicating that the articulatory process did not influence the outcome. Finally, a facilitatory effect of lexicality was found in all conditions, indicating an interaction between perceptual and lexical processing. Overall, our results indicate that crowding influences normal word reading bymeans of an increase in first fixation duration, a measure of word encoding, which we interpret as a modulatory effect of attention on critical spacing