Predicting the unpredicted: No relationship between ‘the’-skipping and response inhibition

Skilled readers are likely to skip short, high-frequency words such as “the” in English. When deciding to skip such words, readers fail to take into account the preceding sentence context and will frequently skip an upcoming word that looks like “the” even if it is incompatible with the context, i.e. infelicitous (Angele & Rayner, 2013). It is not clear if (1) this failure to identify a potential problem with a sentence stems from an inability to access the information about the sentence context at the point of making the skipping decision or (2) a problem in selecting the appropriate information in order to make the decision. The latter case resembles response inhibition tests where participants need to make a decision in the presence of incongruent stimuli. If skipping and response inhibition depend on the same cognitive processes, we should find a relationship between a participant’s performance on response inhibition tests and the rate at which they skip words with an infelicitous gaze-contingent preview. We report an experiment testing this hypothesis in which there was no evidence for a relationship between the congruency effect in response inhibition tests and the rate of skipping infelicitous previews in a sentence reading task

Neural correlates of phonological, orthographic and semantic reading processing in dyslexia

Available online 10 August 2018Developmental dyslexia is one of the most prevalent learning disabilities, thought to be associated with dysfunction in the neural systems underlying typical reading acquisition. Neuroimaging research has shown that readers with dyslexia exhibit regional hypoactivation in left hemisphere reading nodes, relative to control counterparts. This evidence, however, comes from studies that have focused only on isolated aspects of reading. The present study aims to characterize left hemisphere regional hypoactivation in readers with dyslexia for the main processes involved in successful reading: phonological, orthographic and semantic. Forty-one participants performed a demanding reading task during MRI scanning. Results showed that readers with dyslexia exhibited hypoactivation associated with phonological processing in parietal regions; with orthographic processing in parietal regions, Broca's area, ventral occipitotemporal cortex and thalamus; and with semantic processing in angular gyrus and hippocampus. Stronger functional connectivity was observed for readers with dyslexia than for control readers 1) between the thalamus and the inferior parietal cortex/ventral occipitotemporal cortex during pseudoword reading; and, 2) between the hippocampus and the pars opercularis during word reading. These findings constitute the strongest evidence to date for the interplay between regional hypoactivation and functional connectivity in the main processes supporting reading in dyslexia.Supported by grants (RYC-2014-15440, PSI2015-65696) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), a grant (PI2016-12) from the Basque Government and a grant (Exp. 65/15) from the Programa Red guipuzcoana de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación from the Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa (P.M.P-A.); a predoctoral grant from the Department of Education, Universities and Research from the Basque Government (M.O.); grant (PSI2015-64174P) from the MINECO (F.C.); grants (PSI2015-67353-R) from the MINECO and (ERC-2011-ADG-295362) from the European Research Council (M.C.). BCBL acknowledges funding from Ayuda Centro de Excelencia Severo OchoaSEV-2015-0490 from the MINECO

Social context effects on emotional language: The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the emotional evaluation of words

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered our routines, our conversations, the specific social contexts in which we hear or use certain words, and potentially, the representation of the words related to the disease and its consequences. Here we investigated whether the effects of the pandemic have changed the representation of the affective features of COVID-19-related words. To this aim, we collected new ratings of valence (from unpleasant to pleasant) and arousal (from calm to activated) dimensions for COVID-19-related words (e.g., hospital) and COVID-19-unrelated words (e.g., whale). Subsequently, we compared these scores with those from databases that reported ratings for the same pool of words before the pandemic. Our results showed significant changes in arousal for COVID-19-related words but not unrelated words, thus revealing that the pandemic social context modified their affective representation. These findings support the flexibility of emotional representations and the malleability and dynamicity of the mental lexicon as a function of contextual factors

A standardized set of 260 pictures for Modern Greek: Norms for name agreement, age of acquisition, and visual complexity

The appropriate selection of both pictorial and linguistic experimental stimuli requires a previous language-specific standardization process of the materials across different variables. Considering that such normative data have not yet been collected for Modern Greek, in this study normative data for the color version of the Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set (Rossion & Pourtois, 2004) were collected from 330 native Greek adults. Participants named the pictures (providing name agreement ratings) and rated them for visual complexity and age of acquisition. The obtained measures represent a useful tool for further research on Greek language processing and constitute the first picture normative study for this language. The picture norms from this study and previous ones may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental. © 2009 The Psychonomic Society, Inc

Similar Conceptual Mapping of Novel Objects in Mixed- and Single-Language Contexts in Fluent Basque-Spanish Bilinguals

Participants learned the meaning of novel objects by listening to two complementary definitions while watching videos of the new object, in a single-language context (all in Spanish) or a mixed-language context (one definition in Basque, one in Spanish). Then, participants were asked to assess the degree of functional relatedness between novel and familiar objects in two conditions: identical (both definitions overlap) or related (single definition overlap). Relatedness ratings differed significantly between conditions, but they were highly similar across language contexts. Furthermore, items in the identical condition elicited a P300-like event-related potential component, while related items elicited a wave of lesser amplitude. Critically, the amplitude differences between conditions did not differ between language contexts. No interaction was found with proficiency level across participants. In line with previous findings, we show no measurable impact of mixing languages during the establishment of a link between novel objects and existing conceptual representations in bilinguals. © 2020 Language Learning Research Club, University of Michiga

SYLLABARIUM: An online application for deriving complete statistics for Basque and Spanish orthographic syllables

Duñabeitia JA, Cholin J, Corral J, Perea M, Carreiras M. SYLLABARIUM: An online application for deriving complete statistics for Basque and Spanish orthographic syllables. Behavior Research Methods. 2010;42(1):118-125

Erratum: Author Correction: The effect of foreign language in fear acquisition (Scientific reports (2018) 8 1 (1157))

A correction to this article has been published and is linked from the HTML and PDF versions of this paper. The error has not been fixed in the paper