Article
Psychology, Mathematical
Joshua Snell, Jonathan Grainger, Martijn Meeter
Summary: The brain recognizes visual words by encoding the relative positions of letters with open-bigram representations. However, the influence of letter distance on bigram activation remains unexplored. Two experiments showed that decreasing the letter distance led to faster recognition of bigrams, but shorter distances also resulted in slower responses and more false positives when the target letter order was reversed.
PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN & REVIEW
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Cristina Jara, Cristobal Moenne-Loccoz, Marcela Pena
Summary: Infants under the age of 6 months are able to learn word-object and word-action associations when presented in fluent audiovisual stimuli, particularly when the words contain vowel harmony. This suggests that vowels play a significant role in shaping the initial learning stages of lexical categories in preverbal infants.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Marta Vergara-Martinez, Eva Gutierrez-Sigut, Manuel Perea, Cristina Gil-Lopez, Manuel Carreiras
Summary: Behavioral studies have shown that the legibility of handwritten script can hinder visual word recognition, with lexical effects magnified in difficult handwriting conditions. In the present experiment, an early effect of word-frequency in the N170 was observed in the difficult-to-read handwritten condition, suggesting increased attentional deployment and enhanced top-down effects in visual word processing.
Article
Psychology, Developmental
Paul Ratnage, Thierry Nazzi, Caroline Floccia
Summary: Adult studies have shown that consonants are more important than vowels in lexical processing tasks, but the developmental trajectory of this consonant bias varies across different languages. This study tested whether British English-learning 11-month-old infants rely more on consonants than vowels in recognizing familiar word forms, similar to findings in French. The results showed that infants had an equal preference for consonant and vowel mispronunciations of familiar words. This suggests that British English-learning infants' word form recognition is equally influenced by consonant and vowel information, supporting the idea that initial lexical processes vary cross-linguistically.
JOURNAL OF CHILD LANGUAGE
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Fengjiao Cong, Baoguo Chen
Summary: The experiments found that L2 readers exhibit flexible letter position coding during sentence reading, but are limited to words located in the foveal area and unable to effectively utilize information from the parafoveal area. Morphological information influences the magnitude of the transposed letter effect.
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Lucia Vieitez, Juan Haro, Pilar Ferre, Isabel Padron, Isabel Fraga
Summary: This study aimed to investigate the role of arousal in unpleasant word recognition, finding that arousal affects the cognitive process of unpleasant words and dictates whether negative valence effects are present or not.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Mahalakshmi Ramamurthy, Alex L. White, Clementine Chou, Jason D. Yeatman
Summary: Selective attention is crucial in correctly identifying letters and letter positions when reading. Endogenous cues have larger benefits than exogenous cues for typical adults, especially in the left visual field and the most crowded letter positions. Shifting endogenous attention along a line of text can help alleviate the effects of crowding on letter encoding within words.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Mathematical
Ana Baciero, Pablo Gomez, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia, Manuel Perea
Summary: Unlike sighted readers, braille readers show a transposed-letter similarity effect with adjacent letters, suggesting that the flexibility in letter position coding is modality-dependent.
PSYCHONOMIC BULLETIN & REVIEW
(2022)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Mert Ozkan, Stuart Anstis, Bernard M. 't Hart, Mark Wexler, Patrick Cavanagh
Summary: The study reports a powerful example of paradoxical stabilization produced by a moving frame, where the stabilization is related to the distance of the frame's travel rather than its speed. The results suggest a link to visual stability across eye movements, indicating that the displacement of the entire visual scene may act as a frame to stabilize the perception of relative locations.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Chenglin Li, Gyula Kovacs
Summary: A study found that the probability of stimulus repetition significantly affects the degree of repetition suppression. This effect is evident for participants with stimuli from their native language, but only affects non-native participants for non-native stimuli.
Article
Psychology, Experimental
M. Conrad, S. Ullrich, D. Schmidtke, S. A. Kotz
Summary: Recent research suggests that language might code affective meaning sublexically. This study found that affective phonological iconicity extracted from the lexicon impacts the extraction of lexical word meaning.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Maria Fernandez-Lopez, Manuel Perea, Marta Vergara-Martinez
Summary: This study provides evidence in support of the LCD model of word recognition by showing that letter rotations of around 45 degrees incur a processing cost, which is reflected in decreased identity priming effects.
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Joshua Snell, Matthew Simons, Leonie Warlo
Summary: Most word recognition models assume that letters are encoded with their position, but this study found evidence against this assumption. The brain does not use configuration codes in word recognition.
LANGUAGE COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Multidisciplinary
Ekaterina V. Larionova, Olga V. Martynova
Summary: Spelling errors are prevalent in all writing systems. Previous studies focused on the phonological plausibility of errors, whereas this study found that spelling errors occur in naturally produced written language. Through event-related potentials (ERP) recording, the study found that the amplitude of P200 was more positive for correctly spelled words than for misspelled words, and in the 350-500-ms time window, there was a more negative response for misspelled words in certain brain regions.
FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Clare Lally, Kathleen Rastle
Summary: Word recognition is facilitated by visually similar letters and initial uncertainty. Orthographic knowledge guides letter identification. High-level orthographic information plays a greater role than low-level visual feature information.
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Kshipra Gurunandan, Manuel Carreiras, Pedro M. Paz-Alonso
Summary: This study reveals the functional plasticity in language production among adult language learners, demonstrating the impact of language learning on neural correlates, and providing new insights into the verbal fluency task.
Article
Linguistics
Adel Chaouch-Orozco, Jorge Gonzalez Alonso, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia, Jason Rothman
Summary: This study investigates the impact of active exposure to and use of the second language (L2) on bilingual lexical-semantic representation and processing using written translation priming. The results suggest a minimal influence of immersion on bilingual lexical functioning when L2 development is maximal.
STUDIES IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
(2023)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Ana Baciero, Pablo Gomez, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia, Manuel Perea
Summary: The letter-similarity effects were not prominent in lexical decision experiments with common words, but stronger for stimuli with similar appearance, like misspelled logos. This study examined if letter-similarity effects occur in braille reading, and found that they are significant. The findings suggest that the mapping of input information onto abstract letter representations in braille is done through a noisy channel.
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
(2023)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Pavlina Heinzova, Manuel Carreiras, Simona Mancini
Summary: This study investigates the effects of argument structure on verb processing in Basque-Spanish bilinguals. The findings suggest that Basque unergatives lead to more ungrammatical sentences, while Spanish unaccusatives result in longer speech onset times.
LANGUAGE COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Linguistics
Jason Rothman, Fatih Bayram, Vincent DeLuca, Grazia Di Pisa, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia, Khadij Gharibi, Jiuzhou Hao, Nadine Kolb, Maki Kubota, Tanja Kupisch, Tim Lameris, Alicia Luque, Brechje van Osch, Sergio Miguel Pereira Soares, Yanina Prystauka, Deniz Tat, Aleksandra Tomic, Toms Voits, Stefanie Wulff
Summary: In this article, we discuss the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilingualism and propose alternative approaches to improve empirical rigor and promote diversity, inclusivity, and equity in the field. We argue that the practice of juxtaposing monolinguals and bilinguals often fails to meet the standards of empirical control and has contributed to inequalities in bilingualism research. We offer epistemological considerations and methodological alternatives to address this issue.
APPLIED PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
(2023)
Article
Audiology & Speech-Language Pathology
Yanjun Wei, Ying Niu, Marcus Taft, Manuel Carreiras
Summary: The present study investigated the effect of morphological complexity and semantic transparency on Chinese compound word recognition. Electrophysiological results from a visual lexical decision task revealed that transparent and opaque compounds elicited a stronger Left Anterior Negativity (LAN) compared to monomorphemic words. This suggests that Chinese compounds may be decomposed into constituent morphemes at the lemma level, while monomorphemic words are accessed as whole-word lemmas directly from the form level. Additionally, both behavioral experiments showed similar patterns to the EEG results. These findings provide support for morphological decomposition of compounds at the lemma level as proposed by the full-parsing model, and no evidence was found to support the role of transparency in Chinese compound word recognition.
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Mikel Lizarazu, Manuel Carreiras, Nicola Molinaro
Summary: Theta-gamma phase-amplitude coupling in the auditory cortex is modulated by the challenges of processing non-native speech, with beginners showing the lowest coordination and advanced learners showing the highest. This highlights the importance of theta-gamma oscillatory activity in speech comprehension.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Anastasia Klimovich-Gray, Giovanni Di Liberto, Lucia Amoruso, Ander Barrena, Eneko Agirre, Nicola Molinaro
Summary: Early research suggested that individuals with developmental dyslexia utilize contextual information as compensation for phonological deficits, but there is currently no neuro-cognitive evidence to support this. This study used a combination of magnetoencephalography (MEG), neural encoding, and grey matter volume analyses to investigate this issue. The results showed that dyslexic readers had a deficit in speech envelope tracking, and their reading performance was related to semantic compensatory mechanisms in the right hemisphere.
Article
Behavioral Sciences
Shuang Geng, Ileana Quin, Santiago Gil-Robles, Inigo Cristobal Pomposo Gastelu, Garazi Bermudez, Polina Timofeeva, Nicola Molinaro, Manuel Carreiras, Lucia Amoruso
Summary: This study investigates the organizational principles of semantic processing in bilinguals, revealing the distinct involvement of frontoparietal regions in action knowledge retrieval. The results show increased beta oscillations in the naming of actions in Spanish and Basque after surgery, indicating language compensation. Additionally, the study highlights divergent plasticity trajectories in the first and second language after tumor resection.
Correction
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Shuang Geng, Nicola Molinaro, Polina Timofeeva, Ileana Quinones, Manuel Carreiras, Lucia Amoruso
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Abraham Sanchez, Manuel Carreiras, Pedro M. Paz-Alonso
Summary: Processing efficiency differs between high- and low-frequency words, with less frequent words resulting in longer response latencies in several linguistic behavioral tasks. Studies using functional MRI to investigate the word frequency effect have produced heterogeneous results. This study examined the effect of word frequency through complementary analytical approaches and functional connectivity analyses. The findings suggest the involvement of the inferior frontal gyrus in semantic processing during reading, as indicated by the effect of word frequency and the influence of reading demands.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Rafael Salom, Luis Miguel Aras, Jessica Pinero, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia
Summary: Caring for children with DEE is challenging for primary caregivers, impacting their quality of life and support network. Quantitative data is needed to address their needs. A database was developed using CRESIA to measure the psychosocial impact and assess caregivers' well-being.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Jose L. Tapia, Jon Andoni Dunabeitia
Summary: This study identified reliable cognitive predictors of safe driving through a driving simulator experiment. Results showed that cognitive assessment scores were able to predict the rate of traffic infractions in challenging driving conditions, particularly in the aspects of memory and coordination.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Sanjeev Nara, Haider Raza, Manuel Carreiras, Nicola Molinaro
Summary: Numbers and letters are shown to have distinct neural pathways in early visual processing, supporting the idea of separate perceptual circuits for these categories. Multivariate pattern analysis techniques reveal that number processing can be accurately classified as separate from letter processing, both when presented as isolated items and as strings of characters. This dissociation is stronger for letters, indicating that the combinatorial mechanisms for numbers and letters can categorically influence early visual processing.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2023)