Journal of Psycholinguistic Research最新文献

Children's knowledge of referential dependency involved in the interpretation of reflexives has been investigated mainly from a purely syntactic perspective. However, syntax alone is insufficient to account for various kinds of referential dependencies, as many of them require discourse interpretations. To fill this gap, the present study investigated the development of referential dependency established between the Mandarin reflexive ziji and its antecedent in preschool children by taking advantage of the properties of ziji, whose interpretations largely hinge on discourse contexts. A truth-value judgement task was conducted to investigate how 3- to 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children build referential dependencies between the anaphor ziji and its antecedent and between the logophor ziji and its antecedent. The results show that children performed equally well in both types of referential dependencies, and they exhibit a developmental trajectory in their knowledge of referential dependencies. The implications of the findings were then discussed in relation to the role of processing factors and language-specific properties.

Unlike with the typically developing population, non-typically developing individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities, have usually been recommended to learn and use only one language, despite perhaps coming from bilingual families or living in multilingual environments. This common practice, however, is not backed by empirical evidence; previous research, although limited, has systematically shown that bilingualism does not have negative effects. This study investigates how bilingualism shapes the executive control abilities of individuals with genetic disorders. Specifically, we compare the interference suppression abilities of Spanish-Catalan bilinguals and Spanish monolinguals with Prader-Willi syndrome. Fifteen participants with Prader-Willi syndrome were recruited in Spain. The bilingual group consisted of seven Spanish-Catalan bilinguals from Catalonia-an officially bilingual territory of Spain-, while the monolingual group was formed by eight Spanish speaking individuals from Madrid-an officially monolingual territory. Participants were administered two widely used psychological tasks: the Flanker Task (a non-language-based task) and the Stroop Task (a language-based task). Three experimental conditions were included in each task: neutral, congruent, and incongruent. Both accuracy and reaction time data were collected and analyzed. The results obtained are consistent between both tasks in showing (i) no detrimental effects of bilingualism; (ii) a high answer accuracy rate; (iii) a practice effect (the more familiar participants became with the tasks the faster their answers became); (iv) sensitivity to an interference effect (higher reaction times for incongruent trials than neutral trials) but not to a clear facilitation effect (lower reaction times for congruent trials than neutral trials). These results, far from being anecdotal, are in line with results from previous research investigating the effects of bilingualism among typically developing individuals as well as non-typically developing individuals with and without genetic disorders. This study not only evidences that Prader-Willi individuals can become bilingual if they are exposed to more than one language, but also that they can do so without showing negative effects at the cognitive level. In fact, taking into account the trend in the descriptive data, if an effect of bilingualism were in place, it would be a positive one. Bilingualism has repetitively been proven to neither be a burden nor to have negative effects for the typically or the non-typically developing population. Thus, as previous researchers have pointed out, there seems to be a clear incongruity between what the research is showing and the actual advice that these individuals and their families are receiving, and this should be amended without further delay.

This study examines the referential context effect on second-language relative clause ambiguity resolution by proficient L1 Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) and investigates whether the ambiguity resolution process is constrained by individuals' working memory capacity (WMC). It presents a self-paced reading study and investigates L2 relative clauses ambiguity resolution in two phases. The baseline phase probes Chinese EFL learners' initial attachment preference when comprehending global ambiguous sentences without referential context. In the further experimental phases, each target sentence is preceded by a referential context with either neutral or NP-biasing information. We observe the change in reaction time spent on processing sentences and answering comprehension questions. Results showed that firstly regardless of WMC, proficient Chinese EFL learners employed a high-attachment parsing strategy when there was no referential context. Secondly, referential context facilitated sentence processing and comprehension, as demonstrated by decreased reaction times in critical region and on comprehension questions from neutral to biased contexts, with no significant difference in accuracy rates. Notably, the contextual effect was more pronounced when high-attachment contextual cues were present. Thirdly, working memory capacity modulated the ambiguity resolution process. Participants with different WMCs showed different parsing behaviors, and this difference manifested itself in both the interpretive and post-interpretive stages of processing. Participants with lower WMC had limited cognitive resources for processing ambiguous sentences, whereas those with larger WMC were more adept at resolving ambiguity in a context-dependent manner. These findings offer new insights into L2 shallow sentence processing as well as WMC constraints in L2 ambiguity resolution.

Corporate discourse offers a prime site for the study of interdiscursive performance across linguistic and cultural boundaries. However, there is a dearth of quantitative studies to assess cultural interdiscursivity in corporate discourse. Taking advantage of an LDA model and a dispersion formula, this study provides a corpus-based measurement of the interdiscursivity of corporate cultures as expressed within MD&A texts. The results demonstrate three distinct corporate culture types, namely technology-, resource-, and team-oriented cultures, which are expressed through subject terms, leading to strong culture enclave and culture blending effects. This article reveals the quantitative side of discourse and provides new insight into understanding how interdiscursive performance across linguistic and cultural boundaries is expressed in communicative practices.

Deverbal formations in Greek, e.g. mi'razo 'to distribute' < 'mirazma 'distributing' are considered morphologically complex lexical items. Previous psycholinguistic studies in Greek and English already highlighted the importance of lexical category and argument structure of the base verb in the processing of deverbal pseudowords violating constraints pertaining to these properties. A similar study in Slovenian brought into light the role of aspectual properties of the base verb during deverbal word processing. The present study revisits the role of aspect in morphological processing of deverbal word formations by looking at Greek. To this end, an offline acceptability judgement task and an online lexical decision task were conducted using different types of pseudowords, violating derivational rules. Results provide evidence that aspect affects deverbal pseudoword processing in Greek. Aspectual rules have a distinct role in relation to categorial and argument structure ones for the suffix that creates formations with unambiguous, eventive readings and which has clear event implications but not for other suffixes. The current study extends the literature to include the role of this feature in the processing of deverbal formations.

Word recognition is a fundamental reading skill that relies on various linguistic and cognitive abilities. While executive functions (EF) have gained attention for their importance in developing literacy skills, their interaction with domain-specific skills in facilitating reading among different learner groups remains understudied. This study examines the relationship between EF, orthographic awareness, morphological awareness, and Chinese word recognition in 204 Chinese as a second language (CSL) students and 419 native Chinese primary students. Our findings reveal that EF indirectly influences word recognition through orthographic awareness, but not through morphological awareness. The result of group comparison indicates that direct and indirect effects of EF on word recognition are evident in both native and CSL groups. Nevertheless, EF plays a more prominent role in CSL learners. These results contribute to our understanding of cognitive skills in reading and offer significant implications for instructional practices.

Rhythm perception in speech and non-speech acoustic stimuli has been shown to be affected by general acoustic biases as well as by phonological properties of the native language of the listener. The present paper extends the cross-linguistic approach in this field by testing the application of the iambic-trochaic law as an assumed general acoustic bias on rhythmic grouping of non-speech stimuli by speakers of three languages: Arabic, Hebrew and German. These languages were chosen due to relevant differences in their phonological properties on the lexical level alongside similarities on the phrasal level. The results show Iambic-Trochaic-Law (ITL) conforming weak-strong grouping for duration-cued acoustic salience. However, only German participants judged intensity-varying sequences as strong-weak; no grouping preferences were found for speakers of Arabic and Hebrew. Overall these results suggest that prosodic properties of the phonological phrase and of the lexical level of the native language show differing effects on rhythmical grouping.

While abstraction is one of the best studied topics in psychology, there is little consensus on its relationship to valence and affect. Some studies have found that abstraction is associated with greater positivity, while other studies have led to the opposite conclusion. In this paper we suggest that a substantial part of this inconsistency can be attributed to the polysemy of the term abstraction. To address this problem, we use a framework developed by Iliev and Axelrod (Journal of psycholinguistic research, 46(3):715-729, 2017), who have proposed that abstraction should not be treated as a unitary construct, but should be split instead in at least two components. Concreteness is based on the proportion of sensory information in a concept, while precision is based on the aggregation of information corresponding to the concept's position in a semantic taxonomy. While both of these components have been used as operationalizations of abstraction, they can have opposite effects on cognitive performance. Using this framework, we hypothesize that when abstraction is defined as a reduction of precision, it will be associated with greater positivity, but when it is defined as lack of concreteness, it will be associated with less positivity. We test these predictions in a novel study and we find empirical support for both hypotheses. These findings advance our understanding of the link between abstraction and valence, and further demonstrate the multi-component structure of abstraction.

A premise of statistical learning research is that learners attend to and learn the frequencies of co-occurring sounds in the input, or phonotactic sequences. Inherent to the concepts of both frequency and phonotactics is order, or the temporal arrangement of the relevant elements. Order is similarly inherent to statistical learning, yet the effect of order on statistical learning is not well understood. In the present study, adult participants learned the relative frequencies of eight consonant sequences, for example, /mk/ and /st/ in the nonwords /nʌmkət/ and /gɪstək/. Both familiarization and test stimuli were independently ordered and randomized, thus allowing for a relatively broad search for order effects in an established statistical learning paradigm. Participants learned the target frequencies equivalently across the five ordering conditions, indicating no modulating effect of order. Nevertheless, the results reflect an initial pass at further integration of statistical learning with existing research on the effects of order in memory and general cognition. (155 words).

Motivational drivers and emotions that students experience play an important role in the process of learning a new language (L2). This has been recognised by researchers and educators, and extensive research has been conducted in recent decades to examine the psychological and emotional factors involved in L2 learning. However, two ubiquitous epistemic emotions, namely, boredom and curiosity, remain underexplored in the L2 research literature. This study addresses this gap. It performed a series of statistical tests to examine the relationship between these two epistemic emotions and L2 motivation. Specifically, it assessed whether epistemic curiosity plays a mediating role in the nexus of L2 motivation, epistemic curiosity, and epistemic boredom. Data were collected from adolescent learners of English in China (N = 312). The findings from the correlation analysis indicated that epistemic boredom had statistically significant negative relationships with epistemic curiosity and L2 motivation, except for the ought-to L2 self variable, where the relationship was not statistically significant. Conversely, epistemic curiosity had a positive and statistically significant relationship with L2 motivation, except for the ought-to L2 self variable, where the relationship was not statistically significant. Next, the path analysis examined the influence of L2 motivation on epistemic boredom without considering the mediating effect of epistemic curiosity. Its findings indicated that epistemic boredom had a statistically significant negative relationship with the general motivation/attitude and general motivation/effort variables. The subsequent path analysis, which focused solely on two goal-oriented L2 motivation constructs from the Gardnerian framework, detected the mediating role of epistemic curiosity. Some pedagogical implications are drawn from these findings.