0000000000046635
AUTHOR
María Jiménez
Detección temprana de la dislexia mediante el reconocimiento de voces
Un aspecto clave para la intervención educativa específica es la detección temprana de niños con riesgo de dislexia. En este trabajo presentamos una sencilla tarea conductual de asociación de voces (modalidad auditiva) con avatares (modalidad visual), en la que las personas con dislexia muestran un rendimiento más bajo que las personas normo-lectoras. Dicho patrón de datos ocurre no solamente con lectores adultos, sino también con niños. Por tanto, esta tarea de integración multisensorial puede ser empleada como un marcador de la dislexia, en conjunto con otras tareas (v.g., conocimiento fonológico).
Position coding effects in a 2D scenario: the case of musical notation.
How does the cognitive system encode the location of objects in a visual scene? In the past decade, this question has attracted much attention in the field of visual-word recognition (e.g., "jugde" is perceptually very close to "judge"). Letter transposition effects have been explained in terms of perceptual uncertainty or shared "open bigrams". In the present study, we focus on note position coding in music reading (i.e., a 2D scenario). The usual way to display music is the staff (i.e., a set of 5 horizontal lines and their resultant 4 spaces). When reading musical notation, it is critical to identify not only each note (temporal duration), but also its pitch (y-axis) and its temporal seq…
Letter-case information and the identification of brand names.
A central tenet of most current models of visual-word recognition is that lexical units are activated on the basis of case-invariant abstract letter representations. Here, we examined this assumption by using a unique type of words: brand names. The rationale of the experiments is that brand names are archetypically printed either in lowercase (e.g., adidas) or uppercase (e.g., IKEA). This allows us to present the brand names in their standard or non-standard case configuration (e.g., adidas, IKEA vs. ADIDAS, ikea, respectively). We conducted two experiments with a brand-decision task (‘is it a brand name?’): a single-presentation experiment and a masked priming experiment. Results in the s…
Why braille reading is important and how to study it /Por qué es importante la lectura en braille y cómo estudiarla
AbstractDespite its relevance in theoretical and practical terms, braille reading has received little attention from researchers. Awareness of the pros and cons of the different procedures used to examine braille reading is needed to facilitate the realization of systematic studies and to improve teaching methods in braille reading. This study provides a critical examination of braille reading methods and highlights key points for future studies on tactile reading.
Do young readers have fast access to abstract lexical representations? Evidence from masked priming
Although there is consensus that adult readers have fast access to abstract letter/word representations, the developmental trajectory of such access has not been mapped out yet. To examine whether developmental readers have rapid access to abstract representations during the early stages of word processing, we conducted a masked priming lexical decision experiment with two groups of young readers (third and fifth graders) and a group of young adults. We selected two types of words: (a) words composed of cross-case letters that are visually dissimilar (DIS words; e.g., arte/ARTE [Spanish for art]) and (b) words composed of cross-case letters that are visually similar (SIM words; e.g., vivo/V…
Los colores como claves perceptivas durante la lectura
En español, como en muchas otras ortografías, las palabras escritas están diferenciadas unas de otras mediante la inserción de espacios. El hecho de que haya lenguas que no utilizan espacios, y que añadirlos no mejore la lectura en dichas lenguas (v.g., en thai), relativiza la importancia de los espacios entre palabras. Experimentos recientes en nuestro laboratorio han mostrado que la segmentación perceptiva de las palabras puede conseguirse fácilmente alternando el color de las mismas, sin necesidad de espacios. Ello lleva a re-examinar el papel de los colores en el aprendizaje de la lectura.
English as a Tool to Prevent Bullying and Encourage Equalities: The KiVa Project
Through the combination of the KiVa project and the English language beyond its formal academic aspects, this work aims to achieve an efficient antibullying program that fits the students’ needs. The main objective of this research is to prevent bullying, to encourage equalities and to ensure that bullying victims can count on the support of the class group to feel more confident about themselves and to not be afraid. To carry out all this, we suggest using English as students’ L2 in order that it serves as a tool to prevent bullying. Moreover, English is chosen as the subject since it is a neutral common language for all the students, and leads to an environment of equality in the classroo…
Ability for Voice Recognition Is a Marker for Dyslexia in Children
A recent voice recognition experiment conducted by Perrachione, Del Tufo, and Gabrieli (2011) revealed that, in normal adult readers, the accuracy at identifying human voices was better in the participants’ mother tongue than in an unfamiliar language, while this difference was absent in a group of adults with dyslexia. This pattern favored a view of dyslexia as due to “fundamentally impoverished native-language phonological representations.” To further examine this issue, we conducted two voice recognition experiments, one with children with/without dyslexia, and the other with adults with/without dyslexia. Results revealed that children/adults with dyslexia were less accurate at identify…
A challenging dissociation in masked identity priming with the lexical decision task.
Abstract The masked priming technique has been used extensively to explore the early stages of visual-word recognition. One key phenomenon in masked priming lexical decision is that identity priming is robust for words, whereas it is small/unreliable for nonwords. This dissociation has usually been explained on the basis that masked priming effects are lexical in nature, and hence there should not be an identity prime facilitation for nonwords. We present two experiments whose results are at odds with the assumption made by models that postulate that identity priming is purely lexical, and also challenge the assumption that word and nonword responses are based on the same information. Our e…