Exposure to Androstenes Influences Processing of Emotional Words

This article is part of the Research Topic 'The Importance of Olfaction in Intra- and Interspecific Communication'; International audience; There is evidence that human-produced androstenes affect attitudinal, emotional, and physiological states in a context-dependent manner, suggesting that they could be involved in modulating social interactions. For instance, androstadienone appears to increase attention specifically to emotional information. Most of the previous work focused on one or two androstenes. Here, we tested whether androstenes affect linguistic processing, using three different androstene compounds. Participants (90 women and 77 men) performed a lexical decision task after bei…

Chemocommunication in a vision-ruled world

Crossmodal associations between vision and olfaction: evidence from eye movements

The relation between language and cognition in 3- to 9-year-olds: the acquisition of grammatical gender in French.

International audience; The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the acquisition of the probabilistic system based on phonological oppositions on word endings by French-speaking children. The second goal was to explore the extent to which this system affects categorization. In the study, 3- to 9-year-olds assigned gender categorization to invented nouns whose endings were typically masculine, typically…

Spoken word recognition with gender-marked context.

In a cross-modal (auditory-visual) fragment priming study in French, we tested the hypothesis that gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine or unefeminine) is used early in the recognition of the following word to discard gender-incongruent competitors. In four experiments, we compared lexical decision performances on targets primed by phonological information only (e.g. /kRa/-CRAPAUD /kRapo/; /to/-TOAD) or by phonological plus gender information given by a gender-marked article (e.g. unmasculine /kra/-CRAPAUD; a /to/-TOAD). In all experiments, we found a phonological priming effect that was not modulated by the presence of gender context, whether gender-marked …

The morpheme gender effect.

In three experiments we explored the mental representation of morphologically complex words in French. Subjects were asked to perform a gender decision task on morphologically complex words that were of the same gender as their base or not. We found that gender decisions were made more slowly for morphologically complex words made from a base with an opposite gender compared to words for which the gender of the base matches that of the derived noun. Similar results were obtained for words that are pseudo-morphologically complex while no effect was observed for non-morphological embedded words. Our results suggest that during gender identification of derived and pseudo-derived words, morphem…

Working memory capacity and reading comprehension in children: Constraints on pronoun resolution

International audience

Reading comprehension in French 1st and 2nd grade children: Contribution of decoding and language comprehension

This paper reports a study conducted with French first-grade and second-grade children (mean age: 6;8 and 7;8 respectively). The first aim was to re-examine the Gough and Tunmer’s (1986) Simple View in assessing the specific contribution of decoding ability and language comprehension to reading comprehension. The second one was to analyse the difficulties of children in reading comprehension. Reading and listening comprehension were assessed using both visual and auditory version of the same test. Decoding ability was assessed by means of a nonword reading test. On the basis of reading comprehension scores, skilled and less skilled comprehenders were contrasted, and then two groups of less …

Quand l'odeur monte à la tête : Impact des odeurs sur les traitements cognitifs

National audience

The nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect in French

International audience; We investigated whether and how sublexical units such as phonological syllables mediate access to the lexicon in French visual word recognition. To do so, two lexical decision task (LDT) experiments examined the nature of the syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 1a and b, the number of higher frequency syllabic neighbours was manipulated while controlling for the first bigram. The results failed to show a pure syllabic neighbourhood effect. In Experiments 2a and b, syllabic neighbourhood and bigram frequency were factorially manipulated. The interaction showed that the syllabic neighbourhood effect was inhibitory when bigram frequency was high, whereas it wa…

Capacité de mémoire de travail et traitement du pronom chez l’enfant

Resume L’objectif de cette etude est d’explorer les relations entre la capacite de la memoire de travail (MT) et la comprehension de l’ecrit chez l’enfant en s’interessant a une operation particuliere : le traitement des pronoms et en utilisant des variables on-line et off-line. Deux groupes d’enfants de neuf a dix ans a capacite faible ou elevee de MT ont realise une epreuve de traitement des pronoms. Dans cette tâche, l’identification du pronom etait rendue plus ou moins difficile en fonction de la charge en MT, manipulee au moyen de deux facteurs : la disponibilite d’un indice de genre et la distance separant le pronom de l’antecedent. Les resultats montrent que compares aux enfants a ca…

The development of facial emotion recognition: The role of configural information

International audience; The development of children's ability to recognize facial emotions and the role of configural information in this development were investigated. In the study, 100 5-, 7-, 9-, and 11-year-olds and 26 adults needed to recognize the emotion displayed by upright and upside-down faces. The same participants needed to recognize the emotion displayed by the top half of an upright or upside-down face that was or was not aligned with a bottom half that displayed another emotion. The results showed that the ability to recognize facial emotion develops with age, with a developmental course that depends on the emotion to be recognized. Moreover, children at all ages and adults e…