Search results for "Physiological psychology"
showing 10 items of 760 documents
Positional influences on information packaging: Insights from topological fields in German
2012
Abstract We present three event-related potential studies that investigated the contribution of givenness and position-induced topicality (what a sentence is about) to information processing. The studies compared two types of referential expressions (given and inferred noun phrases (NPs)) in distinct sentential positions. The data revealed position-specific effects, reflected by an interaction of topicality and givenness: inferred NPs registered a more pronounced Late Positivity than given NPs in the canonical sentence-medial position, but not sentence-initially (Experiment 1). Additionally, there was a stable effect of givenness across positions, reflected by an N400 for inferred over give…
Measuring orthographic transparency and morphological-syllabic complexity in alphabetic orthographies
2017
This narrative review discusses quantitative indices measuring differences between alphabetic languages that are related to the process of word recognition. The specific orthography that a child is acquiring has been identified as a central element influencing reading acquisition and dyslexia. However, the development of reliable metrics to measure differences between language scripts hasn’t received much attention so far. This paper therefore reviews metrics proposed in the literature for quantifying orthographic transparency, syllabic complexity, and morphological complexity of alphabetic languages. The review included searches of Web of Science, PubMed, PsychInfo, Google Scholar, and var…
Kindergarten pre-reading skills predict Grade 9 reading comprehension (PISA Reading) but fail to explain gender difference
2020
AbstractOne of the aims for compulsory education is to diminish or alleviate differences in children’s skills existing prior to school entry. However, a growing gender gap in reading development has increasingly been documented. Regrettably, there is scant evidence on whether differences between genders (favouring girls) have their roots in pre-reading skills or whether determining mechanisms are related to factors to do with schooling. We examined the extent to which pre-reading skills assessed in Kindergarten (age 6) predict reading comprehension in Grade 9 (age 15) and, whether the gender difference in reading comprehension can be explained by gender differences in the Kindergarten pre-r…
Two maintenance mechanisms of verbal information in working memory
2009
Abstract The present study evaluated the interplay between two mechanisms of maintenance of verbal information in working memory, namely articulatory rehearsal as described in Baddeley’s model, and attentional refreshing as postulated in Barrouillet and Camos’s Time-Based Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model. In four experiments using complex span paradigm, we manipulated the degree of articulatory suppression and the attentional load of the processing component to affect orthogonally the two mechanisms of maintenance. In line with previous neurophysiological evidence reported in the literature, behavioral results suggest that articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing are two independent m…
Delays of retention, processing efficiency, and attentional resources in working memory span development
2004
Working memory span tasks require participants to maintain items in short-term memory while performing some concurrent processing (e.g., reading, counting, or problem solving). The present series of experiments contrasted two models of the development of working memory spans in children. Is this development mainly due to faster completion of the processing component in older children, as Towse and Hitch (1995) suggested, or is it due to resource-related phenomena such as increased processing efficiency and a greater amount of available cognitive resources? Using new computer-paced working memory span tasks that allow a careful control of processing duration, we demonstrate that the cognitiv…
Developmental Increase in Working Memory Span: Resource Sharing or Temporal Decay?
2001
Working memory span tasks require participants to maintain items in short-term memory while performing some concurrent processing (e.g., reading, counting, and problem solving). It has been suggested that the difficulty of these tasks results either from the necessity of sharing a limited resource pool between processing and storage (Case’s cognitive space hypothesis) or from the fact that the memory traces suffer from a temporal decay while the concurrent task is being performed (Towse and Hitch’s memory decay hypothesis). We tested these two hypotheses by comparing children’s performance in tasks in which the processing component always had the same duration but varied in cognitive cost (…
The role of letters and syllables in typical and dysfluent reading in a transparent orthography
2012
The role of letters and syllables in typical and dysfluent 2nd grade reading in Finnish, a transparent orthography, was assessed by lexical decision and naming tasks. Typical readers did not show reliable word length effects in lexical decision, suggesting establishment of parallel letter processing. However, there were small effects of word syllable structure in both tasks suggesting the presence of some sublexical processing also. Dysfluent readers showed large word length effects in both tasks indicating decoding at the letterphoneme level. When lexical access was required in a lexical decision task, dyslexics additionally chunked the letters into syllables. Response duration measure rev…
Is perception a two-way street ?The case of feedback consistency in visual word recognition
1998
It is generally assumed that during reading, the activation produced over orthographic units feeds forward to phonological units. Supporting interactive models of word recognition, Stone, Vanhoy, and Van Orden (1997) recently claimed that phonological activation reverberates to orthographic processing units and consequently constrains orthographic encoding. They found that the consistency of the relations between phonology and orthography (feedback consistency) influenced lexical decision performance. We explored the effect in five experiments conducted with French words. Although feedback consistency affected writing performance, no significant effect was observed in lexical decision even …
Dual-stage and dual-deficit? Word recognition processes during text reading across the reading fluency continuum
2021
AbstractCentral questions in the study of visual word recognition and developmental dyslexia are whether early lexical activation precedes and supports decoding (a dual-stage view) or not (dual-route view), and the locus of deficits in dysfluent reading. The dual-route view predicts early word frequency and length interaction, whereas the dual-stage view predicts word frequency effect to precede the interaction effect. These predictions were tested on eye movements data collected from (n = 152) children aged 9–10 among whom reading dysfluency was overrepresented. In line with the dual-stage view, the results revealed an early word frequency effect in first fixation duration followed by robu…
Reading and math skills development among Finnish primary school children before and after COVID-19 school closure
2022
AbstractThis study quantified the possible learning losses in reading and math skills among a sample of Finnish Grade 3 children (n = 198) who spent 8 weeks in distance learning during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in spring 2020. We compared their reading and math skill development trajectories across Grades 1, 2, and 4 to a pre-COVID sample (N = 378). We also examined if gender, parental education, maternal homework involvement, and child’s task-avoidant behavior predict children’s academic skills at Grade 4 differently in the pre-COVID sample compared with the COVID sample. Children’s reading and math skills were tested, mothers reported their education and homework involvement…