Search results for "Verbal learning"
showing 10 items of 72 documents
The role of letter features in visual-word recognition: Evidence from a delayed segment technique.
2016
Available online 9 June 2016 Do all visual features in aword's constituent letters have the same importance during lexical access? Herewe examined whether some components of a word's letters (midsegments, junctions, terminals) are more important than others. To that end,we conducted two lexical decision experiments using a delayed segment techniquewith lowercase stimuli. In this technique a partial previewappears for 50ms and is immediately followed by the target item. In Experiment 1, the partial preview was composed of terminals+junctions,midsegments+junctions, or midsegments + terminals — a whole preview condition was used as a control. Results only revealed an advantage of the whole pre…
Do mental processes share a domain-general resource?
2010
What determines success and failure in dual-task situations? Many theories propose that the extent to which two activities can be performed concurrently depends on the nature of the information involved in the activities. In particular, verbal and visuospatial activities are thought to be fueled by distinct resources, so that interference occurs between two verbal activities or two visuospatial activities, but little or no interference occurs between verbal and visuospatial activities. The current study examined trade-offs in four dual-task situations in which participants maintained verbal or visuospatial information while concurrently processing either verbal or visuospatial information.…
Contextual diversity facilitates learning new words in the classroom.
2017
Published: June 6, 2017 In the field of word recognition and reading, it is commonly assumed that frequently repeated words create more accessible memory traces than infrequently repeated words, thus capturing the word-frequency effect. Nevertheless, recent research has shown that a seemingly related factor, contextual diversity (defined as the number of different contexts [e.g., films] in which a word appears), is a better predictor than word-frequency in word recognition and sentence reading experiments. Recent research has shown that contextual diversity plays an important role when learning new words in a laboratory setting with adult readers. In the current experiment, we directly mani…
Statistical language learning in neonates revealed by event-related brain potentials
2009
Abstract Background Statistical learning is a candidate for one of the basic prerequisites underlying the expeditious acquisition of spoken language. Infants from 8 months of age exhibit this form of learning to segment fluent speech into distinct words. To test the statistical learning skills at birth, we recorded event-related brain responses of sleeping neonates while they were listening to a stream of syllables containing statistical cues to word boundaries. Results We found evidence that sleeping neonates are able to automatically extract statistical properties of the speech input and thus detect the word boundaries in a continuous stream of syllables containing no morphological cues. …
Phonological similarity effect in complex span task
2013
The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that two systems are involved in verbal working memory; one is specifically dedicated to the maintenance of phonological representations through verbal rehearsal while the other would maintain multimodal representations through attentional refreshing. This theoretical framework predicts that phonologically related phenomena such as the phonological similarity effect (PSE) should occur when the domain-specific system is involved in maintenance, but should disappear when concurrent articulation hinders its use. Impeding maintenance in the domain-general system by a concurrent attentional demand should impair recall performance without affecting…
Vocabulary teaching strategies and conceptual representations of words in L2 in children: evidence with novice learners.
2008
Abstract A controversial issue in bilingual research is whether in the early stages of L2 learning, access to the conceptual system involves mediation of L1 lexical representations [Kroll, J. F., & Stewart, E. (1994). Category interference in translation and picture naming: Evidence for asymmetric connections between bilingual memory representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 149–174] or a direct route from the L2 word [Altarriba, J., & Mathis, K. M. (1997). Conceptual and lexical development in second language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 36, 550–568; Finkbeiner, M., & Nicol, J. (2003). Semantic category effects in second language word learning. Applied Psycholing…
Event-related potentials to tones show differences between children with multiple risk factors for dyslexia and control children before the onset of …
2015
Multiple risk factors can affect the development of specific reading problems or dyslexia. In addition to the most prevalent and studied risk factor, phonological processing, also auditory discrimination problems have been found in children and adults with reading difficulties. The present study examined 37 children between the ages of 5 and 6, 11 of which had multiple risk factors for developing reading problems. The children participated in a passive oddball EEG experiment with sinusoidal sounds with changes in sound frequency, duration, or intensity. The responses to the standard stimuli showed a negative voltage shift in children at risk for reading problems compared to control children…
What makes working memory spans so predictive of high-level cognition?
2005
Working memory (WM) span tasks involving a complex activity performed concurrently with item retention have proven to be good predictors of high-level cognitive performance. The present study demonstrates that replacing these complex self-paced activities with simpler but computer-paced processes, such as reading successive letters, yields more predictive WM span measures. This finding suggests that WM span tasks evaluate a fundamental capacity that underpins complex as well as elementary cognitive processes. Moreover, the higher predictive power of computer-paced WM span tasks suggests that strategic factors do not contribute to the relationship between WM spans and high-level cognition.
Preclinical dementia: an Italian multicentre study on amnestic mild cognitive impairment
2006
<i>Background:</i> Different rates and cognitive predictors of conversion to dementia have been reported in subjects with different kinds of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). <i>Methods:</i> A prospective, 24-month follow-up study, involving 269 subjects who strictly fulfilled criteria for the amnestic MCI. <i>Results:</i> Conversion rate to dementia was 21.4% per year. Seventy-nine out of the 83 individuals who developed dementia were affected by probable Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Among others, at the 24-month follow-up 24.1% were still affected by amnestic MCI, 13.3% had changed their neuropsychological profile of impairment and 17.2% were cognitively no…
Cognitive deficits associated with acquired amusia after stroke: A neuropsychological follow-up study
2009
Recent evidence on amusia suggests that our ability to perceive music might be based on the same neural resources that underlie other higher cognitive functions, such as speech perception and spatial processing. We studied the neural correlates of acquired amusia by performing extensive neuropsychological assessments on 53 stroke patients with a left or right hemisphere middle cerebral artery (MCA) stroke 1 week, 3 months, and 6 months after the stroke. In addition, structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was performed on all patients 1 week and 6 months post-stroke. Based on their performance on a shortened version of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA), the patients we…