Search results for "Vocabulary"
showing 10 items of 283 documents
Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?
2017
International audience; The adaptive view of human memory (Nairne, 2010) assumes that animates (e.g., rabbit) are remembered better than inanimates (e.g., glass) because animates are ultimately more important for fitness than inanimates. Previous studies provided evidence for this view by showing that animates were recalled or recognized better than inanimates (e.g., Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), but they did not assess memory for contextual details (e.g., where animates vs. inanimates occurred). In this study, we tested recollection of spatial information (Study 1) and temporal information (Study 2) associated with animate versus inanimate words. The findings …
Psycholinguistic norms for 320 fixed expressions (idioms and proverbs) in French
2018
International audience; We provide psycholinguistic norms for a new set of 160 French idiomatic expressions and 160 proverbs: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. Different analyses (reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations) performed on the norms are reported and discussed. The norms can be downloaded as supplemental material.
Can Word Puzzles be Tailored to Improve Different Dimensions of Verbal Fluency? A Report of an Intervention Study
2016
Verbal fluency is commonly used as a proxy measure of executive functioning, as it involves cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. Previous research has demonstrated that crosswords can be a useful means of improving verbal fluency, results consistent with the cognitive reserve hypothesis; the form of verbal fluency affected has, however, differed across studies. The present study sought to assess the extent to which it was possible to target phonemic (PVF) and semantic verbal fluency (SVF) separately through word puzzles designed to focus on semantic/thematic and structural clues respectively. Fifty-three university students were randomly assigned to one of three gr…
The influence of rTMS over prefrontal and motor areas in a morphological task: grammatical vs. semantic effects
2008
We investigated the differential role of two frontal regions in the processing of grammatical and semantic knowledge. Given the documented specificity of the prefrontal cortex for the grammatical class of verbs, and of the primary motor cortex for the semantic class of action words, we sought to investigate whether the prefrontal cortex is also sensitive to semantic effects, and whether the motor cortex is also sensitive to grammatical class effects. We used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to suppress the excitability of a portion of left prefontal cortex (first experiment) and of the motor area (second experiment). In the first experiment we found that rTMS applied to t…
How to improve reading skills in dyslexics: the effect of high frequency rTMS.
2013
The latest progress in understanding remediation of dyslexia underlines how some changes in brain are a necessary mechanism of improvement. We wanted to determine whether high frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (hf-rTMS) over areas that are underactive during reading in dyslexics, would improve reading of dyslexic adults. We applied 5Hz-TMS over both left and right inferior parietal lobule (IPL) and superior temporal gyrus (STG) prior to word, non-word and text reading aloud. Results show that hf-rTMS stimulation over the left IPL improves non-word reading accuracy and hf-rTMS stimulation over the left STG increases word reading speed and text reading accuracy. Moreover …
Perceptual priming in schizophrenia evaluated by word fragment and word stem completion
2011
Implicit memory seems to be preserved in schizophrenia as a whole, but dissociations between conceptual and perceptual tasks and between accuracy and reaction time measures have appeared. The present research has revealed some methodological limitations in many studies to date that are focused on the study of perceptual implicit memory in schizophrenic patients using accuracy measures. The review of these studies revealed that limitations are related to an inadequate definition of performance and priming measures, a lack of control over the characteristics of the stimuli, and the absence of information on the experimental procedures used in data collection. Moreover, the task used in these …
Standardization and validation of a parallel form of the verbal and non-verbal recognition memory test in an Italian population sample.
2017
In the neuropsychological assessment of several neurological conditions, recognition memory evaluation is requested. Recognition seems to be more appropriate than recall to study verbal and nonverbal memory, because interferences of psychological and emotional disorders are less relevant in the recognition than they are in recall memory paradigms. In many neurological disorders, longitudinal repeated assessments are needed to monitor the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs or pharmacological treatments on the recovery of memory. In order to contain the practice effect in repeated neuropsychological evaluations, it is necessary the use of parallel forms of the tests. Having two parallel…
Neuronal and Behavioral Correlates of Health Anxiety: Results of an Illness-Related Emotional Stroop Task
2011
<b><i>Background:</i></b> Health anxiety (HA) is defined as the objectively unfounded fear or conviction of suffering from a severe illness. Predominant attention allocation to illness-related information is regarded as a central process in the development and maintenance of HA, yet little is known about the neuronal correlates of this attentional bias. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> An emotional Stroop task with body symptom, illness, and neutral words was employed to elicit emotional interference in healthy participants with high (HA+, n = 12) and low (HA–, n = 12) HA during functional magnetic resonance imaging. <b><i>Results:</i>…
A Comparison of implicit memory tests in schizophrenic patients and normal controls
2007
The objective of the current study was to compare the performance of schizophrenic patients and normal controls on implicit memory tests. Two neuropsychological tasks were administered to 29 patients and normal participant samples. The implicit tests were: Word fragment completion and Word production from semantic categories. The priming score was the variable of interest. Priming effects are obtained in normal subjects and schizophrenia patients, regardless of the implicit test used. However, a dissociation in priming between normal and patient groups was observed, depending on the test used. For word fragment test, priming was identical between... (Ver más) the two groups. However, for wo…
Information structure in language acquisition. Production and comprehension of (in)definite articles by German-speaking children.
2020
AbstractThe present study investigates the production and comprehension of indefinite and definite articles as markers of givenness by typically-developing German-speaking children, from the perspective of information structure theory. The study involves 93 typically-developing children aged four to seven years old with normal language-skills and 20 adults. The results of a story-narration task and a truth-value judgment task reveal that children have more problems with new than with given referents in production as well as comprehension suggesting a “given better than new”-pattern. These findings are explained in the context of perspective-taking capacities and cue weighting theory.