Purpose: The use of attentional resources is an important cognitive indicator of reading engagement but it is unknown how this is influenced by linguistic cues. We designed two experiments to investigate whether shifts in narrative perspectives occupy more of the attention of readers and engage them more in the text. Methods: Experiment 1 employed…

The relationship between language switching and task switching has been well studied in bilingualism literature. This study employs novel experiments involving magnitude-parity switching and transparency-orientation switching and compares the costs associated with these two types of task switching with language switching. Switching costs and the…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

Objective: To examine the manifestation of cognitive control deficit of children with different levels of hyperactivity, an "at risk" dimension for ADHD. Method: A group of children with high hyperactivity (N = 40) and another group of children with low levels of hyperactivity (N = 38) performed a modified stop-signal anticipation task,…

Research on first language (L1) attrition typically focuses on immigrant populations in their second language (L2) environment, yet we know comparably little about L1 attrition in the L1 setting. This study used two lexical tasks to test L1 attrition, a time-sensitive word decision task and a video retelling. Chinese teachers of English vs.…

Previous experimental work shows that negation processing can be direct in bipolar contexts where positive/negative states of affairs can be expressed by available lexical opposites (remember/forget) in monolingual speakers. However, in a unipolar context where such opposites are not available (sing/not sing), the processing first proceeds through…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

In this study, we examined the effects of word and character frequency across three commonly used word-identification tasks (lexical decision, naming, and sentence reading) using the same set of two-character target words (N = 60) and participants (N = 82). Facilitatory effects of word frequency were observed across all three tasks. The…

According to the executive framework of prospective memory (PM), age-related differences in PM performance are mediated by age-related differences in executive functioning (EF). The present study further explored this framework by examining which specific components of EF are associated with PM differences between and within three age groups. A…

Disagreements arise on the differences of semantic processing of different ambiguous words in the perspective of psycholinguistics. This paper compares the differences of the semantic processing of different types of ambiguous words of Chinese English learners by using a multiple semantic priming experiment with short. The results demonstrate the…

In studies of visual object recognition, strong inversion effects accompany the acquisition of expertise and imply the involvement of configural processing. Chinese literacy results in sensitivity to the orthography of Chinese characters. While there is some evidence that this orthographic sensitivity results in an inversion effect, and thus…

Conflict adaptation is key in how children self-regulate and assert cognitive control in a given situation compared with a previous experience. In the current study, we analyzed event-related potentials (ERPs) to identify age-related differences in conflict adaptation. Participants of different ages (5-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and…

In English, positions of lexical stress in disyllabic words are associated with word categories; that is, nouns tend to be stressed more often on the first syllable, whereas verbs are more likely to be stressed on the second syllable (i.e. "sub"ject (noun) vs. sub"ject" (verb)). This phenomenon, which is called the stress…

An affective priming task was used with two cohorts of college students, one deaf or hard of hearing (D/HH), the other hearing, in two experiments. The same set of affective-word targets, preceded by "[Chinese characters omitted]" in Experiment 1 but by affective-word primes of the same valence as the targets in Experiment 2, were…

The debate about whether making a risky choice is based on a weighting and adding process has a long history and is still unresolved. To address this long-standing controversy, we developed a comparative paradigm. Participants' eye movements in 2 risky choice tasks that required participants to choose between risky options in single-play and…