Remote association, the ability to form new relations between independent elements, was assessed using the Remote Associates Test (RAT). The Chinese RAT (CRAT) includes the Chinese radical RAT (CRRAT), Chinese word RAT (CWRAT), and Chinese compound RAT (CCRAT). Behavioral research indicates that an individual's performance on the CRAT reflects…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

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…

Mimicry involves unconsciously copying the actions of others. Increasing evidence suggests that autistic people can copy the goal of an observed action but show differences in their mimicry. We investigated mimicry in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) within a two-dimensional virtual reality environment. Participants played an imitation game with a…

This study investigated bilingual advantages at additional languages learning by comparing early, highly proficient bilinguals to monolinguals' learning of an additional language in adulthood. The study used both behavioral and neurocognitive measures (event-related potentials) and tested subjects along the trajectory of learning from low to high…

A computer-administered version of the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale was administered to 31 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder, 16 with other anxiety disorders, and 23 nonpatient controls. The computer version correlated highly with the clinician-administered version and was well understood and liked by subjects. (SLD)

Childhood abuse was investigated as a potential mediator of the intergenerational transmission of externalizing behaviors (EXT) in adulthood among a large general population sample drawn from the National Comorbidity Survey. Community participants (N = 5,424) underwent diagnostic and psychosocial interviews and reported on their own adult symptoms…