Previous studies demonstrated that dual-task impairments are higher in children than in young adults. A previous study systematically assessed the sources of these larger dual-task impairments by identifying age-related differences in capacity limitations during dual-task processing. Capacity limitations in central cognitive processes were present…

Structural patterns existing in language can be exploited for implicit prediction of sequences in speech and visual input via a process termed statistical learning (SL). Despite extensive examination of SL in dyslexia, whether SL problems arise from modality-constrained learning processes or from global learning processes is still unknown, nor is…

This study examined how a tropical climate (i.e. hot and wet climatic environment) and different language instructions, in French and in Creole, could affect imagery ability on French-Creole bilingual in the French West Indies. Participants were divided into two groups: Half of them completed the French Movement Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ-F), the…

Purpose: This study tested the hypothesis that audiovisual training benefits children more than it does adults and that it improves Japanese-speaking children's English /r/-/l/ perception to a native-like level. Method: Ten sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were conducted for Japanese-speaking adults and children.…

The relationships among visual and auditory temporal processing, rapid naming, and oral reading fluency in Chinese children with and without dyslexia were examined. Primary school-aged Chinese children with dyslexia (N = 47) and chronological-age-matched controls (N = 47) were recruited. Temporal processing, rapid naming, oral reading fluency,…

The research focuses on the diagnostics and stimulation of socially disadvantaged children of a preschool age, which is a crucial component of inclusive education. The aim of the research was to experimentally verify through input and output orientation diagnostics the effectiveness of the stimulation program for 5 to 6 year old socially…

The genetic diversity contained in a population can be used to engage the audience in an understanding of human genotypes and phenotypes. With a series of simple examples of well-documented sensory phenotypes related to the perception of colour, aromas or food preference, the diversity of the audience can be easily explored. The collecting of…

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects…

Grapheme-color synesthesia is an atypical condition in which individuals experience sensations of color when reading printed graphemes such as letters and digits. For some grapheme-color synesthetes, seeing a printed grapheme triggers a sensation of color, but "hearing" the name of a grapheme does not. This dissociation allowed us to…

The present eye-tracking study aimed to investigate the impact of auditory speech information on 12-month-olds' gaze behavior to silently-talking faces. We examined German infants' face-scanning behavior to side-by-side presentation of a bilingual speaker's face silently speaking German utterances on one side and French on the other side, before…

The visual word recognition system recruits neuronal systems originally developed for object perception which are characterized by orientation insensitivity to mirror reversals. It has been proposed that during reading acquisition beginning readers have to "unlearn" this natural tolerance to mirror reversals in order to efficiently…

Using a novel variant of dichotic selective listening, we examined the control of auditory selective attention. In our task, subjects had to respond selectively to one of two simultaneously presented auditory stimuli (number words), always spoken by a female and a male speaker, by performing a numerical size categorization. The gender of the…

It is well known that auditory and visual onsets presented at a particular location can capture a person's visual attention. However, the question of whether such attentional capture disappears when attention is focused endogenously beforehand has not yet been answered. Moreover, previous studies have not differentiated between capture by onsets…

Recent spatial cuing studies have shown that detection sensitivity can be increased by the allocation of attention. This increase has been attributed to one of two mechanisms: signal enhancement or uncertainty reduction. Signal enhancement is an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio at the cued location; uncertainty reduction is a reduction in the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of presentation modes on evaluations of conducting and choral ensemble performance. Participants (N = 36) were graduate music students with conducting and teaching experience studying in Argentina (n = 18) or the USA (n = 18). The participants viewed and evaluated a stimulus videotape that…