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…

Visual working memory (VWM) is typically measured using arrays of two-dimensional isolated stimuli with simple visual identities (e.g., color or shape), and these studies typically find strong capacity limits. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) experts are tasked with reasoning with representations of three-dimensional (3D)…

The relationship between bilingual language control and executive control is debated. The present study investigated the effect of short-term language switching in a comprehension task on executive control performance in unbalanced bilinguals. Participants were required to perform a context task and an executive control task (i.e., flanker task)…

Purpose: The pupil dilation response is sensitive not only to auditory task demand but also to cognitive conflict. Conflict is induced by incompatible trials in auditory Stroop tasks in which participants have to identify the presentation location (left or right ear) of the words "left" or "right." Previous studies demonstrated…

Unlike with the typically developing population, non-typically developing individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities, have usually been recommended to learn and use only one language, despite perhaps coming from bilingual families or living in multilingual environments. This common practice, however, is not backed by empirical…

The present study investigated how response mode (oral vs. manual) modulates the Stroop effect using a picture variant of the Stroop task in which participants named orally, or identified with a manual keypress, line drawings of animals (e.g., camel). Consistent with previous color-response Stroop studies, relative to the nonlinguistic neutral…

It has been suggested that the Stroop task gives rise to 2 conflicts: the information conflict (color vs. word meaning) and the task conflict (name the color vs. read the word). However, behavioral indications for task conflict (reaction time [RT] congruent condition longer than RT neutral condition) appear under very restricted conditions. We…

The cognitive advantage (CA) hypothesis claims that multilingualism promotes the development of several basic cognitive capacities. A large number of empirical findings support this hypothesis, but recently there have also been numerous contradictory findings and methodological objections. The present paper extends the investigation of possible…

Previously reward-associated stimuli persistently capture attention. We attempted to extinguish this attentional bias through a reversal learning procedure where the high-value color changed unexpectedly. Attentional priority shifted during training in favor of the currently high-value color, although a residual bias toward the original high-value…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

While previous work on postverbal subjects in Italian has shown that young children are sensitive to the effects of argument structure and definiteness, little is known about the acquisition of postverbal subjects at the VP-periphery. In response, the present study investigated such subjects under new-information focus by monolingual Italian…

This work is based on previous studies showing that a short conversational intervention (SCI) focusing on the causes of the story events is effective in promoting the causal and mental content of children's narratives. In these studies, however, not all the children improved their narratives after the SCI). The present study examined individual…

This study explored whether kindergarteners who had yet to learn about multi-digit numbers at school could automatically process the underlying magnitudes, i.e., place-values, represented by the digits in a multi-digit number. A place-value Stroop task showed a pair of price tags in each trial. Each price tag contained a three-digit number, of…

Two experimental paradigms, a picture-naming task and a Stroop interference task, were employed to address the structure of the multilingual mental lexicon; more specifically, the process of multilingual non-selective lexical access. German-English-French speakers named objects in their native and most dominant language in a task that included a…

Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to…