Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal…

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive tool to facilitate brain plasticity and enhance language abilities. Our study aims to search for a potential beneficial influence of tDCS on a cognitive linguistic task of naming which found to decline during aging. A group of fifteen healthy old adults (M = 64.93 ± 5.09 years) were…

Individual differences in the strategies that control sequential behavior were investigated in an experiment in which participants memorized sentences and then wrote them by hand, in a non-cursive style. Thirty-two participants each wrote eight sentences, which had hierarchical structures with five levels. The dataset included over 31,000 letters.…

Multiple lines of evidence suggest that glucocorticoid hormones enhance memory consolidation of fearful events. However, most of these studies involve male individuals. Since anxiety, fear, and fear-associated disorders present differently in male and female subjects we investigated in mice whether male and female mice perform differently in a…

Purpose: Bilinguals tend to produce cognates (e.g., "telephone" in English and "teléfono" in Spanish) more accurately than they produce noncognates ("table"/"mesa"). We tested whether the same holds for bilingual children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Participants included Spanish-English…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to derive spatial release from masking (SRM) performance-azimuth functions for bilateral cochlear implant (CI) users to provide a thorough description of SRM as a function of target/distracter spatial configuration. The secondary purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of the microphone…

Purpose: The purpose of the present studies was to determine how children's identification and processing of misarticulated words was influenced by substitution commonness. Method: Sixty-one typically developing preschoolers across 3 experiments heard accurate productions of words (e.g., "leaf"), words containing common substitutions…

In absolute identification, the extended generalized context model (EGCM; Kent & Lamberts, 2005, 2016) proposes that perceptual processing determines systematic response time (RT) variability; all other models of RT emphasize response selection processes. In the EGCM-RT the bow effect in RTs (longer responses for stimuli in the middle of the…

Implicit up/down words, such as "bird" and "foot", systematically influence performance on visual tasks involving immediately following targets in compatible versus incompatible locations. Recent studies have observed that the semantic relation between prime words and target pictures can strongly influence the size and even the…

While much research shows that early sensory and attentional processing is affected by mind wandering, the effect of mind wandering on deep (i.e., semantic) processing is relatively unexplored. To investigate this relation, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) as participants studied English-Spanish word pairs, one at a time, while being…

This study aims to extend statistical learning (SL) research to multilinguals and provide an insight into what could facilitate word segmentation. We studied how the number of cues available in the input as well as the number of languages spoken influence SL and word segmentation. We used two SL tasks: one involving the tracking of transitional…

Purpose: The conventional amplification devices render minimal or no benefit at abating the speech perception problems of individuals with auditory neuropathy spectrum disorder (ANSD). This study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of noise reduction strategies (multiband spectral subtraction, Wiener-as, Karhunen-Loeve transform [Subspace], and…

Taking a perception-action perspective, we investigated how the presence of different real objects in children's immediate situation affected their creativity and whether this effect was moderated by their selective attention. Seventy children between ages 9 and 12 years old participated. Verbal responses on a visual Alternative Uses Task with a…

Two visual world experiments investigated the priming of form (e.g., phonology) during language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard high cloze probability sentences like "In order to have a closer look, the dentist asked the man to open his . . ." while viewing visual arrays with objects like a predictable target mouth,…

Purpose: We aimed to develop a noninvasive neural test of language comprehension to use with nonspeaking children for whom standard behavioral testing is unreliable (e.g., minimally verbal autism). Our aims were threefold. First, we sought to establish the sensitivity of two auditory paradigms to elicit neural responses in individual neurotypical…