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…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Concerning the evolution of our mind, it is of core interest to understand how high-level cognitive functions are embedded within low-level cognitive functions. While the grounding of meaning units such as content words and sentence has been widely investigated, little is known about logical cognitive operations and their association with…

This research investigated how word production is influenced by six feature-based semantic variables (number of semantic features, intercorrelational density, number of near semantic neighbors, semantic similarity, typicality, and distinctiveness). We simultaneously investigated effects of the six semantic variables on spoken picture naming in a…

Many low-stakes assessments, such as international large-scale surveys, are administered during time-limited testing sessions and some test-takers are not able to endorse the last items of the test, resulting in not-reached (NR) items. However, because the test has no consequence for the respondents, these NR items can also stem from quitting the…

To identify the relationship between non-verbal working memory and graphic symbol selection, this study examined whether the response time to select target symbols in a sentence construction task differed between two groups: a high non-verbal working memory group and a low non-verbal working memory group. The interaction effect between non-verbal…

Disengaged item responses pose a threat to the validity of the results provided by large-scale assessments. Several procedures for identifying disengaged responses on the basis of observed response times have been suggested, and item response theory (IRT) models for response engagement have been proposed. We outline that response time-based…

What is the foundational knowledge that children rely on to provide meaning as they construct an exact symbolic number system? People and animals can quickly and accurately distinguish small exact quantities (i.e., 1 to 3). One possibility is that children's ability to map small quantities to spoken number words supports their developing exact…

In this study, we compared children's and adults' ability to accurately identify target words in written minimal pairs (WMPs) with graphemically similar letters while accounting for factors such as gender, similarity of the middle letter in WMPs, mono- versus dimorphemic WMPs, number of syllable, homography, and imageability. Fifty children and…

Early and late bilinguals both differ in the speed with which they comprehend language or in their processing of sentences compared to monolinguals. This is possibly a result of cross-language interference, differential allocation of cognitive resources, or some other difference in language-dependent processes. This dissertation presents research…

In this article, we assess an alternative account of a key experimental pattern thought to index top-down control. The list-wide proportion congruence effect is the well-documented pattern whereby the congruency effect (i.e., Stroop effect) is attenuated in lists containing mostly incongruent trials relative to lists containing mostly congruent…

The Remote Associates Test is a well-established measure, frequently used to assess individuals' creative abilities, as a function of the ability to elicit remote associates. The nature of the involved associative processes is still poorly understood. This hampers a deeper understanding of the creative process, rendering it difficult to determine…

The compound Remote Associates Test (RAT) is a classic measure of creativity. Participants are shown three cue words (sore-shoulder-sweat) and asked to generate a word that connects them (cold). Theoretical views of RAT performance differ in the degree to which they conceptualize performance as depending on automatic spreading activation across…

Young children tend to rely on reactive cognitive control (e.g. strongly slow down after an error), even when task accuracy would benefit from proactive cognitive control (taking a slower task approach up front). We investigated if giving young primary school children opportunities to repeatedly experience tasks where success rates depend on…

Young people use slang for identifying themselves with a particular social group, gaining social recognition and respect from that group, and expressing their emotional state. One feature of Internet slang is its active use by youth in online communication, which, under certain conditions, may cause problematic Internet use (PIU). We conducted two…