This study aimed to analyse the contribution of mothers' home literacy beliefs and practices and the quantity and quality of screen media exposure on Argentinean toddler's language. In addition, we considered parent-child joint engagement, as well as adult scaffolding behaviours during the use of electronic devices. A total of 465 mothers of 18-36 months old children completed an online survey including: the MacArthur Bates CDI, home literacy, screen exposure, joint engagement and scaffolding questionnaires.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study investigates the influences of: 1) the task order of two stimulus equivalence classes (SEC) probes, and 2) the possible differences within the equivalence trial types. These factors were analyzed together on both behavioral and event-related potentials (ERP) data. Two groups of normal subjects participated in two successive sessions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProminence is the hierarchical relation among arguments that allows us to understand 'Who did what to whom' in a sentence. The present study aimed to provide evidence about the role of prominence information for the incremental interpretation of arguments in Spanish. We investigated the time course of neural correlates associated to the comprehension of sentences that require a reversal of argument prominence hierarchization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSemantic priming has been widely observed at both behavioral and electrophysiological levels as reductions in response times and N400 magnitudes respectively. However, the possibility that stimulus relations derived from associative learning elicit N400 priming effects comparable to those found in language has not been properly addressed yet. Equivalence relations emerge after establishing a set of arbitrary and intra-experimentally defined relations through associative learning, thus allowing the study of derived stimulus relations in the absence of semantic content.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArtificial grammars have been widely applied to the study of sequential learning in language, but few studies have directly compared the neural correlates of artificial and native grammar processing. In this study, we examined Event Related Potentials (ERPs) elicited by structural anomalies in semantic-free artificial grammar sequences and sentences in the subjects' native language (Spanish). Although ERPs differed during early stages, we observed similar posterior negativities (N400) and P600 effects in a late stage.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMost languages have a basic or "canonical" word order, which determines the relative positions of the subject (S), the verb (V), and the object (O) in a typical declarative sentence. The frequency of occurrence of the six possible word orders among world languages is not distributed uniformly. While SVO and SOV represent around 85% of world languages, orders like VSO (9%) or OSV (0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA wide range of studies have found late positive ERP components in response to anomalies during processing of structured sequences. In language studies, this component is named Syntactic Positive Shift (SPS) or P600. It is characterized by an increase in potential peaking around 600 ms after the appearance of the syntactic anomaly and has a centroparietal topography.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEvent-related potentials (ERPs) correlates of two test criteria of an abstract category task were dissociated. In a stimulus equivalence task, 10 subjects observed pairs of figures presented serially in three conditions: reflexivity (generalized identity), equivalence (arbitrary derived relations from a previous training), and unrelated pairs. They were instructed to decide whether the second item in a pair matched or mismatched the first one.
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