EEG Beta Power but Not Background Music Predicts the Recall Scores in a Foreign-Vocabulary Learning Task.

As tantalizing as the idea that background music beneficially affects foreign vocabulary learning may seem, there is-partly due to a lack of theory-driven research-no consistent evidence to support this notion. We investigated inter-individual differences in the effects of background music on foreign vocabulary learning. Based on Eysenck's theory of personality we predicted that individuals with a high level of cortical arousal should perform worse when learning with background music compared to silence, whereas individuals with a low level of cortical arousal should be unaffected by background music or benefit from it.

The Influence of Linguistic Proficiency on Masked Text Recognition Performance in Adults With and Without Congenital Hearing Impairment.

Objective: The authors first examined the influence of moderate to severe congenital hearing impairment (CHI) on the correctness of samples of elicited spoken language. Then, the authors used this measure as an indicator of linguistic proficiency and examined its effect on performance in language reception, independent of bottom-up auditory processing.

Design: In groups of adults with normal hearing (NH, n = 22), acquired hearing impairment (AHI, n = 22), and moderate to severe CHI (n = 21), the authors assessed linguistic proficiency by analyzing the morphosyntactic correctness of their spoken language production.

The influence of lexical-access ability and vocabulary knowledge on measures of speech recognition in noise.

Objective: The main objective was to investigate the effect of linguistic abilities (lexical-access ability and vocabulary size) on different measures of speech-in-noise recognition in normal-hearing listeners with various levels of language proficiency.

Design: Speech reception thresholds (SRTs) were measured for sentences in steady-state (SRTstat) and fluctuating noise (SRTfluc), and for digit-triplets in steady-state noise (DIN). Lexical-access ability was measured with a lexical-decision test and a word-naming test.

On the use of the distortion-sensitivity approach in examining the role of linguistic abilities in speech understanding in noise.

Purpose: Researchers have used the distortion-sensitivity approach in the psychoacoustical domain to investigate the role of auditory processing abilities in speech perception in noise (van Schijndel, Houtgast, & Festen, 2001; Goverts & Houtgast, 2010). In this study, the authors examined the potential applicability of the distortion-sensitivity approach for investigating the role of linguistic abilities in speech understanding in noise.

Method: The authors applied the distortion-sensitivity approach by measuring the processing of visually presented masked text in a condition with manipulated syntactic, lexical, and semantic cues and while using the Text Reception Threshold (George et al.

Sentence context modulates visual word recognition and translation in bilinguals.

The influence of sentence context constraint on subsequent processing of concrete and abstract cognates and noncognates was tested in three experiments. Target words were preceded by a predictive, high constraint sentence context, by a congruent, low constraint sentence context, or were presented in isolation. Dutch-English bilinguals performed lexical decision in their second language (L2), or translated target words in forward (from L1 to L2) or in backward (from L2 to L1) direction.

Number-of-translation norms for Dutch-English translation pairs: a new tool for examining language production.

We collected number-of-translation norms on 562 Dutch-English translation pairs from several previous studies of cross-language processing. Participants were highly proficient Dutch-English bilinguals. Form and semantic similarity ratings were collected on the 1,003 possible translation pairs.