Publications by authors named "Deanna C Friesen"

The current study investigated the predictive ability of language knowledge and reported strategy use on reading comprehension performance in English-speaking monolingual and bilingual students. One hundred fifty-five children in grade 4 through 6 (93 bilinguals and 62 monolinguals) were assessed on receptive vocabulary, word reading fluency, reading comprehension, and reading strategy use in English. An additional 38 adult bilinguals (i.

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Purpose: This study examined language group differences in English syntactic knowledge based on performance on a sentence repetition task.

Method: Fourth and sixth grade students who were monolinguals ( = 30), early bilinguals (i.e.

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Background: Caregiving for an individual with Down syndrome (DS) results in needs that can impact the stress and wellbeing of the entire family. These needs may also vary over the lifespan of the individual with DS. Coping strategies may affect stress levels and reduce the effects of unmet needs.

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Introduction: Previous research has found that when bilingual and monolingual children are equated on English receptive vocabulary, bilingual children outperform monolingual children on verbal fluency tasks (e.g., Pino Escobar et al.

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The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.

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The present study investigated the impact of language proficiency and executive control (EC) ability on cross-language semantic activation using an English semantic priming lexical-decision task. Primes were either English-French homographs (i.e.

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Two studies investigated how cultural context and familiarity impact lexical access in Korean-English bilingual and English monolingual adults. ERPs were recorded while participants decided whether a word and picture matched or not. Pictures depicted versions of objects that were prototypically associated with North American or Korean culture and named in either English or Korean, creating culturally congruent and incongruent trials.

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Three studies examined the hypothesis that bilinguals can more rapidly disengage attention from irrelevant information than monolinguals by investigating the impact of previous trial congruency on performance in a simple flanker task. In Study 1, monolingual and bilingual young adults completed two versions of a flanker task. There were no differences between language groups on mean reaction time using standard analyses for congruent or incongruent trials or the size of the flanker effect.

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Three studies are reported investigating how monolinguals and bilinguals resolve within-language competition when listening to isolated words. Participants saw two pictures that were semantically-related, phonologically-related, or unrelated and heard a word naming one of them while event-related potentials were recorded. In Studies 1 and 2, the pictures and auditory cue were presented simultaneously and the related conditions produced interference for both groups.

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Aims And Objectives/purpose/research Questions: Following reports showing bilingual advantages in executive control (EC) performance, the current study investigated the role of selective attention as a foundational skill that might underlie these advantages.

Design/methodology/approach: Bilingual and monolingual young adults performed a visual search task by determining whether a target shape was present amid distractor shapes. Task difficulty was manipulated by search type (feature or conjunction) and by the number and discriminability of the distractors.

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The verbal fluency task is a widely used neuropsychological test of word retrieval efficiency. Both category fluency (e.g.

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The current study investigated phonological processing dynamics in bilingual word naming. English-French and French-English bilinguals named interlingual heterophonic homographs (i.e.

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Although bilingual children tend to obtain lower scores than their monolingual peers on tests of formal language ability, they exhibit a processing advantage on non-verbal executive control (EC) tasks. This advantage may be attributable to EC practice that bilinguals routinely receive from the constant need to manage attention to two jointly activated languages. Metalinguistic tasks, unlike linguistic tasks, require children to access both their language knowledge (i.

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The present study examined the nature of the mental representations bilinguals form when reading a text and to what extent they are language specific. English-French bilinguals read five pairs of passages in succession while their eye movements were tracked. Dependent measures were overall reading times on second passages and fixation latencies on target cognates embeddedin second passages.

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