A dataset of behavioral measures on Chinese word production in picture naming.

Most studies of language production have been conducted with speakers of alphabetic languages, but relatively little research has examined languages with non-alphabetic scripts, such as Chinese. Moreover, most work on language word production has investigated phonological output processing (i.e.

Exploring synchrony effects in performance on tasks involving cognitive inhibition: An online study of young adults.

Inhibition is one of the core components of cognitive control. In experimental tasks which measure cognitive inhibition, performance may vary according to an interplay of individuals' chronotype and the time of day of testing ("synchrony effect", or the beneficial impact on cognitive performance of aligning testing with the time of day preferred by an individual's chronotype). Some prior studies have reported a synchrony effect specifically emerging in activities which require cognitive inhibition, but not in general processing speed, but existing findings are inconsistent.

Exploring the impact of stimulus-stimulus and stimulus-response conflicts on computer mouse trajectories: continuous flow of information from stimulus encoding to response preparation to motor action.

In recent years, mouse tracking (designing experiments in which participants provide responses via dynamic computer mouse movements) has enjoyed increasing experience in experimental psychology. Mouse-tracking studies typically involve some form of stimulus-response (S-R) conflict, and S-R effects emerge in movement trajectories (as well as in latencies). By contrast, it is currently unclear how stimulus-stimulus (S-S) compatibility affects movements.

A joint investigation of facilitation and interference effects of semantic and phonological similarity in a continuous naming task.

Semantic and phonological similarity effects provide critical constraints on the mechanisms underlying language production. In the present study, we jointly investigated effects of semantic and phonological similarity using the continuous naming task. In the semantic condition, Chinese Mandarin speakers named a list of pictures composed of 12 semantic category sets with 5 items from each semantic category, while in the phonological condition, they named a list of pictures from 12 phonological sets of 5 items sharing a spoken syllable.

Effects of conflict in cognitive control: Evidence from mouse tracking.

It has long been debated whether the "congruency sequence effect (CSE)" in conflict tasks such as Flanker could reflect adaptive control. The current study used "mouse tracking" to tackle the issue in a combination of three conflict tasks (i.e.

Exploring task switch costs in a color-shape decision task via a mouse tracking paradigm.

Several decades of cognitive research have explored the processes and mechanisms that underlie task switching. Here we report an experiment in which young adult participants were presented with colored shapes, and were randomly cued to categorize them according to color, or to shape. Responses were made via dynamic movements of the computer mouse ("mouse tracking"), which allows insight into how decision making unfolds.

The role of valence in word processing: Evidence from lexical decision and emotional Stroop tasks.

It is widely accepted that the valence of a word (neutral, positive, or negative) influences lexical processing, yet data from the commonly used lexical decision and emotional Stroop tasks has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the direction of this influence. One critical obstacle to investigating the independent effects of valence is the matching of emotional and neutral stimuli on the lexical, sublexical, and conceptual characteristics known to influence word recognition. The second obstacle is that the cognitive processes which lead to a lexical decision and a colour naming response are unobservable from the response latency measures typically gathered.

Interference effects of phonological similarity in word production arise from competitive incremental learning.

In the blocked cyclic naming task, native Mandarin speakers named pictures with disyllabic names in small sets and blocks, with the critical manipulation whether pictures within a block shared an atonal syllable or not. We found the expected facilitation when the overlapping portion of responses was in word-initial position, but we also replicated a recent observation that with 'inconsistent' overlap (shared syllables could be either in first or second word position), form overlap causes interference. Crucially, interference also occurred when phonologically unrelated filler trials or trials which required a nonlinguistic response were interleaved with the critical pictures.

Parallel Processing of Semantics and Phonology in Spoken Production: Evidence from Blocked Cyclic Picture Naming and EEG.

Spoken language production involves lexical-semantic access and phonological encoding. A theoretically important question concerns the relative time course of these two cognitive processes. The predominant view has been that semantic and phonological codes are accessed in successive stages.

Syllables and phonemes as planning units in Mandarin Chinese spoken word production: Evidence from ERPs.

Speakers of different languages might rely on differential phonological units when planning spoken output. In the present experiment, we investigated the role of phonemes, as well as the relative time course of syllabic vs phonemic encoding, in Mandarin Chinese word production. A form preparation task was combined with encephalography (EEG).

Employing Natural Control for Confounding Factors in the Hunt for the Bilingual Advantage in Attention: Evidence from School Children in Gibraltar.

Does being bilingual convey a benefit in 'cognitive control'? Research on this question has been plagued by confounding geo-political factors which themselves might affect cognitive ability (e.g., Socio-Economic Status, immigration and culture).

Detection and Attention for Auditory, Visual, and Audiovisual Speech in Children with Hearing Loss.

Objectives: Efficient multisensory speech detection is critical for children who must quickly detect/encode a rapid stream of speech to participate in conversations and have access to the audiovisual cues that underpin speech and language development, yet multisensory speech detection remains understudied in children with hearing loss (CHL). This research assessed detection, along with vigilant/goal-directed attention, for multisensory versus unisensory speech in CHL versus children with normal hearing (CNH).

Design: Participants were 60 CHL who used hearing aids and communicated successfully aurally/orally and 60 age-matched CNH.

The role of orthography in second-language spoken word production: Evidence from Tibetan Chinese bilinguals.

Evidence suggests that spoken language production involves involuntary access to orthographic representations, both in languages with alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts. An unexplored question is whether the role of orthography varies as a function of the language being native or non-native to the individual. Native (L1) and non-native (L2) languages differ in important aspects, that is, lexical representations in L2 might be less well established, but acquired at least partly via reading, and these unique features of non-native languages may contribute to a fundamental difference in how spelling and sound interact in production.

Syllables constitute proximate units for Mandarin speakers: Electrophysiological evidence from a masked priming task.

Languages may differ regarding the primary mental unit of phonological encoding in spoken production, with models of speakers of Indo-European languages generally assuming a central role for phonemes, but spoken Chinese production potentially attributing a more prominent role to syllables. In the present study, native Mandarin Chinese speakers named objects that were preceded by briefly presented and masked prime words, which were form related and either matched or mismatched concerning their syllabic structure, or were unrelated. Behavioral results showed a previously reported interaction between prime and target syllable type.

Orthographic effects in Mandarin spoken language production.

For literate individuals, does the spoken production of language involve access to orthographic codes? Previous research has rendered mixed results, with a few positive findings contrasting with a range of null findings. In the current experiments, we chose spoken Mandarin as the target language in order to better dissociate sound from spelling. Mandarin speakers named coloured line drawings of common objects with adjective-noun phrases (e.

Developmental Shifts in Detection and Attention for Auditory, Visual, and Audiovisual Speech.

Purpose: Successful speech processing depends on our ability to detect and integrate multisensory cues, yet there is minimal research on multisensory speech detection and integration by children. To address this need, we studied the development of speech detection for auditory (A), visual (V), and audiovisual (AV) input.

Method: Participants were 115 typically developing children clustered into age groups between 4 and 14 years.

Orthographic effects in second-language spoken-word recognition.

Evidence from both alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages has suggested the role of orthography in the processing of spoken words in individuals' native language (L1). Less evidence has existed for such effects in nonnative (L2) spoken-word processing. Whereas in L1 orthographic representations are learned only after phonological representations have long been established, in L2 the sound and spelling of words are often learned in conjunction; this might predict stronger orthographic effects in L2 than in L1 spoken processing.

Visual speech fills in both discrimination and identification of non-intact auditory speech in children.

To communicate, children must discriminate and identify speech sounds. Because visual speech plays an important role in this process, we explored how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification by children. Critical items had intact visual speech (e.

Visual speech alters the discrimination and identification of non-intact auditory speech in children with hearing loss.

Objectives: Understanding spoken language is an audiovisual event that depends critically on the ability to discriminate and identify phonemes yet we have little evidence about the role of early auditory experience and visual speech on the development of these fundamental perceptual skills. Objectives of this research were to determine 1) how visual speech influences phoneme discrimination and identification; 2) whether visual speech influences these two processes in a like manner, such that discrimination predicts identification; and 3) how the degree of hearing loss affects this relationship. Such evidence is crucial for developing effective intervention strategies to mitigate the effects of hearing loss on language development.

Phonological Priming in Children with Hearing Loss: Effect of Speech Mode, Fidelity, and Lexical Status.

Objectives: This research determined (1) how phonological priming of picture naming was affected by the mode (auditory-visual [AV] versus auditory), fidelity (intact versus nonintact auditory onsets), and lexical status (words versus nonwords) of speech stimuli in children with prelingual sensorineural hearing impairment (CHI) versus children with normal hearing (CNH) and (2) how the degree of HI, auditory word recognition, and age influenced results in CHI. Note that the AV stimuli were not the traditional bimodal input but instead they consisted of an intact consonant/rhyme in the visual track coupled to a nonintact onset/rhyme in the auditory track. Example stimuli for the word bag are (1) AV: intact visual (b/ag) coupled to nonintact auditory (-b/ag) and 2) auditory: static face coupled to the same nonintact auditory (-b/ag).

Orthographic effects in spoken word recognition: Evidence from Chinese.

Extensive evidence from alphabetic languages demonstrates a role of orthography in the processing of spoken words. Because alphabetic systems explicitly code speech sounds, such effects are perhaps not surprising. However, it is less clear whether orthographic codes are involuntarily accessed from spoken words in languages with non-alphabetic systems, in which the sound-spelling correspondence is largely arbitrary.

Tracking the time course of lexical access in orthographic production: An event-related potential study of word frequency effects in written picture naming.

Previous studies of spoken picture naming using event-related potentials (ERPs) have shown that speakers initiate lexical access within 200ms after stimulus onset. In the present study, we investigated the time course of lexical access in written, rather than spoken, word production. Chinese participants wrote target object names which varied in word frequency, and written naming times and ERPs were measured.

Children perceive speech onsets by ear and eye.

Adults use vision to perceive low-fidelity speech; yet how children acquire this ability is not well understood. The literature indicates that children show reduced sensitivity to visual speech from kindergarten to adolescence. We hypothesized that this pattern reflects the effects of complex tasks and a growth period with harder-to-utilize cognitive resources, not lack of sensitivity.

Additivity of semantic and phonological effects: Evidence from speech production in Mandarin.

A number of previous studies using picture-word interference (PWI) tasks conducted with speakers of Western languages have demonstrated non-additive effects of semantic and form overlap between pictures and words, which may indicate underlying non-discrete processing stages in lexical retrieval. The present study used Mandarin speakers and presented Chinese characters as distractors. In two experiments, we crossed semantic relatedness with "pure" phonological (i.

Why do some neurons in cortex respond to information in a selective manner? Insights from artificial neural networks.

Why do some neurons in hippocampus and cortex respond to information in a highly selective manner? It has been hypothesized that neurons in hippocampus encode information in a highly selective manner in order to support fast learning without catastrophic interference, and that neurons in cortex encode information in a highly selective manner in order to co-activate multiple items in short-term memory (STM) without suffering a superposition catastrophe. However, the latter hypothesis is at odds with the widespread view that neural coding in the cortex is highly distributed in order to support generalization. We report a series of simulations that characterize the conditions in which recurrent Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models of immediate serial can recall novel words.