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Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 2024Most language use occurs in face-to-face conversation, which involves rapid turn-taking. Seeing communicative bodily signals in addition to hearing speech may facilitate...
Most language use occurs in face-to-face conversation, which involves rapid turn-taking. Seeing communicative bodily signals in addition to hearing speech may facilitate such fast responding. We tested whether this holds for co-speech hand gestures by investigating whether these gestures speed up button press responses to questions. Sixty native speakers of Dutch viewed videos in which an actress asked yes/no-questions, either with or without a corresponding iconic hand gesture. Participants answered the questions as quickly and accurately as possible via button press. Gestures did not impact response accuracy, but crucially, gestures sped up responses, suggesting that response planning may be finished earlier when gestures are seen. How much gestures sped up responses was not related to their timing in the question or their timing with respect to the corresponding information in speech. Overall, these results are in line with the idea that multimodality may facilitate fast responding during face-to-face conversation.
PubMed: 38812611
DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2024.2314021 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Jan 2024Like biological species, words in language must compete to survive. Previously, it has been shown that language changes in response to cognitive constraints and over...
Like biological species, words in language must compete to survive. Previously, it has been shown that language changes in response to cognitive constraints and over time becomes more learnable. Here, we use two complementary research paradigms to demonstrate how the survival of existing word forms can be predicted by psycholinguistic properties that impact language production. In the first study, we analyzed the survival of words in the context of interpersonal communication. We analyzed data from a large-scale serial-reproduction experiment in which stories were passed down along a transmission chain over multiple participants. The results show that words that are acquired earlier in life, more concrete, more arousing, and more emotional are more likely to survive retellings. We reason that the same trend might scale up to language evolution over multiple generations of natural language users. If that is the case, the same set of psycholinguistic properties should also account for the change of word frequency in natural language corpora over historical time. That is what we found in two large historical-language corpora (Study 2): Early acquisition, concreteness, and high arousal all predict increasing word frequency over the past 200 y. However, the two studies diverge with respect to the impact of word valence and word length, which we take up in the discussion. By bridging micro-level behavioral preferences and macro-level language patterns, our investigation sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying word competition.
Topics: Humans; Language; Psycholinguistics; Emotions; Arousal; Cognition
PubMed: 38150495
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2220898120 -
Cognition Oct 2023Prediction appears to be an important characteristic of the human mind. It has also been suggested that prediction is a core difference of autistic children. Past...
Prediction appears to be an important characteristic of the human mind. It has also been suggested that prediction is a core difference of autistic children. Past research exploring language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children, however, has been somewhat contradictory, with some studies finding normal anticipatory processing in autistic children with low levels of autistic traits but others observing weaker prediction effects in autistic children with less receptive language skills. Here we investigated language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in young children who differed in the severity of their level of autistic traits and were in professional institutional care in Hangzhou, China. We chose the same spoken sentences (translated into Mandarin Chinese) and visual stimuli as a previous study which observed robust prediction effects in young children (Mani & Huettig, 2012) and included a control group of typically-developing children. Typically developing but not autistic children showed robust prediction effects. Most interestingly, autistic children with lower communication, motor, and (adaptive) behavior scores exhibited both less predictive and non-predictive visual attention behavior. Our results raise the possibility that differences in language-mediated anticipatory eye movements in autistic children with higher levels of autistic traits may be differences in visual attention in disguise, a hypothesis that needs further investigation.
Topics: Humans; Child; Child, Preschool; Language; Autistic Disorder; Eye Movements; Cognition; Communication; Autism Spectrum Disorder
PubMed: 37516086
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105571 -
Nature Communications Apr 2024Handedness is a manifestation of brain hemispheric specialization. Left-handedness occurs at increased rates in neurodevelopmental disorders. Genome-wide association...
Handedness is a manifestation of brain hemispheric specialization. Left-handedness occurs at increased rates in neurodevelopmental disorders. Genome-wide association studies have identified common genetic effects on handedness or brain asymmetry, which mostly involve variants outside protein-coding regions and may affect gene expression. Implicated genes include several that encode tubulins (microtubule components) or microtubule-associated proteins. Here we examine whether left-handedness is also influenced by rare coding variants (frequencies ≤ 1%), using exome data from 38,043 left-handed and 313,271 right-handed individuals from the UK Biobank. The beta-tubulin gene TUBB4B shows exome-wide significant association, with a rate of rare coding variants 2.7 times higher in left-handers than right-handers. The TUBB4B variants are mostly heterozygous missense changes, but include two frameshifts found only in left-handers. Other TUBB4B variants have been linked to sensorineural and/or ciliopathic disorders, but not the variants found here. Among genes previously implicated in autism or schizophrenia by exome screening, DSCAM and FOXP1 show evidence for rare coding variant association with left-handedness. The exome-wide heritability of left-handedness due to rare coding variants was 0.91%. This study reveals a role for rare, protein-altering variants in left-handedness, providing further evidence for the involvement of microtubules and disorder-relevant genes.
Topics: Humans; Functional Laterality; Genome-Wide Association Study; Exome; Brain; Repressor Proteins; Forkhead Transcription Factors
PubMed: 38565598
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46277-w -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Oct 2023This study investigates the relationship between cognitive processes and translation quality in the context of English-Arabic translations of journalistic articles....
This study investigates the relationship between cognitive processes and translation quality in the context of English-Arabic translations of journalistic articles. Specifically, it explores the translation processes at the orientation, production, and revision stages and the relationship between such processing and translation quality, using keylogging software (i.e., Translog II) to record the experiment. Twenty-two translation trainees participated in the study, translating a news article from English into Arabic. Presas's (2012) rubric for assessment was used to evaluate the translation quality, and several correlation analyses were applied to the data. Findings revealed negative correlations between translation quality and online revision, translation duration, and text production. The trainees' translations demonstrated limitations in communicating the main ideas of the target text (TT) to the target language (TL). The findings also showed the trainees' focus on online revision and editing and the concentration of translation time and cognitive effort in the drafting phase. The researchers recommend including the three phases of translation (reading, drafting, and revision) into translation training courses and equipping translator trainees with the required skills for each translation stage.
Topics: Humans; Translations; Language; Software; Cognition; Translating
PubMed: 37150796
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-023-09964-1 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Dec 2023In two experiments, we tested whether using a foreign language attenuates neophobia at the lexical (Experiment 1) and discoursal (Experiment 2) levels in comparison to...
In two experiments, we tested whether using a foreign language attenuates neophobia at the lexical (Experiment 1) and discoursal (Experiment 2) levels in comparison to using a native language. A total of 687 native Chinese speakers participated in Experiment 1, and 693 in Experiment 2. All of them learned English as a foreign language. They performed paper-and-pencil tasks for measuring their neophobia toward innovative products described in either Chinese or English at the lexical and discoursal levels. Our results suggest that using a foreign language at the discoursal levels can obviously attenuate the neophobia toward innovative products. Moreover, Dual-process Model could explain the mechanisms of neophobic attenuation induced by foreign language use.
Topics: Humans; Language; Learning
PubMed: 37698815
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-023-10017-w -
Disability and Rehabilitation Sep 2023To perform a scoping review to investigate the psychosocial impact of having an altered facial expression in five neurological diseases. (Review)
Review
PURPOSE
To perform a scoping review to investigate the psychosocial impact of having an altered facial expression in five neurological diseases.
METHODS
A systematic literature search was performed. Studies were on Bell's palsy, facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), Moebius syndrome, myotonic dystrophy type 1, or Parkinson's disease patients; had a focus on altered facial expression; and had any form of psychosocial outcome measure. Data extraction focused on psychosocial outcomes.
RESULTS
Bell's palsy, myotonic dystrophy type 1, and Parkinson's disease patients more often experienced some degree of psychosocial distress than healthy controls. In FSHD, facial weakness negatively influenced communication and was experienced as a burden. The psychosocial distress applied especially to women (Bell's palsy and Parkinson's disease), and patients with more severely altered facial expression (Bell's palsy), but not for Moebius syndrome patients. Furthermore, Parkinson's disease patients with more pronounced hypomimia were perceived more negatively by observers. Various strategies were reported to compensate for altered facial expression.
CONCLUSIONS
This review showed that patients with altered facial expression in four of five included neurological diseases had reduced psychosocial functioning. Future research recommendations include studies on observers' judgements of patients during social interactions and on the effectiveness of compensation strategies in enhancing psychosocial functioning.
PubMed: 37752723
DOI: 10.1080/09638288.2023.2259310 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Jan 2024The discussion about linguistic universals, initiated over 50 years ago by J. Greenberg, remains a topic of significant interest today. While there's an ongoing debate...
The discussion about linguistic universals, initiated over 50 years ago by J. Greenberg, remains a topic of significant interest today. While there's an ongoing debate on the universality of linguistic forms - with some supporting the notion and others dismissing it as baseless-the idea of a unifying linguistic essence stands firm. The article aims to explore the linguacultural values of language, particularly how they enable the reconstruction of ideas and stereotypes within specific segments of a language system. The research found that universal language characteristics serve as a rich source of information for those studying linguacultural aspects. These traits offer nationally determined interpretations of words, drawing from associations rooted in either tangible or cultural codes. When delving into cultural codes present within every culture, the study discerned the presence of basic and universal codes. The existence of these codes provides insights into the formation of stereotypes, which encapsulate the experiences and knowledge intrinsic to the bearers of a culture. Linguistic universals, underpinned by universal grammar and semantic foundations, occupy a central position in linguacultural examinations, especially when reconstructing cultural ideas and stereotypes. Basic and universal cultural codes inherent in each culture facilitate the creation of linguistic worldviews.
Topics: Humans; Linguistics; Language; Semantics; Knowledge; Cognition
PubMed: 38245906
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-024-10050-3 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Dec 2023With both the quantitative and qualitative data from 628 responses to a set of questionnaire collected from the undergraduates of three educational institutions in...
With both the quantitative and qualitative data from 628 responses to a set of questionnaire collected from the undergraduates of three educational institutions in central Vietnam, this study analyzed learners' needs of intercultural communication competence (ICC) related to their studying of English for tourism purposes and future occupations. The methodology used for data analysis including semi-structured interviews, and the questionnaire. The findings showed that the students preferred intercultural language learning activities referring to authentic materials and real-life experience. The results also revealed the participants' great needs of various ICC attitudes and regular tasks in tourism workplaces. Particularly, they had positive attitudes in intercultural communication, and higher needs of tasks for improving discourse and behavioural competences more than other ICC dimensions. The study has implications for tourism learners, educators and related stakeholders to raise their awareness in learning, teaching and developing this long-lasting competence.
Topics: Humans; Tourism; Students; Language; Communication; Learning
PubMed: 37698816
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-023-10012-1 -
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Dec 2023In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether...
In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether the contribution of emotional factors and concreteness is modulated by other linguistic constraints, specifically idiom familiarity and decomposability, that has been shown to impact idiom processing. Participants read short idiomatic phrases (e.g., he kicked the bucket), word-by-word and for comprehension while their reaction time was recorded. The results showed that the emotional status of idioms contribute to their processing and this contribution is modulated by familiarity and decomposability levels of idioms in different ways. In particular, the impact of valence (i.e., the degree an idiom is pleasant/unpleasant) was modulated by familiarity, and the impact of arousal was modulated by decomposability. We did not find strong evidence for the contribution of concreteness for idiom processing. Our findings are aligned with theories of semantic representation, which suggest that besides linguistic information, sensory-motor and affective information are fundamental in representing meaning.
Topics: Male; Humans; Psycholinguistics; Linguistics; Semantics; Recognition, Psychology; Comprehension
PubMed: 37563522
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-023-10001-4