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"Psycholinguistics Comparative method."
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The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research
The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, Clifton Pye shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. Both an overview of lessons Pye has gleaned from more than thirty years of studying how children learn Mayan languages as well as a strong case for a novel method of researching crosslinguistic language acquisition more broadly, this book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage for untangling the complexities of first language acquisition.
Pye here applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages—K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol—showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. His holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children's lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so. More than this, he expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages' variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, he argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one's native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.
eBook
Monolingual comparative normativity in bilingualism research is out of “control”: Arguments and alternatives
Herein, we contextualize, problematize, and offer some insights for moving beyond the problem of monolingual comparative normativity in (psycho) linguistic research on bilingualism. We argue that, in the vast majority of cases, juxtaposing (functional) monolinguals to bilinguals fails to offer what the comparison is supposedly intended to do: meet the standards of empirical control in line with the scientific method. Instead, the default nature of monolingual comparative normativity has historically contributed to inequalities in many facets of bilingualism research and continues to impede progress on multiple levels. Beyond framing our views on the matter, we offer some epistemological considerations and methodological alternatives to this standard practice that improve empirical rigor while fostering increased diversity, inclusivity, and equity in our field.
Journal Article
Perception of emotion across cultures: Norms of valence, arousal, and sensory experience for 4923 Chinese words translated from English in Warriner et al. (2013)
Perception of emotion conveyed through language is influenced by embodied experiences obtained from social interactions, which may vary across different cultures. To explore cross-cultural differences in the perception of emotion between Chinese and English speakers, this study collected norms of valence and arousal from 322 native Mandarin speakers for 4923 Chinese words translated from Warriner et al., (
Behavior Research Methods
, 45, 1191–1207,
2013
). Additionally, sensory experience ratings for each word were collected. Analysis demonstrated that the reliability of this dataset is satisfactory, as indicated by comparisons with previous datasets. We examined the distributions of valence and arousal for the entire dataset, as well as for positive and negative emotion categories. Further analysis suggested that valence, arousal, and sensory experience correlated with various psycholinguistic variables, including the number of syllables, number of strokes, imageability, familiarity, concreteness, frequency, and age of acquisition. Cross-language comparison indicated that native speakers of Chinese and English differ in their perception of emotional valence and arousal, largely due to cross-cultural variations associated with ecological, sociopolitical, and religious factors. This dataset will be a valuable resource for research examining the impact of emotional and sensory information on Chinese lexical processing, as well as for bilingual research investigating the interplay between language and emotion across different cultural contexts.
Journal Article
Music, language, and the brain
In the first comprehensive study of the relationship between music and language from the standpoint of cognitive neuroscience, Aniruddh D. Patel challenges the widespread belief that music and language are processed independently. This volume argues that music and language share deep and critical connections, and that comparative research provides a powerful way to study the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying these uniquely human abilities.
eBook
Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives
Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation (“not”) and intensifiers (“really”) on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., “good”) in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., “not bad” represented as “good”); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time.
Journal Article
Stereotypically thinking: Norms for stereotypical gender nouns in Polish and English
The present contribution provides norms for a database of Polish (a grammatical gender language) and English (a natural gender language) stereotypical gender and neutral nouns. A total of 317 participants rated the degree of stereotypically feminine and masculine features when presented with 240 nouns in each language. The stimuli were highly controlled for a number of psycholinguistic variables, including word frequency, the number of letters and syllables, age of acquisition, concreteness, valence, and arousal. The results of the ratings revealed that gender stereotypical features were observed in both language systems, thus suggesting that single words that do not explicitly reference any male or female characteristics can activate stereotypically feminine and masculine schemas, regardless of grammatical gender. Furthermore, the results suggested a stronger internalization of gender stereotypes among female relative to male participants as well as among sex-typed individuals, therefore pointing to the crucial role of gender and gender schema in how sensitive individuals are to gender stereotypical attributes. The norms reported in the present article aim to broaden researchers’ stimulus choices and allow for consistency across different laboratories and research projects on gender stereotype processing. The adaptation of this database to other languages or cultures could also enable a cross-cultural comparison of empirical findings on stereotype processing.
Journal Article
Critical discourse analysis and cognitive science : new perspectives on immigration discourse
This study advances a model for Critical Discourse Analysis which draws on Evolutionary Psychology and Cognitive Linguistics, applied in a critical analysis of immigration discourse. It will be of special interest to students and researchers with which to explore new perspectives in CDA.
eBook
EEG correlates of developmental dyslexia: a systematic review
Dyslexia is one of the most studied learning disorders. Despite this, its biological basis and main causes are still not fully understood. Electroencephalography (EEG) could be a powerful tool in identifying the underlying mechanisms, but knowledge of the EEG correlates of developmental dyslexia (DD) remains elusive. We aimed to systematically review the evidence on EEG correlates of DD and establish their quality. In July 2021, we carried out an online search of the PubMed and Scopus databases to identify published articles on EEG correlates in children with dyslexia aged 6 to 12 years without comorbidities. We follow the PRISMA guidelines and assess the quality using the Appraisal Tool questionnaire. Our final analysis included 49 studies (14% high quality, 63% medium, 20% low, and 2% very low). Studies differed greatly in methodology, making a summary of their results challenging. However, some points came to light. Even at rest, children with dyslexia and children in the control group exhibited differences in several EEG measures, particularly in theta and alpha frequencies; these frequencies appear to be associated with learning performance. During reading-related tasks, the differences between dyslexic and control children seem more localized in the left temporoparietal sites. The EEG activity of children with dyslexia and children in the control group differed in many aspects, both at rest and during reading-related tasks. Our data are compatible with neuroimaging studies in the same diagnostic group and expand the literature by offering new insights into functional significance.
Journal Article
Teaching to write collaborative argumentative syntheses in higher education
Writing argumentative syntheses based on multiple sources implies integrating ideas from different, often conflicting, positions. This can promote more constructive learning, especially when students undertake the task together with their peers. However, despite the importance of this activity in the university context, students generally lack the competency required. Thus, the primary objective of this research is to analyse the impact of a specific intervention programme (CPG + EICS) that combines help designed to foment collaboration with help aimed at improving the writing of argumentative syntheses, improving the quality of the university students’ work, whether undertaken individually or collaboratively. For this we designed an experimental study with one hundred and sixty participating psychology students, distributed randomly into four different intervention programmes. We then compared and contrasted the impact of the already mentioned first programme (CPG + EICS) with that of the three others in which we progressively reduced the help provided (explicit instruction with video modelling, a guide and collaborative practice). We evaluated the quality of the syntheses by examining the number of arguments and their degree of integration within the students’ texts. The results demonstrate that, to achieve the appropriate competency level, the intervention should include explicit instruction with video modelling. When this instruction combines help aimed at improving the elaboration of argumentative syntheses with help designed to foment collaboration, students integrate a higher level of contradictory information. However, to identify a high level of arguments, explicit instruction focused solely on helping students write argumentative syntheses turns out to be as effective as help directed at collaboration. In addition, after the intervention encouraging collaborative work, students successfully transfer the skills developed to their own individual writing tasks.
Journal Article