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Background: We have previously presented two educational interventions aimed to diminish causal illusions and promote critical thinking. In both cases, these interventions reduced causal illusions developed in response to active contingency learning tasks, in which participants were able to decide whether to introduce the potential cause in each of the learning trials. The reduction of causal judgments appeared to be influenced by differences in the frequency with which the participants decided to apply the potential cause, hence indicating that the intervention affected their information sampling strategies. Objective: In the present study, we investigated whether one of these interventions also reduces causal illusions when covariation information is acquired passively. Method: Forty-one psychology undergraduates received our debiasing intervention, while 31 students were assigned to a control condition. All participants completed a passive contingency learning task. Results: We found weaker causal illusions in students that participated in the debiasing intervention, compared to the control group. Conclusion: The intervention affects not only the way the participants look for new evidence, but also the way they interpret given information. Teaching implications: Our data extending previous results regarding evidence-based educational interventions aimed to promote critical thinking to situations in which we act as mere observers.

Acceptance of fake news is probably modulated by an intricate interplay of social, cultural, and political factors. In this study, we investigated whether individual-level cognitive factors related to thinking and decision making could influence the tendency to accept fake news. A group of volunteers responded to a COVID-19-related fake news discrimination scale as well as to questionnaires assessing their thinking style (reflective vs. intuitive) and thinking disposition (actively open-mindedness). Furthermore, they completed a computerized contingency learning task aimed at measuring their tendency to develop a causal illusion, a cognitive bias leading to perceive causal connections between non-contingent events. More actively open-minded and more reflective individuals presented higher fake news discrimination scores. In addition, those who developed weaker causal illusions in the contingency learning task were also more accurate at differentiating between fake and legitimate news. Actively open-minded thinking was the main contributor in a regression model predicting fake news discrimination.

Recent research has stated that early oral language acquisition difficulties are related to reading and writing difficulties. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with several dimensions of language. In this study we focus on the specific difficulties of children with DLD in spelling. We examine the impact of lexicality and length in written production of Spanish-speaking children with DLD. A total of 18 children with language difficulties (M[subscript age] = 8;4) were compared with age-matched children (M[subscript age] = 8;2). Participants completed a spelling-to-dictation task of words and pseudo-words, where length was manipulated. A digital tablet was used to collect data and obtain measures of accuracy, latencies and total writing durations. Results showed that children with DLD produced more errors, longer latencies and longer writing durations than age-matched children. Regarding accuracy, analysis of the errors shows that children in the control group produce few errors, most being substitutions, while children with DLD made more errors and of more varied categories. Moreover, they were more affected by length on writing accuracy than the control group.

Positive implications of schizotypal personality have been discussed in the literature in the last few years, higher creativity being one of them. Specifically, positive and negative schizotypy dimensions have been respectively related to higher and lower creativity levels. However, a considerable amount of null associations between these two constructs have also been reported. This heterogeneity could be due to the multidimensionality of both constructs. The aim of this study is to go deeper into the general relationship between creativity and schizotypy, disentangling the associations between specific dimensions of these two constructs. We assessed schizotypy in a sample of 154 volunteers. They also filled out creative personality and creative products questionnaires. Regression analyses showed no effect of scores in the positive dimension of schizotypy over either of the two creativity measures. Interestingly, lower scores in the negative dimension were associated with more creative products, whereas lower scores in the disorganized dimension were associated with a more creative personality. Our results point toward the need to use assessment tools tapping into the different aspects of creativity and to take into account the multidimensional nature of schizotypal personality in order to clarify the relationship between these two complex constructs.

Among cognitive factors that can influence the endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs, our study focuses on proneness to false memory generation. In this preregistered study, we presented 170 fluent English speakers residing in the USA with a misinformation task aimed at generating false memories. In this task, they first completed an event encoding stage, in which two events were narrated through sequentially presented pictures. One day later, they read a series of sentences relating the same events but which included several inaccurate descriptions aimed at producing a misinformation effect. Finally, we measured the influence of the misinformation manipulation over false memory generation. After completing the misinformation task, participants responded to a questionnaire measuring pseudoscientific beliefs. Our results showed a positive correlation between pseudoscience endorsement and false memory rates, which indicates that the latter might be a key factor influencing susceptibility to pseudoscience. To our knowledge, this is the first study showing a link between the tendency to believe in pseudoscience and variability regarding proneness to develop false memories. Practical implications for the design of new interventions to effectively reduce pseudoscientific beliefs and their negative impact on our society are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Children with a diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) present impaired oral comprehension. According to the simple view of reading, general amodal linguistic capacity accounts for both oral and reading comprehension. Considering this, we should expect SLI children to display a reading comprehension deficit. However, previous research regarding the association between reading disorders and SLI has yielded inconsistent results. Aims: To study the influence of prior oral comprehension competence over reading comprehension during the first years of reading acquisition of bilingual Catalan-Spanish children with SLI (ages 7-8). Methods & Procedures: We assessed groups of bilingual Catalan-Spanish SLI and matched control children at ages 7 and 8 with standardized reading comprehension tasks including grammatical structures, sentence and text comprehension. Early oral competence and prior non-verbal intelligence were also measured and introduced into regression analyses with the participants' reading results in order to state the relation between the comprehension of oral and written material. Outcomes & Results: Although we found no significant differences between the scores of our two participant groups in the reading tasks, data regarding their early oral competence, but not non-verbal intelligence measures, significantly influence their reading outcome. Conclusions & Implications: The results extend our knowledge regarding the course of literacy acquisition of children with SLI and provide evidence in support of the theories that assume common linguistic processes to be responsible for both oral and reading comprehension.

Background: We have previously presented two educational interventions aimed to diminish causal illusions and promote critical thinking. In both cases, these interventions reduced causal illusions developed in response to active contingency learning tasks, in which participants were able to decide whether to introduce the potential cause in each of the learning trials. The reduction of causal judgments appeared to be influenced by differences in the frequency with which the participants decided to apply the potential cause, hence indicating that the intervention affected their information sampling strategies. Objective: In the present study, we investigated whether one of these interventions also reduces causal illusions when covariation information is acquired passively. Method: Forty-one psychology undergraduates received our debiasing intervention, while 31 students were assigned to a control condition. All participants completed a passive contingency learning task. Results: We found weaker causal illusions in students that participated in the debiasing intervention, compared to the control group. Conclusion: The intervention affects not only the way the participants look for new evidence, but also the way they interpret given information. Teaching implications: Our data extending previous results regarding evidence-based educational interventions aimed to promote critical thinking to situations in which we act as mere observers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has stated that early oral language acquisition difficulties are related to reading and writing difficulties. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with several dimensions of language. In this study we focus on the specific difficulties of children with DLD in spelling. We examine the impact of lexicality and length in written production of Spanish‐speaking children with DLD. A total of 18 children with language difficulties (Mage = 8;4) were compared with age‐matched children (Mage = 8;2). Participants completed a spelling‐to‐dictation task of words and pseudo‐words, where length was manipulated. A digital tablet was used to collect data and obtain measures of accuracy, latencies and total writing durations. Results showed that children with DLD produced more errors, longer latencies and longer writing durations than age‐matched children. Regarding accuracy, analysis of the errors shows that children in the control group produce few errors, most being substitutions, while children with DLD made more errors and of more varied categories. Moreover, they were more affected by length on writing accuracy than the control group. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject: Children with language difficulties are more likely to present reading difficulties. There are fewer studies analysing the impact of oral language difficulties in writing skills. What this paper adds to existing knowledge: The study suggests that children with oral language difficulties also have impairments in spelling, impacting on accuracy, duration and reaction time, possibly related to poor phonological working memory. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work?: This study highlights the need to emphasize early oral intervention and language‐related processing skills to help prevent written language difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the "reduced emotionality hypothesis", we are less emotionally driven when reasoning in a foreign language (FL) than in a native language (NL). We examined whether this foreign language effect (FLe) extends to the way we perceive motivational quotes (i.e., encouraging slogans conveying a profound and inspirational message): we expected FL participants to rate motivational quotes as less profound than NL participants. Strikingly, we observed the opposite: FL participants found motivational quotes more profound than NL participants, even after controlling for potential confounders (e.g., IQ, reasoning style). Both FL and NL participants gave similarly low profundity ratings to pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (i.e., meaningless sentences sounding profound), indicating that the message must be meaningful for the FLe to arise. We propose that, like space or time, language could promote psychological distance. This favours a focus on the background of a message to indicate profoundness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acceptance of fake news is probably modulated by an intricate interplay of social, cultural, and political factors. In this study, we investigated whether individual‐level cognitive factors related to thinking and decision making could influence the tendency to accept fake news. A group of volunteers responded to a COVID19‐related fake news discrimination scale as well as to questionnaires assessing their thinking style (reflective vs. intuitive) and thinking disposition (actively open‐mindedness). Furthermore, they completed a computerized contingency learning task aimed at measuring their tendency to develop a causal illusion, a cognitive bias leading to perceive causal connections between non‐contingent events. More actively open‐minded and more reflective individuals presented higher fake news discrimination scores. In addition, those who developed weaker causal illusions in the contingency learning task were also more accurate at differentiating between fake and legitimate news. Actively open‐minded thinking was the main contributor in a regression model predicting fake news discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of pseudoscientific beliefs in our societies negatively influences relevant areas such as health or education. Causal illusions have been proposed as a possible cognitive basis for the development of such beliefs. The aim of our study was to further investigate the specific nature of the association between causal illusion and endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs through an active contingency detection task. In this task, volunteers are given the opportunity to manipulate the presence or absence of a potential cause in order to explore its possible influence over the outcome. Responses provided are assumed to reflect both the participants' information interpretation strategies as well as their information search strategies. Following a previous study investigating the association between causal illusion and the presence of paranormal beliefs, we expected that the association between causal illusion and pseudoscientific beliefs would disappear when controlling for the information search strategy (i.e., the proportion of trials in which the participants decided to present the potential cause). Volunteers with higher pseudoscientific beliefs also developed stronger causal illusions in active contingency detection tasks. This association appeared irrespective of the participants with more pseudoscientific beliefs showing (Experiment 2) or not (Experiment 1) differential search strategies. Our results suggest that both information interpretation and search strategies could be significantly associated to the development of pseudoscientific (and paranormal) beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Positive implications of schizotypal personality have been discussed in the literature in the last few years, higher creativity being one of them. Specifically, positive and negative schizotypy dimensions have been respectively related to higher and lower creativity levels. However, a considerable amount of null associations between these two constructs have also been reported. This heterogeneity could be due to the multidimensionality of both constructs. The aim of this study is to go deeper into the general relationship between creativity and schizotypy, disentangling the associations between specific dimensions of these two constructs. We assessed schizotypy in a sample of 154 volunteers. They also filled out creative personality and creative products questionnaires. Regression analyses showed no effect of scores in the positive dimension of schizotypy over either of the two creativity measures. Interestingly, lower scores in the negative dimension were associated with more creative products, whereas lower scores in the disorganized dimension were associated with a more creative personality. Our results point toward the need to use assessment tools tapping into the different aspects of creativity and to take into account the multidimensional nature of schizotypal personality in order to clarify the relationship between these two complex constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Causal illusion has been proposed as a cognitive mediator of pseudoscientific beliefs. However, previous studies have only tested the association between this cognitive bias and a closely related but different type of unwarranted beliefs, those related to superstition and paranormal phenomena. Participants (n = 225) responded to a novel questionnaire of pseudoscientific beliefs designed for this study. They also completed a contingency learning task in which a possible cause, infusion intake, and a desired effect, headache remission, were actually non‐contingent. Volunteers with higher scores on the questionnaire also presented stronger causal illusion effects. These results support the hypothesis that causal illusions might play a fundamental role in the endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term schizotypy refers to a group of stable personality traits with attributes similar to symptoms of schizophrenia, usually classified in terms of positive, negative or cognitive disorganization symptoms. The observation of increased spreading of semantic activation in individuals with schizotypal traits has led to the hypothesis that thought disorder, one of the characteristics of cognitive disorganization, stems from semantic disturbances. Nevertheless, it is still not clear under which specific circumstances (i.e., automatic or controlled processing, direct or indirect semantic relation) schizotypy affects semantic priming or whether it does affect it at all. We conducted two semantic priming studies with volunteers varying in schizotypy, one with directly related prime-target pairs and another with indirectly related pairs. Our participants completed a lexical decision task with related and unrelated pairs presented at short (250 ms) and long (750 ms) stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Then, they responded to the brief versions of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences, both of which include measures of cognitive disorganization. Bayesian mixed-effects models indicated expected effects of SOA and semantic relatedness, as well as an interaction between relatedness and directness (greater priming effects for directly related pairs). Even though our analyses demonstrated good sensitivity, we observed no influence of cognitive disorganization over semantic priming. Our study provides no compelling evidence that schizotypal symptoms, specifically those associated with the cognitive disorganization dimension, are rooted in an increased spreading of semantic activation in priming tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enhanced spreading of semantic activation has been hypothesized to underlie some of the most significant symptoms of schizotypal personality, like thought disorder, odd speech, delusion, or magical thinking. We applied the Deese/Roediger-McDermott false memory task to the study of semantic activation in a group of 123 non-clinical individuals varying in the three dimensions of schizotypal personality: positive, negative and disorganized schizotypy. In the study phase, we presented them with lists composed of words semantically associated to unpresented critical words. Then, they responded to a recognition questionnaire including previously presented words and critical unpresented lures, as well as weakly related and unrelated unpresented lures. Participants rated their confidence in recognizing each word. They also filled in a standardized schizotypal personality questionnaire. Confirming the false memory effect, recognition ratings provided in response to critical words were higher than those produced for both weakly related and unrelated items. Crucially, scores in the positive dimension increased recognition percentages and confidence ratings for weakly related and unrelated lures. This study indicates that high levels of positive schizotypy might influence the tendency to accept false memories of unrelated unpresented material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of emotional content on language processing remains unclear. Previous research conducted in English has obtained contradictory results regarding the effects of valence on word recognition. Whereas some studies indicate that valence predicts recognition latencies such that negative words are processed more slowly than positive words, other studies indicate facilitation of responses to emotional (both positive and negative) compared to neutral words. The authors examined the influence of valence and arousal on word recognition reaction time (RT) using large-scale word naming and lexical decision data-sets in Spanish. They found that linear mixed-effects model estimates revealed a valence but not an arousal effect on reading latencies. The influence of valence was better captured by a graded (RTs to positive words < neutral < negative) than by a categorical (positive < negative) valence effect. A categorical emotional versus neutral effect was not reliably observed. In an advance on previous research, the authors' analyses showed that the valence effect is substantially more prominent in lexical decision than in pronunciation. These results mirror some of those reported previously in English, adding evidence to support their validity, and demonstrating important parallels in word recognition processes in orthographically shallow as well as deep languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We carried out an experiment using a conventional causal learning task but extending the number of learning trials participants were exposed to. Participants in the standard training group were exposed to 48 learning trials before being asked about the potential causal relationship under examination, whereas for participants in the long training group the length of training was extended to 288 trials. In both groups, the event acting as the potential cause had zero correlation with the occurrence of the outcome, but both the outcome density and the cause density were high, therefore providing a breeding ground for the emergence of a causal illusion. In contradiction to the predictions of associative models such the Rescorla-Wagner model, we found moderate evidence against the hypothesis that extending the learning phase alters the causal illusion. However, assessing causal impressions recurrently did weaken participants' causal illusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideally, decisions regarding one’s health should be made after assessing the objective probabilities of relevant outcomes. Nevertheless, previous beliefs and emotional reactions also have a role in decision-making. Furthermore, the comprehension of probabilities is commonly affected by the presentation format, and by numeracy. This study aimed to assess the extent to which the influence of these factors might vary between different medical conditions. A sample of university students were presented with two health scenarios containing statistical information on the prevalence of breast cancer and hypertension either through icon arrays (N = 71) or natural frequencies (N = 72). They also received information regarding a preventive measure (mammogram/low-sodium diet) and the likelihood of a positive mammogram or a richsodium diet either when suffering or not suffering from the disease. Before seeing the data, participants rated the severity of the disease and the inconvenience of the preventive measure. After reading the health scenario, participants had to rate its difficulty, and how worrisome it was. They had also to rate the prior probability of suffering from this medical condition, and the posterior probability of it, provided a positive mammogram or a rich-sodium diet. Finally, they rated the extent to which they would recommend the preventive measures. All the rates used the same 1 (little)-8 (a great deal) scale. Participants’ numeracy was also assessed. The scenarios differed significantly in perceived severity and worry, with the cancer scenario obtaining higher scores. Importantly, regression analyses showed that the recommendations in the two health scenarios depended on different variables. A model taking into consideration severity and worry rates best explained decisions in the cancer scenario; in contrast, in the hypertension scenario the model that best explained the recommendations comprised both the posterior probability estimate and the severity rate. Neither numeracy nor presentation format affected recommendation but both affected difficulty, worrying and probability rates. We conclude that previous perceptions of the severity of a health condition modulate the use of probabilistic information for decision-making. The roles of presentation format and numeracy in enabling patients to understand statistical information are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive biases such as causal illusions have been related to paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs and, thus, pose a real threat to the development of adequate critical thinking abilities. We aimed to reduce causal illusions in undergraduates by means of an educational intervention combining training-in-bias and training-in-rules techniques. First, participants directly experienced situations that tend to induce the Barnum effect and the confirmation bias. Thereafter, these effects were explained and examples of their influence over everyday life were provided. Compared to a control group, participants who received the intervention showed diminished causal illusions in a contingency learning task and a decrease in the precognition dimension of a paranormal belief scale. Overall, results suggest that evidence-based educational interventions like the one presented here could be used to significantly improve critical thinking skills in our students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has studied the relationship between political ideology and cognitive biases, such as the tendency of conservatives to form stronger illusory correlations between negative infrequent behaviors and minority groups. We further explored these findings by studying the relation between illusory correlation and moral values. According to the moral foundations theory, liberals and conservatives differ in the relevance they concede to different moral dimensions: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Whereas liberals consistently endorse the Care and Fairness foundations more than the Loyalty, Authority and Purity foundations, conservatives tend to adhere to the five foundations alike. In the present study, a group of participants took part in a standard illusory correlation task in which they were presented with randomly ordered descriptions of either desirable or undesirable behaviors attributed to individuals belonging to numerically different majority and minority groups. Although the proportion of desirable and undesirable behaviors was the same in the two groups, participants attributed a higher frequency of undesirable behaviors to the minority group, thus showing the expected illusory correlation effect. Moreover, this effect was specifically associated to our participants’ scores in the Loyalty subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. These results emphasize the role of the Loyalty moral foundation in the formation of attitudes towards minorities among conservatives. Our study points out the moral system as a useful fine-grained framework to explore the complex interaction between basic cognitive processes and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Children with a diagnosis of specific language impairment (SLI) present impaired oral comprehension. According to the simple view of reading, general amodal linguistic capacity accounts for both oral and reading comprehension. Considering this, we should expect SLI children to display a reading comprehension deficit. However, previous research regarding the association between reading disorders and SLI has yielded inconsistent results. Aims: To study the influence of prior oral comprehension competence over reading comprehension during the first years of reading acquisition of bilingual Catalan-Spanish children with SLI (ages 7-8). Methods & Procedures: We assessed groups of bilingual Catalan-Spanish SLI and matched control children at ages 7 and 8 with standardized reading comprehension tasks including grammatical structures, sentence and text comprehension. Early oral competence and prior non-verbal intelligence were also measured and introduced into regression analyses with the participants' reading results in order to state the relation between the comprehension of oral and written material. Outcomes & Results: Although we found no significant differences between the scores of our two participant groups in the reading tasks, data regarding their early oral competence, but not non-verbal intelligence measures, significantly influence their reading outcome. Conclusions & Implications: The results extend our knowledge regarding the course of literacy acquisition of children with SLI and provide evidence in support of the theories that assume common linguistic processes to be responsible for both oral and reading comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different psycholinguistic theories have suggested the importance of verb semantics in rapidly anticipating upcoming information during real-time sentence comprehension. To date, no study has examined if children use verbs to predict arguments and adjuncts in sentence comprehension using children with specific language impairment (SLI). Twenty-five children with SLI (aged 5 years and 3 months to 8 years and 2 months), 25 age-matched controls (aged 5 years and 3 months to 8 years and 2 months), 25 MLU-w controls (aged 3 years and 3 months to 7 years and 1 month), and 31 adults took part in the study. The eye movements of participants were monitored while they heard 24 sentences, such as El hombre lee con atención un cuento en la cama (translation: The man carefully reads a storybook in bed), in the presence of four depicted objects, one of which was the target (storybook), another, the competitor (bed), and another two, distracters (wardrobe and grape). The proportion of looks revealed that, when the meaning of the verb was retrieved, the upcoming argument and adjunct referents were rapidly anticipated. However, the proportion of looks at the theme, source/goal and instrument referents were significantly higher than the looks at the locatives. This pattern was found in adults as well as children with and without language impairment. The present results suggest that, in terms of sentence comprehension, the ability to understand verb information is not severely impaired in children with SLI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the dual coding theory, differences in the ease of retrieval between concrete and abstract words are related to the exclusive dependence of abstract semantics on linguistic information. Argument structure can be considered a measure of the complexity of the linguistic contexts that accompany a verb. If the retrieval of abstract verbs relies more on the linguistic codes they are associated to, we could expect a larger effect of argument structure for the processing of abstract verbs. In this study, sets of length- and frequency-matched verbs including 40 intransitive verbs, 40 transitive verbs taking simple complements, and 40 transitive verbs taking sentential complements were presented in separate lexical and grammatical decision tasks. Half of the verbs were concrete and half were abstract. Similar results were obtained in the two tasks, with significant effects of imageability and transitivity. However, the interaction between these two variables was not significant. These results conflict with hypotheses assuming a stronger reliance of abstract semantics on linguistic codes. In contrast, our data are in line with theories that link the ease of retrieval with availability and robustness of semantic information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grammatical effects in picture-word interference experiments have been argued to reflect grammatical constraints during lexicalisation. Alternative views hold that those effects derive from the coincidence of semantic and grammatical differences between candidates. We present three experiments conducted in Spanish. Semantic relatedness between target and distracters (related or unrelated), as well as grammatical class (nouns or verbs) and semantic domain (objects or actions) of the distracters were manipulated in infinitive or inflected action naming tasks. Whereas related action-words, but not object-nouns, produced longer reaction times irrespective of their grammatical class in the infinitive condition, only related verbs slowed latencies in the inflected condition. Our results suggest that speech production relies on the exclusion of candidate responses that do not fulfil task-pertinent criteria like membership in the appropriate semantic domain or grammatical class. Taken together, these findings are explained by a response-exclusion account of speech output. This and alternative hypotheses are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Las estrategias que emplean los aprendices lectores dependen en buena medida de la consistencia de los sistemas ortográficos pues, mientras en las ortografías transparentes los aprendices se basan más en estrategias subléxicas, en las opacas tienen que recurrir a un uso flexible de estrategias de tipo subléxico y léxico. No obstante, algunas investigaciones recientes en ortografías transparentes han destacado el uso de estrategias léxicas ya en las primeras fases del aprendizaje. El objetivo de este artículo fue determinar si los aprendices españoles emplean diferentes estrategias en las primeras etapas o mantienen únicamente una lectura subléxica basada en las reglas de conversión grafema-fonema. Para ello se aplicó un diseño basado en bloques a una muestra de 37 alumnos de 7 y 9 años de edad en una tarea de lectura de palabras. Los análisis de modelos lineales de efectos mixtos mostraron un efecto de cambio de estrategia ya a los 7 años. Se confirma así que desde las primeras etapas los aprendices de ortografías transparentes también emplean la vía léxica y recurren a la flexibilidad en el uso de estrategias. Se discuten las consecuencias de los resultados en la concepción del aprendizaje de las ortografías transparentes.Strategies used by reading learners depend largely on the consistency of orthographic systems. Thus, whereas learners of languages with transparent orthographies rely mainly on sublexical strategies, learners of deep orthographic systems have to resort to the use of flexible lexical and sublexical strategies in order to achieve a good command of word recognition. Nevertheless, some recent research on transparent orthography have pointed out that lexical strategies are used from the early stages of learning. The aim of this study was to determine whether learners of Spanish –a transparent language– alternate between different lexical and sublexical strategies, or stick to sublexical reading based on grapheme-phoneme conversion rules only. A block-based reading experiment was conducted with 37 students aged 7 and 9 years. Mixed-effects analyses showed an effect of strategy change even at age 7. We thus confirm that from the first stages, learners of transparent orthographies also employ the lexical route and resort to a flexible use of strategies. The implications of these results in the conception of learning transparent orthographic systems are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a considerable number of studies have tried to establish which characteristics of objects and their names predict the responses of patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in the picture-naming task. The frequency of use of words and their age of acquisition (AoA) have been implicated as two of the most influential variables, with naming being best preserved for objects with high-frequency, early-acquired names. The present study takes a fresh look at the predictors of naming success in Spanish and English AD patients using a range of measures of word frequency and AoA along with visual complexity, imageability, and word length as predictors. Analyses using generalized linear mixed modelling found that naming accuracy was better predicted by AoA ratings taken from older adults than conventional ratings from young adults. Older frequency measures based on written language samples predicted accuracy better than more modern measures based on the frequencies of words in film subtitles. Replacing adult frequency with an estimate of cumulative (lifespan) frequency did not reduce the impact of AoA. Semantic error rates were predicted by both written word frequency and senior AoA while null response errors were only predicted by frequency. Visual complexity, imageability, and word length did not predict naming accuracy or errors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The search for early cognitive markers of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) has focused on episodic memory and spatiotemporal orientation. However, recent research suggests that semantic memory is also impaired in the preclinical stages of AD. Methods: Age- and education-matched groups of participants with AD, mild cognitive impairment, and subjective memory complaints and healthy controls were assessed with 16 cognitive tests encompassing attention, orientation, episodic and semantic memory, and language tasks. Results: The battery correctly distinguished AD patients from healthy seniors in 92% of the cases. Three semantic memory-based tasks turned out to be particularly powerful for this purpose. Conclusion: Our results suggest that semantic memory tasks should be included in the battery of tests for the evaluation of cognitively impaired patients. Copyright © 2009 S. Karger AG, Basel [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]