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• This study investigates the role of pattern understanding in Chinese kindergarten children's word reading. • Pattern understanding makes a unique contribution to subsequent Chinese single- and double-character word reading. • The effects of pattern understanding are mediated by phonological awareness. • The direct effect of pattern understanding remains significant on Chinese double-character reading. The present study investigated the direct effect of pattern understanding on Chinese word reading, and the indirect effects via metalinguistic awareness. Participants were 138 children (73 boys, mean age = 59.60 months at the first wave of assessment) recruited from four kindergartens in Hong Kong. They were assessed twice with an interval of 14 months. In the first wave of assessment, which took place in the spring term in the second year of kindergarten, children were assessed regarding pattern understanding, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and orthographic awareness. Working memory, spatial visualization, and receptive vocabulary were also assessed as control variables. In the second wave, which took place at the end of the third kindergarten year, Chinese word reading was measured using two tasks, i.e. single-character word reading and double-character word reading. Results of a multivariate multiple regression showed that pattern understanding made a unique contribution to subsequent Chinese single- and double-character word reading independently of spatial visualization, working memory, vocabulary, and demographic variables. Results of the mediation model showed that the unique effects of pattern understanding were mediated by phonological awareness. The direct effect of pattern understanding remained significant on Chinese double-character reading. The findings highlight the importance of pattern understanding in Chinese word reading for Chinese kindergarten children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Phonological awareness in kindergarten plays a crucial role in predicting later word problem-solving abilities in mathematics. • Visual-spatial skills, specifically the visual-spatial sketchpad, have an indirect influence on multi-digit arithmetic performance through their impact on simple addition skills. • Sustained attention in kindergarten contributes to word problem performance in later grades through its influence on number identification skills. This longitudinal study aimed to investigate the differential contributions of phonological processing and spatial attention skills to mathematical performance in Chinese children. The study involved the assessment of 184 children's phonological awareness, phonological memory, rapid automatized naming (RAN), visual-spatial sketchpad, and sustained attention during their kindergarten. Three years later, the same children were evaluated on tasks related to simple addition, non-symbolic comparison, number identification, complex word problems, and multi-digit arithmetic. Through path analysis, the study revealed that phonological awareness in kindergarten directly predicted later word problem-solving abilities. Additionally, simple addition mediated the relationship between visual-spatial working memory and multi-digit arithmetic performance, while number identification mediated the relationship between sustained attention and complex word problems. However, number processing skills did not mediate the relationship between phonological processing and mathematics performance. These findings contribute to our understanding of the complex interplay between visual-spatial skills, phonological processing skills, number processing, and mathematics performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Explore a machine-learning approach that isolates Phoneme-related Neural-Congruency (PRNC) components during Phoneme Elision. • PRNCs capture electroencephalographic neural mechanisms differentiating children with dyslexia (DYS) and controls (CAC); DYS exhibit reduced congruency. • PRNCs inform on the neural origins of Baddeley's working memory model and the unitary structure of phonological processing. We explored neural components in Electroencephalography (EEG) signals during a phonological processing task to assess (a) the neural origins of Baddeley's working-memory components contributing to phonological processing, (b) the unitary structure of phonological processing and (c) the neural differences between children with dyslexia (DYS) and controls (CAC). EEG data were collected from sixty children (half with dyslexia) while performing the initial- and final- phoneme elision task. We explored a novel machine-learning-based approach to identify the neural components in EEG elicited in response to the two conditions and capture differences between DYS and CAC. Our method identifies two sets of phoneme-related neural congruency components capturing neural activations distinguishing DYS and CAC across conditions. Neural congruency components capture the underlying neural mechanisms that drive the relationship between phonological deficits and dyslexia and provide insights into the phonological loop and visual-sketchpad dimensions in Baddeley's model at the neural level. They also confirm the unitary structure of phonological awareness with EEG data. Our findings provide novel insights into the neural origins of the phonological processing differences in children with dyslexia, the unitary structure of phonological awareness, and further verify Baddeley's model as a theoretical framework for phonological processing and dyslexia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Games improved preschool children's problem solving, letter-word recognition and phonological awareness. • No effects were observed on target science vocabulary. • Teachers perceived the games as engaging, easy to play, and aligned with curriculum goals. • Results extend research about games in preschool beyond mathematics. • Results show that structured games are feasible and useful in adverse classroom contexts. This paper reports results of an experimental study that assessed the efficacy and teachers' perception of feasibility of a set of structured games for promoting curriculum learning goals in 12 prekindergarten and kindergarten classrooms in Chile. We developed four structured games aligned with the Chilean curriculum learning goals, and that were adequate to the material and human conditions of low-income classrooms in Chile. Six classrooms implemented the games in the course of 6 months, and the other six received them at the end of the intervention. One-hundred-and-twenty-one children were evaluated in letter-word identification, math problem solving, phonological awareness, and science word knowledge at the beginning and end of the school year. Head teachers were interviewed about the games' feasibility in their classrooms and their ability to engage the children. Multilevel regression results show that children in classrooms that implemented the games increased more than children in no-game classrooms in their letter-word identification, math problem-solving, and phonological awareness scores, controlling for grade level, entry receptive vocabulary, and entry executive function. Head teachers found the games engaging and fun for the children. They reported few difficulties in implementing the games in authentic classroom conditions. Results are analyzed regarding contributions to extant literature on playful learning and games, as well as implications for the successful use of playful methodologies for the promotion of academic learning goals in preschool classrooms in low- and middle-income countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is an autosomal dominant neurocutaneous syndrome that affects multiple organ systems resulting in widespread symptoms, including cognitive deficits. In addition to the criteria required for an NF1 diagnosis, approximately 70% of children with NF1 present with Unidentified Bright Objects (UBOs) or Focal Areas of Signal Intensity, which are hyperintense bright spots seen on T2-weighted magnetic resonance images and seen more prominently on FLAIR magnetic resonance images (Sabol et al., 2011). Current findings relating the presence/absence, quantities, sizes, and locations of these bright spots to cognitive abilities are mixed. To contribute to and hopefully disentangle some of these mixed findings, we explored potential relationships between metrics related to UBOs and cognitive abilities in a sample of 28 children and adolescents with NF1 (M=12.52 years; SD=3.18 years; 16 male). We used the Lesion Segmentation Tool (LST) to automatically detect and segment the UBOs. The LST was able to qualitatively and quantitatively reliably detect UBOs in images of children with NF1. Using these automatically detected and segmented lesions, we found that while controlling for age, biological sex, perceptual IQ, study, and scanner, "total UBO volume", defined as the sum of all the voxels representing all of the UBOs for each participant, helped explain differences in word reading, phonological awareness, and visuospatial skills. These findings contribute to the emerging NF1 literature and help parse the specific deficits that children with NF1 have, to then help improve the efficacy of reading interventions for children with NF1. • Children with Neurofibromatosis type 1 often present with Unidentified Bright Objects (UBOs). • The Lesion Segmentation Tool can be used to segment UBOs. • In previous literature, findings linking UBOs to cognition are inconsistent. • UBO volume relates to word reading, phonological awareness, visuospatial, and language skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• All the involved linguistic skills had effects on QNC Levels I and III, whereas only vocabulary yielded support for QNC Level II. • Working memory may bear domain-general nature in their contributions to various QNC levels. • The effect of QNC Level IIa on QNC Level III increased significantly with age. • The impact of QNC Level I on QNC Level IIb increased as the proportion of girls increased in the sample. This meta-analysis systematically investigated the pathways to the Quantity-Number Competencies (QNC) model based on 78 studies involving 21,860 children. The QNC model assumes children acquire early numeracy via three developmental levels: QNC Level I (Basic numerical skills), QNC Level IIa (imprecise quantity to number-word linkage) and QNC Level IIb (precise quantity to number-word linkage), and QNC Level III (relations between numerical quantities). Findings showed (1) all the involved linguistic skills had effects on QNC Levels I and III, whereas only vocabulary yielded support for QNC Level II; (2) phonological and visuospatial working memory made comparable contributions to all QNC levels; (3) most paths within QNC stayed stable with development, with the path coefficient from QNC Level IIa to QNC Level III increased significantly with age; and (4) the path coefficient from QNC Level I to QNC Level IIb increased as the proportion of girls increased in the sample. These findings suggest the phonological awareness might primarily support representations for number words and number facts, whereas vocabulary might facilitate the linkage between number words and quantities. The similar effects of different working memory on QNC levels suggested working memory's general storage and processing abilities underlie early numeracy development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We examined the cognitive-linguistic predictors of early literacy development in Chinese and Japanese Kanji. • Phonological awareness was more strongly associated with word reading in Japanese than in Chinese. • RAN was more strongly associated with word reading in Chinese than in Japanese. • Morphological awareness was associated with literacy skills in both languages. • The nature of scripts modulates the relations between cognitive-linguistic skills and literacy skills even among logographic orthographies. We examined the cognitive-linguistic predictors of early literacy development and the extent to which they were similar or different across two logographic orthographies (Chinese and Japanese Kanji). Data from 167 Hong Kong Chinese children and 169 Japanese children were used. Children were tested on cognitive-linguistic skills (phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming [RAN], morphological awareness, vocabulary) in Grade 1 and literacy skills (word reading and spelling) in Grades 1 and 2. Whereas the association of phonological awareness with word reading was significantly stronger in Japanese than in Chinese, the association of RAN with word reading was stronger in Chinese. Morphological awareness predicted literacy skills in both languages. Moreover, mediation analysis revealed that the effects of the cognitive-linguistic skills on later literacy skills were fully mediated by early literacy skills, except that morphological awareness directly predicted later spelling in Japanese. These findings suggest that the nature of writing systems can modulate the relationship between cognitive-linguistic skills and literacy skills, even when they share the logographic nature and use the same graphic symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phonological instruction, comprising phonemic awareness and phonics training, has been demonstrated to be effective in improving the reading ability of English L1 speakers. In terms of the EFL context, although phonological instruction is receiving attention, most studies have focused on European EFL learners, leaving their Eastern counterparts an under-researched area. European and East Asian languages have different characteristics, with the logographic nature of East Asian languages making it more challenging for East Asian learners to learn English. The questions, therefore, remain how phonological instruction is implemented and whether phonological instruction is effective in East Asia. Motivated by these questions, the current scoping review aims to provide an overview of phonological instruction used in East Asia, and provide further information on instructional components and impacts on reading for second/foreign language teachers. The present study reviewed 24 studies from 21 articles. Findings suggest that (a) most included studies were conducted among Chinese L1 primary school learners; (b) the most employed research design is quasi-experimental pre-post-test; (c) phonemic awareness training does not necessarily combine with phonics training in phonological instruction; (d) phonological instruction improves East Asian EFL learners' code-related, oral language, and reading comprehension skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As social media influencers have become a global phenomenon, brands are channeling substantial resources into influencer marketing campaigns. Researchers are keenly exploring diverse content factors that wield influence in online social spheres, including linguistic elements. However, uncertainties persist regarding their association with digital consumer engagement. To bridge this knowledge gap, our study takes a comprehensive approach to identify prevalent linguistic styles employed by social media influencers, integrating multiple linguistic variables. We collected data and audio transcripts from over 11,000 videos featuring 151 top YouTube influencers. Native language processing and automated coding were then employed to extract linguistic variables from the videos. Utilizing a data dimensionality reduction technique (t-SNE), we streamlined their complexity and categorized them to unearth patterns in linguistic style within the sample. Consequently, we proposed an original taxonomy comprising seven linguistic styles used by influencers: videos of expert advice , storytelling , intimate experiences , struggle and overcoming , motivation and guidance , coaching and mentoring , and middle-of-the-road videos. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that each linguistic style correlates with varying levels of digital consumer engagement. These findings not only enhance the existing body of knowledge on influencer marketing and social influence but also offer important insights for influencers and marketing practitioners on selecting the most effective linguistic style for content creation to drive consumer engagement. • Identifies seven linguistic styles of social media influencers' videos on YouTube. • +11,000 videos were analyzed by machine learning techniques and clustering analysis. • Shows the linguistic styles' effect of influencer videos on consumer engagement. • Contributes to influencer marketing, social influence, and opinion leaders literature. • Guides influencers and marketing practitioners on how to communicate strategically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Narrative tasks provide sensitive measures in detecting language disorders and are fundamental for linguistic evaluation in children with language fragilities. • The literature on children with CIs has shown the predictive role of a composite measure of receptive language on narrative abilities. • Both children with CIs and DLD display fragilities in narration, both in the morphological and syntactic components. • Fragilities in the production of morphological elements are different among the groups. • Morphosyntactic comprehension predicted the number of pronouns produced only in the group with typical hearing. The narrative skills of children with cochlear implants (CIs) are fragile, but the factors at play and whether these difficulties could be similar to those detected in language impairment are not clear. The present study aims to assess, at the microstructural level, narrative skills, comparing children with CIs with children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) or Typical Development (TD). Furthermore, the relationship between verbal (lexical and morphosyntactic) comprehension and narrative skills across groups is investigated. The narratives of 19 children with CIs (M age = 62.42 months, SD = 6.83), 13 children with DLD (M age = 65.38 months, SD = 4.27), and 18 preschool children with TD (M age = 63.67 months, SD = 4.31) were assessed in a standardized task. Articles, prepositions, pronouns, gender and number agreement, accuracy in the use of verbs, and number of arguments in each sentence were analysed. Lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension were also assessed. Performance was compared across groups using ANOVAs or Kruskal–Wallis tests. The role of lexical and morphosyntactic comprehension in predicting each morphological and syntactic element in the narrative task was examined using linear regressions. Data analysis showed that both children with CIs and DLD had fragilities in narration, both in the morphological and syntactic components. Although some differences between children with CIs and those with DLD emerged in descriptive analyses, these were not statistically significant. Regressions showed that morphosyntactic comprehension predicted the number of pronouns produced only in the TD group. The scarce differences between CI and DLD groups and the absence of an effect of morphosyntactic comprehension on pronoun production may be due to their low production of these elements in the narrative task and/or to a difficulty in managing pronouns in an expressive task regardless of their ability to comprehend them. Potential implications of these results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with cochlear implants exhibit lower phonological awareness and sound discrimination skills compared to their normal-hearing peers. However, music training has been shown to have a positive effect on speech discrimination and awareness skills. Our study included 23 cochlear implant users and 23 normal hearing participants aged 5–6 years with language skills. The aim was to observe the effect of a music-integrated phonological awareness program on cochlear implant users and to compare the phonological awareness skills of children with cochlear implants before and after online training with their normal hearing peers. Results showed that the trained study group scored higher on the Scale of Early Childhood Phonological Awareness (PASECP) after training than the control group (p < 0.05). In addition, SMRT scores increased between before and after training in the study group, and Mismatch Negativity (MMN) amplitudes increased and latencies decreased as a result of training (p < 0.05). The study suggests that phonological awareness training integrated with music can effectively improve the phonological awareness skills of children with cochlear implants and has the potential to enable them to achieve phonological awareness levels similar to or even better than their normal hearing peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigated first- (L1) and second-language (L2) vocabulary and phonology, and selective attention, as precursors of L2 early literacy in bilingual kindergartners with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). We compared typically developing (TD) and DLD bilinguals with TD/DLD monolinguals (n = 157, M AGE = 3;8), and examined how TD/DLD bilinguals' precursor abilities predicted L2 phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming (RAN), and letter knowledge. The precursor variables were assessed during preschool, including L1/L2 Dutch and L1 Turkish/Polish. Two years later, we assessed L2 Dutch early literacy. The results showed that at preschool, DLD bilinguals scored lower than the other groups on L1 vocabulary and L1–L2 phonology. By kindergarten, bilingual and DLD groups had poorer Dutch rhyme and RAN than monolingual and TD groups, respectively. Combined L1–L2 phonological skills predicted phonological awareness and RAN among TD/DLD bilinguals. We conclude that poorer L1–L2 phonology in DLD bilingual preschoolers poses a risk for their L2 early literacy at kindergarten. • DLD bilinguals score below TD peers in preschool L1 vocabulary, and L1 and L2 phonology (word and nonword production). • Bilingual and DLD groups had lower L2 rhyme and rapid automatized naming scores. • Combined L1–L2 phonology predicts L2 early literacy in TD and DLD bilinguals. • Low preschool phonology in TD and DLD bilinguals forms a risk to later L2 early literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Spectral moments of sonorants encode linguistic (stress and phoneme) and sociolinguistic (language variety) information. • The sonorants' coarticulatory effects on the adjacent vowel disambiguate linguistic and sociolinguistic information. • This study is the first comparative acoustic analysis of Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek sonorants. This study aims to determine the effect of language varieties on the spectral distribution of stressed and unstressed sonorants (nasals /m, n/, lateral approximants /l/, and rhotics /r/) and their coarticulatory effects on adjacent sounds. To quantify the shape of the spectral distribution, we calculated the spectral moments from the sonorant spectra of nasals /m, n/, lateral approximants /l/, and rhotics /r/ produced by Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek speakers. To estimate the co-articulatory effects of sonorants on the adjacent vowels' F1 - F4 formant frequencies, we developed polynomial models of the adjacent vowel's formant contours. All sonorants had distinct effects on adjacent vowel formant contours, especially for F3 and F4. The study highlights that the combination of spectral moments and coarticulatory effects of sonorants determines sonorants' linguistic (stress and phonemic category) and sociolinguistic (language variety) characteristics. It also provides the first comparative acoustic analysis of Athenian Greek and Cypriot Greek sonorants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Response inhibition and interference suppression are separate dimensions at 4–5 years of age. • Diverse inhibition dimensions differently account for early literacy skills. • Interference suppression was significantly related to early literacy skill tasks. • Interference suppression was associated with the growth in phonological awareness. • Language, verbal working memory, and visual-motor skills are also considered. Inhibitory control is associated with the pre-academic skills, nevertheless it is unclear the role of the diverse inhibitory control dimensions especially in the development of early literacy skills. In the present longitudinal study, the multi-componential structure of inhibitory control was investigated, and the roles of two different inhibitory control abilities were examined with respect to early literacy skills, with other variables (vocabulary, working memory, and visual-motor integration skills) controlled. A sample of 147 typically developing children from 4 to 5 years of age was assessed in the winter (T1) and then in the spring (T2) at a preschool educational center. Confirmatory factor analysis yielded a response inhibition dimension and an interference suppression dimension. Path analysis was conducted to examine the contribution of these dimensions, considered formative indices, on phonological awareness and procedural writing knowledge, with the other variables controlled. The latent change score approach was used to investigate the variables associated with change in phonological awareness and procedural writing knowledge at T1 and T2. Our results demonstrated that interference suppression was concurrently associated with phonological awareness and procedural writing knowledge tasks together with the other measures at T1. Moreover, interference suppression is associated with changes in phonological awareness, whereas the other measures did not contribute significantly to literacy growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: A growing area of research in epidemiology is the identification of health-related sibling spillover effects, or the effect of one individual's exposure on their sibling's outcome. The health within families may be confounded by unobserved factors, rendering identification of sibling spillovers challenging.Methods: We demonstrate a gain-score (fixed effects) regression method for identifying exposure-to-outcome spillover effects within sibling pairs in linear models. The method identifies the exposure-to-outcome spillover effect if only one sibling's exposure affects the other's outcome, and it identifies the difference between the spillover effects if both siblings' exposures affect the others' outcomes. The method fails with outcome-to-exposure spillover or with outcome-to-outcome spillover. Analytic results, Monte Carlo simulations, and a brief application demonstrate the method and its limitations.Results: We estimate the spillover effect of a child's preterm birth on an older sibling's literacy skills, measured by the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening-Kindergarten test. We analyze 20,010 sibling pairs from a population-wide, Wisconsin-based (United States) birth cohort. Without covariate adjustment, we estimate that preterm birth modestly decreases an older sibling's test score.Conclusions: Gain-scores are a promising strategy for identifying exposure-to-outcome spillover effects in sibling pairs while controlling for sibling-invariant unobserved confounding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Musical pitch perception is closely related to phonological awareness and reading development in alphabetic languages. However, whether such a relation also exists in tonal languages such as Chinese remains unclear. Here, we examined the musical pitch—reading relations and the possible mediating effects of phonological awareness in a sample of typically-developing Chinese children followed from Grade 3 (age 9) to Grade 5 (age 11). Phonological awareness and reading (accuracy and fluency) were assessed at both time points. Musical pitch perception was examined with a passive oddball EEG paradigm and an active identification task at age 9. Results showed that neural musical pitch sensitivity (indexed by P3a latency) predicted reading accuracy at age 11 and its two-year development. Behavioral musical pitch sensitivity predicted reading fluency at both ages through the effects of phonological awareness. Together, our results reveal the effects of musical pitch processing on reading development at both behavioral and neural levels in Chinese. • Musical pitch perception is related to reading development in alphabetic languages. • We examine this relation in typically-developing Chinese school-age children. • Neural musical pitch sensitivity directly predicts later reading and its development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• 1. Negative state impairs proactive control but positive state improves proactive control. • 2. Control system responds adaptively to the emotional disruption of control. • 3. The findings extend the adaptive control hypothesis to emotional contexts. This study investigated bilingual language control in emotional contexts. We assessed the language switching and mixing performance of two groups of Chinese-English bilinguals in picture naming under neutral, negative, and positive emotional states. One group switched languages voluntarily while another matched group switched languages according to external cues. We found that negative state impaired proactive control, whereas positive state seemed to improve proactive control. Importantly, the detrimental effects of negative state could be proportional to the cognitive demands imposed by the naming context. However, negative states disrupted proactive control in voluntary but not cued naming, where the proactive control demands were comparable. This finding suggests that the control system selectively compensates for the emotional disruption of control in a cued-naming context requiring strict control but not in a voluntary-naming context preferring less strict control. Accordingly, we tentatively proposed a theoretical account of the adaptive control mechanism in emotional contexts. These findings would extend the Adaptive Control Hypothesis to more naturalistic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The phonological lexicon of Mandarin Chinese is graded. • Constituent edit yields highest dissimilarity, followed by phoneme, and then tone. • Graded neighborhood density and frequency affect lexical retrieval across tasks. • Distant neighbors facilitate and near neighbors inhibit lexical retrieval. How phonological neighborhood affects lexical retrieval can shed important light on lexical organization and processing. Yet these effects are unclear, particularly in Mandarin Chinese. This is likely because the working definition of phonological neighbors (i.e., the one-phoneme edit rule) used in Indo-European languages inadequately characterizes the phonological similarity among Mandarin words, which have simpler syllable structures and lexical tones. The current study proposes a graded Mandarin phonological neighborhood and investigates the impacts of near-to-distant Mandarin phonological neighbors on lexical retrieval. In Study 1, we investigated how Mandarin phonological similarity is influenced by the editing of lexical tone, constituent (onset/rime, initial/final) and phoneme. Native Mandarin speakers rated the similarity between the edited monosyllabic words. We found that constituent-edit neighbors were rated as the most dissimilar, followed by phoneme-edit neighbors, while tone-edit neighbors were the most similar. In Study 2, we calculated the constituent-, phoneme- and tone-edit phonological neighborhood densities and frequencies for 4,706 monosyllabic Mandarin words. We then utilized extant datasets to examine how the density and frequency of neighbors at varied distances, as well as of homophonic neighbors, impact response latencies in word naming, visual lexical decision, and picture naming tasks. The results showed that graded phonological neighbors had differential impacts on lexical retrieval efficiency: distant (constituent-edit) neighbors facilitated word retrieval, while near (phoneme-, tone-edit and homophonic) neighbors had inhibitory effects. We discuss these findings within an interactive activation and competition framework and suggest future directions to study the representation and processing of the Mandarin phonological lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates two broad classes of language processing accounts that make predictions for sentences like "The admirer of the singer(s) apparently thinks...". Feature distortion accounts predict increased processing difficulty at the verb in sentences with a plural distractor noun (singers) while similarity-based interference accounts predict the opposite: increased difficulty in sentences with a singular distractor noun (singer). Neither of these effects was reliably observed in earlier research, and the Bayesian meta-analysis of 31 published studies reported here is almost perfectly inconclusive. An explanation may be that both effects occur simultaneously and therefore mask each other. To test this idea, we conducted three single-trial self-paced reading experiments ( N 1 = 4 , 296 , N 2 = 3 , 920 , N 3 = 3 , 559) which orthogonally manipulated agreement attraction and inhibitory interference. Surprisingly, all three experiments produced evidence for agreement attraction but none for inhibitory interference, which supports feature distortion but not similarity-based interference accounts. Experiment 4 ( N 4 = 3 , 535) tested the role of the expected task by preparing participants for a comprehension question (vs. acceptability judgment in Experiments 1–3). It showed neither agreement attraction nor inhibitory interference effects. Our findings demonstrate that agreement attraction effects can arise in grammatical sentences – contra earlier research – but also that these effects crucially depend on the task. This explains inconsistent results in prior research and supports feature distortion as the driving force behind attraction effects in grammatical sentences. • Three experiments show agreement attraction effects in grammatical sentences. • The same experiments produced no evidence for similarly-based interference. • Expt. 4 shows that agreement attraction effects crucially depend on the offline task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Lexical stress position is unpredictable in languages such as English or Italian. • A corpus analysis revealed the existence of sublexical cues to stress in Italian. • Results from a megastudy show Italian readers use those cues and lexical ones. • Our results can serve as benchmark for computational models of reading. • Our study provides a large database of stimuli and responses. When reading polysyllabic words, assignment of lexical stress is a challenge for readers, especially in languages, such as English or Italian, in which stress position is not strictly determined even though words as well as nonwords typically contain several sublexical cues to stress that readers might use. Here, we attempted to identify such cues using a corpus analysis and to examine their impact on human performance in a megastudy in which participants (N = 45) assigned stress to nonwords (N = 800), stimuli particularly revealing of stress cue use because they have no predefined stress pattern. Hierarchical regression results confirmed an impact of sublexical cues examined in former studies and revealed a role for cues not previously examined, including similarity to real words. These results are informative for computational models of reading as they indicate that readers assign stress to nonwords based on not only sublexical but also lexical information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• New ERP method to study children's language comprehension in naturalistic context. • Child and adult N400 responses reflect word predictability given the context. • Like adults, child N400s in a connected discourse are not modulated by frequency. • ERP responses to low frequency words show a prolonged anterior negativity. • Results show top-down cues play a substantial role in children's lexical processes. When listening to speech, adults rely on context to anticipate upcoming words. Evidence for this comes from studies demonstrating that the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) that indexes ease of lexical-semantic processing, is influenced by the predictability of a word in context. We know far less about the role of context in children's speech comprehension. The present study explored lexical processing in adults and 5–10-year-old children as they listened to a story. ERPs time-locked to the onset of every word were recorded. Each content word was coded for frequency, semantic association, and predictability. In both children and adults, N400s reflect word predictability, even when controlling for frequency and semantic association. These findings suggest that both adults and children use top-down constraints from context to anticipate upcoming words when listening to stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Individual differences in foveal and parafoveal word processing skill were assessed. • Individual differences were then used to predict eye-movement patterns in reading. • The Random Forests technique was used to identify the best predictors. • Foveal word processing efficiency predicts both foveal and parafoveal processing in reading. The study examined whether word-level eye-movement patterns in text reading can be predicted by individual differences in foveal and parafoveal word processing efficiency. Individual differences in lexical skills were gauged by presenting words and pseudowords with short exposure times in the fovea (30–60 ms) and at varying eccentricities in the parafovea. Lexical decision was used to index orthographic processing, word naming to index phonological processing and pseudoword naming to index grapheme-phoneme decoding. The Random Forests statistical technique was used to assess the relative importance of individual difference measures in predicting readers' eye-movement patterns. The results show that individual differences in foveal word processing efficiency are better predictors of both foveal and parafoveal word processing during reading than differences in parafoveal processing efficiency. Results indicate that individual variability in foveal word recognition skills are better determinants of reading fluency among adult readers than variability in parafoveal word recognition skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The results of two large-scale eye-tracking studies are reported. • A novel variable trailing mask paradigm was used to determine whether amount or location of rereading of NP/Z garden-path sentences was related to offline comprehension. • E1 presented comprehension questions after each sentence, and E2 presented the comprehension questions both before and after each sentence. • Results provide strong evidence (of multiple types) against selective reanalysis of NP/Z garden-paths. When people read temporarily ambiguous ("garden-path") sentences, the forward movement of their eyes is often interrupted by regressions. These regressions are usually followed by rereading some portion of the previously read text. Frazier and Rayner (1982) proposed the Selective Reanalysis Hypothesis (SRH), which proposed that readers regress to critical choice points in the syntactic phrase marker of garden-paths where misparses had occurred, and furthermore, then reanalyzed the syntactic structure to arrive at a correct parse in most cases. A considerable amount of more recent work, however, suggests that readers often do not derive a correct parse or interpretation from such sentences. If these more recent observations are accurate, perhaps rereading is not necessarily strategic, controlled, or predictable. The current study consists of two large-scale eye-tracking experiments designed specifically to examine where and how much people reread garden-path sentences, and whether rereading influences comprehension accuracy. A variable text-masking paradigm was employed to restrict access to portions of garden-paths and non-garden-paths during rereading. Scanpath analyses were used to determine whether some or all participants targeted syntactically critical parts of previously read text. Comprehension questions probed final interpretations. In short, readers often misinterpreted the garden-paths, and no rereading measures predicted better comprehension. Furthermore, scanpath analyses revealed considerable variation across and within readers; only small percentages of trials conformed to structurally-based predictions. Taken together, we fail to find support for structurally strategic rereading. We therefore propose that rereading of these sentences is more often "confirmatory" than "revisionary" in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cue-based retrieval theories of sentence processing posit that long-distance dependency formation is guided by a cue-based retrieval mechanism: dependents are retrieved via retrieval cues associated with a verb. When retrieval cues match multiple similar items in memory, this leads to cue-based retrieval interference. A landmark study by Van Dyke and McElree tested interference from sentence-external items: retrieval cues were manipulated to (mis-)match semantically similar items presented prior to a target dependency. The support for interference of this type is weak, and only comes from English object cleft constructions. Our study provides a cross-linguistic investigation of interference from sentence-external items: Three eyetracking studies in English, German and Russian tested interference in the online processing of filler-gap dependencies under varying task demands. A fourth study attempted to replicate the Van Dyke and McElree study using self-paced reading. Bayes factors analyses show cross-linguistic evidence against interference from sentence-external items. A broader implication from these data is that cue-based retrieval interference is driven by sentence-internal distracting items, suggesting that a cue-based search is restricted to the current linguistic context. • Cross-linguistic study on cue-based interference from sentence-external items. • Three larger-sample eye-tracking studies in English, German and Russian. • A fourth self-paced reading study attempts to replicate the original Van Dyke study. • Data show evidence against interference from sentence-external items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Readers target the eyes to locations in implausible sentences where inserting/deleting to would make the sentence plausible. • Readers misinterpret implausible sentences less when they spend longer fixated where inserting to would make them plausible. • Older adults have a stronger tendency to make noisy-channel inferences for implausible sentences than young adults. • Perceptual information extracted during reading influences whether or not readers make noisy-channel inferences. This novel experiment investigates the relationship between readers' eye movements and their use of "noisy channel" inferences when reading implausible sentences, and how this might be affected by cognitive aging. Young (18–26 years) and older (65–87 years) adult participants read sentences which were either plausible or implausible. Crucially, readers could assign a plausible interpretation to the implausible sentences by inferring that a preposition (i.e., to) had been unintentionally omitted or included. Our results reveal that readers' fixation locations within such sentences are associated with the likelihood of them inferring the presence or absence of this critical preposition to reach a plausible interpretation. Moreover, our older adults were more likely to make these noisy-channel inferences than the younger adults, potentially because their poorer visual processing and greater linguistic experience promote such inference-making. We propose that the present findings provide novel experimental evidence for a perceptual contribution to noisy-channel inference-making during reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prediction has been proposed as an overarching principle that explains human information processing in language and beyond. To what degree can processing difficulty in syntactically complex sentences – one of the major concerns of psycholinguistics – be explained by predictability, as estimated using computational language models, and operationalized as surprisal (negative log probability)? A precise, quantitative test of this question requires a much larger scale data collection effort than has been done in the past. We present the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark, a dataset of self-paced reading times from 2000 participants, who read a diverse set of complex English sentences. This dataset makes it possible to measure processing difficulty associated with individual syntactic constructions, and even individual sentences, precisely enough to rigorously test the predictions of computational models of language comprehension. By estimating the function that relates surprisal to reading times from filler items included in the experiment, we find that the predictions of language models with two different architectures sharply diverge from the empirical reading time data, dramatically underpredicting processing difficulty, failing to predict relative difficulty among different syntactic ambiguous constructions, and only partially explaining item-wise variability. These findings suggest that next-word prediction is most likely insufficient on its own to explain human syntactic processing. • We collect a large reading time dataset for English syntactically complex sentences. • We evaluate to what extent surprisal – estimated using neural network language models – can explain processing difficulty. • Surprisal greatly underestimated processing difficulty for most constructions. • It failed to predict relative difficulty among different garden path constructions. • It also failed to predict across-item variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SNARC effect is a phenomenon in which the left hand reacts quickly to small numbers, and the right hand reacts quickly to large numbers. In this study, the symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects between 9-year-old children and adults were compared, and the cognitive mechanisms underlying these effects were examined in both groups. The findings indicate that children and adults exhibit significant symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects, with children having a stronger non-symbolic SNARC effect than adults. According to path analyses, visual perception and phonological awareness played important roles in children's symbolic SNARC effect, whereas inhibitory control played an important role in adults' symbolic SNARC effect. Three-dimensional mental rotation and phonological memory accounted for significant variance in the non-symbolic SNARC effect in children and adults. Working memory did not significantly contribute to symbolic or non-symbolic SNARC effects in children and adults. In sum, our findings would not only help understand the theoretical relationships among various cognitive skills and SNARC effects but also help to develop age-appropriate intervention programs related to the nature of spatial-numerical associations. ● We studied symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects in children and adults. ● Visual perception and phonological awareness play crucial roles in children's symbolic SNARC effect. ● Inhibitory control plays an important role in adults' symbolic SNARC effect. ● Mental rotation and short-term memory significantly predict the non-symbolic SNARC effect in both age groups. ● Working memory does not explain the strength difference between symbolic and non-symbolic SNARC effects in both age groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent influential experimental finding in pragmatics is that of scalar diversity : that different lexical items vary robustly in how likely they are to lead to scalar inference. For instance, hearers are much more likely to strengthen the meaning of some to some but not all than to infer good but not excellent from good. In this paper, we address the question of what underlies scalar diversity and identify two sources of uncertainty: uncertainty associated with the identity of relevant alternatives, and uncertainty associated with the step of excluding those alternatives. In our experiments, we make use of the Question Under Discussion to eliminate the former, and of the focus particle only to eliminate the latter kind of uncertainty. Our findings show that both manipulations make inference calculation more likely, but only when they are combined is scalar diversity reduced to a minimum. In order to quantitatively characterize the observed (reduction in) variation, this paper adopts the information theoretic measure of relative entropy. • We investigate two sources of uncertainty in variation in scalar implicature. • Discourse context reduces uncertainty about the identity of alternatives. • Semantic focus reduces uncertainty about whether to exclude alternatives. • Relative entropy quantifies changes in the variation of implicature calculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Soliciting metacognitive judgments reactively temper the entity being monitored, phenomenon known as the reactivity effect. • Neither immediate nor pre-study JOLs reactively enhance the relatedness effect in self-paced study conditions. • In experimenter-paced study conditions, only immediate JOLs, but not pre-study JOLs, enhance the relatedness effect. • The enhanced relatedness effect of immediate JOLs shows minimal transfer to no-JOL pairs when JOL and no-JOL pairs are interleaved. • Goal change plays a small or possibly even no role in the enhanced relatedness effect of immediate JOLs. Measurement of mental processes is the bedrock of cognitive psychology, but the interpretation of such measurements is profoundly undermined by evidence that many mental processes are changed by (are reactive to) the act of being observed and measured. The current article is concerned with one particular type of reactivity, namely changes in memory performance when individuals are asked to concurrently monitor their learning via judgments of learning (JOLs). One explanation for memory reactivity is that the requirement to engage in metamemory monitoring changes learners' goals, shifting them towards greater prioritization of mastering easy items and de-prioritization of memorizing difficult ones. This hypothesis is tested in 5 experiments (2 of which were pre-registered), which varied item difficulty by contrasting related (e.g., computer – keyboard) and unrelated (e.g., book – shoe) word pairs. While the experiments find robust evidence that recall is affected by the requirement to make immediate JOLs (reactivity), two key predictions of the goal-change account are not supported. The observed findings suggest that a change in the learner's goal is not the main mechanism underlying JOL reactivity. Alternative explanations for why memory is reactive to metamemory judgments are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Chinese four-character idioms are processed as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs). • Frequently used four-character phrases can be processed parafoveally as MCUs. • Lexical identification is episodic in natural reading. • Parafoveal processing operates over words, MCUs, or sub-units of a single word. The perceptual span in Chinese reading extends one character to the left and three to the right of the point of fixation. Thus, four-character idioms and phrases often extend rightward beyond these limits during reading. We investigated whether such idioms, frequent phrases and equibiased strings are processed parafoveally as Multi-Constituent Units (MCUs). Using the boundary paradigm in Experiments 1 and 2, we separately manipulated preview (identities or pseudocharacters) of the first two and the last two characters of idioms and frequently used phrases. In Experiment 3, we examined processing of strings judged to be a single lexical unit, equi-biased ambiguous strings and matched unambiguous multi-word strings. Experiments 1 and 2 produced greater preview benefit for the final two characters when the first two characters were presented after identity rather than pseudocharacter previews. In Experiment 3, preview effects were largest for single units, reduced for equi-biased strings and smallest for multi-word strings. Together the results demonstrate that four-character idioms and frequently used phrases are processed as MCUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Models of eye-movement control during reading, developed largely within psychology, usually focus on visual, attentional, lexical, and motor processes but neglect post-lexical language processing; by contrast, models of sentence comprehension processes, developed largely within psycholinguistics, generally focus only on post-lexical language processes. We present a model that combines these two research threads, by integrating eye-movement control and sentence processing. Developing such an integrated model is extremely challenging and computationally demanding, but such an integration is an important step toward complete mathematical models of natural language comprehension in reading. We combine the SWIFT model of eye-movement control (Seelig et al., 2023) with key components of the Lewis and Vasishth sentence processing model (Lewis and Vasishth, 2005). This integration becomes possible, for the first time, due in part to recent advances in successful parameter identification in dynamical models, which allows us to investigate profile log-likelihoods for individual model parameters. We present a fully implemented proof-of-concept model demonstrating how such an integrated model can be achieved; our approach includes Bayesian model inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling as a key computational tool. The integrated Sentence-Processing and Eye-Movement Activation-Coupled Model (SEAM) can successfully reproduce eye movement patterns that arise due to similarity-based interference in reading. To our knowledge, this is the first-ever integration of a complete process model of eye-movement control with linguistic dependency completion processes in sentence comprehension. In future work, this proof of concept model will need to be evaluated using a comprehensive set of benchmark data. • Computational model of the interaction of eye movements and sentence processing. • Integrating psychological and linguistic threads of reading research in one model. • Parameter inference of the integrated SEAM model in a principled Bayesian workflow. • Regressive eye movements can be triggered by similarity-based memory interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Two well-powered experiments replicated the phonological parafoveal preview benefit during silent reading for real word and pseudoword previews. • The preview effect depended on sentence constraint, lexicality (between-experiments comparison), and participant spelling ability. • Parafoveal phonological activation during reading aids word recognition, but this benefit depends on the ease of precursory processing stages. For decades, researchers have debated whether readers benefit from translating visual word forms into phonological codes. A focus of this debate has been on the earliest moments of processing when a word is perceived in parafoveal vision (i.e., phonological preview benefit). A recent meta-analysis (Vasilev et al., 2019) concluded that the phonological preview benefit may be small and unreliable but they did not take into account potentially important stimulus-level or participant-level factors that varied across the included studies. Therefore, we conducted two well-powered experiments that systematically investigated the effects of sentence constraint, preview lexicality, and participant language skills on the phonological preview benefit effect. We found phonological preview benefits that were larger in high versus low constraint sentences, larger for words than pseudowords, and larger for better spellers. We conclude that phonological codes do facilitate early word recognition during reading, but that the phonological preview benefit magnitude depends on subject- and stimulus-level factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Reflexive attraction is mitigated when verbal agreement is available. • Reflexives' perceived grammaticality depends on verb- rather than subject-matching. • This suggests that verbal agreement alters the feature representation of the subject. • Memory representations are less stable than assumed by Cue-Based Retrieval. • Findings are interpreted in terms of representational interference. The formation of linguistic dependencies is subject to memory interference. In this study, we ask whether memory representations are fixed, or whether they can be distorted and updated after their initial encoding. Models of Cue-Based Retrieval assume that memory representations are fixed. However, representational interference and rational inference models assume that memory contents can be edited. To examine this, we test how reflexive attraction is affected by preceding verbal agreement in Hebrew. Cue-Based Retrieval suggests that agreement on the verb can exaggerate the reflexive's sensitivity to the distractor. In contrast, we propose that if memory representations can be edited, verbal agreement can alter the representation of the subject. This process would reduce vulnerability to distortions originating from the distractor. In two self-paced reading experiments and one forced-choice completion we find (i) decreased reflexive attraction when (grammatical or ungrammatical) agreement cues were available on the preceding verb; and (ii) a preference for reflexive forms matching the verb over forms matching the subject when the sentence included ungrammatical verbal agreement. These results suggest that comprehenders use featural information from the verb to recover properties of the subject. The findings are therefore consistent with a memory model where representations can be distorted and updated, as well as with rational inference about memory disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Written languages vary in their structural properties, which leads to cross-linguistic variability in distributions of word lengths and frequency of occurrence. • This study is the first to test across 12 typologically diverse alphabetic languages whether word length and frequency of occurrence has a similar effect on eye-movements during reading. • Both effects were highly similar across 12 alphabetic languages, suggesting universality of reading behavior within the writing system. Reading research robustly finds that shorter and more frequent words are recognized faster and skipped more often than longer and less frequent words. An empirical question that has not been tested yet is whether languages within the same writing system would produce similarly strong length and frequency effects or whether typological differences between written languages would cause those effects to vary systematically in their magnitude. We analyzed text reading eye-movement data in 12 alphabetic languages from the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO). The languages varied substantially in their word length and frequency distributions as a function of their orthographic depth and morpho-syntactic type. Yet, the effects of word length and frequency on fixation durations and skipping rate were highly similar in size between the languages. This finding suggests a high degree of cross-linguistic universality in the readers' behavioral response to linguistic complexity (indexed by word length) and the amount of experience with the word (indexed by word frequency). These findings run counter to influential theories of single word recognition, which predict orthographic depth of a language to modulate the size of these benchmark effects. They also facilitate development of cross-linguistically generalizable computational models of eye-movement control in reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Comprehenders are sensitive to state changes of semantically related objects. • Interference effects arise due to semantic similarity between the objects. • Interference effects arise due to the dissimilarity of states of the same object. • Results are compatible with theories emphasizing dynamic views of cognition. The present research shows that language comprehenders are sensitive to multiple states of target and semantically related objects. In Experiments 1 to 2B, participants (total N = 273) read sentences that either implied a minimal change of an object's state (e.g., "Jane chose a mango") or a substantial change (e.g., "Jane stepped on a mango") and then verified whether a subsequently pictured object was mentioned in the sentence. Crucially, the picture either showed the original/modified state of an object that was mentioned in the sentence (e.g., "mango" in Experiment 1) or not (e.g., "banana" in Experiments 2A and 2B). The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that the objects in a modified state were verified faster when a sentence implied a substantial state-change rather than a minimal state-change. In contrast, the reverse was true for the objects in the original state. Importantly, verification latencies of pictures depicting original and modified states of an object in the substantial state-change condition were approximately similar, thus suggesting that language comprehenders maintain multiple representations of an object in different states. The results of Experiments 2A and 2B revealed that when participants had to indicate that a pictured object (e.g., banana) was not mentioned in the sentence, their verification latencies were slowed down when the sentence contained a semantically related item (e.g., mango) and described this item as being changed substantially by the action. However, these verification latencies varied continuously with the degree of change: the more dissimilar the states of a semantically related item, the less time participants needed to verify a pictured object. The results are discussed through the prism of theories emphasizing dynamic views of event cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Compound words are very common in Finnish and Chinese. • In Finnish two-component compounds vary in length; in Chinese their length is equal. • Finnish compounds are recognized via components when the length exceeds 10 letters. • Chinese compound words are recognized holistically despite their horizontal extent. Two eye-tracking experiments in alphabetic Finnish and two in logographic Chinese examined the recognition of two-constituent compound words in reading. In Finnish, two-constituent compound words vary greatly in length, whereas in Chinese they are identical in length. According to the visual acuity principle (Bertram & Hyönä, 2003), short Finnish compound words and all two-character Chinese compound words that fit in foveal vision are recognized holistically, whereas long Finnish compound words are recognized via components. Experiment 1 in Finnish provided evidence consistent with the account, whereas the results for long compound words presented in condensed font in Experiment 2 were inconsistent with it. In Chinese, the first-character frequency effect was non-significant even when the compound words were presented in large font. The Finnish results suggest that componential processing is necessary when the compound word entails more than 10 letters. The Chinese results are compatible with the Chinese Reading Model (Li & Pollatsek, 2020) that assumes whole-word representations to overrule the activation of components during compound word recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Proficient L2-English speakers were primed to produce near-ungrammatical double-objects. • Priming from grammatical alternating verbs and near-ungrammatical non-alternating verbs. • There was lexical boost from non-alternating same-verb double object primes. • No difference found in priming patterns between L1-Germanic and L1-Romance speakers. • Results are consistent with abstract and lexically-based L2-statistical learning but not L1-generalization. In two structural priming experiments, we investigated the representations of lexically-specific syntactic restrictions of English verbs for highly proficient and immersed second language (L2) speakers of English. We considered the interplay of two possible mechanisms: generalization from the first language (L1) and statistical learning within the L2 (both of abstract structure and of lexically-specific information). In both experiments, L2 speakers with either Germanic or Romance languages as L1 were primed to produce dispreferred double-object structures involving non-alternating dative verbs. Priming occurred from ungrammatical double-object primes involving different non-alternating verbs (Experiment 1) and from grammatical primes involving alternating verbs (Experiment 2), supporting abstract statistical learning within the L2. However, we found no differences between L1-Germanic speakers (who have the double-object structure in their L1) and L1-Romance speakers (who do not), inconsistent with the prediction for between-group differences of the L1-generalization account. Additionally, L2 speakers in Experiment 2 showed a lexical boost: There was stronger priming after (dispreferred) non-alternating same-verb double-object primes than after (grammatical) alternating different-verb primes. Such lexically-driven persistence was also shown by L1 English speakers (Ivanova, Pickering, McLean, Costa, & Branigan, 2012) and may underlie statistical learning of lexically-dependent structural regularities. We conclude that lexically-specific syntactic restrictions in highly proficient and immersed L2 speakers are shaped by statistical learning (both abstract and lexically-specific) within the L2, but not by generalization from the L1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] • 4 speeded continuation tasks investigated agreement attraction in Romanian. • Bare nouns cannot typically be preverbal subjects in Romanian. • Bare noun intervenors cause less attraction than modified DP intervenors. • Cue-based retrieval is sensitive to the overtness of the determiner. This paper investigates whether agreement attraction is modulated by distributional properties determining subject-likelihood by examining the degree to which bare nouns and full determiner phrases (DPs) cause agreement attraction effects in Romanian. Romanian represents an ideal testing ground for this, given two distributional constraints making bare nouns less subject-like: Locative Determiner Omission , preventing locative prepositions from taking nouns with definite articles (unless modified by adjectives), and the Naked Noun Constraint , disallowing bare nouns as preverbal subjects. We predicted that bare nouns should be less likely to trigger agreement attraction than overt DPs. We conducted four speeded forced-choice sentence continuation tasks on Romanian native speakers to test this prediction. We observe that overt DPs cause significantly more attraction than bare nouns. We suggest that the results are consistent with a cue-based retrieval mechanism for forming agreement dependencies, where cues that determine subjecthood are used to reactivate elements in working memory upon processing a verb. These cues can be language specific, and in Romanian, this means that agreement attraction is sensitive to the morphophonological overtness of the determiner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Early biliteracy learners were followed from kindergarten to Grade two. • Chinese and English literacy learning showed both unique and general patterns. • Pure copying is a significant predictor of Chinese learning but not English. Literacy learning in different writing systems involves both universal and unique features, even in bilinguals. The present study investigated whether the role of pure copying differs in Chinese and English literacy acquisition by following a group of early Chinese-English bilinguals from kindergarten to grade two across three time points. Age, nonverbal IQ, three cognitive-linguistic skills administered in Chinese (i.e., phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and RAN) and pure copying of unfamiliar scripts (Korean and Hebrew) were tested in 188 children (mean age = 5.54 years) when they were in their final year of kindergarten. Both Chinese and English word reading and spelling performance were measured when they were in first and second grades, respectively. Results showed that pure copying skill was a critical predictor of Chinese reading and spelling, whereas it was not a significant longitudinal correlate of English reading and spelling. In addition, Chinese phonological awareness was a unique correlate of subsequent English, but not Chinese, word reading and spelling. This finding highlights the unique features of literacy learning in two different writing systems and suggests the importance of using somewhat different strategies according to the unique features of different writing systems during literacy learning and teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deficiencies of many nutrients in pregnancy have adverse effects on fetal brain development with consequent impaired cognitive function in childhood. However, it is unclear whether deficiencies of vitamin B12 prenatally are harmful to the developing fetus. We therefore used the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children to test the hypothesis that cognitive outcomes in childhood are reduced if their mothers consumed a diet low in vitamin B12 during pregnancy. A detailed exposome analysis was used to identify 9 factors independently associated with low vitamin B12 intake. These were taken into account in each of 26 outcome analyses. Results showed that the children of women with the lowest 10% intake of B12 were at increased risk of poor vocabulary at 24 months, reduced ability at combining words at 38 months, poor speech intelligibility at 6 years, poor mathematics comprehension at school years 4 and 6 (ages 8-9 and 10-11 years), and poor results on the national mathematics tests (age 13). There were no such significant adjusted associations for reading or spelling abilities, or for verbal or full-scale IQ (Intelligence Quotient) at 8 or at 15. Thus, we have confirmed that there are adverse effects on the child's development if the pregnant woman has a low intake of vitamin B12, and we have shown that these are specific to certain speech and mathematical abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Heritability estimates vary widely across reading-related neurocognitive skills. • Age- and school grade-specific genetic influences have been reported. • Previous meta-analyses focused on some reading skills without controlling for moderators. • Reading-related skills show moderate-to-substantial meta-heritability estimates. • School grade levels moderated the heritability of some reading-related skills. Reading ability is a complex task requiring the integration of multiple cognitive and perceptual systems supporting language, visual and orthographic processes, working memory, attention, motor movements, and higher-level comprehension and cognition. Estimates of genetic and environmental influences for some of these reading-related neurocognitive components vary across reports. By using a multi-level meta-analysis approach, we synthesized the results of behavioral genetic research on reading-related neurocognitive components (i.e. general reading, letter-word knowledge, phonological decoding, reading comprehension, spelling, phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and language) of 49 twin studies spanning 4.1–18.5 years of age, with a total sample size of more than 38,000 individuals. Except for language for which shared environment seems to play a more important role, the causal architecture across most of the reading-related neurocognitive components can be represented by the following equation a² > e² > c². Moderators analysis revealed that sex and spoken language did not affect the heritability of any reading-related skills; school grade levels moderated the heritability of general reading, reading comprehension and phonological awareness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous work shows that linguistic features (e.g., word length, word frequency) impact the predictability of stuttering events. Most of this work has been conducted using reading tasks. Our study examined how linguistic features impact the predictability of stuttering events during spontaneous speech. The data were sourced from the FluencyBank database and consisted of interviews with 35 adult stutterers (27,009 words). Three logistic regression mixed models were fit as the primary analyses: one model with four features (i.e., initial phoneme, grammatical function, word length, and word position within a sentence), a second model with six features (i.e., the features from the previous model plus word frequency and neighborhood density), and a third model with nine features (i.e., the features from the previous model plus bigram frequency, word concreteness, and typical age of word acquisition). We compared our models using the Area Under the Curve statistic. The four-feature model revealed that initial phoneme, grammatical function, and word length were predictive of stuttering events. The six-feature model revealed that initial phoneme, word length, word frequency, and neighborhood density were predictive of stuttering events. The nine-feature model was not more predictive than the six-feature model. Linguistic features that were previously found to be predictive of stuttering during reading were predictive of stuttering during spontaneous speech. The results indicate the influence of linguistic processes on the predictability of stuttering events such that words associated with increased planning demands (e.g., longer words, low frequency words) were more likely to be stuttered. • Linguistic features are predictive of stuttering during spontaneous speech. • Six linguistic features better predicted stuttering than four features. • Nine linguistic features were not more predictive of stuttering than six features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Persons with aphasia use gestures strategically to accomplish a variety of social actions. • Persons with aphasia increase gesture use following Facilitating Authentic Conversation (FAC) a social approach treatment. • Persons with aphasia increased gestural processing scores following treatment that was embedded in authentic conversation. • The treatment, facilitating authentic Conversation, is described in detail. • The relationships between gesture and conversation are discussed. There is limited research in group communication treatment for people with aphasia but existing studies report benefits of gesture to support conversation. Gesture supports conversation through recipient design features and reducing linguistic demands of lexical retrieval and formulation. Additionally, gesture serves an affiliative function. However, the relationship between gesture use and gestural capacity has not been widely examined. As part of a larger study on group cohesiveness and conversation, this investigation examined the patterns of co-speech gesture within authentic conversations among persons with aphasia to discern the functions of gesture use for the participants, changes in the use of gesture over time, and the relationship between gesture use and gesture ability. Conversation Analysis (CA) was applied in an embedded case-study design. Three participants received an academic semester of group and individual conversation-based treatment according to Facilitating Authentic Conversation (Damico et al. , 2015). Four conversations from the treatment were selected and transcribed for multi-modality communication with CA conventions applied, and then cyclically analysed for patterns of gesture. Participants demonstrated gesture that served social and linguistic functions: ratifying clinicians' proxy turns, turn-allocation, turn repair, relaying novel visual information, emphasizing content, demonstrating affiliation with the prior speaker, demonstrating their assessment others' talk, and demonstrating humor. All three participants showed an increased rate of gesture per turn and increasingly used gesture to repair conversation breakdown. Increased gesture use over the course of the semester coincided with increased scores for pantomime on the Porch Index of Communicative Ability (Porch, 1981, PICA). Individuals with aphasia demonstrated increased use of gesture for varied purposes and improved gestural processing following a semester of conversation-based treatment. This is significant because gesture is an effective support for the repair of conversation breakdown typical of persons with aphasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Improved naming in people with aphasia (PwA) was found when using an approach that requires linguistic and working memory abilities. • Individuals with mild-moderate aphasia were capable of completing working memory tasks with a high degree of accuracy. • Significantly improved performance was found on certain WM assessments during post-treatment testing. The purpose of the study was to pilot a working memory (WM) – and modified Semantic Feature Analysis (SFA) approach to treat word finding deficits in a group of people with aphasia (PwA). Two research questions were posed: 1. Will the group of PwA be able to complete the WM tasks used in the approach? 2. Will the approach improve naming performance in PwA? Three individuals with mild – moderate aphasia participated in this singlesubject multiple baseline treatment design. Pre-treatment assessments of language, and pre- to post-treatment assessments of WM abilities were carried out. The treatment protocol incorporated WM and linguistic tasks in order to improve naming accuracy across two treatment lists. Probes were carried out prior to treatment on each list, and at one-month following completion of treatment. Two outcome measures were obtained: Percent accuracy in completing the WM steps, and treatment effect sizes (Beeson & Robey, 2006). Additionally, modified t -tests (Crawford & Garthwaite, 2012 ; Crawford & Howell, 1998), were calculated in which post-treatment WM measures were compared against neurotypical control groups to detect any improvements in WM functions. All three participants completed the WM steps with a high degree of accuracy. A range of small to large ESs were obtained for all three participants across the two treated lists, while no meaningful ESs were obtained for the control (untreated) list. All three participants demonstrated improved scores across most of the WM measures with significant improvements noted on certain WM assessments. The findings revealed that the WM – SFA approach can be used successfully in individuals with mild – moderate aphasia. The proposed approach holds promise as feasible intervention designed to remediate anomia in PwA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study is to examine the developmental route of conversation rules awareness and its violation in 4–10-year olds typically developing children, to identify age-matched developmental sequences and identify variables that influence this pragmatic developmental component. Evidence of adequate pragmatic functioning can be found in preschool children. However, only at older ages (before and during school) children exhibit a higher awareness of conversational rules and exhibit a metapragmatic ability to explicitly reflect knowledge of pragmatic behaviors and laws during a conversation (Collins et al., 2014). Metapragmatic awareness of conversational rules violations was examined in 75 typically developing children using seven short video conversations between children, including two conversational categories (Turn-taking mechanism and Dialogue cooperation), followed by four explicitly ascending metapragmatic questions. A positive correlation between age and performance in the metapragmatic awareness task was found. Furthermore, the metapragmatic performance was better in all age groups for Turn-taking mechanism category videos over Dialogue cooperation skills category. Finally, two different developmental trajectories trends were observed regarding the conversational categories. The current study supports the idea that awareness of both categories is age-dependent and highlights the importance of the different effect conversational categories have. We suggest that these categories presumably have a different developmental route in typically developing children and offer possible explanations. • We assessed Metapragmatics awareness of children using two conversational categories. • Turn-taking mechanism scores were better than Dialogue cooperation scores. • Metapragmatic awareness is related to age changes in typically developing children. • Metapragmatic improvement in Dialogue cooperation scores begins at 7.5 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In interlanguage pragmatics, the request development of young learners has been rather underresearched, often without being compared with baseline (L1) data. The present study explores the request behavior of two intermediate proficiency groups of primary school children (8- and 11-year-olds, respectively) who learn Greek in an immersion setting. A Cartoon Oral Production Task was designed to elicit requests of differentiated degree of imposition which were addressed to familiars and strangers, adults or peers. The base constructions which emerged from the data analysis were compared to those deployed by age-matched L1 Greek-speaking children. The L2 participants of the study exhibited a more extended requestive repertoire and a more sophisticated sociopragmatic sensitivity than reported in previous research. Convergences and divergences from their L1 peers' behavior across communicative situations point to a developmental phase in their interlanguage which could be best pictured as midways along the path defined by the pragmalinguistics-sociopragmatics continuum. Findings of the study can more generally contribute to descriptive and methodological issues in child L2 pragmatic development research. • Data were elicited via a Cartoon Oral Production Task from both language groups. • Base constructions emerged from the bottom-up analysis of the data. • L2 children exhibited considerable pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic gains. • Convergences and divergences were recorded from L1 peers' request behavior. • In immersion settings, pragmatic development can be seen as part of language socialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Self-regulation in kindergarten directly predicts math skills in first grade. • Self-regulation in kindergarten indirectly predicts fifth grade achievement. • Self-regulation in first grade directly predicts fifth grade achievement. • Both directly assessed and reported self-regulation predict later achievement. A large body of research has documented the role of self-regulation in academic skill development for young children. However, few studies have investigated longitudinal and indirect effects from kindergarten through later elementary school. In this longitudinal Norwegian study, we investigated pathways from children's self-regulation in kindergarten (M age = 5.8; N = 243, 49% girls), to language and math skills in first grade (N = 240) and reading comprehension and math achievement in fifth grade (N = 160). Self-regulation was measured with direct and teacher-reported assessments. Path models showed that both directly assessed and teacher-reported self-regulation in kindergarten predicted math skills but not vocabulary and phonological awareness skills in first grade. Teacher-reported self-regulation indirectly predicted fifth grade reading comprehension through first grade teacher-reported self-regulation, and directly assessed self-regulation predicted fifth grade math achievement through math skills and directly assessed self-regulation in first grade. When controlling for kindergarten self-regulation, both self-regulation measures in first grade predicted fifth grade reading and directly assessed self-regulation predicted math achievement. Findings elucidate the foundational role of early self-regulation for later academic achievement and the differential effects of directly assessed versus teacher-reported self-regulation in a Norwegian sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We examined the cross-lagged relations between pinyin and character recognition. • We examined if phonological awareness mediates their relation. • Pinyin knowledge and character recognition were reciprocally related from kindergarten to the beginning of Grade 1. • Phonological awareness did not mediate their relation. • Pinyin is important for Chinese reading, but its contribution comes before its formal teaching at school. Although previous studies have shown that early pinyin knowledge predicts future character recognition, it remains unclear if early character recognition also predicts future pinyin knowledge. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the cross-lagged relations between pinyin knowledge and character recognition and whether their relation is mediated by phonological awareness. One hundred fifty-nine third year kindergarten children (70 girls, 89 boys; M age = 72.70 months) from Jining, China, were followed from the end of kindergarten to the beginning of Grade 1 and were tested twice on pinyin knowledge, phonological awareness, and character recognition. Results of cross-lagged analysis showed first that pinyin knowledge and character recognition had a reciprocal relationship. Second, phonological awareness did not mediate the effects of pinyin knowledge on character recognition. These findings suggest that pinyin knowledge and character recognition have a reciprocal relation that takes place well before children are formally introduced to either script. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Letter–sound interaction experiences at home predicted growth in counting skills from preschool to the first year of primary school. • Preschool language skills predicted growth in counting, number transcoding and calculation skills from preschool to the first year of primary school. • Counting, number transcoding and calculation abilities in preschool predict significant variance in these skills after children have commenced primary school. This study examines the longitudinal relationships between home learning experiences and early number skills. The counting, number transcoding and calculation skills of 274 children were assessed in the penultimate term of preschool (M age = 4:0). Prior to these assessments, parents completed questionnaires that surveyed the frequency of the children's home learning experiences. Three types of experiences were indexed: code-focused home literacy experiences that focus on the phonological and orthographic features of language, meaning-focused home literacy experiences that focus on sharing the meaning of language and text, and home number experiences. The children's language abilities (phonological awareness and vocabulary) and nonverbal abilities (inhibitory control and nonverbal reasoning) were assessed in the final term of preschool (M age = 4:3). Their number skills were reassessed in the final term of the first year of primary school (M age = 5:3). Home letter–sound interaction experiences (interactive code-focused literacy experiences) had significant longitudinal relationships with counting and number transcoding that were independent of language and nonverbal abilities. The relationship between letter–sound interaction experiences and later counting was also independent of the autoregressive influence of baseline counting ability. We extend previous findings by demonstrating that interactive code-focused home literacy experiences in the preschool period predict growth in counting skills even when a broad range of language and cognitive abilities are controlled. Supporting parents to engage in code-focused home literacy experiences may benefit pre-schoolers' counting skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Pre-school literacy and self-regulation predict learning five years later • Pre-school self-regulation is more closely related to math than to reading • Early written language skills predict math, not phonological awareness This study aimed to elucidate possible similarities and differences in early predictors of reading and math in First and Fourth Grade. Participants were 110 4-year-old Icelandic children (mean age 55.7 months, 49% girls) who were assessed on literacy and self-regulation in preschool and their performance related to their reading and math scores in Grades 1 and 4 (mean age 79.8 months and 122.2 months, respectively). The results revealed that basic reading skills in First Grade were predicted by domain-specific constructs related to preschool literacy, including phonological awareness and letter-knowledge, while First and Fourth Grade math, as well as Fourth Grade reading comprehension, was predicted by a wider constellation of skills, including self-regulation, early knowledge of written language and, in the case of reading comprehension, also phonological awareness. These results confirm previous findings indicating that self-regulation plays a stronger role in math than in reading at the beginning of formal schooling, but extends prior studies by linking preschool self-regulation to more advanced aspects of reading and math development in Fourth Grade. The findings also add to an emerging evidence that early written language skills, but not phonological awareness, are unique predictors of math. The instructional implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]