Search

Literacy affects many aspects of language and cognition, including the shift from a more holistic mode of processing to a more analytical part-based mode of processing. Here we examined whether this shift impacts the ability of preschool and primary school children to learn the rules underlying a finite-state grammar using an artificial grammar learning (AGL) paradigm implemented with either linguistic (letters) or non-linguistic (colors) materials to further examine if children's AGL performance was modulated by type of stimuli. Both tasks involved a training phase in which half of the preschool children and half of the primary school children were exposed to a set of either letter or color strings without any information about the rules underlying the construction of those strings. Later, in the test phase, they were asked to decide whether a new set of letter or color strings conformed to those rules to test grammar learning. Results showed that only primary school children showed evidence of learning, and, importantly, only with colors. These findings seem to support the view that learning to read promotes reliance on smaller linguistic units that might hinder the ability of first-graders to learn the rules underlying finite-state grammars implemented with linguistic materials., This study was conducted at the Psychology Research Centre (PSI/01662), University of Minho, and supported by Grant POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028212 from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Tech nology and Higher Education through national funds, and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement. The research was also funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad with a research grant to Luis Jiménez (PSI2015-70990-P).

Recent studies have suggested that proficient bilinguals show morphological decomposition in the L2, but the question remains as to whether this process is modulated by the cognateness of the morphemic constituents of L2 words and by L2 proficiency. To answer this question was the main goal of the present research. For that purpose, a masked priming lexical decision task was conducted manipulating for the first time the degree of orthographic overlap of the L2 word as a whole, as well as of their morphemic constituents (bases and suffixes). Thirty-four European Portuguese-English bilinguals (16 intermediate and 18 high-proficient) and 16 English native-speaking controls performed the task in English. Results revealed that both groups of bilinguals decomposed words as the native control group. Importantly, results also showed that morphological priming effects were sensitive not only to cross-language similarities of words as a whole, but also to their morphemic constituents (especially, suffixes)., This research was conducted at Psychology Research Centre (UID/PSI/01662/2013), University of Minho and funded by the FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) through the state budget, with reference IF/00784/2013 / CP1158 / CT0013. This has also been partially supported by the FCT and the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education through national funds and co-financed by FEDER through COMPETE2020 under the PT2020 Partnership Agreement (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007653). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript., info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Los niveles de autonomía psicológica de los alumnos desempeñan un papel importante en su ajuste a las presiones y desafíos de la vida universitaria. En este sentido, el presente estudio analiza las relaciones entre los niveles de autonomía de los estudiantes en su entrada en la Enseñanza Superior y la calidad de su ajuste académico al final del primer año. Se aplicó el Iowa Developing Autonomy Inventory (IDAI; Hood y Jackson, 1983) en el inicio del año lectivo, y el Questionário de Vivências Académicas (QVA; Almeida, Soares y Ferreira, 2000) al final de ese año, a una muestra de 420 alumnos de primer año de la Universidade do Minho. Los resultados revelan que los alumnos poseen percepciones bastante positivas en cuanto a sus niveles de autonomía en las áreas de Gestión del tiempo, Movilidad e Interdependencia, y niveles más bajos en la Gestión del dinero, observándose algunas oscilaciones en función del género. Por otro lado, los alumnos cuya entrada en la Enseñanza Superior no implicó su abandono del hogar familiar, especialmente los de sexo masculino, presentan niveles más elevados de ajuste académico. Finalmente, los resultados sugieren que el ajuste académico se encuentra asociado a los niveles de autonomía de los alumnos, en particular en lo que concierne a la Gestión del tiempo, Independencia emocional de sus compañeros e Interdependencia., Students’ psychological autonomy levels play an important role in their adjustment to the pressures and challenges of college life. In this sense, the present descriptive study analyzes the relationships between autonomy levels reached by students at the moment they entered Higher Education and the quality of their academic adjustment at the end of 1st academic year. It was applied the Iowa Developing Autonomy Inventory (IDAI), in the beginning of 1st semester, and the Academic Experiences Questionnaire (AEQ) at the end of that academic year, to a sample of 420 1st year University of Minho students’. Results show that students had quite positive results in what concerns to Time management, Mobility and Interdependence, and lower results in Money management. It was observed some gender effects. On the other hand, the students whose entrance in the Higher Education did not imply family separation, especially male students, present higher levels of academic adjustment. Finally, results suggest that academic adjustment was associated to students’ levels of autonomy, in particular in what concerns to Time management, Peer emotional independence and Interdependence.

The present study presents normative ratings of free association for 139 European Portuguese (EP) words for 8-, 10- and 12-year-old children attending the 3rd, 5th and 7th grades of elementary and middle school in Portugal. For each word, five indices are presented: a) the percentage of associates, b) the strength of the first associate, c) the strength of the second associate, d) the distance between the first and the second associates and e) the percentage of idiosyncratic responses. Additionally, grade-level frequency values for each word from the ESCOLEX database (Soares et al., in press) are also provided. As expected, the results revealed developmental changes in the knowledge organization of children, ocurring at the age of 9-10 (5th grade) and remaining stable in 11-12 year-old children (7th grade). Specifically, we observed a decrease in the percentage of associates and idiosyncratic responses as well as an increase in the strength of the first and the second associate from the 3rd grade to the 5th grade. Moreover, the comparative analysis with the previous work of Carneiro, Albuquerque, Fernandes, & Esteves (2004) on EP and Macizo, Gómez-Ariza, & Bajo (2000) on Spanish for a subset of common words (16 and 58, respectively) shows that the present norms fit well with previous EP data but differ from Spanish data. The normative values can be downloaded at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases or at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental., This work is part of the research projects “Bilingual semantic processing: a study with cognate words by using different learning methods” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104671/2008) and “Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A software program for deriving objective and subjective psycholinguistic indices for European Portuguese words” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104679/2008), funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and by Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) through the European programs Quadro de Referência Estratégico Nacional (QREN) and Programa Operacional Factores de Competitividade (COMPETE). The authors thank Pedro Macizo for allowing us to use their normative data for 58 Spanish words with the purpose of comparison with the EP data. We also thank Isabel Padrón and Álvaro Iriarte for helping us with the classification of children’s responses as a function of syntagmatic–paradigmatic typology.

How bilinguals represent words in two languages and which mechanisms are responsible for second language acquisition are important questions in the bilingual and vocabulary acquisition literature. This study aims to analyze the effect of two learning methods (picture-based vs. word-based method) and two types of words (cognates and noncognates) in early stages of children’s L2 acquisition. Forty-eight native speakers of European Portuguese, all sixth graders (mean age= 10.87 years; SD= 0.85), participated in the study. None of them had prior knowledge of Basque (the L2 in this study). After a learning phase in which L2 words were learned either by a picture- or a word-based method, children were tested in a backward-word translation recognition task at two times (immediately vs. one week later). Results showed that the participants made more errors when rejecting semantically-related than semantically-unrelated words as correct translations (semantic interference effect). The magnitude of this effect was higher in the delayed test condition regardless of the learning method. Moreover, the overall performance of participants from the word-based method was better than the performance of participants from the picture-word method. Results were discussed concerning the most significant bilingual lexical processing models.

How is the new vocabulary connected with the semantic memory? Starting from the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994), this study aimed to explore the links established between the new words and the conceptual system manipulating two learning methods and the type of word to be learned (cognate vs. no cognate). The data showed that the learning method and the type of words modulate the organization of bilingual memory.

En este trabajo se evaluó el papel de la animacidad en la desambiguación de cláusulas de relativo con doble antecedente en portugués europeo (PE). El estudio de cómo resuelve el procesador este tipo de ambigüedades ha sido objeto de gran interés en la investigación; sin embargo, en PE ésta ha sido escasa y poco consistente. Además, dado que la literatura más reciente ha destacado la relevancia de variables extrasintácticas en este proceso, se realizaron dos estudios con el objetivo de evaluar las estrategias de adjunción en PE manipulando la animacidad de los nombres. En el estudio 1 se empleó una tarea de compleción de frases y en el estudio 2 una tarea de lectura auto-administrada. En ambos, los resultados revelaron una preferencia significativa por la estrategia de adjunción alta. No obstante, el tipo de estrategia fue modulado por la animacidad de los nombres, de tal manera que se prefirió la estrategia de adjunción baja cuando el primer nombre era inanimado y el segundo animado. Estos resultados arrojan luz sobre el uso de estas estrategias en PE y parecen apoyar la idea de que, en fases relativamente tempranas del procesamiento, el procesador atiende a información no exclusivamente sintáctica., This work analyses the role of animacy in European Portuguese (EP) attachment preferences of relative clauses to complex noun phrases. Although the study of how the human parser solves this type of ambiguities has been the focus of extensive research in the literature, what is known about EP is both limited and puzzling. Additionally, as recent studies have stressed the importance of extra-syntactic variables in this syntactic process, two experiments were carried out in order to assess EP attachment preferences considering four animacy conditions: Study 1 used a sentence-completion-task, and Study 2 a self-paced reading task. In both studies results showed a significant preference for high attachment in EP. They also showed that this preference was modulated by the animacy of the host NP: when the first host was inanimate and the second animate, the parser changes its preference to a low attachment strategy. These findings clarify previous results on EP and strengthen the idea that even in early stages of processing the parser is sensitive to extra-syntactic information.

Este artículo presenta un modelo de interacción de variables personales y contextuales en la predicción del rendimiento y del desarrollo psicosocial de estudiantes universitarios. La muestra fue constituida por 560 estudiantes de primer año de la Universidad do Minho. Los resultados del path analysis sugieren que, a pesar de que las expectativas iniciales de implicación académica de los alumnos, representan un índice efectivo de su implicación en la vida universitaria, y que el clima social del aula afecta a los niveles de implicación, bienestar y satisfacción obtenidos, esas relaciones no fueron lo suficientemente fuertes para influir en los resultados de las variables criterio del modelo. El rendimiento académico fue determinado por la nota de acceso a la Universidad y el desarrollo psicosocial por los niveles de autonomía en el momento de ingreso. Pese a la necesidad de una mayor investigación, los resultados alertan sobre la importancia de las características preuniversitarias de los alumnos en la configuración de sus procesos de adaptación This article presents a model of interaction of personal and contextual variables in the prediction of academic performance and psychosocial development of Portuguese college students. The sample consists of 560 first-year college students of the University of Minho. The path analysis results suggest that initial expectations of the students’ involvement in academic life constituted an effective predictor of their involvement during their first year; as well as the social climate of the classroom influenced their involvement, well-being and levels of satisfaction obtained. However, these relationships were not strong enough to influence the criterion variables integrated in the model (academic performance and psychosocial development). Academic performance was predicted by the high school grades and college entrance examination scores, and the level of psychosocial development was determined by the level of development showed at the time they entered college. Though more research is needed, these results point to the importance of students’ pre-college characteristics when we are considering the quality of their college adjustment process SI