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This study explores literature reading and reception of narrative texts among Swedish middle school students. Through a written assignment and a think-aloud protocol, students' comprehension and interpretation of narrative texts are investigated. The study shows that Swedish middle school students tend to focus mainly on the plot. The main comprehension hindrance is at the lexical level, but cultural aspects, such as general knowledge of the surrounding world, are also crucial. The students also tend to have difficulties interpreting the gaps in the text and making meaning from the implicit. However, the students are also capable of interpretations and conclusions that go beyond the text. The study suggests that literature teaching in middle school should strive to activate both syntagmatic and paradigmatic thinking [Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible words. Harvard University Press] to help students to a better comprehension of the literary text, but that the syntagmatic reading should be emphasised to encourage the joy of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political parties have incentives to appeal to diverse voters to maximize support. This study examines the effect of politicians exploiting dogwhistles—expressions that convey hidden messages to specific audiences while escaping notice by the majority—for this purpose. Findings from a word replacement test and a survey experiment assessing the utility of racial dogwhistles in Sweden suggest that dogwhistling can aid politicians in gaining support from in-groups while retaining backing from out-groups; for example, “suburban gang” (dogwhistle) elicits more support than “immigrant gang.” Results suggest that dogwhistling is effective beyond the U.S. context and for different forms of political support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the present study was to examine working memory (WM) capacity, lexical access and phonological skills in 19 children with cochlear implants (CI) (5;7–13;4 years of age) attending grades 0–2, 4, 5 and 6 and to compare their performance with 56 children with normal hearing. Their performance was also studied in relation to demographic factors. The findings indicate that children with CI had visuospatial WM capacities equivalent to the comparison group. They had lower performance levels on most of the other cognitive tests. Significant differences between the groups were not found in all grades and a number of children with CI performed within 1 SD of the mean of their respective grade-matched comparison group on most of the cognitive measures. The differences between the groups were particularly prominent in tasks of phonological WM. The results are discussed with respect to the effects of cochlear implants on cognitive development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Swedish makes use of tonal accents (Accents 1 and 2) to contrast words, but the functional load is very low, with some regional dialects not even exhibiting the contrast. In particular given the low number of minimal pairs, the question is whether tonal word accent is used in lexical access. Here we present two cross-modal fragment semantic priming studies in order to address this question. Both experiments use first syllable fragments in order to prime semantically related targets. Experiment 1 utilises words whose first syllable occurs with both accent patterns, creating a situation in which there is lexical competition between words that differ solely in terms of accent. Experiment 2 removes this competition by using words that have no such accent competitors. Our results show that native speakers of Swedish use tonal word accent in lexical access: Accent mispronunciations failed to prime semantically related targets, regardless of whether primes had accent competitors or not. Results for a group of early bilingual speakers (who grew up with one Swedish-speaking parent and one other non-tonal language) showed no differences in processing compared to the monolinguals. This indicates that the extraction of accent features during acquisition and their use in lexical access is robust, even in a scenario where multiple input languages lead to tonal word accent being a useful feature for only some of the lexical items that are being acquired. There is no doubt that the accent system is well entrenched into the bilinguals' phonological system., (© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.)