It has been claimed that due to their experience in controlling two languages, bilinguals exceed monolinguals in certain executive functions, especially inhibition of task-irrelevant stimuli. Here we investigated the effects of bilingualism on an executive phonological task, namely the forced-attention dichotic listening task with syllabic…

To further investigate the possible regulatory role of private and inner speech in the context of referential social speech communications, a set of clear and systematically applied measures is needed. This study addresses this need by introducing a rigorous method for identifying private speech and certain sharply defined instances of inaudible…

People with autism show attenuated cerebral lateralisation for emotion processing. Given growing appreciation of the notion that autism represents a continuum, the present study aimed to determine whether atypical hemispheric lateralisation is evident in people with normal but above average levels of autism-like traits. One hundred and…

The effect of knowledge on memory generally is processing. However, both conceptual and empirical reasons exist to suspect that the organizational account is incomplete. Recently a revised version of that account has been proposed under the rubric of distinctiveness theory (Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008). The goal of the experiments reported…

Purpose: The aim of the present study was to determine, through colorimetric analysis, whether school textbooks for children aged 5 to 7 years contained tasks requiring normal colour vision discrimination for their resolution. In addition, the performance of a group of observers with diverse colour vision deficiencies was evaluated while…

In this research, an implicit test using a lexical-decision task, in which words were discriminated from homophonic pseudo-words, was developed to detect the phenomenon of "Chinese orthographic satiation." The phenomenon is defined as a sense of uncertainty of the composition of a well-learned Chinese character through a prolonged visual…

Knowledge restructuring refers to changes in the strategy with which people solve a given problem. Two types of knowledge restructuring are supported by existing category learning models. The first is a relearning process, which involves incremental updating of knowledge as learning progresses. The second is a recoordination process, which…

Numerous studies conducted in both the psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic fields have established that the parents' socio-economic status (SES) influences several aspects of children's language production. Moreover, a number of psycholinguistic studies strongly suggest that these differences are due in part to differences in the nature and the…

To better understand short-term memory for temporal intervals, we re-examined the choose-short effect. In Experiment 1, to contrast the predictions of two models of this effect, the subjective shortening and the coding models, pigeons were exposed to a delayed matching-to-sample task with three sample durations (2, 6 and 18 s) and retention…

The present study investigated whether bilingual readers activate constituents of compound words in one language while processing compound words in the other language via decomposition. Two experiments using a lexical decision task were conducted with adult Korean-English bilingual readers. In Experiment 1, the lexical decision of real English…

Attention lapses resulting from reactivity to task challenges and their consequences constitute a pervasive factor affecting everyday performance errors and accidents. A bidirectional model of attention lapses (error [image omitted] attention-lapse: Cheyne, Solman, Carriere, & Smilek, 2009) argues that errors beget errors by generating attention…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

Studies have suggested that supramodal attentional resources are biased rightward due to asymmetric spatial fields of the two hemispheres. This bias has been observed especially in right-handed subjects. We presented left and right-handed subjects with brief uniform grey visual stimuli in either the left or right visual hemifield. Consistent with…

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene…

When participants respond to auditory and visual stimuli, responses to audiovisual stimuli are substantially faster than to unimodal stimuli (redundant signals effect, RSE). In such tasks, the RSE is usually higher than probability summation predicts, suggestive of specific integration mechanisms underlying the RSE. We investigated the role of…