Development of an Auditory Passage Comprehension Task for Swedish Primary School Children of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity

Purpose This study reports on the development of an auditory passage comprehension task for Swedish primary school children of cultural and linguistic diversity. It also reports on their performance on the task in quiet and in noise. Method Eighty-eight children aged 7–9 years and showing normal hearing participated. The children were divided into three groups based on presumed language exposure: 13 children were categorized as Swedish-speaking monolinguals, 19 children were categorized as simultaneous bilinguals, and 56 children were categorized as sequential bilinguals. No significant difference in working memory capacity was seen between the three language groups. Two passages and associated multiple-choice questions were developed. During development of the passage comprehension task, steps were taken to reduce the impact of culture-specific prior experience and knowledge on performance. This was achieved by using the story grammar principles, universal topics and plots, and simple language that avoided complex or unusual grammatical structures and words. Results The findings indicate no significant difference between the two passages and similar response distributions. Passage comprehension performance was significantly better in quiet than in noise, regardless of language exposure group. The monolinguals outperformed both simultaneous and sequential bilinguals in both listening conditions. Conclusions Because the task was designed to minimize the effect of cultural knowledge on auditory passage comprehension, this suggests that compared with monolinguals, both simultaneous and sequential bilinguals have a disadvantage in auditory passage comprehension. As expected, the findings demonstrate that noise has a negative effect on auditory passage comprehension. The magnitude of this effect does not relate to language exposure. The developed auditory passage comprehension task seems suitable for assessing auditory passage comprehension in primary school children of linguistic and cultural diversity.

Deep Neural Networks Evolve Human-like Attention Distribution during Goal-directed Reading Comprehension

Attention is a key mechanism for information selection in both biological brains and many state-of-the-art deep neural networks (DNNs). Here, we investigate whether humans and DNNs allocate attention in comparable ways when seeking information in a text passage to answer a question. We analyze 3 transformer-based DNNs that reach human-level performance when trained to perform the reading comprehension task. We find that the DNN attention distribution quantitatively resembles human attention distribution measured by eye tracking: Human readers fixate longer on words that are more relevant to the question-answering task, demonstrating that attention is modulated by the top-down reading goal, on top of lower-level visual layout and textual features. Further analyses reveal that the attention weights in DNNs are also influenced by both the top-down reading goal and lower-level textual features, with the shallow layers more strongly influenced by lower-level textual features and the deep layers attending more to task-relevant words. Additionally, deep layers’ attention to task-relevant words gradually emerges when pre-trained DNN models are fine-tuned to perform the reading comprehension task, which coincides with the improvement in task performance. These results demonstrate that DNNs can naturally evolve human-like attention distribution through task optimization. The results suggest that human attention during goal-directed reading comprehension is a consequence of task optimization and the attention weights in DNN are of biological significance.

BINARY OR NON-BINARY? GENDER MORPHOLOGY IN SPANISH: DIFFERENCES DEPENDENT ON THE TASK

There is empirical evidence in different languages on how the computation of gender morphology during psycholinguistic processing affects the conformation of sex-generic representations. However, there is no empirical evidence on the processing of non-binary morphological variants in Spanish (-x or -e) in contrast to the generic masculine variant (-o). To analyze this phenomenon, we conducted two experiments: an acceptability judgment task and a sentence comprehension task. The results show differences depending on the task. So, the underlying processes that are put into play in each one generate different effects. In acceptability judgments, which involve strategic processes mediated by beliefs and the linguistic norm, the generic masculine is more acceptable to refer to mixed groups. In the sentence comprehension task, which inquires about automatic processes and implicit representations, the non-binary forms consistently elicited a reference to mixed groups. Furthermore, the response times indicated that these morphological variants do not entail a higher processing cost than the generic masculine.

The Effect of Background Noise on a “Studying for an Exam” Task in an Open-Plan Study Environment: A Laboratory Study

Students can be disturbed by background noise while working in an open-plan study environment. To improve the acoustic quality of open-plan study environments a study was done on the influence of different sound scenarios on students working on a typical student task, “studying for an exam”. Three sound scenarios and a quiet reference sound scenario were developed, based on the sound environment of a real open-plan study environment, with a varying number of talkers in the background and different reverberation times of the study environment. Seventy students worked on a set of tasks simulating a “studying for an exam” task while being exposed to the sound scenarios. This task comprises a reading comprehension task with text memory by delayed answering questions about the text, with additional tasks being performed in the gap between studying the text and retrieving. These additional tasks are a mental arithmetic task and a logical reasoning task. Performance, self-estimated performance and disturbance of students were measured. No significant effect of the sound scenarios was found on performance of students working on the reading comprehension task with text memory and the mental arithmetic task. However, a significant effect of sound was found on performance of students working on the logical reasoning task. Furthermore, a significant effect of the sound scenarios was found on self-estimated performance and perceived disturbance for all tasks from which the reading comprehension task with text memory was the most disturbed task. It is argued that the absence of a detrimental sound effect on the performance of students working on a reading comprehension task with text memory is a result of focusing due to task engagement and task difficulty, both aspects working as a “shield against distraction”.

Microvariation in the division of labor between null- and overt-subject pronouns: the case of Italian and Spanish

In Italian, null pronouns are typically interpreted toward antecedents in a prominent syntactic position, whereas overt pronouns prefer antecedents in lower positions. Interpretation preferences in Spanish are less clear. While comprehension and production have never been systematically compared in Italian and Spanish, here we look at the preferences for overt- and null-subject pronouns in the two languages using the same production and comprehension materials. Using an offline comprehension task with a group of Spanish and Italian speakers, we tested sentences where the type of pronoun (null vs. explicit) and position of the pronoun (anaphoric vs. cataphoric) are manipulated, to determine how context affects speakers’ interpretations in the two languages. With two production tasks, we measured referential choice in controlled discourse contexts, linking the production patterns to the differences observed in comprehension. Our results indicate microvariation in the two null-subject languages, with Spanish following the Position of Antecedent Hypothesis but to a lesser degree than Italian. More specifically, in Spanish, the weaker object bias for overt pronouns parallels with a higher use of overt pronouns (and with fewer null pronouns) in contexts of topic maintenance.

Age, Language Difference and Proficiency as Determinant Factors in Learning Strategy Use

This study examines how language difference, age, and proficiency are related to the choice and use of learning strategies by students completing a reading comprehension task. The aim of this study is to determine the learning strategies employed by two groups of students of different ages and with different foreign language proficiency levels. Participants of the study were 94 university students and 105 secondary school students. Participants were given a reading comprehension task in their native language, Turkish, and another in English, with the learning strategies they employed in the two languages categorized according to the Learning Strategies Determining Scale. It was observed that language difference, age and proficiency were influential factors in determining which learning strategies individuals used.

The bilingual home language boost through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic

Usage-based accounts of language acquisition suggest that bilingual language proficiency is dynamic and susceptible to changes in language use. The COVID-19 pandemic led to unprecedented modifications in the language learning environment of developing bilinguals. Drawing on this unique opportunity, we analyzed existing data of two matched groups of Mandarin-English bilingual children (ages 4 to 8 years, n=40), one tested before (pre-COVID group) and the other after (COVID group) the pandemic. The dataset comprises responses to a language environment questionnaire, and scores on a sentence comprehension task and a sentence recall task in the bilinguals’ two languages. Questionnaire data revealed that children in the COVID group read more in English but spoke less English with their mothers and friends compared to peers in the pre-COVID group. On the comprehension task, the two groups performed comparably in English but the COVID group showed better performance in Mandarin than the pre-COVID group. On the production task, the pre-COVID group showed better English performance than the COVID group, whereas the COVID group showed better Mandarin performance than the pre-COVID group. Within the pre-COVID group, English was stronger than Mandarin in both comprehension and production. Within the COVID group, the two languages were balanced in comprehension and Mandarin was stronger than English in production. Moreover, language use variables were correlated with production performance in both languages. These patterns illustrate the intimate relationships between language use and bilingual language proficiency through the lens of COVID-19 induced language environment modification.

Differences in the production and perception of communicative kinematics in autism

In human communication, social intentions and meaning are often revealed in the way we move. In this study, we investigate the flexibility of human communication in terms of kinematic modulation in a clinical population, namely, autistic individuals. The aim of this study was twofold: to assess 1) whether communicatively relevant kinematic features of gestures differ between autistic and neurotypical individuals, and 2) if autistic individuals use communicative kinematic modulation to support gesture recognition. We tested autistic and neurotypical individuals on a silent gesture production task and a gesture comprehension task. We measured movement during the gesture production task using a Kinect motion tracking device in order to determine if autistic individuals differed from neurotypical individuals in their gesture kinematics. For the gesture comprehension task, we utilized stick-light figures as stimuli and, by testing for a correlation between the kinematics of these videos and recognition performance, we assessed whether autistic individuals used communicatively relevant kinematic cues to support recognition. We found that 1) silent gestures produced by autistic and neurotypical individuals differ in communicatively relevant kinematic features, such as the number of meaningful holds between movements, and 2) while autistic individuals are overall unimpaired at recognizing gestures, they processed repetition and complexity, measured as the amount of submovements perceived, different than neurotypicals do. These findings highlight how subtle aspects of neurotypical behavior can be experienced differently by autistic individuals, and demonstrate the relationship between movement kinematics and social interaction in high-functioning autistic individuals.

Relative Clause Sentence Processing in Korean-Speaking School-Aged Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment

Purpose The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed online and off-line sentence-processing tasks using relative clause sentences. The response time (RT) data obtained from the online processing task were analyzed at each word position and between adjacent words for items answered both correctly and incorrectly on the off-line comprehension task. A linear mixed-effects model and a generalized linear mixed-effects model were used to analyze the performances on the online/off-line sentence-processing task between the two groups. Results The results revealed that the processing pattern of RTs on the online processing task differed between the two groups, such that the SLI group did not show the predicted RT increase while the TD group did. Also, the SLI group processed each word with comparable or faster reading rates than the TD group. On the off-line comprehension task, the SLI group performed poorly compared to the TD group. Conclusions Processing of syntactically complex sentences differed between the TD and SLI groups, such that the SLI group had lower accuracy on the off-line comprehension task and was less efficient on the online processing task as compared to the TD group. These results mainly support the syntactic deficit account in children with SLI.