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Transnationals constitute one-third of the population of the economically prosperous Singapore. Applying a family language policy (FLP) framework and collaborative autoethnography from data (interviews, videos, and diaries) spanning 13 years, this study delves into the linguistic journey of an Italian-Chinese family with two children born in Singapore. The analysis demonstrates the dynamics of language ideologies, management, and practices, following changes in parental beliefs, children's linguistic proficiencies and agency, availability of resources within the family and the host country, and unexpected events like COVID-19. The article highlights how multilingual parents' ideologies shape up owning to individual experiences, beliefs, and aspirations, and how these ideologies are translated into language choices and day-to-day language maintenance, vis-à-vis Singapore's English-centric policies. This unique longitudinal case study also touches on features pertaining to transnational families in Singapore, such as the perception of the local variety 'Singlish,' caregiving, and schooling options, illustrating the intricate interplay of micro and macro factors governing family multilingualism.

This article presents the ENglish Reading Online (ENRO) project that offers data on English reading and listening comprehension from 7,338 university-level advanced learners and native speakers of English representing 19 countries. The database also includes estimates of reading rate and seven component skills of English, including vocabulary, spelling, and grammar, as well as rich demographic and language background data. We first demonstrate high reliability for ENRO tests and their convergent validity with existing meta-analyses. We then provide a bird's-eye view of first (L1) and second (L2) language comparisons and examine the relative role of various predictors of reading and listening comprehension and reading speed. Across analyses, we found substantially more overlap than differences between L1 and L2 speakers, suggesting that English reading proficiency is best considered across a continuum of skill, ability, and experiences spanning L1 and L2 speakers alike. We end by providing pointers for how researchers can mine ENRO data for future studies.

A recent Registered Replication Report (RRR) of the development of verbal rehearsal during serial recall revealed that children verbalized at younger ages than previously thought, but did not identify sources of individual differences. Here, we use mediation analysis to reanalyze data from the 934 children ranging from 5 to 10 years old from the RRR for that purpose. From ages 5 to 7, the time taken for a child to label pictures (i.e. isolated naming speed) predicted the child's spontaneous use of labels during a visually presented serial reconstruction task, despite no need for spoken responses. For 6- and 7-year-olds, isolated naming speed also predicted recall. The degree to which verbalization mediated the relation between isolated naming speed and recall changed across development. All relations dissipated by age 10. The same general pattern was observed in an exploratory analysis of delayed recall for which greater demands are placed on rehearsal for item maintenance. Overall, our findings suggest that spontaneous phonological recoding during a standard short-term memory task emerges around age 5, increases in efficiency during the early elementary school years, and is sufficiently automatic by age 10 to support immediate serial recall in most children. Moreover, the findings highlight the need to distinguish between phonological recoding and rehearsal in developmental studies of short-term memory.

Divergent thinking (DT) is considered as an indicator of creative potential and a predictor of creative achievement. Furthermore, it is also conceptualized as an indicator of cognitive reserve (CR) in healthy elderly. CR refers to a functional benefit that can potentially offer protection against brain pathologies and is thereby considered a protective factor against cognitive decline. Creativity researchers have therefore attempted to understand the impact of the aging processes on DT abilities; however, it is difficult to draw a coherent picture from these studies. The aim of our systematic review was to more consistently summarize and interpret evidence about this topic. We selected 16 studies using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Our findings highlight a complex and multidimensional, rather than a simple linear relationship between the aging processes and DT performances, especially if the different DT indexes are considered separately. We also found that findings from more recent studies suggest that older subjects are able to think as divergently as younger people, particularly in the verbal domain, if no time constraints are imposed and if the workload is not too high. We conclude by discussing theoretical and methodological issues and implications for future research.

The study of divergent thinking (DT) ability in the elderly population has experienced a renewed interest because of its proven relationship with cognitive reserve (CR). However, experimental research on DT skills in this population has often been inconsistent. One of the reasons why this may have happened is that the possible negative influence of psychological symptoms, which have been proven to be common during older age, have been frequently neglected. Thus, our study aimed at exploring the impact of psychological symptoms (i.e., depression, anxiety, and apathy) on DT abilities in 45 healthy elderly participants (age = 74.2 ± 5.71; 33 women; educational level = 6.51 ± 2.58). The results showed that different psychological symptoms have negative effects on diverse DT indexes: apathetic symptoms correlated negatively with total DT, fluency, and flexibility indexes; depressive symptoms with originality. Moreover, educational level (i.e., a proxy of CR) seemed to have a moderating effect on the relationship between apathy and DT. Even if further studies are needed, future studies should consider the variability of psychological symptoms in the elderly population and their negative effects on different DT indexes and the possible role of CR as a moderator of this relationship. Implications are also discussed.

The present study investigated whether morphological processing in reading is influenced by the orthographic consistency of a language or its morphological complexity. Developing readers in Grade 3 and skilled adult readers participated in a reading aloud task in four alphabetic orthographies (English, French, German, Italian), which differ in terms of both orthographic consistency and morphological complexity. English is the least consistent, in terms of its spelling-to-sound relationships, as well as the most morphologically sparse, compared to the other three. Two opposing hypotheses were formulated. If orthographic consistency modulated the use of morphology in reading, readers of English should show more robust morphological processing than readers of the other three languages, because morphological units increase the reliability of spelling-to-sound mappings in the English language. In contrast, if the use of morphology in reading depended on the morphological complexity of a language, readers of French, German, and Italian should process morphological units in printed letter strings more efficiently than readers of English. Both developing and skilled readers of English showed greater morphological processing than readers of the other three languages. These results support the idea that the orthographic consistency of a language, rather than its morphological complexity, influences the extent to which morphology is used during reading. We explain our findings within the remit of extant theories of reading acquisition and outline their theoretical and educational implications.

The objective of this study was to analyse the relations between the function of openness to the world, family functioning and child behaviour. In order to do that, a quantitative research was conducted with 171 biparental families from the South Region of Brazil, with children from four to six years of age. Two association hypotheses were formulated: The function of openness to the world and family functioning positively influence child's strengths and negatively influence their difficulties; Family functioning and the function of openness to the world are positively related, and this relation has an influence on child behaviour, so as to increase strengths and reduce difficulties. Results indicate associations between the phenomena and that it is necessary to consider the interaction between the function of openness to the world and family functioning to better understand child behaviour.

The activation relationship is an emotional bond between caregiver and child that encourages child openness to the world through stimulation and discipline. This study aimed to analyse the father-child activation relationship in the Brazilian context through the Risky Situation. Twelve dyads have been observed: six father-boy and six father-girl dyads at preschool age. The results showed greater activation of boys compared to girls. Such results are analysed according to the Activation Relationship Theory. Despite sample size limitation, results consistently support the findings of other studies conducted in other contexts.

We tested the criterion-related validity and potential bias of two measures of pupils' academic achievement: the Teacher Rating Scale (TRS) and the Mathematics and Literacy Achievement Tests (MLTs). These measures are representative of assessment methods largely used in the elementary school. The aims were: (1) to verify the extent to which TRS and MLTs can be predicted by external criteria collected at kindergarten and (2) to estimate the degree to which each measure might be biased by family, teacher and children's characteristics. A total of 239 children were assessed during kindergarten. At the end of the first grade, they were tested for social-emotional adjustment and academic achievement (TRS and MLTs). Results suggest that family socioeconomic status and children's school readiness at kindergarten were associated with both measures; however, the predictors accounted for significantly more variance in TRS than in MLTs. Regarding the presence of bias, results indicate that TRS seems more sensitive to children's social competence, whereas the MLTs appears to be more sensitive to pupils' anxiety.

In this eye-tracking study, we investigated how semantics inform morphological analysis at the early stages of visual word identification in sentence reading. We exploited a feature of several derived Italian words, that is, that they can be read in a "morphologically transparent" way or in a "morphologically opaque" way according to the sentence context to which they belong. This way, each target word was embedded in a sentence eliciting either its transparent or opaque interpretation. We analyzed whether the effect of stem frequency changes according to whether the (very same) word is read as a genuine derivation (transparent context) versus as a pseudoderived word (opaque context). Analysis of the first fixation durations revealed a stem-word frequency effect in both opaque and transparent contexts, thus showing that stems were accessed whether or not they contributed to word meaning, that is, word decomposition is indeed blind to semantics. However, while the stem-word frequency effect was facilitatory in the transparent context, it was inhibitory in the opaque context, thus showing an early involvement of semantic representations. This pattern of data is revealed by words with short suffixes. These results indicate that derived and pseudoderived words are segmented into their constituent morphemes also in natural reading; however, this blind-to-semantics process activates morpheme representations that are semantically connoted.

There is broad consensus that printed complex words are identified on the basis of their constituent morphemes. This fact raises the issue of how the word identification system codes for morpheme position, hence allowing it to distinguish between words like "overhang" and "hangover", and to recognize that "preheat" is a word, whereas "heatpre" is not. Recent data have shown that suffixes are identified as morphemes only when they occur at the end of letter strings (Crepaldi, Rastle, & Davis, 2010, "Morphemes in Their Place: Evidence for Position-Specific Identification of Suffixes," "Memory & Cognition, 38", 312-321), which supports the general proposal that the word identification system is sensitive to morpheme positional constraints. This proposal leads to the prediction that the identification of free stems should occur in a position-independent fashion, given that free stems can occur anywhere within complex words (e.g., over"dress" and "dresser"). In Experiment 1, we show that the rejection time of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., "moonhoney") is longer than that of matched control nonwords (e.g., "moonbasin"), suggesting that honey and "moon" are identified within "moonhoney", and that these morpheme representations activate the representation for the word "honeymoon". In Experiments 2 and 3, we demonstrate that the masked presentation of transposed-constituent pseudocompounds (e.g., "moonhoney") facilitates the identification of compound words ("honeymoon"). In contrast, monomorphemic control pairs do not produce a similar pattern (i.e., "rickmave" did not prime "maverick"), indicating that the effect for "moonhoney" pairs is genuinely morphological in nature. These results demonstrate that stem representations differ from affix representations in terms of their positional constraints, providing a challenge to all existing theories of morphological processing. (Contains 7 tables and 3 footnotes.)

Multivariate analyses were conducted to clarify the nature of the influences of parental values on social behaviours of kindergarteners in the context of socio-demographic variables and sex of participants. This study included 217 mothers and 172 fathers from the same families, who completed a socio-demographic questionnaire and a new Q-sort that assesses parental values on Individualism (IND)/Collectivism (COL) and Horizontal (HOR)/Vertical (VER) continuums. To test the hypothesis of an association between parental values and children's behaviours, teachers also provided information about each child's social competence, anger-aggression, and anxiety-withdrawal in kindergarten using the Social Competence and Behavior Scale. Parents shared a greater proportion of IND/COL than VER values and mothers were more likely to emphasise IND and COL values than fathers. Mothers within IND and COL groups had more socially competent kindergartners as reported by teachers. Considering the mixed results found in the literature regarding sex differences in parenting and behaviours of children, the present results suggested that examining more closely the system of parental values might offer valuable avenues for future research on early childhood socialisation. (Contains 6 tables.)

It is generally held that noun processing is specifically sub-served by temporal areas, while the neural underpinnings of verb processing are located in the frontal lobe. However, this view is now challenged by a significant body of evidence accumulated over the years. Moreover, the results obtained so far on the neural implementation of noun and verb processing appear to be quite inconsistent. The present review briefly describes and critically re-considers the anatomo-correlative, neuroimaging, MEG, TMS and cortical stimulation studies on nouns and verbs with the aim of assessing the consistency of their results, particularly within techniques. The paper also addresses the question as to whether the inconsistency of the data could be due to the variety of the tasks used. However, it emerged that neither the different investigation techniques used nor the different cognitive tasks employed fully explain the variability of the data. In the final section we thus suggest that the main reason for the emergence of inconsistent data in this field is that the cerebral circuits underlying noun and verb processing are not spatially segregated, at least for the spatial resolution currently used in most neuroimaging studies. (Contains 5 tables and 1 figure.)

Recent masked priming experiments have brought to light a morphological level of analysis that is exclusively based on the orthographic appearance of words, so that it breaks down corner into corn- and -er, as well as dealer into deal- and -er (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). Being insensitive to semantic factors, this morpho-orthographic segmentation process cannot capture the morphological relationship between irregularly inflected words and their base forms (e.g., fell-fall, bought-buy); hence, the prediction follows that these words should not facilitate each other in masked priming experiments. However, the first experiment described in the present work demonstrates that fell does facilitate fall more than orthographically matched (e.g., fill) and unrelated control words (e.g., hope). Experiments 2 and 3 also show that this effect cannot be explained through orthographic sub-regularities that characterize many irregular inflections, as no priming arose when unrelated words showing the same orthographic patterns were tested (e.g., tell-tall vs. toll-tall). These results highlight the existence of a second higher-level source of masked morphological priming; we propose that this second source of priming is located at the lemma level, where inflected words (but not derived words) share their representation irrespective of orthographic regularity. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)