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A study was carried out to explore whether or not there is a relationship between children's reading ability and text-messaging behaviour. The aims of this study were to compare good and poor readers on their amount of usage of mobile phones, the frequency and type of text devices they used, and the speed at which they could read messages in "text" versus those written in formal English. Ten- and 11-year-olds completed three assessments: a questionnaire, two writing tasks and a reading task. The results showed that, overall, poor readers spent more minutes per day using their phones. Despite their less frequent use of phones, the good readers used more textisms in their written text message and were faster at reading all the messages. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the meanings of idioms in context than in isolation. The good and poor comprehenders did not differ in their abilities to interpret transparent idioms in context, but the poor comprehenders were significantly worse at using context to work out the meanings of opaque idioms. The explanation task revealed the source of information used by the children to derive nontarget interpretations. We discuss these findings in relation to idiom processing strategies and Levorato and Cacciari's global elaboration model.

Discusses the relative contribution of several theoretically relevant skills and abilities in accounting for variance in both word reading and text comprehension. Data is presented from two waves of a longitudinal study. Shows there is a dissociation between the skills and abilities that account for variance in word reading, and those that account fro variance in text comprehension. (Author/VWL)

We investigated whether emotional information facilitates retrieval and whether it makes representations more salient during sentence processing. Participants were presented with sentences including entities (nouns) that were either bare, with no additional information or that were emotionally or neutrally qualified by means of adjectives. Reading times in different word regions, specifically at the region following the verb where retrieval processes are measurable, were analysed. Qualified representations needed longer time to be build up than bare representations. Also, it was found that the amount of information and the type of information affect sentences processing and more specifically retrieval. In particular, retrieval for emotionally specified representations was faster than that for bare representations.

The influence of stereotype and grammatical information (masculine intended as generic) on the representation of gender in language was investigated using a sentence evaluation paradigm. The first sentence introduced a role name (e.g., The spies came out ...) and the second sentence contained explicit information about the gender of one or more of the characters (e.g., ...one of the women ...). The experiment was conducted in French, German, and English. In contrast to English, stereotypicality of role names had no influence on readers' male biased representations in French and German, where interpretations were dominated by the masculinity of the masculine (allegedly) intended as generic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports six experiments in which we explored whether gender stereotype information is typically invoked when certain role and profession terms are read and the extent to which the use of such information is under the reader's strategic control. All of the experiments used a design in which subjects had to decide whether two terms (one an occupation and one a kinship term) could refer to the same person (e.g., surgeon-brother or surgeon-sister). The presentation conditions and the instructions were varied from experiment to experiment, to try to encourage the subjects to respond strategically and to suppress their use of gender stereotypes when responding. The results support not only the hypothesis that information about the stereotypical gender associated with occupations and roles is typically incorporated into the reader's representation immediately, but also the hypothesis that such information is difficult or impossible to suppress. The implications of these findings for current theories of text processing and text representation are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the use of performance-related feedback as a strategy for overcoming spontaneous occupational stereotyping when certain social role nouns and professional terms are read. Across two studies participants were presented with two terms: a role noun (e.g., surgeon) and a kinship term (e.g., mother) and asked to quickly decide whether both terms could refer to the same person. The feedback training involved telling participants whether their responses were correct or incorrect and providing them with their cumulative percentage correct score. In the absence of feedback, responding to stereotype-incongruent pairings was typically slower and less accurate than in stereotype-congruent and neutral conditions. However, the results demonstrated that performance significantly improved to stimuli on which participants received the feedback training (Experiment 1), and to a novel set of stimuli (Experiment 2). In addition, the effects were still evident 1 week later (Experiment 2). It is concluded that performance-related feedback is a valuable strategy for overcoming spontaneous activation of occupational stereotypes and can result in lower levels of stereotype use., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Purpose: Both hearing poor comprehenders (PCs) and deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH) PCs have problems in understanding causal and temporal coherence relations signaled by connectives. The study examined whether hearing and DHH PCs' problems with connective understanding are similar and mainly related to their limited vocabulary, including knowledge of connective words, or to their poor reading comprehension abilities more generally., Method: Three groups of 7- to 10-year-old readers, matched on grade level (hearing PCs, DHH PCs, and hearing good comprehenders [GCs]) performed a reading comprehension task, a vocabulary task, and causal and temporal connective understanding tasks. Hearing and DHH PCs were also matched on reading comprehension and decoding abilities., Results: The DHH PCs performed significantly worse than both the hearing GCs and PCs in temporal and causal connective understanding. Significant differences between hearing PCs and GCs were found only in causal connective understanding. DHH readers' difficulties in causal connective understanding were significantly associated with poorer vocabulary knowledge. In contrast, vocabulary knowledge did not uniquely contribute to hearing PCs' difficulties with causal connective understanding, once their reading comprehension skills were controlled for., Conclusions: The results suggest that despite a similar reading profile, DHH PCs' difficulties with causal connective understanding are more closely related to their vocabulary delay, whereas hearing PCs' difficulties are more strongly influenced by their poor text integration processes (as indexed by their reading comprehension skills). Neither vocabulary knowledge nor reading comprehension skills contributed to the explanation of DHH readers and hearing PCs' temporal connective understanding.

To understand a dialogue, we need to know the topics that are being discussed. This enables us to integrate our knowledge of what was said previously to interpret the current dialogue. This study involved a large-scale behavioral experiment conducted online and a separate fMRI experiment, both testing human participants. In both, we selectively manipulated knowledge about the narrative content of dialogues presented in short videos. The clips were scenes from situation comedies that were split into two parts. The speech in the part 1 clips could either be presented normally or spectrally rotated to render it unintelligible. The part 2 clips that concluded the scenes were always presented normally. The behavioral experiment showed that knowledge of the preceding narrative boosted memory for the part 2 clips as well as increased the intersubject semantic similarity of recalled descriptions of the dialogues. The fMRI experiment replicated the finding that prior knowledge improved memory for the conclusions of the dialogues. Furthermore, prior knowledge strengthened temporal intersubject correlations in brain regions including the left angular gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus. Together, these findings show that (1) prior knowledge constrains the interpretation of a dialogue to be more similar across individuals; and (2), consistent with this, the activation of brain regions involved in semantic control processing is also more similar between individuals who share the same prior knowledge. Processing in these regions likely supports the activation and integration of prior knowledge, which helps people to better understand and remember dialogues as they unfold., (Copyright © 2022 Raykov et al.)

Existing evidence suggests that children from around the age of 8 years strategically alter their public image in accordance with known values and preferences of peers, through the self-descriptive information they convey. However, an important but neglected aspect of this 'self-presentation' is the medium through which such information is communicated: the voice itself. The present study explored peer audience effects on children's vocal productions. Fifty-six children (26 females, aged 8-10 years) were presented with vignettes where a fictional child, matched to the participant's age and sex, is trying to make friends with a group of same-sex peers with stereotypically masculine or feminine interests (rugby and ballet, respectively). Participants were asked to impersonate the child in that situation and, as the child, to read out loud masculine, feminine and gender-neutral self-descriptive statements to these hypothetical audiences. They also had to decide which of those self-descriptive statements would be most helpful for making friends. In line with previous research, boys and girls preferentially selected masculine or feminine self-descriptive statements depending on the audience interests. Crucially, acoustic analyses of fundamental frequency and formant frequency spacing revealed that children also spontaneously altered their vocal productions: they feminized their voices when speaking to members of the ballet club, while they masculinized their voices when speaking to members of the rugby club. Both sexes also feminized their voices when uttering feminine sentences, compared to when uttering masculine and gender-neutral sentences. Implications for the hitherto neglected role of acoustic qualities of children's vocal behaviour in peer interactions are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue 'Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part II)'.

Our knowledge about people can help us predict how they will behave in particular situations and interpret their actions. In this study, we investigated the cognitive and neural effects of person knowledge on the encoding and retrieval of novel life-like events. Healthy human participants learnt about two characters over a week by watching 6 episodes of one of two situation comedies, which were both centered on a young couple. In the scanner, they watched and then silently recalled 20 new scenes from both shows that were all set in unfamiliar locations: 10 from their trained show and 10 from the untrained show. After scanning, participants' recognition memory was better for scenes from the trained show. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns of brain activity when watching the videos were reinstated during recall, but this effect was not modulated by training. However, person knowledge boosted the similarity in fMRI patterns of activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) when watching the new events involving familiar characters. Our findings identify a role for the MPFC in the representation of schematic person knowledge during the encoding of novel, lifelike events., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press.)