Allegra Cattani

Explicit and implicit processes in multicue judgment.

In two experiments, a multicue probability learning task was used to train participants in relating judgments to a criterion, on the basis of several cues that could or could not be relevant. The outcome feedback had 25% added noise to simulate real-world experience-based learning. Judgmental strategies acquired were measured by individual multiple linear regression analyses of a test phase (with no feedback) and were compared with self-ratings of cue relevance. In a third experiment, participants were instructed explicitly on cue relevance, with no training phase. The pattern of results suggested that both implicit and explicit cognitive processes influenced judgments and that they may have been sensitive to different task manipulations in the learning phase. On more complex tasks, despite weak explicit learning, explicit processes continued to influence judgments, producing a decrement in performance. These findings explain why studies of expert judgment often show only moderate levels of self-insight, since people have only partial access to the processes determining their judgments.

How much exposure to English is necessary for a bilingual toddler to perform like a monolingual peer in language tests

BACKGROUND Bilingual children are under-referred due to an ostensible expectation that they lag behind their monolingual peers in their English acquisition. The recommendations of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists (RCSLT) state that bilingual children should be assessed in both the languages known by the children. However, despite these recommendations, a majority of speech and language professionals report that they assess bilingual children only in English as bilingual children come from a wide array of language backgrounds and standardized language measures are not available for the majority of these. Moreover, even when such measures do exist, they are not tailored for bilingual children. AIMS It was asked whether a cut-off exists in the proportion of exposure to English at which one should expect a bilingual toddler to perform as well as a monolingual on a test standardized for monolingual English-speaking children. METHODS & PROCEDURES Thirty-five bilingual 2;6-year-olds exposed to British English plus an additional language and 36 British monolingual toddlers were assessed on the auditory component of the Preschool Language Scale, British Picture Vocabulary Scale and an object-naming measure. All parents completed the Oxford Communicative Development Inventory (Oxford CDI) and an exposure questionnaire that assessed the proportion of English in the language input. Where the CDI existed in the bilinguals additional language, these data were also collected. OUTCOMES & RESULTS Hierarchical regression analyses found the proportion of exposure to English to be the main predictor of the performance of bilingual toddlers. Bilingual toddlers who received 60% exposure to English or more performed like their monolingual peers on all measures. K-means cluster analyses and Levene variance tests confirmed the estimated English exposure cut-off at 60% for all language measures. Finally, for one additional language for which we had multiple participants, additional language CDI production scores were significantly inversely related to the amount of exposure to English. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS Typically developing 2;6-year-olds who are bilingual in English and an additional language and who hear English 60% of the time or more, perform equivalently to their typically developing monolingual peers.

Visual memory for shapes in deaf signers and nonsigners and in hearing signers and nonsigners: atypical lateralization and enhancement.

Deaf and hearing individuals who either used sign language (signers) or not (nonsigners) were tested on visual memory for objects and shapes that were difficult to describe verbally with a same/different matching paradigm. The use of 4 groups was designed to permit a separation of effects related to sign language use (signers vs. nonsigners) and effects related to auditory deprivation (deaf vs. hearing). Forty deaf native signers and nonsigners and 51 hearing signers and nonsigners participated in the study. Signing individuals (both deaf and hearing) were more accurate than nonsigning individuals (deaf and hearing) at memorizing shapes. For the shape memory task but not the object task, deaf signers and nonsigners displayed right hemisphere (RH) advantage over the left hemisphere (LH). Conversely, both hearing groups displayed a memory advantage for shapes in the LH over the RH. Results indicate that enhanced memory performance for shapes in signers (deaf and hearing) stems from the visual skills acquired through sign language use and that deafness, irrespective of language background, leads to the use of a visually based strategy for memory of difficult-to-describe items.

Atypical Lateralization of Memory for Location: Effects of Deafness and Sign Language Use.

This paper examines the impact of auditory deprivation and sign language use on the enhancement of location memory and hemispheric specialization using two matching tasks. Forty-one deaf signers and non-signers and 51 hearing signers and non-signers were tested on location memory for shapes and objects (Study 1) and on categorical versus coordinate spatial relations (Study 2). Results of the two experiments converge to suggest that deafness alone supports the atypical left hemispheric preference in judging the location of a circle or a picture on a blank background and that deafness and sign language experience determine the superior ability of memory for location. The importance of including a sample of deaf non-signers was identified.

Monodialectal and multidialectal infants’ representation of familiar words

Monolingual infants are typically studied as a homogenous group and compared to bilingual infants. This study looks further into two subgroups of monolingual infants, monodialectal and multidialectal, to identify the effects of dialect-related variation on the phonological representation of words. Using an Intermodal Preferential Looking task, the detection of mispronunciations in familiar words was compared in infants aged 1;8 exposed to consistent (monodialectal) or variable (multidialectal) pronunciations of words in their daily input. Only monodialectal infants detected the mispronunciations whereas multidialectal infants looked longer at the target following naming whether the label was correctly produced or not. This suggests that variable phonological input in the form of dialect variation impacts the degree of specificity of lexical representations in early infancy.

The impact of language on the expression and assessment of pain in children.

This paper focuses on the importance of language in the expression of pain. Variation in definitions of pain is presented, together with a review of the evidence examining the impact language may have on the way pain is expressed linguistically. The implications for conducting research with children who speak different languages are explored. Strategies such as using non-linguistic methods of communication, additional time required for conducting interviews and the inclusion of research team members from the same ethnic or linguistic background are presented.

A cross-cultural study of acceptance and use of robotics by future psychology practitioners

Research in robotics has made available numerous possibilities and tools for further innovation in the psychological practice. For instance, recent research provided many examples of possible applications of robots in the education and rehabilitation of people with learning difficulties and/or intellectual disabilities. In this paper, we present a study on how cultural backgrounds can influence the perception and intention to use a robot as an instrument in the future practice. The study involved 37 Italian students and 37 UK students, as future professionals in the field of psychology, which experienced the actual capabilities of a humanoid robot through a live demo. In this work, we explored the main factors of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) with the aim to reveal cultural differences. The instrument used was the UTAUT questionnaire, which was designed and validated to investigate the robot acceptance and use. A significant difference on the intention to use the robot is reported in our results. The discriminant analysis produced a very high degree of separation between the two groups, confirming that there is a different approach toward the use of robotics between the two cultures.

Cultural responses to pain in UK children of primary school age: a mixed-methods study.

Pain-measurement tools are often criticized for not addressing the influence of culture and ethnicity on pain. This study examined how children who speak English as a primary or additional language discuss pain. Two methods were used in six focus group interviews with 34 children aged 4-7 years: (i) use of drawings from the Pediatric Pain Inventory to capture the language used by children to describe pain; and (ii) observation of the childrens placing of pain drawings on red/amber/green paper to denote perceived severity of pain. The findings demonstrated that children with English as an additional language used less elaborate language when talking about pain, but tended to talk about the pictures prior to deciding where they should be placed. For these children, there was a positive significant relationship between language, age, and length of stay in the UK. The childrens placement of pain drawings varied according to language background, sex, and age. The findings emphasize the need for sufficient time to assess pain adequately in children who do not speak English as a first language.

Vocabulary of 2-Year-Olds Learning English and an Additional Language: Norms and Effects of Linguistic Distance

Typically-developing bilingual children usually underperform relative to monolingual norms when assessed in one language only. We measured vocabulary with Communicative Development Inventories for 372 24-month-old toddlers learning British English and one Additional Language out of a diverse set of 13 (Bengali, Cantonese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hindi-Urdu, Italian, Mandarin, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Welsh). We furthered theoretical understanding of bilingual development by showing, for the first time, that linguistic distance between the child’s two languages predicts vocabulary outcome, with phonological overlap related to expressive vocabulary, and word order typology and morphological complexity related to receptive vocabulary, in the Additional Language. Our study also has crucial clinical implications: we have developed the first bilingual norms for expressive and receptive vocabulary for 24-month-olds learning British English and an Additional Language. These norms were derived from factors identified as uniquely predicting CDI vocabulary measures: the relative amount of English versus the Additional Language in child-directed input and parental overheard speech, and infant gender. The resulting UKBTAT tool was able to accurately predict the English vocabulary of an additional group of 58 bilinguals learning an Additional Language outside our target range. This offers a pragmatic method for the assessment of children in the majority language when no tool exists in the Additional Language.

Decreased attention to object size information in scale errors performers

Young children sometimes make serious attempts to perform impossible actions on miniature objects as if they were full-size objects. The existing explanations of these curious action errors assume (but never explicitly tested) childrens decreased attention to object size information. This study investigated the attention to object size information in scale errors performers. Two groups of children aged 18-25 months (N=52) and 48-60 months (N=23) were tested in two consecutive tasks: an action task that replicated the original scale errors elicitation situation, and a looking task that involved watching on a computer screen actions performed with adequate to inadequate size object. Our key finding - that children performing scale errors in the action task subsequently pay less attention to size changes than non-scale errors performers in the looking task - suggests that the origins of scale errors in childhood operate already at the perceptual level, and not at the action level.