THE NEW JOURNAL ABOUT PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

 

THE NEW JOURNAL ABOUT PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

 

1.   Self-Regulatory Behaviors and Approaches to Learning of Arts Students: A Comparison Between Professional Training and English Learning

 

Expert: MC Tseng et al. J Psycholinguist Res 46 (3), 643-659. 6 2017.

 

  SUMMARY

This study investigated the self-regulatory behaviors of arts students, namely memory strategy, goal-setting, self-evaluation, seeking assistance, environmental structuring, learning responsibility, and planning and organizing. We also explored approaches to learning, including deep approach (DA) and surface approach (SA), in a comparison between students' professional training and English learning. The participants consisted of 344 arts majors. The Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire and the Revised Learning Process Questionnaire were adopted to examine students' self-regulatory behaviors and their approaches to learning. The results show that a positive and significant correlation was found in students' self-regulatory behaviors between professional training and English learning. The results indicated that increases in using self-regulatory behaviors in professional training were associated with increases in applying self-regulatory behaviors in learning English. Seeking assistance, self-evaluation, and planning and organizing were significant predictors for learning English. In addition, arts students used the deep approach more often than the surface approach in both their professional training and English learning. A positive correlation was found in DA, whereas a negative correlation was shown in SA between students' self-regulatory behaviors and their approaches to learning. Students with high self-regulation adopted a deep approach, and they applied the surface approach less in professional training and English learning. In addition, a SEM model confirmed that DA had a positive influence; however, SA had a negative influence on self-regulatory behaviors.

·         PubMed: 27858256

·         DOI: 10.1007/s10936-016-9460-0

Keywords : Self-Regulatory dep approach surface approach art majors

 

2.   Inhibition Efficiency in Highly Proficient Bilinguals and Simultaneous Interpreters: Evidence from Language Switching and Stroop Tasks

• Authors and affiliations

• Xavier AparicioEmail author
• Karin Heidlmayr
• Frédéric Isel

First Online:08 June 2017

DOI: 10.1007/s10936-017-9501-3

Cite this article as:

Aparicio, X., Heidlmayr, K. & Isel, . J Psycholinguist Res (2017). doi:10.1007/s10936-017-9501-3

SUMMARY

The present behavioral study aimed to examine the impact of language control expertise on two domain-general control processes, i.e. active inhibition of competing representations and overcoming of inhibition. We compared how Simultaneous Interpreters (SI) and Highly Proficient Bilinguals—two groups assumed to differ in language control capacity—performed executive tasks involving specific inhibition processes. In Experiment 1 (language decision task), both active and overcoming of inhibition processes are involved, while in Experiment 2 (bilingual Stroop task) only interference suppression is supposed to be required. The results of Experiment 1 showed a language switching effect only for the highly proficient bilinguals, potentially because overcoming of inhibition requires more cognitive resources than in SI. Nevertheless, both groups performed similarly on the Stroop task in Experiment 2, which suggests that active inhibition may work similarly in both groups. These contrasting results suggest that overcoming of inhibition may be harder to master than active inhibition. Taken together, these data indicate that some executive control processes may be less sensitive to the degree of expertise in bilingual language control than others. Our findings lend support to psycholinguistic models of bilingualism postulating a higher-order mechanism regulating language activation

Keywords

Bilingualism Language control Stroop task Active inhibition Overcoming of inhibition Language switching.

3.   Data from Russian Help to Determine in Which Languages the Possible Word Constraint Applies.

 

EXPERT:  Alexeeva et al. J Psycholinguist Res 46 (3), 629-640. 6 2017. 

SUMMARY

The Possible Word Constraint, or PWC, is a speech segmentation principle prohibiting to postulate word boundaries if a remaining segment contains only consonants. The PWC was initially formulated for English where all words contain a vowel and claimed to hold universally after being confirmed for various other languages. However, it is crucial to look at languages that allow for words without vowels. Two such languages have been tested: data from Slovak were compatible with the PWC, while data from Tarifiyt Berber did not support it. We hypothesize that the fixed word stress could influence the results in Slovak and report two word-spotting experiments on Russian, which has similar one-consonant words, but flexible word stress. The results contradict the PWC, so we suggest that it does not operate in the languages where words without vowels are possible, while the results from Slovak might be explained by its prosodic properties.