Category: Language Acquisition

 Over half the world's population speaks more than one language. But it's not clear how these languages interact in the brain. A new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that Chinese people who are fluent in English translate English words into Chinese automatically and quickly, without thinking about it.

Like her research subjects, Taoli Zhang of the University of Nottingham is originally from China, but she lives in the UK and is fluent in English. She co wrote the new paper with her colleagues, Walter J.B. van Heuven and Kathy Conklin. She wanted to study how two different languages are stored in the bilingual brain. "If you read in English, you don't really require your knowledge of Chinese. Do you switch it off?" Earlier research in European languages found that both languages stayed active in the brain. But that work was in pairs of languages, like English and French or Spanish and Italian, have a lot of similarities in spelling and vocabulary. That's not true for English and Chinese.

The subjects in Zhang's experiments were all Chinese students at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. For the study, each person was shown pairs of words. The first word flashed on the computer screen so quickly that the person didn't realize they'd seen it. The second word appeared for longer; the person was supposed to hit a key indicating whether it was a real word as quickly as possible. This was just a test to see how quickly they were processing the word.

The trick was this: Although everything in the test was in English, in some cases, the two words actually had a connection — but only if you know how they're written in Chinese. So, for example, the first word might be "thing," which is written 东西in Chinese, and the second might be "west," which is written 西in Chinese. The character for "west" appears in the word "thing," but these two words are totally unrelated in English.

Zhang found that, when two words shared characters in Chinese, participants processed the second word faster — even though they had no conscious knowledge of having seen the first word in the pair. Even though these students are fluent in English, their brains still automatically translate what they see into Chinese. This suggests that knowledge of a first language automatically influences the processing of a second language, even when they are very different, unrelated languages.

"As long as I can speak English to you, why would you care what my brain is doing in terms of Chinese?" Zhang asks. In daily life, it doesn't matter; it's just good enough that she can talk to the people around her. But she says understanding the way languages are linked in the brain could someday help people learn second languages. "When people learn two languages, they automatically make the link between them. We would like to find out how the link between the two languages influences language processing."

The article is entitled, "Fast automatic translation and morphological decomposition in Chinese-English bilinguals."

When a person has a family history of cancer, their worry about developing the disease may lead to them refusing to have preventive tests. Advice from genetic counselling units reduces their anxiety but, until now, nobody knew how much. Now, a scientific team has validated the 'Escala de Preocupación por el Cáncer — EPC' (equivalent of the Cancer Worry Scale), the first of its kind in the Spanish language, in order to evaluate it.

"Excessive concern about cancer can result in two kinds of behaviour. Some people undergo excessive and unnecessary diagnostic tests, while others do not want to take any, out of fear that they will discover they have cancer," says Esther Cabrera, lead author of the study and director of the School of Health Sciences at the Mataró-Maresme Technocampus (Barcelona).

Genetic counselling, in the case of patients with a family history of the disease, is the right kind of tool for reducing these worries. However, until now there has been no tool in the Spanish language for evaluating the effectiveness of this initiative, nor any instrument to evaluate the fear of suffering from cancer.

"I could say that genetic counselling works well, but I couldn't measure this," says Ignacio Blanco, another author of the study and director of the Genetic Counselling Unit at the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) in Barcelona. Now he has access to the 'Escala de Preocupación por el Cáncer' (EPC), an equivalent of the Cancer Worry Scale that shows him "that the degree of patients' concern does not increase following this counselling — quite the contrary," he adds.

The study, published in Medicina Clínica, shows that the EPC is a valid and reliable scale for evaluating concern about cancer in healthy people. It is a translation and a cultural adaptation of the English-language Cancer Worry Scale: six questions that measure concern on a scale ranging from 6 (the least) to 24 (the highest level).

From psychology to general medicine

The research study was carried out on 212 healthy women without any family history of breast cancer who attended the ICO Genetic Counselling Unit. Before the experts studied their family trees, the patients answered the test questions. Several days after the genetic counselling, the researchers once again distributed the scales to analyse the effectiveness of this tool.

One of the advantages of this tool is that it can be used in any of the branches of medicine that a patient seeks help from — psychology, oncology or even general medicine. "The scale can be used in primary healthcare as a filtering instrument among the healthy population to identify individuals with high levels of concern about cancer," the researchers say.

The simplicity of the questions (for example, "How worried are you about the possibility of developing cancer one day?") and the answers ("Not at all worried/A bit worried/ Quite worried/Very worried") make it possible to easily objectify "something that is difficult to measure," explains Esther Cabrera.

The tool has shown itself to be effective in alerting healthcare professionals to certain healthy patients who are unwilling to undergo preventive testing. "On many occasions, their fears are related to their decision about whether or not to take preventive measures that would help them avoid cancer or diagnose it a very early stage," Cabrera points out.

The researchers add that the tool will be useful for comparing and understanding the factors that affect the degree to which different groups of people worry. This would also make it possible to customise educational initiatives to improve people's quality of life.

Journal Reference:

1. Esther Cabrera, Adelaida Zabalegui, Ignacio Blanco. Versión española de la Cancer Worry Scale (Escala de Preocupación por el Cáncer: adaptación cultural y análisis de la validez y la fiabilidad). Medicina Clínica, 2011; 136 (1): 8 DOI: 10.1016/j.medcli.2010.04.015

It is one of the wonders of language: We cannot possibly anticipate or memorize every potential word, phrase, or sentence. Yet we have no trouble constructing and understanding myriads of novel utterances every day. How do we do it? Linguists say we naturally and unconsciously employ abstract rules — syntax.

How abstract is language? What is the nature of these abstract representations? And do the same rules travel among realms of cognition? A new study exploring these questions — by psychologists Christoph Scheepers, Catherine J. Martin, Andriy Myachykov, Kay Teevan, and Izabela Viskupova of the University of Glasgow, and Patrick Sturt of the University of Edinburgh — makes what Scheepers calls "a striking new finding": The process of storing and reusing syntax "works across cognitive domains."

More specifically: "The structure of a math equation correctly solved is preserved in memory and determines the structuring of a subsequent sentence that a person has to complete." Neuroscientists have found evidence suggesting a link between math and language, "but this is the first time we've shown it in a behavioral setup."

The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study made use of a cognitive process called structural priming. Simply put, if you use a certain kind of structure in one sentence, you're likely to use it again in a subsequent sentence. To find out how abstract — and cognitively general — this process is, the experimenters gave native English-speaking students a pencil-and-paper test containing a series of math problems paired with incomplete sentences.

Each math problem was structured in one of three ways. With "high-attachment" syntax, the final operation of the problem applied to a large "chunk" of the earlier part. For instance: 80 — (5 + 15) / 5, where the final division (/ 5) applies to the previous addition term (5 + 15). With "low-attachment" syntax — say, 80 — 5 + 15 / 5 — the final operation applied to a smaller previous chunk. A third category — "baseline" problems like 80 — 5 — implied neither high nor low attachment.

After each equation, the participant was given a sentence fragment that could be completed with either high or low attachment syntax. For instance — The tourist guide mentioned the bells of the church that … A high-attachment ending would refer to the entire phrase the bells of the church and might finish with "that chime hourly." Low attachment would link only the church to the completed final clause — say, "that stands on a hill."

The subjects were variously successful in solving the problems. Their choice of high or low attachment sentence completions also revealed complexities — some perhaps related to the preference in English for low-attachment syntax.

Still, in significant numbers, high-attachment math problems primed high-attachment sentence completions, and low-attachment problems made low-attachment completions likely.

What does all this mean? Our cognitive processes operate "at a very high level of abstraction," the authors write. And those abstractions may apply in similar fashion to all kinds of thinking — in numbers, words, or perhaps even music.

Want to convince someone to do something? A new University of Michigan study has some intriguing insights drawn from how we speak.

The study, presented May 14 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, examines how various speech characteristics influence people's decisions to participate in telephone surveys. But its findings have implications for many other situations, from closing sales to swaying voters and getting stubborn spouses to see things your way.

"Interviewers who spoke moderately fast, at a rate of about 3.5 words per second, were much more successful at getting people to agree than either interviewers who talked very fast or very slowly," said Jose Benki, a research investigator at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

For the study, Benki and colleagues used recordings of 1,380 introductory calls made by 100 male and female telephone interviewers at the U-M ISR. They analyzed the interviewers' speech rates, fluency, and pitch, and correlated those variables with their success in convincing people to participate in the survey.

Since people who talk really fast are seen as, well, fast-talkers out to pull the wool over our eyes, and people who talk really slow are seen as not too bright or overly pedantic, the finding about speech rates makes sense. But another finding from the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation, was counterintuitive.

"We assumed that interviewers who sounded animated and lively, with a lot of variation in the pitch of their voices, would be more successful," said Benki, a speech scientist with a special interest in psycholinguistics, the psychology of language.

"But in fact we found only a marginal effect of variation in pitch by interviewers on success rates. It could be that variation in pitch could be helpful for some interviewers but for others, too much pitch variation sounds artificial, like people are trying too hard. So it backfires and puts people off."

Pitch, the highness or lowness of a voice, is a highly gendered quality of speech, influenced largely by body size and the corresponding size of the larynx, or voice box, Benki says. Typically, males have low-pitched voices and females high-pitched voices. Stereotypically, think James Earl Jones and Julia Child.

Benki and colleagues Jessica Broome, Frederick Conrad, Robert Groves and Frauke Kreuter also examined whether pitch influenced survey participation decisions differently for male compared to female interviewers.

They found that males with higher-pitched voices had worse success than their deep-voiced colleagues. But they did not find any clear-cut evidence that pitch mattered for female interviewers.

The last speech characteristic the researchers examined for the study was the use of pauses. Here they found that interviewers who engaged in frequent short pauses were more successful than those who were perfectly fluent.

"When people are speaking, they naturally pause about 4 or 5 times a minute," Benki said. "These pauses might be silent, or filled, but that rate seems to sound the most natural in this context. If interviewers made no pauses at all, they had the lowest success rates getting people to agree to do the survey. We think that's because they sound too scripted.

"People who pause too much are seen as disfluent. But it was interesting that even the most disfluent interviewers had higher success rates than those who were perfectly fluent."

Benki and colleagues plan to continue their analyses, comparing the speech of the most and least successful interviewers to see how the content of conversations, as well as measures of speech quality, is related to their success rates.

Introductory science courses – in biology, chemistry, math and physics – can be challenging for first-year college, CEGEP and university students. Science 101 courses can make or break a student's decision to venture into a scientific field or even pursue higher education.

"The language, fundamentals and scope of science gateway courses can be akin to a foreign culture," says Calvin Kalman, principal of Concordia's Science College and a professor in the Department of Physics. "Students can have great difficulty reading scientific texts – even when they are written in their native language – and they must also cope with complex knowledge taught by their professor."

Since 1995, Kalman has investigated new ways to ease this learning curve. "The main problem in teaching science is that its approach is not holistic," he explains, noting high school through university-level textbooks aren't necessarily consistent and don't employ user-friendly language. "They offer layers of scientific results, coming from competing interpretations, deposited during centuries."

Kalman's most recent paper, published in the journal Science & Education, followed CEGEP and university students over the course of a semester. He asked that they practice what he calls "reflective writing" – a process where students digest, analyze and pen their thoughts on assigned readings before classroom discussions. "It's a way of getting students to wrestle with materials and grasp their meaning, rather than just summarizing," he explains.

As part of his study, students were interviewed three times and asked to describe how reflective-writing helped their comprehension of course content. "They felt that they had to put the information into their own words, which really helped them refine key concepts," Kalman says. "Reflective writing gets students to initiate a self-dialogue about texts and ask: 'What do I understand?' and 'What do I not understand?'"

Kalman says teaching and learning is most successful when a student's outlook on a course is close to that of their professor. "Students are often looking for basics to pass courses, but that doesn't engage them," he says. "Unless they come to class prepared to ask questions, students end up serving time."

Kalman's solutions aren't radical: He encourages professors to go beyond PowerPoint presentations and lectures to promote critical thinking both inside and outside the classroom. His research has garnered collaborations with peers in Toronto, Vancouver and, internationally, in Portugal, Vietnam and China. Improving science education, Kalman says, is the only way for nations to remain at the forefront of the knowledge-based economy.

"Bolstering student understanding of basic science courses can improve retention rates in this field," he says. "But if students don't understand what they're learning they'll drop out and we'll lose ideas and people who will move their countries forward. What countries need are people who think critically – who are entrepreneurs – and that begins with how they're taught."

This work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Journal Reference:

1. Calvin S. Kalman. Enhancing Students’ Conceptual Understanding by Engaging Science Text with Reflective Writing as a Hermeneutical Circle. Science & Education, 2010; 20 (2): 159 DOI: 10.1007/s11191-010-9298-z

Researchers at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam have discovered a universal property of musical scales. Until now it was assumed that the only thing scales throughout the world have in common is the octave.

The many hundreds of scales, however, seem to possess a deeper commonality: if their tones are compared in a two- or three-dimensional way by means of a coordinate system, they form convex or star-convex structures. Convex structures are patterns without indentations or holes, such as a circle, square or oval. 

Almost all music in the world is based on an underlying scale from which compositions are built. In Western music, the major scale (do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do) is the best known scale. However, there are many other scales in use, such as the minor and the chromatic scale. Besides these 'traditional' scales there are also artificial scales created by modern composers. At a superficial level, scales consist of an ascending or descending sequence of tones where the initial and final tones are separated by an octave, which means the frequency of the final tone is twice that of the initial tone (the fundamental).

1000 scales

By placing scales in a coordinate system (an 'Euler lattice') they can be studied as multidimensional objects. Dr. Aline Honingh and Prof. Rens Bod from the ILLC did this for nearly 1,000 scales from all over the world, from Japan to Indonesia and from China to Greece. To their surprise, they discovered that all traditional scales produced star-convex patterns. This was also the case with almost 97% of non-traditional, scales conceived by contemporary composers, even though contemporary composers often state they have designed unconventional scales. This percentage is very high, because the probability that a random series of notes will produce a star-convex pattern is very small. Honingh and Bod try to explain this phenomenon by using the notion of consonance (harmony of sounds). They connect their research results with language and visual perception where convex patterns have also been detected, possibly indicating a cognitive universal (a general cognitive property).

The research results were recently published in the scientific Journal of New Music Research. The research is part of the Vici programme 'Integrating Cognition' of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) led by Rens Bod.

Journal Reference:

1. Aline Honingh and Rens Bod. In search of universal properties of musical scales. Journal of New Music Research, March 2011

We hold many beliefs about memory — for instance, if you study more, you learn more. We are also constantly making judgments about particular instances of learning and remembering — I'll never forget this party! That was easy to understand. I'll ace it on the test.

But do beliefs influence judgments, and how do judgments affect memory performance? "There's a disconnect among beliefs, judgments, and actual memory," says Williams College psychologist Nate Kornell. Ask people to predict how or what they will learn and "in many situations, they do a breathtakingly bad job."

Why? A new study by Kornell — with Matthew G. Rhodes of Colorado State University, Alan D. Castel of University of California/Los Angeles, and Sarah K. Tauber of Kent State University — posits that we make predictions about memory based on how we feel while we're encountering the information to be learned, and that can lead us astray. The study will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The researchers conducted three experiments, each with about 80 participants from teenagers to senior citizens. To test the relationships between "metamemory" — or beliefs and judgments about memory — and performance, they looked at two factors: the ease of processing information and the promise of future study opportunities.

The participants were serially shown words in large or small fonts and asked to predict how well they'd remember each. In one iteration of the experiment, they knew they'd have either one more chance or none to study the words; in another, three more chances or none. Afterwards, they were tested on their memory of the words.

As expected, font size affected judgment but not memory. Because the larger fonts felt more fluently processed, participants thought they'd be easier to remember. But they weren't. The number of study opportunities did affect memory — and the more repetitions, the better the performance. Participants predicted this would be so, but significantly underestimated the improvement additional study would yield. Belief affected judgment, but not much.

In a third experiment, participants were asked questions estimating the influence of font size and study on their learning. They still thought, incorrectly, that font size made a difference. But they were 10 times more sensitive to the number of study trials than in the earlier experiments. This time, they based their answers on their beliefs, not their immediate experiences and judgments.

What fools us? First, "automatic processing": "If something is easy to process, you assume you will remember it well," says Kornell. Second, there's the "stability bias": "People act as though their memories will remain the same in the future as they are right now." Wrong again.

Actually, "effortful processing" leads to more stable learning. And "the way we encode information is not based on ease; it's based on meaning." We remember what is meaningful to us.

It's unlikely we'll start checking our judgments every time we make one, says Kornell: "That's too slow." So we'll just have to study more than we think we have to. And to preserve memories, we'd be wise to keep a journal.

The article "The Ease of Processing Heuristic and the Stability Bias: Dissociating Memory, Memory Beliefs, and Memory Judgments" was recently published in Psychological Science.

People fluent in sign language may simultaneously keep words and signs in their minds as they read, according to an international team of researchers.

In an experiment, deaf readers were quicker and more accurate in determining the meaningful relationship between English word pairs when the word pairs were matched with similar signs, according to Judith Kroll, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics and Women's Studies, Penn State. The slightly better reaction time and improved accuracy rate indicates that the readers are able to juggle both English and sign language at the same time.

"If a sign language user is a bilingual juggler they might not respond to the connections between the signs and words in a conscious way," said Kroll, who serves as the director of Penn State's Center for Language Science. "But we can design experiments to measure the unconscious response."

The study shows that sign language users are similar to other bilinguals, said Kroll, who also worked with Jill Morford, professor, University of New Mexico; Erin Wilkinson, assistant professor, University of Manitoba; Agnes Villwock, student, University of Hamburg; and Pilar Pinar, associate professor, Gallaudet University.

"This reflects previous research on bilinguals that shows both languages are active even when they're reading or speaking one language," Kroll said.

According to Morford, who was the lead author for the study, the research also represents the growing acceptance among the scientific community that sign language is a real language.

"This work is critical to help make the science of studying American Sign Language every bit as rigorous as the study of other languages," said Morford.

The researchers, who released their findings in a recent issue of Cognition, tested 19 deaf adults who were fluent in American Sign Language as they decided whether pairs of English words were related or unrelated in meaning.

A total of 120 word pairs was divided into two groups of 60 word pairs that had either related or unrelated meanings. Of the related pairs, such as bird-duck, 14 also had similar signs while 16 of the unrelated word pairs had similar signs. In ASL, signs are considered related if they have similar hand shapes, locations, movements or orientations. The researchers added a number of randomly assigned word pairs to complete the test.

When the participants encountered word pairs and signs that were related, the reaction time was significantly faster and more accurate than the reaction of a control group made up of 15 bilingual speakers who spoke English as a second language.

When the word pairs were matched with unrelated signs, the participants' reaction time was slower and less accurate.

"You see interference," said Kroll. "The reaction isn't slowed down enough to cause issues in the day-to-day usage of the language, but there's a momentary gap in processing that indicates that the bilingual is not processing information like monolinguals."

The research conducted on ASL by Penn State's Center for Language Science (CLS), in collaboration with the National Science Foundation's Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) at Gallaudet University, was supported by the NSF's Science of Learning Center Program and the National Institutes of Health. CLS and VL2 are partners in a new NSF project awarded to Penn State as part of the partnerships for international research and education program.

Journal Reference:

1. Jill P. Morford, Erin Wilkinson, Agnes Villwock, Pilar Piñar, Judith F. Kroll. When deaf signers read English: Do written words activate their sign translations?Cognition, 2011; 118 (2): 286 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2010.11.006

The way in which teachers and textbooks use language and different metaphors in mathematics education determines how pupils develop their number sense, according to a recent thesis from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

When school pupils encounter numbers that cannot be conceptualised as quantities in an obvious way, clarity is required in terms of the language used by both teachers and textbooks. One significant risk is that the explanatory models and metaphors used by teachers are overgeneralised by pupils or create contradictions.

In her thesis, Cecilia Kilhamn shows how the difficulties experienced by pupils in understanding negative numbers — numbers that are less than zero — are similar to the difficulties that mathematicians have experienced historically. This suggests that better knowledge about the history of mathematics would provide a better understanding of pupils' problems.

"A reluctance to accept negative numbers is closely linked to our desire to be able to concretise that which is abstract and understand negative numbers in terms of concepts such as debts, lifts or temperatures," explains Kilhamn.

However, many of the concrete explanatory models used in school mathematics cannot deal with subtraction, multiplication or division using negative numbers. A transition to a clearer mathematical language is therefore needed when the number domain is expanded from natural numbers to signed numbers, i.e. positive and negative numbers.

The study in question is a longitudinal case study in which pupils in a school class were followed over a period of three years. The results show that pupils' ability to accept and make sense of negative numbers depends on how well developed their sense of natural numbers is.

Insights such as being able to visualise zero as a number and not just a representation of nothing, understanding how subtraction works and being able to deal with the number line are important prerequisites for negative numbers. Another crucial factor is how clear teachers and textbooks are in their explanations. Numbers can be seen metaphorically as quantities, points, distances or operations, as constructed objects and as relations.

"But no individual metaphor for numbers can make negative numbers fully comprehensible," continues Kilhamn. "It is therefore important that the deficiencies and limitations of these metaphors are also made clear in teaching, and that logical mathematical reasoning is used in parallel with concretised models."

Her study also highlights a number of problems relating to the fact that the mathematical language used in Swedish schools is a little ambiguous or inadequate. For example, no distinction is made between subtracting the number x and the negative number x if both are referred to as "minus x." There is also no word in the Swedish language corresponding to the English term "signed number."

"Swedish textbooks introduce negative numbers without making it clear that all the natural numbers change at the same time and become positive numbers," she adds. "Another difficulty is the size of negative numbers, which have two contradictory properties that are distinguished in mathematics by separating absolute value (magnitude) from real value (position). A large negative number has a smaller value than a small negative number. This distinction also needs to be made clear to pupils."

The thesis was completed within the framework of the Graduate Research School in Educational Sciences at the Centre for Educational Sciences and Teacher Research (CUL) at the University of Gothenburg.

NewsPsychology (Mar. 22, 2011) — A system for emergency call centres that can assess a caller’s stress levels or emotional state, and hence the urgency of the call, could reduce the impact of any given crisis and improve the emergency response. A team in The Netherlands reports just such an automatic emotion-detecting system in this month’s International Journal of Intelligent Defence Support Systems.

Iulia Lefter of Delft University of Technology and colleagues at the Netherlands Defence Academy and TNO Defence, Security and Safety, explain how emergency call centres are commonly overwhelmed by the sheer number of calls, especially during disaster situations or other national emergencies. A system that could distinguish automatically between a seriously urgent call and a more mundane issue could reduce the burden considerably and allow calls to be prioritised more effectively.

“Stress and negative emotions, in general, have a strong influence on voice characteristics,” the researchers explain. “Because speech is a natural means of communication, we can utilise the sound patterns of speech to detect stress and (negative) emotions in a non-intrusive way by monitoring the communication.” Factors such as how quickly a person is talking, whether or not there are rises and falls in pitch and tone and breathing rate, all change when we are stressed and can be detected.

The team has now “trained” a computer algorithm that receives audio input from emergency calls to assess the emotive level of the callers’ speech. Four different training techniques were used with recordings from actual emergencies of known outcome and the team says their error rates are as low as 4.2% for a database of call centre recordings used in the research. Optimisation of the algorithm using a larger training set and more robust statistical tools might improve that still further.

The researchers expect the system to have military applications in the first instance. However, it could be adapted to the civilian emergency services and perhaps other applications, such as criminal investigations.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by newsPsychology staff) from materials provided by Inderscience, via AlphaGalileo.

Journal Reference:

1. Iulia Lefter et al. Automatic stress detection in emergency (telephone) calls. Int. J. Intelligent Defence Support Systems, 2011, 4, 148-168

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of NewsPsychology ( or its staff.