Category: Language Acquisition

NewsPsychology (Mar. 19, 2011) — When presented with different terms to describe a clinical trial, parents were far more likely to consent to enroll their child if it was called a “research study” than if it was called a “medical experiment” or a “research project,” in large part because they perceived the former as safer, even though that was not necessarily the case, according to a report in IRB: Ethics & Human Research.

Terms such as these are typically used interchangeably in informed consent forms and by researchers describing trials to potential participants and their parents, on the assumption that they mean the same thing. However, parents interpret the terms differently, suggesting that standard descriptions used in informed consent include “information that potentially biases how a parent receives the invitation to participate,” the researchers conclude.

For the study, 94 parents who had taken a child to the emergency department at the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh answered six questions that assessed their willingness to enroll their child in a study and their perception of the following protocol descriptions: research study, research project, research experiment, medical experiment, and medical study.

Only 18 percent of the parents thought these terms were equivalent. Of the parents who did not think the terms meant the same thing, most would allow their child to participate in a “research study” but not in a “research project,” a “medical study,” or a “medical experiment.” The parents also identified the words “medical” and “experiment” as having negative connotations.

The researchers conclude that “approximately 63% of the respondents rated the protocol descriptors as being different with respect to protocol risk and safety and the inclusion of untested treatments, procedures, and medicines.” To minimize bias, the researchers suggest that consent forms use value-free descriptions about research and include a glossary of terms. In addition, they recommend that institutional review boards carefully scrutinize the language in consent forms to ensure that semantic biases are not imbedded in them.

The authors are Stephen John Cico, MD, of University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital; Eva Vogeley, MD, JD, MDiv, of Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and University of Pittsburgh, and William J. Doyle, PhD, of University of Pittsburgh and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by newsPsychology staff) from materials provided by The Hastings Center, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Journal Reference:

1. Stephen John Cico, Eva Vogeley, and William J. Doyle. Informed Consent and Parents’ Willingness to Enroll Their Children in Research. IRB: Ethics & Human Research, 33, no. 2 (2011): 6-13. [link]

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.

People who make an effort to exert self-control are attracted to aggressive art and public policy appeals, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. They also don't appreciate messages that nag them to control their behavior.

"We set out to examine whether exerting self-control can indeed lead to a wide range of angry behaviors and preferences subsequently, even in situations where such behaviors are quite subtle," write authors David Gal (Northwestern University) and Wendy Liu (University of California San Diego).

"Research has shown that exerting self-control makes people more likely to behave aggressively toward others and people on diets are known to be irritable and quick to anger," the authors explain. The researchers found that people who exerted self-control were more likely to prefer anger-themed movies, were more interested in looking at angry facial expressions, were more persuaded by anger-framed appeals, and expressed more irritation at a message that used controlling language to convince them to change their exercise habits.

In one study, people who choose an apple instead of a chocolate bar were more likely to choose movies with anger and revenge themes than milder movies.

In another study, participants who exerted financial restraint by choosing a gift certificate for groceries over one for a spa service showed more interest in looking at angry faces rather than at fearful ones.

In a third experiment, dieters had more favorable opinions toward a public policy message that used an anger-framed appeal (if funds are not increased for police training, more criminals will escape prison) than they did toward a sad message.

Finally, participants who chose a healthy snack over a tastier, less-healthy one were more irritated by a marketer's message that included controlling language (words such as "you ought to," "need to," and "must").

"Public policy makers need to be more aware of the potential negative emotions resulting from encouraging the public to exert more self control in daily choices," the authors write. "Instead behavioral interventions might rely on a broader range of methods to foster positive behaviors toward long-term goals."

Journal Reference:

1. David Gal and Wendy Liu. Grapes of Wrath: The Angry Effects of Exerting Self-Control. Journal of Consumer Research, October 2011

When Professor Henry Higgins instructed Eliza Doolittle that it was "Ay not I, O not Ow, Don't say 'Rine,' say 'Rain'," he was drawing on years of experience as a professor of phonetics. But research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the European Commission suggests that Higgins's ability to differentiate expertly between similar sounds may have stemmed from birth.

Neuroscientists at UCL (University College London) have shown that the brain structure of expert phoneticians differ from those of the general public. However, whilst some of these changes can be explained by the brain's 'plasticity' — the ability of experience and training to change the brain's shape — the researchers believe that some of the differences are likely to have been present since birth.

"We know that experts, for example professional golfers or London taxi drivers, have different brain structures or patterns of brain activity from ordinary members of the public," says Professor Narly Golestani, now based at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. "It's often hard to tell whether these differences have been shaped entirely by experience or whether a person's brain structure may influence the profession that they enter."

Professor Golestani and colleagues, whose work includes understanding how the brain recognises and processes sound, investigated brain structure in expert phoneticians — individuals who are specialised in the study of phonetics and need to able to distinguish accurately between very similar speech sounds and subtle regional accents. Unlike other expertise, such as musical ability, phoneticians gain their experience and training in adulthood, allowing the researchers to test the effects on brain structure of extensive and naturalistic training in adults.

Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), the researchers compared the brain structures of seventeen phoneticians against sixteen healthy control volunteers and showed clear differences in the structure of key areas of the brain. Their results are published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Professor Sophie Scott, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow explains: "We found a brain area which correlates in size with numbers of years of analysing the sounds of speech. Interestingly, we also find that the shape of the left auditory cortex — something which is established in the womb — also differs between expert phoneticians and lay controls, but doesn't correlate with years of practice.

"This finding may suggests a predisposition in some people to be interested in sound, and may help them decide to choose this kind of career. Perhaps this is why Henry Higgins became a professor of phonetics rather than, say, a professor of physics."

The researchers found that an area of the brain known as the left pars opercularis — part of the Broca's area, a region of the brain involved in speech production but also in analysing and separating speech sounds — correlated with the amount of training in transcription that a phonetician had undergone. Phonetic transcription involves accurately identifying phonetic sounds and associating them to phonetic symbols.

They also found that the shape of an area known as the left transverse gyrus, which includes the left primary auditory cortex, differed in phoneticians compared to the lay public, but that its shape and size did not correlate with the amount of training a phonetician had undergone.

The left transverse gyrus in phoneticians tended to include a greater number of folds — and hence surface area — which in turn allows for a greater capacity for establishing new and more complex patterns of brain connectivity. The folding of this brain region is thought to be established before birth, starting during the thirty-first week of gestation; there is no evidence that it can develop further folds during adulthood.

Dr John Williams, Head of Neuroscience & Mental Health at the Wellcome Trust, says: "This intriguing study provides an insight into how language is processed in the brain and why some people may have more of a penchant towards languages. It goes beyond being a merely curious finding to one which may in time help us understand also why some people have phonological difficulties, such as people with developmental dyslexia."

Journal Reference:

1. N. Golestani, C. J. Price, S. K. Scott. Born with an Ear for Dialects? Structural Plasticity in the Expert Phonetician Brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 2011; 31 (11): 4213 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3891-10.2011

Research commissioned by Cerebra, the charity that helps to improve the lives of children with brain conditions, and carried out by the Cerebra Research Unit (CRU) at the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry, has found little evidence to suggest that cranial osteopathy is of benefit to children with cerebral palsy.

The research is published on-line in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.

Osteopathy has, over recent years, become a popular complementary treatment for children with cerebral palsy. Cerebra initially asked researchers at the CRU to investigate existing evidence regarding the benefits of osteopathy in this instance. The research team found no properly conducted scientific studies, with only one small study that showed some improvement after osteopathy therapy — but this had very few participants and the results were difficult to interpret.

The lack of existing evidence prompted Cerebra to ask the research team to carry out a large randomised control trial in order to provide families with good evidence about the effect of osteopathy for their children with cerebral palsy.

Before the trial was designed, the CRU research team talked in detail to parents and carers of children with cerebral palsy to discuss how they would like the study to be run. This degree of parental involvement in designing a trial is very unusual, but it ensured that the team designed a trial that was acceptable to families and that addressed the issues they wanted to be answered.

The researchers also interviewed osteopaths from the Foundation of Paediatric Osteopathy to find out more about the treatment and to help design the trial — the osteopaths who interacted with the research team agreed that the trial was a sensible test of the treatment.

In total, 142 children from the South West of England and Greater London were recruited to the trial for a six month period. Children were randomly allocated to either a treatment group or a control group: those in the control group were offered six sessions of osteopathy when they had completed the trial. This meant that the research team was able to compare a group of children who had received treatment with a group who had not, and that all children were offered the opportunity to have the treatment paid for by the trial.

Of the 142 children who were recruited into the trial, 133 (94 per cent) remained in the trial for the full six months.

The children were assessed 10 weeks and six months after they started the trial. The main results are those obtained at six months. The researchers found no statistically significant difference between the two groups in terms of a child's movement (which was assessed by physiotherapists who did not know if the child had received osteopathic treatment or not), the child's quality of life, the child's sleeping patterns and the child's level of pain. There was also no difference in the quality of life score for the parents and carers in either group.

The only difference identified by the research team was that 38 per cent of parents whose children had received osteopathy rated their children's overall wellbeing as better compared with 19 per cent of those who had not received osteopathy.

Professor Stuart Logan, Cerebra Professor of Paediatric Epidemiology, Director — Institute of Health Service Research and Director — PenCLAHRC, at the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry, commented: "This has been a fantastic experience working so closely with Cerebra in designing and carrying out research which is of importance to their members. It was also a great opportunity to work with osteopaths who are committed to developing the evidence base around their work. None of this could have been done without the whole-hearted support of the families."

He added: "A properly conducted randomised controlled trial, such as this, is the only way to provide reliable, conclusive evidence on the effectiveness of any treatment. We hope that this evidence will be used to help parents and carers make informed decisions about treatment choices for their children. It can also give health professionals the information they need to be able to advise parents about treatments."

Chris Jones, Chief Executive at Cerebra added "It has been an extremely positive experience working with Professor Logan, and the Peninsula College of Medicine & Dentistry. Whilst we would obviously prefer to spend limited resources on finding and proving the positive benefits of any particular treatment — something that will directly improve the lives of children with Cerebral Palsy — it is also vitally important that we help children, parents and carers better understand what doesn't work as well as what does. Informed and educated decision making is critically important and we hope this research will play a significant part in empowering those people we are here to help."

Cerebral palsy affects approximately one in 400 children in the UK. Physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy are often provided to support children with cerebral palsy. A number of complementary therapies claim to be beneficial.

Journal Reference:

1. K. Wyatt, V. Edwards, L. Franck, N. Britten, S. Creanor, A. Maddick, S. Logan. Cranial osteopathy for children with cerebral palsy: a randomised controlled trial. Archives of Disease in Childhood, 2011; DOI: 10.1136/adc.2010.199877

New research published in Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), shows that language learning goes well beyond simple imitation, and in fact that language learners are quite creative and remarkably smart. Not only are learners able to generalize grammatical restrictions to new words in a category — in this case, made-up adjectives — but they also do not learn these restrictions in situations where they can be attributed to some irrelevant factor.

This point is driven home in an article, "Learning what not to say: The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production," to be published in the March 2011 issue of Language. When authors Jeremy Boyd of the University of Illinois and Adele Goldberg of Princeton University asked adult speakers to produce sentences containing made-up adjectives like ablim, they found that people avoided using ablim before the noun it modified, unconsciously treating it like real adjectives that sound similar — e.g., afraid, which also cannot be used before the noun it modifies (i.e., the afraid cat is a less preferred formulation than the cat that's afraid). This result indicates that speakers readily generalize a restriction against this use — referred to as "prenominal" — to adjectives that they've never heard before.

But how is the restriction learned in the first place? Drs. Boyd and Goldberg show that witnessing ablim used after nouns (i.e., postnominally, as in the hamster that's ablim) makes participants even more likely to avoid its use before nouns in their own utterances. While this may sound like learners are simply imitating the adjective uses they see in the language to which they are exposed, the authors go on to show that learning is savvy, and only occurs under certain conditions.

For example, in an analogous learning situation, when children see an adult with his right hand in a cast play a video game using just his left, they do not assume that there is a restriction on how the game can be played — i.e., that one can only use one's left hand. They immediately infer that the adult would use his right hand (or both hands) if he could, but that the cast is preventing him from doing so. In similar fashion, when a new group of participants witnessed ablim used postnominally, but this time in a context in which there was a reason for its postnominal use that had nothing to do with ablim itself, participants did not learn a restriction against ablim's prenominal use. This indicates that learners carefully evaluate the input they receive, and that learning only occurs when the input is deemed informative.

This research demonstrates that speakers do not learn purely by imitating others, but bring sophisticated and creative resources to bear on the process. This is especially true when it comes to language, where the fact that children routinely produce sentences to which they have never been exposed indicates that they are not simply imitating what they hear.

Journal Reference:

1. Jeremy K. Boyd, Adele E. Goldberg. Learning what not to say: The role of statistical preemption and categorization in a-adjective production. Language, March 2011; (in press)

Unconsciously, right-handers associate good with the right side of space and bad with the left. But this association can be rapidly changed, according to a study published online March 9, 2011 in Psychological Science, by MPI researcher Daniel Casasanto and Evangelia Chrysikou (University of Pennsylvania). Even a few minutes of using the left hand more fluently than the right can reverse right-handers' judgments of good and bad, making them think that the left is the 'right side' of space. Conceptions of good and bad are rooted in people's bodily experiences, and can change when patterns of bodily experience change.

In language, positive ideas are linked with the right side of space and negative ideas with the left. It is good to be "in the right," but bad to be "out in left field." Space and goodness are also associated in the unconscious mind, but not always in the same way that they are linked in language. For right-handers, right is good, but for left-handers, left is good.

Choosing sides

In experiments by MPI psychologist Daniel Casasanto, when people were asked which of two products to buy, which of two job applicants to hire, or which of two alien creatures looks more intelligent, right-handers tended to choose the product, person, or creature they saw on their right, but most left-handers chose the one on their left.

Why do righties and lefties think differently? Casasanto proposed that people's conceptions of good and bad depend, in part, on the way they use their hands. "People can act more fluently with their dominant hand, and come to unconsciously associate good things with their fluent side of space."

Handicapped hand

To test this theory, Casasanto and colleagues studied how natural right-handers think about good and bad when their right hand is handicapped, either due to brain injury or something much less extreme: wearing a ski glove. Stroke patients completed a task that reveals implicit associations between space and goodness in healthy participants. Patients who had lost the use of their left hand showed the usual right-is-good pattern. But patients who lost the use of their right hand following damage to the left-hemisphere of the brain associated good with left, like natural left-handers.

The same pattern was found in healthy university students who performed a motor fluency task while wearing a bulky glove on either their left hand (which preserved their right-handedness) or on their right hand, which turned them temporarily into left-handers. After about 12 minutes of lopsided motor experience, the right-gloved participants' judgements on an unrelated task showed a good-is-left bias, like natural left-handers.

Malleable mind

"People generally think their judgements are rational, and their concepts are stable," says Casasanto. "But if wearing a glove for a few minutes can reverse people's usual judgements of what's good and bad, perhaps the mind is more malleable than we thought."

Journal Reference:

1. D. Casasanto, E. G. Chrysikou. When Left Is 'Right': Motor Fluency Shapes Abstract Concepts. Psychological Science, 2011; DOI: 10.1177/0956797611401755

NewsPsychology (Mar. 8, 2011) — The vast majority of humans — over 90% — prefer to use their right hand for most skilled tasks. For decades, researchers have been trying to understand why this asymmetry exists. Why, with our two cerebral hemispheres and motor cortices, are we not equally skilled with both hands?

A study from the University of Aberdeen in the UK, published in the April 2011 issue of Elsevier's Cortex, suggests that the explanation may stem from actions that require us to use both hands at the same time, which may bias right-handers toward choosing their right hands.

Gavin Buckingham, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Brain and Mind at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, and his PhD supervisor Dr. David Carey, asked left- and right-handed participants to reach first toward a pair of targets with both hands at the same time and, immediately afterwards, toward a new single target with only their closest hand. Just before they began the reach, subjects were given a short vibratory pulse on one of their hands, giving them a clue about where the new target would appear, and hence which hand should perform this second portion of the reach. On a small proportion of trials, the pulse was given to the wrong hand, which meant that subjects had to restrain the reach with this incorrectly-cued hand in order to make the reach with the correct hand.

The right-handed subjects had far greater trouble dealing with this incorrect cue when it was given to their right hands, making more mistakes and taking longer to successfully inhibit the reaches, almost as if the right hand was already pre-selected to carry on during the bimanual reach. The left-handed subjects showed no such asymmetries, suggesting that they are less inherently biased to select one hand over the other.

These findings build on a series of studies from the same researchers which have indicated that right-handers have their attention largely directed at their right hands during bimanual tasks. "One explanation for these data is that hand choice is related to hemispheric specialisation for speech and language" says Dr Carey. "Many left-handed people have "right-handed" brains, which weakens the typical bias towards choosing their dominant left hand."

Journal Reference:

1. Gavin Buckingham, Julie C. Main, David P. Carey. Asymmetries in motor attention during a cued bimanual reaching task: Left and right handers compared. Cortex, 2011; 47 (4): 432 DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2009.11.003

A Virginia Tech College of Engineering researcher is seeking a new way to help those who are unable to speak to find their voice. But this isn't "The King's Speech," the Academy Award-winning film about a British royal undergoing speech therapy to battle a stammer. Instead, Alexander Leonessa wants to help bring back the voice of stroke patients and others who have suffered paralysis of the vocal folds, through electrical stimulation.

Leonessa, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is developing a small device that could use functional electrical stimulation on the paralyzed vocal folds of stroke patients or others who have lost the ability to talk, or even swallow and breathe properly. "The device has the potential of improving the quality of life for patients with vocal paralysis, or neuromuscular disabilities, including traumatic brain injury, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy and Parkinson's disease," he said.

Leonessa won a $480,000 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for this research effort. 

The concept of electrical stimulation on muscles is decades old, and is regularly used on legs and arms to prevent muscle atrophy. If the brain can no longer send electrical impulses to move a limb, the muscles and nerves can basically die off from disuse. Therefore, doctors use an external electrical appendage placed on the exterior skin to provide a small electrical shock that can cause the muscle to contract. The practice exercises the muscles, and therefore can save the leg or arm.

Leonessa said that applying the same method to vocal folds can result in reinnervating the muscle, which also affects breathing and swallowing and other functions. The folds close and open — almost like eye lids — to create or release air pressure that vibrates the vocal chords, and makes sound. If one of the flaps is unable to close, no pressure, hence no sound, can be created. In many cases, be it from a stroke or injury, one of the folds is affected by paralysis, Leonessa said.

During the five-year study, Leonessa and his graduate student research team will work with doctors at the Center for Voice and Swallowing Disorders, part of Wake Forrest University's Baptist Medical Center in North Carolina. There, patients with paralyzed vocal folds will undergo electrical stimulation tests to see if small shocks can reinvigorate their ability to talk through forced contraction.

The effort has several challenges: Muscles are highly nonlinear and have time-varying characteristics, depending on the patient. Further, a stimulated muscle changes when fatigue occurs and individual muscle models are different. Even more challenging is the fact that there is a significant delay between stimulation and muscle contraction, adding to the processing and transmission delays in the electrical stimulation system.

Leonessa plans to develop a portable, noninvasive device that can be adjusted to each patient. The device itself would be no larger than an iPod, clipped to the belt, and have small wires leading to a patch over the patient's throat. An Atlanta-based tech company will help develop the device, which will come later in the five-year study if the use of electrical stimulation on the vocal folds holds promise for muscle and nerve rejuvenation.

"Breathing and swallowing have received much attention for patients with vocal fold paralysis, but vocalization is still considered an open problem with unresolved issues due to the complexity of the larynx and the difficulties in stimulating the relevant muscles, without invasive surgeries, given their depth in the neck," said Leonessa. "The proposed development of a robust control strategy in cooperation with voice-driven data acquisition and a novel electrode array for stimulation purposes will provide a solution to these issues."

When people are feeling bad about themselves, they're more likely to show bias against people who are different. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, examines how that works.

"This is one of the oldest accounts of why people stereotype and have prejudice: It makes us feel better about ourselves," says Jeffrey Sherman of the University of California, Davis, who wrote the study with Thomas Allen. "When we feel bad about ourselves, we can denigrate other people, and that makes us feel better about ourselves."

Sherman and Allen used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) — a task designed to assess people's automatic reactions to words and/or images — to investigate this claim. In order to reveal people's implicit prejudice, participants are asked to watch a computer monitor while a series of positive words, negative words, and pictures of black or white faces appear. In the first part of the test, participants are asked to push the "E" key for either black faces or negative words and the "I" key for white faces or positive words. For the second task, the groupings are reversed — participants are now supposed to associate positive words with black faces and negative words with white faces.

Determining prejudice in the IAT is pretty straightforward: If participants have negative associations with black people, they should find the second task more difficult. This should be especially true when people feel bad about themselves.

But what psychologists don't agree on is how this works. "People were using the exact same data to make completely different arguments about why," Sherman says. There are two possibilities: either feeling bad about yourself activates negative evaluations of others, or it makes you less likely to suppress those biases.

In their experiment, Sherman and Allen asked participants to take a very difficult 12-question test that requires creative thinking. No one got more than two items correct. About half of the participants were given their test results and told that the average score was nine, to make them would feel bad about themselves. The other half were told that their tests would be graded later. All of the participants then completed the IAT and, as expected, those who were feeling bad about their test performance showed more evidence of implicit prejudice.

But Sherman and Allen took it a step farther. They also applied a mathematical model that reveals the processes that contribute to this effect. By plugging in the data from the experiment, they were able to determine that people who feel bad about themselves show enhanced prejudice because negative associations are activated to a greater degree, but not because they are less likely to suppress those feelings.

The difference is subtle, but important, Sherman says. "If the problem was that people were having trouble inhibiting bias, you might try to train people to exert better control," he says. But his results suggest that's not the issue. "The issue is that our mind wanders to more negative aspects of other groups. The way around that is to try and think differently about other people. When you feel bad about yourself and catch yourself thinking negatively about other groups, remind yourself, 'I may be feeling this way because I just failed a test or something.'"

Journal Reference:

1. T. J. Allen, J. W. Sherman. Ego Threat and Intergroup Bias: A Test of Motivated-Activation Versus Self-Regulatory Accounts. Psychological Science, 2011; DOI: 10.1177/0956797611399291

According to University of Toronto speech-language pathologist Luc De Nil, the beat could be revealing such things as how children master one of the most complex tasks of all — speech.

"The rapid and precise muscle movements of speech must be the most intricate, yet poorly understood, of all the sensory-motor skills," says De Nil.

De Nil's interest in finger-tapping came out of his group's previous work on adults who stutter. His team discovered that they have problems in acquiring new and unusual tapping sequences and not just speech. The research suggests an underlying neural basis for the motor deficit.

The researchers tested the abilities of stuttering adults to learn both speech and tapping sequences. In some experiments, the participants were given extensive practice lasting more than one day. Other studies investigated the effects on the accuracy of a speaker's performance when motor learning was disrupted. To follow up, the investigators use magnetic resonance imaging and fMRI to observe and analyze the neural processes underlying speech production in children and adults who stutter.

"We turned to children next because we wanted to know if the adult data was relevant to them and if giving them finger and speech tasks would let us observe motor skills as they develop in both stutterers and non-stutterers."

De Nil discussed some of the findings at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting held in Washington, D.C. He took part in the session From Freud to fMRI: Untangling the Mystery of Stuttering on February 20.