Expanding the emergentist Account:Reply to open peer commentaries.

Emergentism provides a framework for understanding how language learning processes vary across developmental age and linguistic levels, as shaped by core mechanisms and constraints from cognition, entrenchment, input, transfer, social support, motivation, and neurology. As our commentators all agree, this landscape is marked by intense variability arising from the complexity. These mechanisms interact in collaborative and competitive ways during actual moments of language use. To better understand these interactions and their effects, we need much richer longitudinal data regarding both input and output during actual contexts of usage. We believe that modern technology can eventually provide this data (Flege & Bohn, 2021) in ways that will allow us to more fully populate an emergent landscape.

Age effects in second language acquisition: Expanding the emergentist account.

In 2005, Science magazine designated the problem of accounting for difficulties in L2 (second language) learning as one of the 125 outstanding challenges facing scientific research. A maturationally-based sensitive period has long been the favorite explanation for why ultimate foreign language attainment declines with age-of-acquisition. However, no genetic or neurobiological mechanisms for limiting language learning have yet been identified. At the same time, we know that cognitive, social, and motivational factors change in complex ways across the human lifespan. Emergentist theory provides a framework for relating these changes to variation in the success of L2 learning. The great variability in patterns of learning, attainment, and loss across ages, social groups, and linguistic levels provides the core motivation for the emergentist approach. Our synthesis incorporates three groups of factors which change systematically with age: environmental supports, cognitive abilities, and motivation for language learning. This extended emergentist account explains why and when second language succeeds for some children and adults and fails for others.

Autistic discussion forums: insights into the topics that clinicians don't know about.

Background: User-led autism discussion forums provide a wealth of information about autistic lived experiences, albeit oriented toward those who regularly use computers. We contend that healthcare professionals should read autism discussion forums to gain insight, be informed, and in some cases, to correct assumptions about autistic persons' lives and possibilities. But experts may be dismissive of user-led forums, believing forums to be filled with myths, misinformation, and combative postings. The questions motivating our research were: Do online forums raise issues that are educational for clinicians and other stakeholders? Are forums useful for those who do empirical research? Method: Content analysis was conducted on 300 posts (62,000 words) from Reddit, Quora, and Wrong Planet. Forums were sampled to reflect broad topics; posts were selected sequentially from the identified forums. The authors read through posts in the Excel sheet, highlighting statements that were the main ideas of the post, to discern both broad categories of topics and more specific topics. We coded content pertinent to classic autism myths and analyzed attitudes towards myths such as 'lack emotion' and 'cannot form relationships.' To document whether forum posts discuss topics that are not widely known outside of elite experts, we compared discussion content to new material about autism contained in the March 2022 DSM 5 Text revision. Results: Classic autism myths were discussed with examples of when elements of myths may be valid. Posters described cases where parents or therapists believed myths. Experts may believe autism myths due to rapid changes in diagnostic practices and due to their lack of knowledge regarding the characteristics of autistic people who have typical intellectual abilities. We conclude that forums contain high-value information for clinicians because all concepts in the DSM 5 text revision were discussed by posters in the years before the text revision appeared. Ideas that are only slowly becoming part of the research literature are discussed at length in forums. Reading and analyzing forums is useful for both clinicians and scientists. In addition, the relative ease of forum analysis lowers the bar for entry into the research process.

American Sign Language Syntax and Analogical Reasoning Skills Are Influenced by Early Acquisition and Age of Entry to Signing Schools for the Deaf.

Failing to acquire language in early childhood because of language deprivation is a rare and exceptional event, except in one population. Deaf children who grow up without access to indirect language through listening, speech-reading, or sign language experience language deprivation. Studies of Deaf adults have revealed that late acquisition of sign language is associated with lasting deficits. However, much remains unknown about language deprivation in Deaf children, allowing myths and misunderstandings regarding sign language to flourish. To fill this gap, we examined signing ability in a large naturalistic sample of Deaf children attending schools for the Deaf where American Sign Language (ASL) is used by peers and teachers. Ability in ASL was measured using a syntactic judgment test and language-based analogical reasoning test, which are two sub-tests of the ASL Assessment Inventory. The influence of two age-related variables were examined: whether or not ASL was acquired from birth in the home from one or more Deaf parents, and the age of entry to the school for the Deaf. Note that for non-native signers, this latter variable is often the age of first systematic exposure to ASL. Both of these types of age-dependent language experiences influenced subsequent signing ability. Scores on the two tasks declined with increasing age of school entry. The influence of age of starting school was not linear. Test scores were generally lower for Deaf children who entered the school of assessment after the age of 12. The positive influence of signing from birth was found for students at all ages tested (7;6-18;5 years old) and for children of all age-of-entry groupings. Our results reflect a continuum of outcomes which show that experience with language is a continuous variable that is sensitive to maturational age.

Acquiring English as a second language via print: the task for deaf children.

Only a minority of profoundly deaf children read at age-level. We contend this reflects cognitive and linguistic impediments from lack of exposure to a natural language in early childhood, as well as the inherent difficulty of learning English only through the written modality. Yet some deaf children do acquire English via print. The current paper describes a theoretical model of how children could, in principle, acquire a language via reading and writing. The model describes stages of learning which represent successive, conceptual insights necessary for second/foreign language learning via print. Our model highlights the logical difficulties present when one cannot practice a language outside of reading/writing, such as the necessity of translating to a first language, the need for explicit instruction, and difficulty that many deaf children experience in understanding figurative language. Our model explains why learning to read is often a protracted process for deaf children and why many fail to make progress after some initial success. Because language acquisition is thought to require social interaction, with meaning cued by extralinguistic context, the ability of some deaf individuals to acquire language through print represents an overlooked human achievement worthy of greater attention by cognitive scientists.

Understanding differences in neurotypical and autism spectrum special interests through Internet forums.

Special interests are frequently developed by individuals with autism spectrum disorder, expressed as an intense focus on specific topics. Neurotypical individuals also develop special interests, often in the form of hobbies. Although past research has focused on special interests held by children with autism spectrum disorder, little is known about their role in adulthood. The current study investigated differences in the content, number, and specificity of the special interests held by adult individuals with autism spectrum disorder and neurotypical individuals, using Internet discussion forums as a data source. Quantitative analysis of forum posts revealed significant differences between the diagnostic groups. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder reported having more interests in systemizing domains, more specific interests, and a greater number of interests overall than neurotypical individuals. Understanding special interests can lead to the development of educational and therapeutic programs that facilitate the acquirement of other important social and communication skills.

Superior encoding enhances recall in color-graphemic synesthesia.

Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which particular stimuli, such as letters or sound, generate a secondary sensory experience in particular individuals. Reports of enhanced memory in synesthetes raise the question of its cognitive and neurological substrates. Enhanced memory in synesthetes could arise from the explicit or implicit use of a synesthetic cue to aid memory, from changes unique to the synesthete brain, or from both, depending on the task. To assess this question, we tested nine color-graphemic synesthetes using standardized neuropsychological measures that should not trigger color-graphemic synesthesia (visuo-spatial tests) and measures that should trigger color-graphemic synesthesia (verbal tasks). We found a synesthetic advantage on both types of tests, primarily in the initial encoding of information. The pattern of results adds to existing evidence of advantages in synesthetic memory, as well as provides novel evidence that synesthetes may have enhanced encoding rather than superior recall. Synesthetes learn more initially, rather than forgetting less over time.

Obsessive-compulsive personality traits: compensatory response to executive function deficit?

Obsessive-compulsive personality traits (OCPTs) may be associated with cognitive disorganization (i.e., executive control deficits). That is, individuals presenting with pronounced OCPTs may rigidly adhere to rules and procedure in an attempt to compensate for cognitive disorganization. We predicted that individuals presenting with OCPTs would demonstrate cognitive disorganization during neurocognitive task performance and would display working memory deficits. To test this hypothesis, we identified a group of university students demonstrating pronounced OCPTs and a comparison group, and administered the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test (ROCFT). Self-report measures of OCPTs, classical OCD, and depressive symptoms were administered. Students presenting with pronounced OCPTs exhibited performance deficits on the ROCFT. They obtained significantly lower copy organization scores and displayed a subtle visuospatial working memory deficit. Performance deficits on a nonverbal measure of executive control and working memory were related to OCPTs, but were not associated with classic OCD symptoms. Our findings lend support to the contention that specific OCPTs may represent, at least in part, compensatory tactics that evolve in response to executive control deficits.

Emotion and lying in a non-native language.

Bilingual speakers frequently report experiencing greater emotional resonance in their first language compared to their second. In Experiment 1, Turkish university students who had learned English as a foreign language had reduced skin conductance responses (SCRs) when listening to emotional phrases in English compared to Turkish, an effect which was most pronounced for childhood reprimands. A second type of emotional language, reading out loud true and false statements, was studied in Experiment 2. Larger SCRs were elicited by lies compared to true statements, and larger SCRs were evoked by English statements compared to Turkish statements. In contrast, ratings of how strongly participants felt they were lying showed that Turkish lies were more strongly felt than English lies. Results suggest that two factors influence the electrodermal activity elicited when bilingual speakers lie in their two languages: arousal due to emotions associated with lying, and arousal due to anxiety about managing speech production in non-native language. Anxiety and emotionality when speaking a non-naive language need to be better understood to inform practices ranging from bilingual psychotherapy to police interrogation of suspects and witnesses.

Repetition blindness: an emergent property of inter-item competition.

Repeating an item in a brief or rapid display usually produces faster or more accurate identification of the item (repetition priming), but sometimes produces the opposite effect (repetition blindness). We present a theory of short-term repetition effects, the competition hypothesis, which explains these paradoxical outcomes. The central tenet of the theory is that repetition produces a representation with a higher signal-to-noise ratio but also produces a disadvantage in the representation's ability to compete with other items for access to awareness. A computational implementation of the competition hypothesis was developed to simulate standard findings in the RB literature and to generate novel predictions which were then tested in three experiments. Results from these experiments suggest that repetition effects emerge from competitive interactions between items and that these influences extend to adjacent, nonrepeated items in the display. The results also present challenges to existing theories of short-term repetition effects.

The Temporolimbic Personality: a cross-national study

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Background and objectives: Early investigators claimed that temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) was associated with a personality traits and psychiatric symptoms collectively known as the interictal behavioral syndrome or Geschwind’s syndrome. Interictalbehavioral alterations associated with TLE included affective dysregulation; irritability and impulsive aggression; anxiety and obsessive-compulsive symptoms; paranoia; abnormal patterns of social interaction; schizophrenic-like symptoms and dissociative states; hypergraphia; and hyper religiosity. A number of psychiatric disorders are known to have subclinical variants. Are recurrent temporolimbic seizure-like events (as determined by a self-report symptom inventory—the LSCL-Limbic System Checklist) among non-clinical subjects also associated with TLE-related psychiatric symptoms/ syndromes and personality features? Methods: To test this, we examined the clinical/personality profiles of students who self-reported symptoms associated with temporolimbic seizures. Results: In two separate studies, we found that American and Turkish students reporting temporolimbic seizure-like symptoms had clinical/personality profiles resembling interictal clinical/personality features. Conclusions: Findings do not imply that high- or median-LSCL scorers are afflicted with an undiagnosed TL seizure disorder. Rather, the temporolimbic personality may be found, albeit in milder form, among individuals free of neurologic disease (AU)

Fast pairs: a visual word recognition paradigm for measuring entrenchment, top-down effects, and subjective phenomenology.

When word pairs having a familiar order are sequentially flashed on a computer in their non-familiar order, (code zip), observers have a strong phenomenology of seeing them in familiar order (zip code). Reversal errors remained frequent even when participants obtained perceptual experience of reverse-display items by beginning with a block of longer-duration trials. A forced-choice order-detection procedure reduced but did not eliminate reversal errors, showing that "fast pairs" is a robust perceptual illusion. Even adjective + noun pairs (green skirt) showed reversal errors, and reversal errors increased with the log frequency of the word pair, consistent with a strong role for statistical processing at the level of multi-word units.

Semantic interference and associative facilitation from words presented in rapid serial visual presentation.

Semantic interference in picture naming is readily obtained when categorically related distractor words are displayed with picture targets; however, this is not typically the case when both primes and targets are words. Researchers have argued that to obtain semantic interference for word primes and targets, the prime must be shown for a sufficient duration, prime processing must be made difficult, and participants must attend to the primes. In this article, we used a novel procedure for prime presentation to investigate semantic interference in word naming. Primes were presented as the last word of a rapid serial visual presentation stream, with the target following 600-1,200 msec later. Semantic interference was observed for categorically related targets, whereas facilitation was found for associatively related targets.

When personality and culture clash: the psychological distress of allocentrics in an individualist culture and idiocentrics in a collectivist culture.

Because humans need both autonomy and interdependence, persons with either an extreme collectivist orientation (allocentrics) or extreme individualist values (idiocentrics) may be at risk for possession of some features of psychopathology. Is an extreme personality style a risk factor primarily when it conflicts with the values of the surrounding society? Individualism-collectivism scenarios and a battery of clinical and personality scales were administered to nonclinical samples of college students in Boston and Istanbul. For students residing in a highly individualistic society (Boston), collectivism scores were positively correlated with depression, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder and dependent personality. Individualism scores, particularly horizontal individualism, were negatively correlated with these same scales. A different pattern was obtained for students residing in a collectivist culture, Istanbul. Here individualism (and especially horizontal individualism) was positively correlated with scales for paranoid, schizoid, narcissistic, borderline and antisocial personality disorder. Collectivism (particularly vertical collectivism) was associated with low report of symptoms on these scales. These results indicate that having a personality style which conflicts with the values of society is associated with psychiatric symptoms. Having an orientation inconsistent with societal values may thus be a risk factor for poor mental health.