RESUMEN
Few studies exist on the reading habits of the deaf population, and most of those that do were published more than 20 years ago. Hence, changes in reading habits due to the availability to the deaf population of online reading material and portable electronic devices have likely occurred. Additionally, in the hearing population, confinement causes changes in reading habits. We used an online questionnaire to compare the reading habits of 102 deaf and hard of hearing adult residents of Spain both before and during COVID-19 confinement. In general, more reading occurred during confinement, although not all participants showed this pattern: Regular readers read more during lockdown. Motivations for reading were largely unaffected by confinement. Furthermore, the time spent reading was not related to the availability of books at home: More was read in digital format during confinement.
Asunto(s)
COVID-19 , Sordera , Hábitos , Personas con Deficiencia Auditiva , Lectura , Humanos , Adulto , Masculino , Femenino , Personas con Deficiencia Auditiva/psicología , COVID-19/epidemiología , Persona de Mediana Edad , Sordera/psicología , España , SARS-CoV-2 , Encuestas y Cuestionarios , Adulto Joven , Anciano , Motivación , Cuarentena/psicologíaRESUMEN
The Guatemalan pediatric population is affected by a high incidence of poverty and violence. The previous literature showed that these experiences may ultimately impact cognitive performance. The aim of this article is to update the standardized scores for ten neuropsychological tests commonly used in Guatemala considering vulnerability. A total of 347 healthy children and adolescents from 6 to 17 years of age (M = 10.83, SD = 3) were assessed, controlling for intelligence, mental health and neuropsychological history. The standard scores were created using multiple linear regression and standard deviations from residual values. The predictors included were the following: age, age squared (age2), mean parental education (MPE), mean parental education squared (MPE2), gender, and vulnerability, as well as their interaction. The vulnerability status was significant in the scores for language, attention and executive functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that includes the condition of vulnerability in the calculation of neuropsychological standard scores. The utility of this update is to help in the early detection of special needs in this disadvantaged population, promoting more accurate interventions in order to alleviate the negative effects that living in vulnerable conditions has on children and adolescents.
RESUMEN
Many explanations accounting for rapid automatized naming's (RAN) relationship with reading have been proposed. One of the most debated perspectives argues that RAN measures orthographic processing, defined as the ability to process groups of letters or entire words as single units. Given that reading familiar spelling patterns will rely on orthographic processing more than reading unfamiliar spelling patterns, manipulating orthographic syllable frequency can be a useful tool to examine RAN's relationship with orthographic familiarity. To meet this aim, RAN's concurrent and longitudinal contribution to reading speed of nonwords composed of high and low syllable frequency, as well as real words, was assessed in a sample of 142 Spanish children. RAN, phonological skills, and visual skills were measured in kindergarten and Grade 5, whereas reading speed was measured in Grade 5 only. Both longitudinal and concurrent path analyses revealed that RAN made a comparable contribution to the reading of both types of nonwords as well as to real-word reading. This suggests that the reading-related cognitive ability measured by RAN operates at a grapho-phonemic, grapho-syllabic, and whole-word level. The current results do not support the view of RAN as a measure of orthographic processing.
Asunto(s)
Aptitud , Desarrollo del Lenguaje , Lingüística/métodos , Lectura , Niño , Preescolar , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , España , TiempoRESUMEN
BACKGROUND: The directionality of the relationship between impulsivity and heavy drinking patterns remains unclear. Recent research suggests it could be reciprocal and depends on different facets of impulsivity and different patterns of drinking. The aim of this study was to analyze this potential reciprocal relationship between self-reported and behavioral measures of impulsivity and sensation seeking with specific patterns of heavy drinking in a sample of Spanish adolescents across 2 years. METHODS: The study has a cross-lagged prospective design in which participants were evaluated 3 times over 2 years (once a year). Participants were 1,430 adolescents (53.9% male; mean age at study commencement = 13.02, SD = 0.51) from 22 secondary schools in Spain. Computerized versions of the following instruments were used: 2 subscales of Impulsive Sensation Seeking, 2 behavioral measures (Stroop Test and Delay Discounting [DD] task), frequency of intoxication episodes (IE), and the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index to evaluate alcohol-related problems (ARP). Random intercepts cross-lagged panel models of reciprocal relationships between impulsivity measures and alcohol use outcomes were used. RESULTS: Individual levels of self-reported impulsivity and sensation seeking significantly predicted prospective involvement in IE and ARP. Performance in behavioral measures (Stroop Test and DD) did not predict subsequent heavy drinking or alcohol problems. No measure of drinking was found to be a significant predictor of prospective changes in impulsivity. CONCLUSIONS: Within-person levels of self-reported impulsivity and sensation seeking significantly predicted further heavy drinking from as early as 13 years old, whereas behavioral measures were not predictive. In our study, neither IE nor ARP predicted prospective changes in impulsivity. Further studies should address additional specific relationships between facets of impulsivity and specific outcomes of heavy drinking.
Asunto(s)
Conducta del Adolescente/psicología , Conductas de Riesgo para la Salud , Conducta Impulsiva , Autoinforme , Consumo de Alcohol en Menores/psicología , Adolescente , Conducta del Adolescente/fisiología , Femenino , Predicción , Conductas de Riesgo para la Salud/fisiología , Humanos , Conducta Impulsiva/fisiología , Estudios Longitudinales , Masculino , Estudios Prospectivos , España/epidemiología , Factores de Tiempo , Consumo de Alcohol en Menores/tendenciasRESUMEN
One of the hallmarks of dyslexia is the failure to automatise written patterns despite repeated exposure to print. Although many explanations have been proposed to explain this problem, researchers have recently begun to explore the possibility that an underlying implicit learning deficit may play a role in dyslexia. This hypothesis has been investigated through non-linguistic tasks exploring implicit learning in a general domain. In this study, we examined the abilities of children with dyslexia to implicitly acquire positional regularities embedded in both non-linguistic and linguistic stimuli. In experiment 1, 42 children (21 with dyslexia and 21 typically developing) were exposed to rule-governed shape sequences; whereas in experiment 2, a new group of 42 children were exposed to rule-governed letter strings. Implicit learning was assessed in both experiments via a forced-choice task. Experiments 1 and 2 showed a similar pattern of results. ANOVA analyses revealed no significant differences between the dyslexic and the typically developing group, indicating that children with dyslexia are not impaired in the acquisition of simple positional regularities, regardless of the nature of the stimuli. However, within group t-tests suggested that children from the dyslexic group could not transfer the underlying positional rules to novel instances as efficiently as typically developing children.
Asunto(s)
Dislexia/fisiopatología , Dislexia/psicología , Desarrollo del Lenguaje , Aprendizaje/fisiología , Estudios de Casos y Controles , Niño , Femenino , Humanos , MasculinoRESUMEN
Some research on literacy acquisition suggests that implicit learning processes may be related to reading and writing proficiency in English, which is a deep orthography. However, little research has been done to determine if the same is true in shallow orthographies. Here, we investigated whether the implicit learning ability of third grade Spanish speaking children was related to their reading and writing abilities. Twenty eight children viewed pseudowords which all adhered to untaught graphotactic rules and were later assessed to determine their implicit learning of these rules. The children's reading and writing abilities were also assessed using standardized tests. No correlations were found between the participants' level of implicit learning and their performance on reading tasks or on a pseudoword writing task, suggesting that implicit learning is not strongly related to the acquisition of phonological regularities in a shallow orthography. A correlation was found between recognition of previously seen exemplars and the ability to spell inconsistent words which require word specific knowledge to resolve the spelling inconsistencies. This result suggests that implicit learning mechanisms may play a role in the acquisition of lexical knowledge and thus, in writing proficiency.
Asunto(s)
Lenguaje , Aprendizaje , Lectura , Escritura , Niño , Lenguaje Infantil , Femenino , Humanos , Conocimiento , Alfabetización , Masculino , Aprendizaje VerbalRESUMEN
Statistical learning (SL) studies have shown that participants are able to extract regularities in input they are exposed to without any instruction to do so. This and other findings, such as the fact that participants are often unable to verbalize their acquired knowledge, suggest that SL can occur implicitly or incidentally. Interestingly, several studies using the related paradigms of artificial grammar learning and serial response time tasks have shown that explicit instructions can aid learning under certain conditions. Within the SL literature, however, very few studies have contrasted incidental and intentional learning conditions. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of having prior knowledge of the statistical regularities in the input when undertaking a task of visual sequential SL. Specifically, we compared the degree of SL exhibited by participants who were informed (intentional group) versus those who were uninformed (incidental group) about the presence of embedded triplets within a familiarization stream. Somewhat surprisingly, our results revealed that there were no statistically significant differences (and only a small effect size) in the amount of SL exhibited between the intentional versus the incidental groups. We discuss the ways in which this result can be interpreted and suggest that short presentation times for stimuli in the familiarization stream in our study may have limited the opportunity for explicit learning. This suggestion is in line with recent research revealing a statistically significant difference (and a large effect size) between intentional versus incidental groups using a very similar visual sequential SL task, but with longer presentation times. Finally, we outline a number of directions for future research.
RESUMEN
Indicators of letter visual similarity have been used for controlling the design of empirical and neuropsychological studies and for rigorously determining the factors that underlie reading ability and literacy acquisition. Additionally, these letter similarity/confusability matrices have been useful for studies examining more general aspects of human cognition, such as perception. Despite many letter visual-similarity matrices being available, they all have two serious limitations if they are to be used by researchers in the reading domain: (1) They have been constructed using atypical reading data obtained from speeded reading-aloud tasks and/or under degraded presentation conditions; (2) they only include letters from the English alphabet. Although some letter visual-similarity matrices have been constructed using data gathered from normal reading conditions, these either are based on old fonts, which may not resemble the letters found in modern print, or were never published. For the first time, this article presents a comprehensive letter visual-similarity/confusability matrix that has been constructed based on untimed responses to clearly presented upper- and lowercase letters that are present in many languages that use Latin-based alphabets, including Catalan, Dutch, English, French, Galician, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Such a matrix will be useful for researchers interested in the processes underpinning reading and literacy acquisition.
Asunto(s)
Lenguaje , Pruebas Neuropsicológicas , Lectura , Reconocimiento en Psicología , Dislexia , Humanos , Alfabetización Informacional , LingüísticaRESUMEN
There is little empirical evidence showing a direct link between a capacity for statistical learning (SL) and proficiency with natural language. Moreover, discussion of the role of SL in language acquisition has seldom focused on literacy development. Our study addressed these issues by investigating the relationship between SL and reading ability in typically developing children and healthy adults. We tested SL using visually presented stimuli within a triplet learning paradigm and examined reading ability by administering the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT-4; Wilkinson & Robertson, 2006). A total of 38 typically developing children (mean age of 9;5 years, range 6;4-12;5) and 37 healthy adults (mean age of 21 years, range 18-34) were assessed. In children, SL was significantly related to reading ability. Importantly, this relationship was independent of grade and also age. The adult data, too, revealed that SL was significantly related to reading ability. A regression analysis of the combined child and adult data revealed that SL accounted for a unique amount of variance in reading ability, after age and attention had been taken into consideration. For the first time, this study provides empirical evidence that a capacity for more effective SL is related to higher reading ability in the general population.
Asunto(s)
Desarrollo Infantil , Lenguaje , Aprendizaje por Probabilidad , Lectura , Adolescente , Adulto , Niño , Femenino , Humanos , Desarrollo del Lenguaje , Masculino , Pruebas NeuropsicológicasRESUMEN
It is possible that statistical learning (SL) plays a role in almost every mental activity. Indeed, research on SL has grown rapidly over recent decades in an effort to better understand perception and cognition. Yet, there remain gaps in our understanding of how SL operates, in particular with regard to its (im)mutability. Here, we investigated whether participant-related variables (such as age) and task-related variables (such as speed of stimulus presentation) affect visual statistical learning (VSL) in typically developing children. We tested 183 participants ranging in age from 5 to 12 years and compared three speeds of presentation (using stimulus durations of 800, 400 and 200 msecs). A multiple regression analysis revealed significant effects of both age and speed of presentation - after attention during familiarization and gender had been taken into consideration. VSL followed a developmental trajectory whereby learning increased with age. The amount of learning increased with longer presentation times (as shown by Turk-Browne, Jungé & Scholl, 2005, in their study of adults). There was no significant interaction between the two variables. These findings assist in elucidating the nature of statistical learning itself. While statistical learning can be observed in very young children and at remarkably fast presentation times, participant- and task-related variables do impact upon this type of learning. The findings reported here may serve to enhance our understanding of individual differences in the cognitive and perceptual processes that are thought to rely, at least in part, on SL (e.g. language processing and object recognition).