Bo Yao

Lancaster University | LU · Department of Psychology

The implicit prosody hypothesis (Fodor, 1998, 2002) proposes that silent reading coincides with a default, implicit form of prosody to facilitate sentence processing. Recent research demonstrated that a more vivid form of implicit prosody is mentally simulated during silent reading of direct speech quotations (e.g., Mary said, "This dress is beauti...

Emotion (positive and negative) words are typically recognized faster than neutral words. Recent research suggests that emotional valence, while often treated as a unitary semantic property, may be differentially represented in concrete and abstract words. Studies that have explicitly examined the interaction of emotion and concreteness, however, h...

In this chapter, we review recent research concerned with “inner voice” experiences during silent reading of direct speech (e.g., Mary said, “This dress is beautiful!”) and indirect speech (e.g., Mary said that the dress was beautiful). Converging findings from speech analysis, brain imaging, and eye tracking indicate that readers spontaneously eng...

Healthy individuals display a tendency to allocate attention unequally across space, and this bias has implications for how individuals interact with their environments. However, the origins of this phenomenon remain relatively poorly understood. The present research examined the joint and independent contributions of two fundamental motivational s...

In human communication, direct speech (e.g., Mary said: "I'm hungry") is perceived to be more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., Mary said [that] she was hungry). However, for silent reading, the representational consequences of this distinction are still unclear. Although many of us share the intuition of an "inner voice," particularly during silen...

We replicated and extended the findings of Yao et al. [(2018). Differential emotional processing in concrete and abstract words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 44(7), 1064-1074] regarding the interaction of emotionality, concreteness, and imageability in word processing by measuring eye fixation times on target...

Understanding the neural, metabolic, and psychological mechanisms underlying human altruism and decision-making is a complex and important topic both for science and society. Here, we investigated whether transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) applied to two prefrontal cortex regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, anode) and th...

Introduction Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), or hearing non-existent voices, are a common symptom in psychosis. Recent research suggests that AVHs are also experienced by neurotypical individuals. Individuals with schizophrenia experiencing AVHs and neurotypicals who are highly prone to hallucinate both produce false positive responses in au...

The neural mechanisms of inner speech remain unclear despite its importance in a variety of cognitive processes and its implication in aberrant perceptions such as auditory verbal hallucinations. Previous research has proposed a corollary discharge model in which inner speech is a truncated form of overt speech, relying on speech production-related...

Embodied cognition theories propose that abstract concepts are grounded in a variety of exogenous and endogenous experiences which may be flexibly activated across contexts and tasks. In three experiments, we explored how semantic size (i.e., the magnitude, dimension or extent of an object or a concept) of abstract (vs concrete) concepts is mentall...

In this study we investigated whether transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) applied to two prefrontal cortex regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, anode) and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, cathode) can be used to induce changes in self-reported emotions and modulate metabolite concentrations under both electrode...

Embodied cognition theories propose that abstract concepts can be embodied via metaphorical extensions from experiences of the physical or the mental worlds. In three experiments, we explored how semantic size (e.g., the magnitude, dimension or extent of an object or a concept) of abstract concepts is mentally represented. We show that abstract siz...

Growing evidence shows that theta-band (4-7Hz) activity in the auditory cortex phase-locks to rhythms of overt speech. Does theta activity also encode the rhythmic dynamics of inner speech? Previous research established that silent reading of direct speech quotes (e.g., Mary said: "This dress is lovely!") elicits more vivid inner speech than indire...

Embodied theories propose that language is understood via mental simulations of sensory states related to perception and action. Given that direct speech (e.g., She says, "It's a lovely day!") is perceived to be more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., She says (that) it's a lovely day) in perception, recent research shows in silent reading that more...

Stories transport readers into vivid imaginative worlds, but understanding how readers create such worlds—populating them with characters, objects, and events—presents serious challenges across disciplines. Auditory imagery is thought to play a prominent role in this process, especially when representing characters' voices. Previous research has sh...

A growing body of evidence shows that theta-band (4-7Hz) activity in the auditory cortex phase-locks to the rhythm of overt speech. But does theta activity in the auditory cortex also phase-lock to inner speech? We explored this question with EEG while participants silently read direct (e.g., Mary said: “This dress is lovely!”) and indirect speech...

The Glasgow Norms are a set of normative ratings for 5,553 English words on nine psycholinguistic dimensions: arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic size, and gender association. The Glasgow Norms are unique in several respects. First, the corpus itself is relatively large, while simultane...

Contextual constraint is a key factor affecting a word's fixation duration and its likelihood of being fixated during reading. Previous research has generally demonstrated additive effects of predictability and frequency in fixation times. Studies examining the role of parafoveal preview have shown that greater preview benefit is obtained from more...

In an eye-tracking experiment we examined how readers comprehend indirect replies when they are uttered in reply to a direct question. Participants read vignettes that described two characters engaged in dialogue. Each dialogue contained a direct question (e.g., How are you doing in Chemistry?) answered with an excuse (e.g., The exams are not fair)...

In everyday conversation, much communication is achieved using indirect language. This is particularly true when we utter requests. The decision to use indirect language is influenced by a number of factors including deniability, politeness, and the degree of imposition on the receiver of a request. In this paper we report the results of an eye-tra...

Healthy individuals display a tendency to allocate attention unequally across space, and this bias has implications for how individuals interact with their environments. However, the origins of this phenomenon remain relatively poorly understood. The present research examined the joint and independent contributions of two fundamental motivational s...

Visual emotion word processing has been in the focus of recent psycholinguistic research. In general, emotion words provoke differential responses in comparison to neutral words. However, words are typically processed within a context rather than in isolation. For instance, how does one's inner emotional state influence the comprehension of emotion...

Although gossip serves several important social functions, it has relatively infrequently been the topic of systematic investigation. In two experiments, we advance a cognitive-informational approach to gossip. Specifically, we sought to determine which informational components engender gossip. In Experiment 1, participants read brief passages abou...

Size is an important visuo-spatial characteristic of the physical world. In language processing, previous research has demonstrated a processing advantage for words denoting semantically "big" (e.g., jungle) versus "small" (e.g., needle) concrete objects. We investigated whether semantic size plays a role in the recognition of words expressing abst...

In human communication, direct speech (e.g., Mary said, "I'm hungry") is perceived as more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., Mary said that she was hungry). This vividness distinction has previously been found to underlie silent reading of quotations: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that direct speech elicited higher br...

In human communication, direct speech (e.g., Mary said: "I'm hungry") is perceived to be more vivid than indirect speech (e.g., Mary said [that] she was hungry). However, the processing consequences of this distinction are largely unclear. In two experiments, participants were asked to either orally (Experiment 1) or silently (Experiment 2, eye-tra...