Eleonore H.M. Smalle

• PhD
• Professor (Assistant) at Tilburg University

Recent studies using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have demonstrated that disruptions of the articulatory motor cortex impair performance in demanding speech perception tasks. These findings have been interpreted as support for the idea that the motor cortex is critically involved in speech perception. However, the validity of...

In four experiments, we describe the first finding of a Metrical Hebb Effect. Participants are shown to exhibit a Hebb Repetition Effect for repeating list-wide stress patterns across sequences of familiar words, even though the lexical items within the “repeating” lists do not themselves repeat. Experiment 1 established the presence of a Hebb effe...

Children are more successful language learners than adults, yet the nature and cause of this phenomenon are still not well understood. Auditory statistical learning from speech has been a prominent focus of research in the field of language development because it is regarded as a fundamental learning mechanism underlying word segmentation in early...

Statistical learning is the ability to extract patterned information from continuous sensory signals. Recent evidence suggests that auditory-motor mechanisms play an important role in auditory statistical learning from speech signals. The question remains whether auditory-motor mechanisms support such learning generally or in a domain-specific mann...

Why do children learn language more easily than adults do? This puzzle has fascinated cognitive and language scientists for decades. In the present letter, we approach the language learning puzzle from a cognitive perspective that is inspired by evidence from the perceptual and motor learning literature. Neuroscientific studies show that two memory...

Waarom leren kinderen gemakkelijker een nieuwe taal dan volwassenen, terwijl hun intellectuele capaciteiten nog zoveel beperkter zijn? Dit is een openstaande vraag die cognitieve (taal)wetenschappers al jarenlang fascineert. In de huidige literatuurstudie gaan we dieper in op de recentste inzichten die een antwoord kunnen bieden op de vraag waarom...

Human learning is supported by multiple neural mechanisms that maturate at different rates and interact in mostly cooperative but also sometimes competitive ways. We tested the hypothesis that mature cognitive mechanisms constrain implicit statistical learning mechanisms that contribute to early language acquisition. Specifically, we tested the pre...

This is a commentary on a review article by Dell, Kelley, Bian, and Holmes (2019), “Tuning the blueprint: how studies of implicit learning during speaking reveal the information processing components of the production system”, doi: 10.1080/23273798.2019.1613553. The authors describe limitations for what can be learned in the mature language product...

It is still an unresolved question why adults do not learn languages as effortlessly as children do. We tested the hypothesis that the higher cognitive control abilities in adults interfere with implicit learning mechanisms relevant for language acquisition. Across two days, Dutch-speaking adults were asked to rapidly recite novel syllable strings...

Older adults are able to implicitly pick up structural regularities in the environment despite declining cognitive abilities. Here, we investigated elderly’s abilities to implicitly pick up novel linguistic constraints in speech production. Across four training days, young and healthy older Dutch-speaking adults were asked to rapidly recite Dutch p...

There is increasing evidence for an association between both serial order short-term memory (STM) and the long-term learning (LTL) of serial order information and reading abilities. In this developmental study, we examined the hypothesis that STM for serial order supports online grapheme-to-phoneme conversion processes during the initial stages of...

Compared to most human language abilities, the cognitive mechanisms underlying spelling have not been as intensively investigated as reading and therefore remain to this day less well understood. The current study aims to address this shortcoming by investigating the contribution of serial order short-term memory (STM) and long-term learning (LTL)...

Older adults are able to implicitly pick up structural regularities in the environment in a relatively unaffected way despite age-related cognitive decline. Although there is extensive evidence for this observation in the domain of motor skill learning, it is not clear whether this is also true for aspects of language learning. In this study, we in...

Accumulating evidence suggests that emotional information is often recognised faster than neutral information. Several studies examined the effects of valence and arousal on word recognition, but yielded partially diverging results. Here, we used two alternative versions of a constructive recognition paradigm in which a target word is hidden by a v...

It is widely accepted that specific memory processes, such as serial-order memory, are involved in written language development and predictive of reading and spelling abilities. The reverse question, namely whether orthographic abilities also affect serial-order memory, has hardly been investigated. In the current study, we compared 20 illiterate p...

It is widely accepted that specific memory processes, such as serial-order memory, are involved in written language development and predictive of reading and spelling abilities. The reverse question, namely whether orthographic abilities also affect serial-order memory, has hardly been investigated. In the current study, we compared 20 illiterate p...

Adults do not learn languages as easily as children do. It has been hypothesized that the late-developing prefrontal cortex that supports executive functions competes with procedural learning mechanisms that are important for language learning. To address this hypothesis, we tested whether a temporary neural disruption of the left Dorsolateral Pref...

Whereas adults often rely on explicit memory, children appear to excel in implicit memory, which plays an important role in the acquisition of various cognitive skills, such as those involved in language. The current study aimed to test the assertion of an age-dependent shift in implicit versus explicit learning within a theoretical framework that...

Why do children appear to learn languages more easily than adults? This lingering question, better known as the sensitive-period hypothesis, has generated much research interest. A central aspect of language development is the acquisition of new words. During novel word acquisition, learners need to discover novel lexical units from fluent speech,...

Speech errors typically respect the speaker's implicit knowledge of language-wide phonotactics (e.g., /ŋ/ cannot be a syllable onset in the English language). Previous work demonstrated that adults can learn novel experimentally-induced phonotactic constraints by producing syllable strings in which the allowable position of a phoneme depends on ano...

In three experiments, we investigated Hebb repetition learning (HRL) differences between children and adults, as a function of the type of item (lexical vs. sub-lexical) and the level of item-overlap between sequences. In a first experiment, it was shown that when non-repeating and repeating (Hebb) sequences of words were all permutations of the sa...