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44
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Introduction
My research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms governing efficient and impaired written and spoken language comprehension. I investigate typical and atypical populations (children with developmental language disorder, older adults with Parkinson’s disease) throughout life. To examine language comprehension in these different groups, I use a combination of experimental methods with online measures (e.g., self-paced reading, EEG, eye movements) and individual differences.
Skills and Expertise
Current institution
Publications
Publications (44)
Older adults in the third-age group (60–79 years) maintain reading comprehension skills similar to those of younger adults, but little is known about individuals in the fourth age (80+ years). This study investigates differences in reading comprehension in a between-group design. We evaluated a sample of 150 older adults, comprising 86 third-age an...
Prosodic cues facilitate children’s understanding of pragmatic
meanings. Multimodal prosody (i.e., combining prosody with
body movements) provides enhancing cues to pragmatic
comprehension and could be beneficial for children with
Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study
evaluated 45 Typically Developing children (TD) and 34
c...
This study examined lexical-semantic processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) during visually situated comprehension of real-time spoken words. Existing evidence suggests that children with DLD may experience challenges in lexical access and retrieval, as well as greater lexical competition compared to their peers with Typi...
Although there is evidence that recognizing pseudowords is more difficult than recognizing words during childhood, adulthood, and early old age (60–75 years), it is not yet clear what happens during advanced aging or the fourth age, a stage when the decline of fluid intelligence strongly affects processing speed, but a good performance of crystalli...
It is known that formal explanations with categorical labels are more satisfying than explicit tautologies. However, would they still be more satisfying if they are implicitly tautological themselves? In two experiments, we compared the degree of satisfaction between tautological formal explanations, explicit tautologies, and proper explanations. A...
Background:
During the fourth age (80+ years), cognitive difficulties increase. Although language seems to resist the advancement of age, an older person without pathological developments in cognition may exhibit deficits in lexical access. This study examines the restrictions on lexical access in people aged 80 and older in word recognition and r...
Older adults show a progressive cognitive decline, and although language processing appears to resist advancing age, studies in word retrieval report that elders show important difficulties. Previous research reports that such failures increase from age 70 years, which suggests that during the fourth age word retrieval would exhibit even stronger c...
Purpose:
Article-noun disagreement in spoken language is a marker of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, the evidence is less clear regarding article comprehension. This study investigates article comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking children with and without DLD.
Method:
Eye tracking methodology used in a long...
Several studies have investigated the comprehension of decontextualized English nominal metaphors. However, not much is known about how contextualized, non-nominal, non-English metaphors are processed, and how this might inform existing theories of metaphor comprehension. In the current work, we investigate the effects of context and of sequential...
Purpose
Previous studies have raised the possibility of preserved language comprehension in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in online tasks and within simple sentence structures. Consequently, we evaluated the capacity of children with DLD to comprehend verbal number agreement in simple sentence structures (i.e., verb–object–sub...
The effect of age and cognitive load. During the fourth age, a marked physiological deterioration and critical points of dysfunction are observed, during which cognitive performance exhibits a marked decline in certain skills (fluid intelligence) but good performance of others (crystallized intelligence). Experimental evidence describes important c...
The comprehension of Spanish verbal future and past tense of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) was evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment with 96 Spanish-and Catalan-speaking participants distributed in 4 groups: 24 children with DLD (M age 7.8 years), 24 children with the same chronological age (M age 7.8), 24 children with the...
Our visual environment is highly predictable in terms of where and in which locations objects can be found. Based on visual experience, children extract rules about visual scene configurations, allowing them to generate scene knowledge. Similarly, children extract the linguistic rules from relatively predictable linguistic contexts. It has been pro...
Visually situated spoken words activate phonological, visual, and semantic representations guiding overt attention during visual exploration. We compared the activation of these representations in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) across four eye-tracking experiments, with a particular focus on visual (shape) represent...
We conducted a visual world eye-tracking experiment with highly proficient Spanish-English bilingual adults to investigate the effects of relative language dominance, operationalized as a continuous, multidimensional variable, on the time course of relative clause processing in the first-learned language, Spanish. We found that participants exhibit...
Immediate contextual information and world knowledge allow comprehenders to anticipate incoming language in real time. The cognitive mechanisms that underlie such behavior are, however, still only partially understood. We examined the novel idea that gender attitudes may influence how people make predictions during sentence processing. To this end,...
Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) need more exposures to learn new words in an unambiguous context compared to children with typical development (TD). However, it remains unclear whether they would be able to learn new words by extracting frequencies over multiple word-object encounters in ambiguous situations. The present study e...
When a word is used metaphorically (for example “walrus” in the sentence “The president is a walrus”), some features of that word's meaning (“very fat,” “slow-moving”) are carried across to the metaphoric interpretation while other features (“has large tusks,” “lives near the north pole”) are not. What happens to these features that relate only to...
To reduce ambiguity across a conversation, interlocutors reach temporary conventions or referential precedents on how to refer to an entity. Despite their central role in communication, the cognitive underpinnings of the interpretation of precedents remain unclear, specifically the role and mechanisms by which information related to the speaker is...
Background
Function words, and more specifically prepositions and prepositional locutions, are considered to be one of the most important difficulties for children with DLD.
Aims
To examine the capacity of bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to comprehend different Spanish prepositions and prepositional locutions in a sim...
A main challenge for theories of embodied cognition is to understand the task dependency of embodied language processing. One possibility is that perceptual representations (e.g., typical colour of objects mentioned in spoken sentences) are not activated routinely but the influence of perceptual representation emerges only when context strongly sup...
The association between a word and typical location (e.g., cloud—up) appears to modulate healthy individuals’ response times and visual attention. This study examined whether similar effects can be observed in a clinical population characterized by difficulties in both spatial representation and lexical processing. In an eye-tracking experiment, pa...
ABSTRACT
The ability to represent quantities, either in a symbolic or nonsymbolic format, predicts calculation skills. Recording the saccades during gazing at these stimuli allows us to infer the cognitive processing taking place at that moment. The purpose of this research study was to analyse the duration of the first fixation during symbolic and...
Function words and, more specifically, articles have been widely indicated as one of the main sources of difficulty for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study is the first to assess the online comprehension of Spanish articles in bilingual children with DLD. In an eye tracking experiment, we monitored participants’ e...
In adults, words are more effective than sounds at activating conceptual representations. We aimed to replicate these findings and extend them to infants. In a series of experiments using an eye tracker object recognition task, suitable for both adults and infants, participants heard either a word (e.g. cow) or an associated sound (e.g. mooing) fol...
An important component of reading comprehension is the reader's capacity to make inferences that can maintain the coherence between propositions within the text. However, the cognitive and linguistic skills that underlie online inference making remain elusive. The authors aimed to clarify the effects of vocabulary and text comprehension on word‐to‐...
El presente estudio aborda el impacto de la enfermedad de Parkinson en el procesamiento de información semántica durante una tarea de reconocimiento visual de palabras. Para ello, se comparó el rendimiento de un grupo de pacientes con Parkinson con el rendimiento de sujetos sin daño neurológico en dos experimentos. Se evaluaron los efectos de tiemp...
The present work is a description and an assessment of a methodology designed to quantify different aspects of the interaction betweenlanguage processing and the perception of the visual world. The recording of eye-gaze patterns has provided good evidence for the contributionof both the visual context and linguistic/world knowledge to language comp...
There is a consensus among language researchers that people can predict upcoming language. But do people always predict when comprehending language? Notions that “brains … are essentially prediction machines” certainly suggest so. In three eye-tracking experiments we tested this view. Participants listened to simple Dutch sentences (‘Look at the di...
Existing evidence has shown a processing advantage (or facilitation) when representations derived from a non-linguistic context (spatial proximity depicted by gambling cards moving together) match the semantic content of an ensuing sentence. A match, inspired by conceptual metaphors such as ‘similarity is closeness’ would, for instance, involve car...
In the digital era, tech devices (hardware and software) are increasingly within hand’s reach. Yet, implementing information and communication technologies for educational contexts that have robust and long-lasting effects on student learning outcomes is still a challenge. We propose that any such system must a) be theoretically motivated and desig...
Over the past two decades, 'visually situated' language comprehension (the interplay between language comprehension, attention, and non-linguistic visual context) has emerged as an increasingly active area of research. One important result in this area is that both linguistic and world knowledge, as well as visual cues, can rapidly inform the unfol...
for downloadable version see
http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~knoeferp/Homepage__Psycholinguistics/Publications_files/knoeferle_guerra_LLC_pre-print.pdf
Recent experimental evidence suggests that spatial distance between two depicted objects in a non-referential visual context (i.e., when neither spatial distance nor the objects were mentioned) can rapidly and incrementally modulate the processing of semantic similarity between and-coordinated subject noun phrases in a sentence. The present researc...
A large body of evidence has shown that visual context information can rapidly modulate language comprehension for concrete sentences and when it is mediated by a referential or a lexical-semantic link. What has not yet been examined is whether visual context can also modulate comprehension of abstract sentences incrementally when it is neither ref...
What does semantic similarity between two concepts mean? How could we measure it? The way in which semantic similarity is calculated might differ depending on the theoretical notion of semantic representation. In an eye-tracking reading experiment, we investigated whether two widely used semantic similarity measures (based on featural or distributi...
Recent evidence from eye tracking during reading showed that non-referential spatial distance presented in a visual context can modulate semantic interpretation of similarity relations rapidly and incrementally. In two eye-tracking reading experiments we extended these findings in two important ways; first, we examined whether other semantic domain...
Research on situated language processing has examined how visually depicted objects or concrete action events inform the comprehension of concrete sentences. By contrast, much less is known about how abstract sentence comprehension interacts with non-linguistic visual information. Moreover, while non-linguistic information can rapidly inform langua...
Background: The organization of the human conceptual system is a central issue for cognitive sciences. Conceptual Metaphors Theory, proposed that this system is fundamentally metaphorical, based on the description of linguistic data that systematically linked concrete concepts with abstract ones. However, advances in neurosciences and cognitive psy...
