
Wouter DuyckGhent University | UGhent · Department of Experimental Psychology
Wouter Duyck
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189
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Introduction
all papers available on http://www.wouterduyck.be/?page_id=4
Publications
Publications (189)
The International Cognitive Ability Resource, abbreviated ICAR, counters some of the practical problems researchers face when using good, but proprietary, licensed intelligence tests like the Wechsler tests, which include unfeasible administration times and financial costs. So far, ICAR has been validated for adolescents and adults in many countrie...
Despite ongoing discussions regarding the relevance of Latin in modern education, this language still holds a prominent role in European secondary school curricula. While studying Latin is commonly believed to yield cognitive and linguistic benefits, this argument primarily relies on dated research that often uses methodologies that do not allow to...
Building on social identity theory and cognitive models on information processing, the present paper considered whether and how stereotyped information in job ads impairs older/younger job seekers’ job attraction. Two eye-tracking experiments with older (Study 1) and younger job seekers (Study 2) investigated effects of negatively metastereotyped p...
Aim
This study investigated the effectiveness of nudge interventions promoting hand hygiene in an industrial plant during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Subject and methods
A large field experiment was conducted with 861 participants and 14,645 observations. The interventions involved manipulating the placement of alcohol gel dispensers, the presence of s...
High-frequency words are processed faster than low-frequency words, known as the word frequency effect (FE). Although the FE has been studied in various writing systems as well as in first- (L1) and second-language (L2) reading, existing theoretical hypotheses are mainly based on findings in alphabetic languages. To date, no study has investigated...
Studying Latin in secondary education is still widespread in Europe and believed to result in cognitive benefits, even beyond the linguistic domain. In this study we explored the relation between such study and later academic achievement in higher education (N = 1,898). First, we demonstrated that Latin students exhibit increased levels of study ac...
The practice of nudging received much attention in different domains of human behaviour (e.g. finance, health, traffic safety and sustainability), but its relevance has not been systematically investigated for safety in the process industry. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of nudge interventions in promoting safety behavior in the...
Psychology is one of the seven hub sciences, which involves great responsibility for psychologists but also great opportunities for both psychologists and other scholars; that was the theme of the 17th European Congress of Psychology organized by the Slovenian Psychologists’ Association. This article contains a detailed example of how psychology fu...
Predictive models of academic achievement are used in various (often high stakes) applications, including selection and study orientation procedures for higher education. Considering the far-reaching consequences of their outcomes, these models should show as little bias for irrelevant factors as possible. While numerous studies have researched the...
Several studies have pointed to beneficial effects of bilingualism on executive functioning. However, observations of these beneficial effects have at times proven difficult to reproduce. Moreover, findings of studies on cognitive effects of bilingualism have been contested altogether. These contradictory outcomes leave the research field of biling...
Purpose
The clinical use of event-related potentials in patients with language disorders is increasingly acknowledged. For this purpose, normative data should be available. Within this context, healthy aging and gender effects on the electrophysiological correlates of semantic sentence comprehension were investigated.
Method
One hundred and ten he...
The current work presents the very first eye-tracking corpus of natural reading by Chinese-English bilinguals, whose two languages entail different writing systems and orthographies. Participants read an entire novel in these two languages, presented in paragraphs on screen. Half of the participants first read half of the novel in their native lang...
Both older and younger job seekers face difficulties when entering the workforce. Qualification‐based targeted recruitment (QBTR) might be used to attract older/younger job seekers, yet how this strategy is perceived by older/younger job seekers has not been considered before. The present study fills this gap and investigated effects of negatively...
Age discrimination may explain lower labour market chances of older and younger job seekers. What remains underresearched, however, is how older/younger job seekers might self‐select out from early recruitment procedures due to stigmatizing information in job ads. Building on theories of metastereotypes and the linguistic category model, two experi...
Polynomial regression is a proven method to calculate person-environment (PE) interest fit between the RIASEC (realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional) interests of a student and the RIASEC profile of a study program. The method has shown much larger effects of PE interest fit on academic achievement than earlier a...
Aims
This preliminary study aimed to investigate therapy-induced electrophysiological changes in persons with primary progressive aphasia (PPA). The investigated event-related potential (ERP) components associated with language processing were the mismatch negativity, P300, N400, and P600.
Methods
A linguistic ERP test battery and standardized lan...
Research into second language (L2) reading is an exponentially growing field. Yet, it still has a relatively short supply of comparable, ecologically valid data from readers representing a variety of first languages (L1). This article addresses this need by presenting a new data resource called MECO L2 (Multilingual Eye Movements Corpus), a rich be...
Scientific studies of language behavior need to grapple with a large diversity of languages in the world and, for reading, a further variability in writing systems. Yet, the ability to form meaningful theories of reading is contingent on the availability of cross-linguistic behavioral data. This paper offers new insights into aspects of reading beh...
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...
Student fail rates in the first year of open access academic higher education can become dramatically high. The present study in Flanders, Belgium examines how performance on program-specific basic skillsets can identify students at risk at the start of their curriculum in 21 bachelor programs (N = 6,624), months before actually failing their exams...
This paper documents Scottish adolescents’ vocational interest types. Our research is based on the responses of 1,306 pupils from 18 secondary schools to an empirically verified online interest inventory test. Our results are threefold. First, the structural validity of the test with the Scottish sample is confirmed by evaluating the underlying cir...
Purpose
The current study examines how speech disfluencies manifest themselves in the two languages of bilingual persons who stutter, starting from the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with an attentional deficit at the level of speech production.
Methods
Twenty-eight bilingual people who stutter performed a spontaneous and a controlled sp...
Categorical and associative relationships among words are two key forms of semantic knowledge. In this study, we examined ageing and gender effects on the processing of both types of semantic relationships by using the event-related potential technique. Moreover, we aimed to develop normative electrophysiological data for clinical purposes. One hun...
Words that share form and meaning across two or more languages (i.e., cognates) are generally processed faster than control words (non-cognates) by bilinguals speaking these languages. This so-called cognate effect is considered to be a demonstration of language non-selectivity during bilingual lexical access. Still, research up till now has focuse...
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) enrolments in higher education are declining while the STEM gender gap of female underrepresentation seems to widen. The present study addresses both issues by exploring how the fit between a student's vocational interests and the STEM field contributes to a (non-) STEM study choice. Data was...
Previous research in English has suggested that reading rate predictions can be improved considerably by taking average word length into account. In the present study, we investigated whether the same regularity holds for Dutch. The Dutch language is very similar to English, but words are on average half a letter longer: 5.1 letters per word (in no...
Previous research in English has suggested that reading rate predictions can be improved considerably by taking average word length into account. In the present study, we investigated whether the same regularity holds for Dutch. The Dutch language is very similar to English, but words are on average half a letter longer: 5.1 letters per word (in no...
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...
Applied linguistic work claims that multilinguals’ non-native languages interfere with one another based on similarities in cognitive factors like proficiency or age of acquisition. Two experiments explored how trilinguals regulate control of native- and non-native-language words. Experiment 1 tested 46 Dutch–English–French trilinguals in a monitor...
Language-related potentials are increasingly used to objectify (mal)adaptive neuroplasticity in stroke-related aphasia recovery. Using preattentive [mismatch negativity (MMN)] and attentive (P300) phonologically related paradigms, neuroplasticity in sensory memory and cognitive functioning underlying phonological processing can be investigated. In...
Previous research in English has suggested that reading rate predictions can be improved considerably by taking average word length into account. In the present study, we investigated whether the same regularity holds for Dutch. The Dutch language is very similar to English, but words are on average half a letter longer: 5.1 letters per word (in no...
Second language (L2) speakers produce speech more slowly than first language (L1) speakers. This may be due to a delay in lexical retrieval, but it is also possible that the delay is situated at later stages. This study used delayed picture naming to test whether late production stages (leading up to articulation) are slower in L2 than in L1. Dutch...
The job interview is still one of the most widely used personnel selection tools that might, however, be prone to bias especially when stigmatized applicants are being evaluated. In response to the growing concerns regarding labour market shortages and adverse impact in personnel selection, we conducted two experimental studies that investigated po...
We investigated how eye movements are influenced by different reading goals in participants' first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants read or studied the contents of texts while their eye movements were recorded. One group was asked to read L1 and L2 texts as they would read any expository text (informational reading). Another group was as...
Background
Recovery from stroke-related aphasia follows different stages, evolving from the acute and subacute phase (< 6 months post stroke) into the chronic phase (> 6 months post stroke). In general, phonology remains tenaciously disturbed, making it a relevant language marker to assess in every stage of recovery. The classical behavioural evalu...
The current study examined whether use of a foreign language affects the manner in which people evaluate a criminal situation. We employed a range of crime scenarios, for which severity judgment scores were obtained. Crimes that were written in a foreign language were systematically evaluated as less severe compared with the same cases described in...
Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution - edited by Roberto R. Heredia January 2020
Binnen de afasierevalidatie staan we aan de vooravond van het introduceren van neuroplasticiteitsgerichte diagnostiek. Neuroplasticiteitsgericht onderzoek is niet alleen sensitiever dan pen-en-papiertaken, het geeft ons ook een betrouwbaar zicht op de manier waarop de hersenen zich reorganiseren tijdens het afasieherstel (plasticiteit). Bovendien d...
Cambridge Core - Cognition - Bilingual Lexical Ambiguity Resolution - edited by Roberto R. Heredia
The authors investigated how eye movements are influenced by different reading goals in participants’ first (L1) and second language (L2). Participants read or studied the contents of texts while their eye movements were recorded. One group was asked to read L1 and L2 texts as they would read any expository text (informational reading). Another gro...
Category selective recall in spontaneous speech after stroke has been reported only rarely. We recently described three cases demonstrating transient number speech in the acute stage of left hemispheric stroke and hypothesized a link with multilingualism and mathematical proficiency. In this report, we describe a similar case with a transient episo...
From a holistic point of view, semantic processes are subserved by large-scale subcortico-cortical networks. The dynamic routing of information between grey matter structures depends on the integrity of subcortical white matter pathways. Nonetheless, controversy remains on which of these pathways support semantic processing. Therefore, a systematic...
Semantic processing is a fundamental aspect in human communication. The cortical organization of semantic processing has been exhaustively described, in contrast to inconsistent results on the function of subcortical grey matter structures. Hence, this manuscript reports a systematic review and meta-analysis on the subcortical involvement in verbal...
Each student faces the challenge of choosing a study program that matches his or her vocational interest. A good person-environment fit (PE fit) between student and study program influences study success and persistence, prerequisites to obtaining the desired degree. But which criterion should be used when presenting advice sets of study options to...
The extent to which a good person-environment (PE) interest fit between student and study program leads to better study results in higher education is an ongoing debate wherein the role of the study program environment has remained inadequately studied. Unanswered questions include: how diverse study programs are in the interests of their student p...
Using the visual world paradigm, we tested whether Dutch-English bilinguals predict upcoming semantic information in auditory sentence comprehension to the same extent in their native (L1) and second language (L2). Participants listened to sentences in L1 and L2 while their eye-movements were measured. A display containing a picture of either a tar...
In complex tasks such as interpreting, the importance of a well-functioning working memory can hardly be overestimated. However, empirical studies have failed to produce consistent results with regard to an interpreter advantage in working memory. Recent studies tend to focus on the executive component of working memory. To our knowledge, no such s...
In the present study we assessed the extent to which different word recognition time measures converge, using large databases of lexical decision times and eyetracking measures. We observed a low proportion of shared variance between these measures, which limits the validity of lexical decision times to real-life reading. We further investigated an...
There is currently a lively debate in the literature whether bilingualism leads to enhanced cognitive control or not. Recent evidence suggests that knowledge of more than one language does not always suffice for the manifestation of a bilingual cognitive control advantage. As a result, ongoing research has focused on modalities of bilingual languag...
Research on error monitoring suggests that bilingual Dutch-English speakers are slower to correct some speech errors in their second language (L2) as opposed to their first language (L1). But which component of self-monitoring is slowed down in L2, error detection or interruption and repair of the error? This study charted the time course of monito...
In dialogue, speakers tend to adapt their speech to the speech of their interlocutor.
Adapting speech production to preceding speech input may be particularly relevant for
second language (L2) speakers interacting with native (L1) speakers, as adaptation may
facilitate L2 learning. Here we asked whether Dutch-English bilinguals adapt
pronunciation...
Recent meta-analyses have indicated that the bilingual advantage in cognitive control is not clear-cut. So far, the literature has mainly focussed on behavioral differences and potential differences in strategic task tendencies between monolinguals and bilinguals have been left unexplored. In the present study, two groups of younger and older bilin...
The current study addresses the effects of negative attainability feedback on the shift from engagement to disengagement from a career goal. It was hypothesized that negative attainability feedback regarding study choice may lead to both goal engagement and goal disengagement and that this relation is mediated by self-efficacy, motivational beliefs...
There are clear disadvantages in the speed of word production and recognition in a second language (L2), relative to the first language (L1). Some accounts claim that these disadvantages occur because of a slow-down in lexical retrieval and phonological encoding. But it is also possible that the slow-down originates from a later part of the product...
This study investigated whether brain activity in Dutch-French bilinguals during semantic access to concepts from one language could be used to predict neural activation during access to the same concepts from another language, in different language modalities/tasks. This was tested using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), within and across langu...
Do cross-lingual interactions occur even with structures of different word order in different languages of bilinguals? Or could the latter provide immunity to interference of the contrasting characteristics of the other language? To answer this question, we examined the reported speech production (utterances reporting what just happened; e.g., Holl...
The current study examines the hypothesis that differential aphasia may be due to a problem with language control rather than with language-specific impairment and how this is related to non-linguistic cognitive control abilities. To this end, we report a case study of an L2 dominant French-English bilingual aphasia patient with larger impairments...
The age of acquisition (AoA) effect in first/monolingual language processing has received much attention in psycholinguistic research. However, AoA effects in second language processing were only investigated rarely. In the current study, we investigated first (L1) and second language (L2) AoA effects in a combined eye tracking and mega study appro...
In the recent literature on bilingualism, a lively debate has arisen about the long-term effects of bilingualism on cognition and the brain. These studies yield inconsistent results, in part because they rely on comparisons between bilingual and monolingual control groups that may also differ on other variables. In the present neuroimaging study, w...
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...
In a recent review, Mukadam, Sommerlad, and Livingston (2017) argue that bilingualism offers no protection against cognitive decline. The authors examined the results of 13 studies (five prospective, eight retrospective) in which monolinguals and bilinguals were compared for cognitive decline and onset of dementia symptoms. Analysis of four of the...
A new, Holland-based Interest Inventory is proposed, intended to facilitate the transition from secondary to tertiary education. Specific interest items were designed to grasp activities that are prevalent during tertiary studies, including an Academic-track-scale to assist in the choice between academic and vocational-oriented programs. Interest p...
The lexical bias effect is the tendency for people to make phonological speech errors that result in existing words. Several studies have argued that this effect arises from a combination of factors: the self-monitoring system covertly weeding out more nonword than word errors and feedback of activation during speech production biasing towards lexi...
Choosing a suitable study program is one of the factors that facilitates academic achievement and thus prevents drop-out in the first year of tertiary education. This requires adequate information on both the individual abilities and the environment during the study choice process. The SIMON (Study Skills and Interest MONitor) project of Ghent Univ...
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...
The present study assessed intra- and cross-lingual neighborhood effects, using both a generalized lexical decision task and an analysis of a large-scale bilingual eye-tracking corpus (Cop, Dirix, Drieghe & Duyck, in press). Using new neighborhood density and frequency measures, the general lexical decision task yielded an inhibitory cross-lingual...
The current study investigated the effects of word-level age of acquisition on natural reading. Previous studies, using multiple language modalities, found that earlier learned words are recognized, read, spoken and responded to faster than words learned later in life. Until now, in visual word recognition, experimental materials were limited to si...
Semantic information, which is acquired through lifetime, is stored in the temporal cortex of the human brain. An important link with the inferior frontal gyrus makes top-down and bottom-up representations possible. Extensive reviews and meta-analyses are available on the cortical organization of semantic processing. However, the role of subcortica...
Background
Until today, there is no satisfying explanation for why one language may recover worse than another in differential bilingual aphasia. One potential explanation that has been largely unexplored is that differential aphasia is the consequence of a loss of language control rather than a loss of linguistic representations. Language control...
Speakers monitor their own speech for errors. To do so, they may rely on perception of their own speech (external monitoring) but also on an internal speech representation (internal monitoring). While there are detailed accounts of monitoring in first language (L1) processing, it is not clear if and how monitoring is different in a second language...