During the last 2 decades, major advances have been made in understanding the development of executive functions (EFs) in early childhood. This article reviews the EF literature during the preschool period using an integrative framework. The framework adopted considers EF to be a unitary construct with partially dissociable components (A. Miyake et al., 2000). The authors focus on 3 EF components: working memory, response inhibition, and shifting. For the present purposes, the central executive is conceived of as a central attention system that is involved in all EF component operations. Research to date suggests that elementary forms of the core EF components are present early during the preschool period. Changes in EF during the latter half of the preschool period appear to be due to the development of attention and integration of component EFs. Finally, the review outlines a number of areas that warrant further investigation if researchers are to move forward in understanding early EF development.

/pdf/executive-function-in-preschoolers-a-review-using-an-3igach2jp2.pdf

Executive function in preschoolers: A review using an integrative framework.

Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kucera and Francis frequency norms. By using the lexical decision times of recently published megastudies, we show how bad this measure is and what must be done to improve it. In particular, we investigated the size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure. We observed that corpus size is of practical importance for small sizes (depending on the frequency of the word), but not for sizes above 16–30 million words. As for the language register, we found that frequencies based on television and film subtitles are better than frequencies based on written sources, certainly for the monosyllabic and bisyllabic words used in psycholinguistic research. Finally, we found that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence. Part of the superiority of the latter is due to the words that are frequently used as names. Assembling a new frequency norm on the basis of these considerations turned out to predict word processing times much better than did the existing norms (including Kucera & Francis and Celex). The new SUBTL frequency norms from the SUBTLEXUS corpus are freely available for research purposes from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental, as well as from the University of Ghent and Lexique Web sites.

/pdf/moving-beyond-kucera-and-francis-a-critical-evaluation-of-57xbh00uuj.pdf

Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English

Eye movements are now widely used to investigate cognitive processes during reading, scene perception, and visual search. In this article, research on the following topics is reviewed with respect to reading: (a) the perceptual span (or span of effective vision), (b) preview benefit, (c) eye movement control, and (d) models of eye movements. Related issues with respect to eye movements during scene perception and visual search are also reviewed. It is argued that research on eye movements during reading has been somewhat advanced over research on eye movements in scene perception and visual search and that some of the paradigms developed to study reading should be more widely adopted in the study of scene perception and visual search. Research dealing with "real-world" tasks and research utilizing the visual-world paradigm are also briefly discussed.

https://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~bkbergen/cogs200/Rayner-Bartlett.pdf

Eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search.

http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rlevy/papers/levy-2008-cognition.pdf

Expectation-based syntactic comprehension

This article presents a new model that accounts for working memory spans in adults, the time-based resource-sharing model. The model assumes that both components (i.e., processing and maintenance) of the main working memory tasks require attention and that memory traces decay as soon as attention is switched away. Because memory retrievals are constrained by a central bottleneck and thus totally capture attention, it was predicted that the maintenance of the items to be recalled depends on both the number of memory retrievals required by the intervening treatment and the time allowed to perform them. This number of retrievals:time ratio determines the cognitive load of the processing component. The authors show in 7 experiments that working memory spans vary as a function of this cognitive load.

/pdf/time-constraints-and-resource-sharing-in-adults-working-zzpqr184bo.pdf

Time constraints and resource sharing in adults' working memory spans.

WordGen is an easy-to-use program that uses the CELEX and Lexique lexical databases for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French. Items can be generated in these four languages, specifying any combination of seven linguistic constraints: number of letters, neighborhood size, frequency, summated position-nonspecific bigram frequency, minimum position-nonspecific bigram frequency, position-specific frequency of the initial and final bigram, and orthographic relatedness. The program also has a module to calculate the respective values of these variables for items that have already been constructed, either with the program or taken from earlier studies. Stimulus queries can be entered through WordGen’s graphical user interface or by means of batch files. WordGen is especially useful for (1) Dutch and German item generation, because no such stimulus-selection tool exists for these languages, (2) the generation of nonwords for all four languages, because our program has some important advantages over previous nonword generation approaches, and (3) psycholinguistic experiments on bilingualism, because the possibility of using the same tool for different languages increases the cross-linguistic comparability of the generated item lists. WordGen is free and available athttp://expsy.ugent.be/wordgen.htm.

/pdf/wordgen-a-tool-for-word-selection-and-nonword-generation-in-12bqrlkzal.pdf

WordGen: a tool for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French.

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated several factors that in- fluence the comprehension complexity of singly-embedded relative clauses (RCs) in English. Three factors were manipulated in Experiment 1, result- ing in three main eects. First, object-extracted RCs were read more slowly than subject-extracted RCs, replicating previous work. Second, RCs that were embedded within the sentential complement of a noun were read more slowly than comparable RCs that were not embedded in this way. Third, and most interestingly, object-modifying RCs were read more slowly than subject-modifying relative clauses. This result contradicts one of the central tenets of complexity research: that nested sentences are harder to under- stand than their right-branching equivalents (e.g., Miller and Chomsky 1963). It is hypothesized that this result followed from a combination of two information-flow factors: (1) background information is usually pre- sented early in a sentence; and (2) restrictive RCs—the form of the RCs in Experiment 1—usually convey background information. Experiment 2 tested this hypothesis by comparing restrictive and non-restrictive RCs— which generally provide new information—in both subject- and object- modifying positions. The results of the experiment were as predicted by the information-flow account: Only restrictive RCs were read more slowly when modifying objects. It is concluded that both resource and information-flow factors need to be considered in explaining RC complexity eects.

/pdf/reading-relative-clauses-in-english-3olk7v6t28.pdf

Reading relative clauses in English

The development of working memory: exploring the complementarity of two models.

An eye movement experiment is reported in which target words of two and four letters were presented in sentences that strongly raised the expectation of a particular word. There were three possible conditions: The expected word was present in the sentence, an unexpected word of the same length was present, or an unexpected word of a different length was present (all continuations were acceptable, but the latter two were difficult to predict). Our first purpose was to test one of the core assumptions of the Extended Optimal Viewing Position model of eye guidance in reading (Brysbaert & Vitu, 1998). This model states that word skipping is primarily a function of the length of the upcoming word. It leads to the prediction that an unpredicted two‐letter word will be skipped more often than a predicted four‐letter word, which is indeed what we observed. Our second aim was to determine if we could obtain an interaction between context predictability and parafoveal word length, by looking at what happens when th...

/pdf/word-skipping-in-reading-on-the-interplay-of-linguistic-and-4clqjwts57.pdf

Word skipping in reading: On the interplay of linguistic and visual factors

This paper used self-paced reading to test processing preferences in pronoun interpretation in English two clause sentences. The results demonstrate that people's preferences can be reversed by changing the coherence relation between the clauses. The results are not compatible with the existence of a single all-purpose strategy in pronoun resolution. Rather, the results support Kehler's (2002) hypothesis that the processing patterns observed in pronoun processing are a byproduct of more general cognitive inference processes underlying the establishment of coherence, such that discourse coherence guides pronoun reference, and pronoun reference guides discourse coherence.

/pdf/discourse-coherence-and-pronoun-resolution-1qjw7weyc1.pdf

Timothy Desmet

Papers

WordGen: a tool for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French.

Reading relative clauses in English

The development of working memory: exploring the complementarity of two models.

Word skipping in reading: On the interplay of linguistic and visual factors

Discourse Coherence and Pronoun Resolution.