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We examined 7.5‐month‐old infants' ability to segment words from infant‐ and adult‐directed speech (IDS and ADS). In particular, we extended the standard design of most segmentation studies by including a phase where infants were repeatedly exposed to target word recordings at their own home (extended exposure) in addition to a laboratory‐based familiarization. This enabled us to examine infants' segmentation of words from speech input in their naturalistic environment, extending current findings to learning outside the laboratory. Results of a modified preferential‐listening task show that infants listened longer to isolated tokens of familiarized words from home relative to novel control words regardless of register. However, infants showed no recognition of words exposed to during purely laboratory‐based familiarization. This indicates that infants succeed in retaining words in long‐term memory following extended exposure and recognizing them later on with considerable flexibility. In addition, infants segmented words from both IDS and ADS, suggesting limited effects of speech register on learning from extended exposure in naturalistic environments. Moreover, there was a significant correlation between segmentation success and infants' attention to ADS, but not to IDS, during the extended exposure phase. This finding speaks to current language acquisition models assuming that infants' individual attention to language stimuli drives successful learning.
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Investigated 24-month-olds' word recognition in sentence-medial positions in two experiments using an intermodal preferential-looking paradigm. In Experiment 1, 33 French toddlers detected word-final voicing mispronunciations and compensated for native voicing assimilations in the middle of sentences. In Experiment 2, 31 English toddlers detected word-final voicing mispronunciations but did not compensate for illicit voicing assimilations. In summary, French and English 24-month-olds can take into account fine phonetic detail even if words are presented in the middle of sentences. In addition, French toddlers show language-specific compensation abilities for pronunciation variation caused by native voicing assimilation.
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Early Word Learning explores the overlapping and interactive processes leading to young children learning words and their meanings. Experts in the field review the development of early lexical acquisition, starting with an infant's learning of native speech sounds, to segmenting proto-words from fluent speech, mapping individual words to meanings in the face of natural variability and uncertainty, and developing a structured mental lexicon. Drawing on cutting-edge research in infant eye-tracking, neuroimaging techniques and computational modelling, this book surveys the field covering both established results and the most recent advances in word learning research. The chapters combine empirical, computational and theoretical perspectives, to provide a comprehensive yet coherent and unified representation of early word learning, spanning the first two years of life. It is essential reading for both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in early language development and developmental psycholinguistics as well as researchers in these fields. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
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Children look longer at a familiar object when presented with either correct pronunciations or small mispronunciations of consonants in the object's label, but not following larger mispronunciations. The current article examines whether children display a similar graded sensitivity to different degrees of mispronunciations of the vowels in familiar words, by testing children's sensitivity to 1-feature, 2-feature and 3-feature mispronunciations of the vowels of familiar labels: Children aged 1;6 did not show a graded sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations, even when the trial length was increased to allow them more time to form a response. Two-year-olds displayed a robust sensitivity to increases in vowel mispronunciation size, differentiating between small and large mispronunciations. While this suggests that early lexical representations contain information about the features contributing to vocalic identity, we present evidence that this graded sensitivity is better explained by the acoustic characteristics of the different mispronunciation types presented to children.
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The current study investigated the interaction of implicit grammatical gender and semantic category knowledge during object identification. German-learning toddlers (24-month-olds) were presented with picture pairs and heard a noun (without a preceding article) labeling one of the pictures. Labels for target and distracter images either matched or mismatched in grammatical gender and either matched or mismatched in semantic category. When target and distracter overlapped in both semantic and gender information, target recognition was impaired compared with when target and distracter overlapped on only one dimension. Results suggest that by 24 months of age, German-learning toddlers are already forming not only semantic but also grammatical gender categories and that these sources of information are activated, and interact, during object identification.
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The adult lexicon is organized among many representational dimensions that encode phonological, semantic and perceptual links among words. Priming studies that use behavioral, eye-tracking and electrophysiological measurements highlight the interactive and dynamic nature of lexical processing and representation in the adult lexicon. These studies suggest that word recognition routinely involves simultaneous access to other words that overlap with a spoken word on phonological, semantic or other perceptual dimensions. While these studies provide valuable information about the mechanisms guiding lexical retrieval and the factors underlying lexical organization in the lexicons of adult college-educated individuals who know many thousands of words, it is debatable the extent to which these findings can be extended to our understanding of early lexical processing in young children. On the one hand, differences in general cognitive abilities, linguistic experience and language-related knowledge in young children and college-educated adults could imply drastic differences in the way words are linked in developing and mature lexicons. On the other hand, once a word has an entry in the mental lexicon, how many or which other words the child knows may be irrelevant, such that a) the structure of the developing lexicon is a miniature version of the adult lexicon, organized according to similar dimensions; and b) the processes guiding word recognition differ minimally across development. Adjudicating between these two proposals requires examination of the structure of the early lexicon and the processes guiding lexical processing in young children. How does this structure initially develop and change as the child’s knowledge grows over time? Does the organization of the early lexicon influence subsequent word learning and word processing? Understanding these questions has the potential to inform adult theories of psycholinguistic processing and highlight important processes in early vocabulary development. This chapter will attempt to answer these questions against the background of the literature to date whilst also sketching paths for future research on the topic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)
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Examined whether bilinguals implicitly generate picture labels in both of their languages when tested in their first language (L1) with a cross-modal event-related potential (ERP) priming paradigm. The results extended previous findings by showing that not only do bilinguals implicitly generate the labels for visually fixated images in both of their languages when immersed in their L1, but also that these implicitly generated labels in one language could prime recognition of subsequently presented auditory targets across languages (i.e., L2-L1). Thus, support is provided for cascaded models of lexical access during speech production as well as a new priming paradigm for the study of bilingual language processing.
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Recent studies suggest that infants’ audiovisual speech perception is influenced by articulatory experience (Mugitani et al., 2008; Yeung & Werker, 2013). The current study extends these findings by testing if infants’ emerging ability to produce native sounds in babbling impacts their audiovisual speech perception. We tested 44 6-month-olds on their ability to detect mismatches between concurrently presented auditory and visual vowels and related their performance to their productive abilities and later vocabulary size. Results show that infants’ ability to detect mismatches between auditory and visually presented vowels differs depending on the vowels involved. Furthermore, infants’ sensitivity to mismatches is modulated by their current articulatory knowledge and correlates with their vocabulary size at 12 months of age. This suggests that—aside from infants’ ability to match nonnative audiovisual cues (Pons et al., 2009)—their ability to match native auditory and visual cues continues to develop during the first year of life. Our findings point to a potential role of salient vowel cues and productive abilities in the development of audiovisual speech perception, and further indicate a relation between infants’ early sensitivity to audiovisual speech cues and their later language development.
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What are the processes underlying word recognition in the toddler lexicon? Work with adults suggests that, by 5-years of age, hearing a word leads to cascaded activation of other phonologically, semantically and phono-semantically related words (Huang & Snedeker, 2010; Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). Given substantial differences in children’s sensitivity to phonological and semantic relationships between words in the first few years of life (Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2010; Newman, Samuelson, & Gupta, 2009; Storkel & Hoover, 2012), the current set of experiments investigated whether children younger than five also show such phono-semantic priming. Using a picture-priming task, Experiments 1 and 2 presented 2-year-olds with phono-semantically related prime-target pairs, where the label for the prime image is phonologically related (Experiment 1 – onset CV overlap, Experiment 2 – rhyme VC overlap) to a semantic associate of the target label. Across both experiments, toddlers recognised a word faster when this was preceded by a phono-semantically related prime relative to an unrelated prime. Overall, the results provide strong evidence that word recognition involves cascaded processing of phono-semantically related words by 2-years of age.
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The anticipation of the forthcoming behaviour of social interaction partners is a useful ability supporting interaction and communication between social partners. Associations and prediction based on the production system (in line with views that listeners use the production system covertly to anticipate what the other person might be likely to say) are two potential factors, which have been proposed to be involved in anticipatory language processing. We examined the influence of both factors on the degree to which listeners predict upcoming linguistic input. Are listeners more likely to predictbookas an appropriate continuation of the sentence “The boy reads a”, based on the strength of the association between the wordsreadandbook(strong association) andreadandletter(weak association)? Do more proficient producers predict more? What is the interplay of these two influences on prediction? The results suggest that associations influence language-mediated anticipatory eye gaze in two-year-olds and adults only when two thematically appropriate target objects compete for overt attention but not when these objects are presented separately. Furthermore, children's prediction abilities are strongly related to their language production skills when appropriate target objects are presented separately but not when presented together. Both influences on prediction in language processing thus appear to be context dependent. We conclude that multiple factors simultaneously influence listeners’ anticipation of upcoming linguistic input and that only such a dynamic approach to prediction can capture listeners’ prowess at predictive language processing.
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Objectives Although sports team members often value their teams highly, they sometimes make mistakes and thereby unintentionally put their teams at a disadvantage. Thus, they should be motivated to compensate for their mistake to resolve this discrepancy. To test this hypothesis, we studied whether professional soccer players compensate for their own goals by scoring regular goals in the same game (Study 1) and possible processes underlying such compensation efforts (Study 2). Design In Study 1, we compared how frequently prior own goal scorers scored a regular goal in the same game to (a) their expected goal scoring frequencies and (b) their probabilities to score a regular goal following a regular goal by the opposing team. In Study 2, we investigated four possible processes underlying the expected compensatory efforts. Method We analyzed all own goals from the first fifty years of the German Bundesliga (N = 889) and possible ensuing regular goals by the own goal scorer. Moreover, we surveyed amateur soccer players about four motives: group performance, individual performance, individual public image, and group public image. Results Following their own goals, professional soccer players are particularly likely to score regular goals in the same game (i.e., a compensatory own goal effect). Presumably, they primarily do so to secure a good group performance, but the other motives also play a role. Conclusions Group members who make highly visible mistakes are motivated to compensate for the disadvantage they caused. Presumably, they mainly do so to secure a good team Performance.
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Research has shown that people prefer supporting to conflicting information when making decisions. Whether this biased information search also occurs in group decision making was examined in three experiments. Experiment 1 indicated that groups as well as individuals prefer supporting information and that the strength of this bias depends on the distribution of the group members' initial decision preferences. The more group members had chosen the same alternative prior to the group discussion (group homogeneity), the more strongly the group preferred information supporting that alternative. Experiment 2 replicated these results with managers. Experiment 3 showed that the differences between homogeneous and heterogeneous groups reflect group-level processes. Higher commitment and confidence in homogeneous groups mediated this effect. Functional and dysfunctional aspects of biased information seeking in group decision making are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Tax authorities utilize a wide range of instruments to motivate honest taxpaying ranging from strict audits to fair procedures or personalized support, differing from country to country. However, little is known about how these different instruments and taxpayers’ trust influence the generation of interaction climates between tax authorities and taxpayers, motivations to comply, and particularly, tax compliance. The present research examines the extended slippery slope framework (eSSF), which distinguishes tax authorities’ instruments into different qualities of power of authority (coercive and legitimate) and trust in authorities (reason-based and implicit), to shed light on the effect of differences between power and trust. We test eSSF assumptions with survey data from taxpayers from three culturally different countries ( N = 700) who also vary concerning their perceptions of power, trust, interaction climates, and tax motivations. Results support assumptions of the eSSF. Across all countries, the relation of coercive power and tax compliance was mediated by implicit trust. The connection from legitimate power to tax compliance is partially mediated by reason-based trust. The relationship between implicit trust and tax compliance is mediated by a confidence climate and committed cooperation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Licensing PDF ABSTRACT Tax authorities utilize a wide range of instruments to motivate honest taxpaying ranging from strict audits to fair procedures or personalized support, differing from country to country. However, little is known about how these different instruments and taxpayers’ trust influence the generation of interaction climates between tax authorities and taxpayers, motivations to comply, and particularly, tax compliance. The present research examines the extended slippery slope framework (eSSF), which distinguishes tax authorities’ instruments into different qualities of power of authority (coercive and legitimate) and trust in authorities (reason-based and implicit), to shed light on the effect of differences between power and trust. We test eSSF assumptions with survey data from taxpayers from three culturally different countries (N = 700) who also vary concerning their perceptions of power, trust, interaction climates, and tax motivations. Results support assumptions of the eSSF. Across all countries, the relation of coercive power and tax compliance was mediated by implicit trust. The connection from legitimate power to tax compliance is partially mediated by reason-based trust. The relationship between implicit trust and tax compliance is mediated by a confidence climate and committed cooperation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. ABSTRACT Introduction Method Results Discussion References Full Article Figures & data References Citations Metrics Licensing PDF ABSTRACT Tax authorities utilize a wide range of instruments to motivate honest taxpaying ranging from strict audits to fair procedures or personalized support, differing from country to country. However, little is known about how these different instruments and taxpayers’ trust influence the generation of interaction climates between tax authorities and taxpayers, motivations to comply, and particularly, tax compliance. The present research examines the extended slippery slope framework (eSSF), which distinguishes tax authorities’ instruments into different qualities of power of authority (coercive and legitimate) and trust in authorities (reason-based and implicit), to shed light on the effect of differences between power and trust. We test eSSF assumptions with survey data from taxpayers from three culturally different countries (N = 700) who also vary concerning their perceptions of power, trust, interaction climates, and tax motivations. Results support assumptions of the eSSF. Across all countries, the relation of coercive power and tax compliance was mediated by implicit trust. The connection from legitimate power to tax compliance is partially mediated by reason-based trust. The relationship between implicit trust and tax compliance is mediated by a confidence climate and committed cooperation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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Tax honesty means to give up short-term self-interest for the good of the community. States need sufficient tax funds to finance public goods such as health care or education. Tax psychology has the aim to understand citizens’ tax behaviour and to analyse the psychological processes, which determine tax honesty. The present book chapter gives an overview of the history of taxation, the different qualities of tax behaviour, the socio-demographic, economic, psychological, third party and cultural determinants of tax compliance as well as the theoretical models of tax behaviour. Throughout the chapter, research gaps and future research avenues are descripted. In addition, the most important general guide rails for future tax research are discussed in the conclusion including the analyses of interactions between tax compliance determinants, the application of new methods such as field-experiments applying machine learning, the boundary conditions and consequences of digitalization and research on tax behaviour in developing and emerging markets.
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A constructive, highly professional relationship between tax authorities and taxpayers is essential for tax compliance. The aim of the present paper was to explore systematically the determinants of this relationship and related tax compliance behaviors based on the extended slippery slope framework. We used in-depth qualitative interviews with 33 self-employed taxpayers and 30 tax auditors. Interviewees described the relationship along the extended slippery slope framework concepts of power and trust. However, also novel sub-categories of power (e.g., setting deadlines) and trust (e.g., personal assistance) were mentioned. Furthermore, also little-studied categories of tax behavior emerged, such as accepting tax behavior, e.g., being available to the tax authorities, or stalling tax behavior, e.g., the intentional creation of complexity. The results comprehensively summarize the determinants of the tax relationship and tax compliance behaviors. Additionally, results highlight future research topics and provide insights for policy strategies.
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Economic psychology studies the fundamentals of perception and understanding of economic phenomena, economic thought and behaviour. It is an interdisciplinary field of research, strongly overlapping with behavioural economics. Scholars in the field laid the foundations more than a century ago, studying work and organizational behaviour, consumer decision making and selected topics of public economics. Today, economic psychology deals with cognitive dynamics and decision making in general, lay theories of economics, marketing and consumer behaviour, household financial decisions, labour markets, entrepreneurship, work and unemployment, shadow economy and tax behaviour, and wealth and wellbeing. Focusing on the cognitive drivers of decision making, economic psychology also considers emotions related to economic behaviour, such as greed and envy, fear and anger, and positive feelings, such as satisfaction and well-being. We have selected contributions to these topics and provide in the introduction a short overview of the history of economic psychology. The selected papers are briefly introduced, emphasizing future directions of research and potential contributions to contemporary societal challenges.
