Sentence Completion Research Articles

EXPRESS: Learning New Words via Reading: The Influence of Emotional Narrative Context on Learning Novel Adjectives.

People learn new words in narrative contexts, but little is known about how the emotional valence of the narrative influences word learning. In a pre-registered experiment, seventy-six English-speaking adults read 30 novel adjectives embedded in 60 short narratives (20 positive, 20 negative, and 20 neutral valence). Both immediately after and 24 hours later, participants completed a series of post-tests including speeded recognition, sentence completion, meaning generation, and valence judgment. Results showed that participants learned both the novel word form and its meaning. Compared to novel words experienced in the neutral contexts, those read in the emotional contexts (both positive and negative) showed better learning of orthographic form in the immediate post-test, but only those read in the negative context were recognised with greater accuracy in the delayed post-test. Furthermore, the valence of the context was reflected in the word meanings participants generated for each novel word, suggesting that word valence can be inferred from the valence of the contexts. Results from sentence completion and valence judgment were mixed, depending on the task demands. These findings are discussed with reference to theories of affective embodiment and the implications for learning abstract words are considered.

Selective Mutism in the Context of Autism and Bilingualism.

Juan is a 5-year-old boy who has been followed by a developmental-behavioral pediatrician and pediatric neuropsychologist since being diagnosed with language delay and autism spectrum disorder at age 2 years. He is otherwise healthy and was born at term after a healthy pregnancy. His primary language is Spanish, and he has minimal interactions in English. His first words were at 20 months; they were not functional but rather words related to his interests such as "train." He began using 2 to 3-word phrases shortly after but only to request needs. He began speaking in complete sentences at age 4 years.A neuropsychological evaluation was conducted at age 2 years during which Juan demonstrated repetitive behaviors such as hand-flapping, toe-walking, body rocking, and head banging. He displayed sensory seeking behaviors such as rubbing items on his face and close visual inspection. He did not respond to his name and his use of eye contact was inconsistent. He demonstrated rigidity and difficulty transitioning between activities. He did not engage in social reciprocity, and his facial expressions were limited. Minimal spontaneous language was observed, and expressive language largely consisted of echolalia in both languages. Juan was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and applied behavior analysis, speech and language therapy, and occupational therapy were recommended.Developmental-behavioral follow-up over the next 2 years noted improvements in behavior, transitions, and social interactions. He participated in early childhood intervention and early childhood special education with significant advances for speech and language in English and Spanish, demonstrating a large vocabulary. At 4 years, parents noted Juan to have reluctance to speak in English. He stopped speaking in English entirely for 3 weeks, though he continued to speak in Spanish. When he resumed speaking in English, it was only with people he knew well (e.g., parents, teachers, babysitter). In clinic, he did not speak to the English-speaking developmental-behavioral pediatrician but spoke in short sentences to the Spanish-speaking neuropsychologist.A repeat neuropsychological evaluation completed at age 5 years revealed that Juan had stopped speaking in English completely, even among those previously deemed "safe." Results were consistent with average cognitive abilities with a strength in verbal skills. Juan's single-word vocabulary in Spanish was exceptionally high. He did not provide expressive responses in English, but his receptive English vocabulary was high average. He responded to English language with nonverbal gestures or spoken language in Spanish. Parents reported Juan to display increased anxiety accompanied by extreme school refusal, behavioral difficulties, and reluctance to leave the home.Given this information, what are your diagnostic considerations and treatment recommendations?

Thangka image captioning model with Salient Attention and Local Interaction Aggregator

Thangka image captioning aims to automatically generate accurate and complete sentences that describe the main content of Thangka images. However, existing methods fall short in capturing the features of the core deity regions and the surrounding background details of Thangka images, and they significantly lack an understanding of local actions and interactions within the images. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Thangka image captioning model based on Salient Attention and Local Interaction Aggregator (SALIA). The model is designed with a Dual-Branch Salient Attention Module (DBSA) to accurately capture the expressions, decorations of the deity, and descriptive background elements, and it introduces a Local Interaction Aggregator (LIA) to achieve detailed analysis of the characters’ actions, facial expressions, and the complex interactions with surrounding elements in Thangka images. Experimental results show that SALIA outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations of Thangka image captioning, achieving BLEU4: 94.0%, ROUGE_L: 95.0%, and CIDEr: 909.8% on the D-Thangka dataset, and BLEU4: 22.2% and ROUGE_L: 47.2% on the Flickr8k dataset.

Morphological awareness and reading comprehension: to what extent do semantic relations in the classic sentence completion task influence associations?

AbstractIt is well-established that morphological awareness is related to reading comprehension. Morphological awareness is often assessed with a sentence completion task, in which children are asked to complete a sentence with a related word (e.g., “warm. He chose the jacket for its __”). As evident from this classic example, semantic relations could influence performance because warmth is related in meaning to jacket. We examine whether the degree of semantic relations in the sentence completion task influences the association between morphological awareness and reading comprehension. In grade 3, English-speaking children did a sentence completion task in two conditions: one with sentences designed to have high semantic relations with the target and another with low. Children also completed control measures of non-verbal reasoning, vocabulary, phonological awareness, working memory, and word reading fluency. At grade 4, children completed reading comprehension. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that performance on both conditions of the sentence completion task (i.e., high and low semantic relations) significantly predicted reading comprehension, after all controls. Intriguingly, when both tasks were in the same regression, only performance on the high semantic relations task made a unique contribution to reading comprehension. The findings confirm the contribution to reading comprehension of morphological awareness, assessed with the sentence completion task, and show the relevance of semantic dimensions to these relations. As such, findings appear to validate the use of sentence completion to assess morphological awareness and highlight its capture of the multidimensional nature of morphological awareness, including its semantic dimensions.

Teasing apart time reference-related encoding and retrieval deficits in aphasia: evidence from Greek, Russian, Italian and English

ABSTRACT Background Persons with aphasia (PWAs) are often impaired in time reference/tense production. It has been suggested that this impairment is due to encoding or/and retrieval deficits. However, to the best of our knowledge, no experimental design that enables teasing apart selective encoding and retrieval deficits has been proposed thus far. Aims This study aims at disentangling time reference-related encoding deficits from time reference-related retrieval deficits in PWAs. Methods & procedures Two sentence completion tasks tapping production of time reference and subject-verb agreement (control condition) were administered to eight Greek-speaking PWAs, eight Russian-speaking PWAs, six Italian-speaking PWAs, seven English-speaking PWAs and four groups of language-, age- and education-matched healthy controls. Task 1 tapped encoding and retrieval processes to a similar extent. Task 2 predominantly tapped retrieval processes. Comparisons between each PWA and the corresponding control group, as well as within-participant comparisons were performed. Outcomes & results All four control groups performed at ceiling. Twenty-eight out of 29 PWAs were impaired in time reference in at least one of the two completion tasks, and all but three PWAs were impaired in production of subject-verb agreement in at least one of the two tasks. In all language groups, there were PWAs exhibiting between-task dissociations. A double dissociation emerged in the time reference condition, as some Greek-, Russian- and English-speaking PWAs performed better on Task 1 than on Task 2, whereas other Greek- and Italian-speaking PWAs performed worse on Task 1 than on Task 2. In the agreement condition, in each language group, there were PWAs performing better on Task 1 than on Task 2. However, none PWA exhibited the opposite pattern. Based on the results, we identified both PWAs with selective time reference-related encoding deficits and PWAs with selective time reference-related retrieval deficits. Conclusions The present experimental design provides a sound basis for teasing apart selective time reference-related encoding deficits and time reference-related retrieval deficits.

Suicidal ideation recognition based on sentence completion test via coding- and topic-enhanced model

Suicidal ideation refers to the thoughts related to suicide, including but not limited to specific plans for death and desires for suicide. Its recognition is of great significance in preventing individuals from suicide. In the context of large-scale screening on suicide ideation, self-report scale is the most used approach, but the subjects are easy to conceal real information. Though some automated methods based on social media platforms are put forward, they are difficult to cover all the populations that need to be tested. To this challenge, in this paper, a new perspective on suicidal ideation recognition via sentence completion test (SCT) is provided. SCT contains some sentence fragments and requires subjects to complete them, having implicitness and being suitable for large-scale screening, but its use depends on automated scoring method. Therefore, based on a self-developed SCT, a dataset is collected, containing 1,399 individuals’ responses on both the SCT and one classical self-report scale about suicidal ideation. To support the prediction with reasonable evidences for such a psychometric task, considering that individual suicidal ideation may be reflected by the different response patterns of each item or the general topic contained in all items, a coding- and topic-enhanced model for suicidal ideation recognition is proposed. The strategies of contrastive learning and focal loss are leveraged to establish different representations of different response patterns in the SCT and solve the class-imbalanced problem. To verify the effectiveness, extensive experiments are conducted, demonstrating that the proposed method achieves a feasible and practical performance.

Self-Attitude Parameters as Predictors of Psychological Well-Being in Students with Limited Health Capacities.

Psychological well-being is a system of optimal psychological qualities and states manifested as life strategy and a system of personal attitude to the world and oneself. Self-attitude is an intrapersonal phenomenon of individual projections in the field of self-awareness. In assessing psychological well-being, it acts as a guiding vector for self-development and self-actualization. In case of people with disabilities, psychological well-being largely depends on self-attitude as a predictor. This study featured the effect of self-attitude on psychological well-being in university students with limited health capacities. The study involved 60 students aged 18–25. The list of methodological tools involved Sentence Completion (J. M. Sacks, S. Levy), Subjective Well-Being Scale (adapted by M. V. Sokolova), and Personal Self-Attitude (V. V. Stolin, S. R. Pantileev). The study established differences in the assessment of psychological well-being by students with and without disabilities. Physically challenged students tended to demonstrate low self-esteem, associated with negative emotional and health experience. They also had specific parameters of self-attitude with a vector of positivity and trends towards personal growth. These parameters are a motivating component of social behavior that determines the general perception of psychological well-being by students with disabilities.

Can children and artificial intelligence be sources of ideas for school meal preparations based on whole food utilization?

Involving children in creation of school meals is important to engage them on healthy and sustainable eating habits, and the whole food utilization is a way to avoid food waste and increase the consumption of nutrients. Also, artificial intelligence (AI) has shown to be an interesting source of new ideas but has not been used for designing children’s meals. The aims of the work were to evaluate the potential of school meals either co-designed by children or generated with AI, and to explore parents’ perception towards the utilization of whole food in their children’s meal. Children, with the potential support of their parents, proposed recipes with whole fruit/vegetable utilization, and a selection among the suggestions was conducted by nutritionists and the school cooks. The selected meal was compared to a similar recipe from ChatGPT generated from a simple prompt with regard to their acceptance and emotions evoked. The two dishes were variations of carrot pie recipes including vegetable peel and were both prepared by experienced school cooks. A third recipe proposed by the school’s cooks was used as comparison. Parents’ perceptions towards whole food utilization to their children were elicited by sentence completion methodology. Results showed that children liked both their and the cooks’ recipes but rejected ChatGPT’s recipe. Both cooks’ and children’s carrot pies evoked positive emoji pairs, meanwhile ChatGPT’s carrot pie was associated to emojis of negative connotation. Texture and unfamiliar taste were cited to justify the rejection. For parents, the utilization of whole fruits/vegetable in children’s meals is perceived as a good and nutritious idea, but safety concerns were revealed. This work demonstrates co-design with school children and whole food utilization as actionable strategies towards reducing waste of nutritious resources. Moreover, the study reports an unsuccessful exploratory usage of ChatGPT through a task-focused prompt. This may suggest the importance of specifying the context of the task when prompting an AI, to compensate for contextual information that is implicitly available to humans. Concerns about safety aspects should be addressed to ensure parents’ support for whole vegetable utilization in school meals.

THE EFFECT OF DISCOURSE-LEVEL CUES ON RC ATTACHMENT PREFERENCE IN L2 ENGLISH: IMPLICIT CAUSALITY IN VERBS

Examining implicit causality and relative clause attachment ambiguity in bilingual participants, this study investigates whether adult second language (L2) English speakers share sensitivity with native speakers to implicit causality (IC) information during online resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity. L1 Turkish/L2 English speakers and English natives participated in offline sentence completion and online self-paced reading tasks. Results revealed that L1 English speakers preferred high attachment in IC conditions and low attachment in non-IC conditions. In contrast, L2 speakers showed a preference for high attachment in both conditions, suggesting that L2 sentence processing relies more on lexical than syntactic information.

Development of morphological awareness in Arabic: the role of morphological system and morphological distance

AbstractThis study is a cross-sectional developmental investigation of inflectional and derivational morphological awareness (MA) in Arabic diglossia. It examines the impact of the morphological distance between Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA) on inflectional morphological awareness and derivational morphological awareness in a sample of 200 speakers of Palestinian Arabic (PA) in 2nd through 10th grade from mid-high and low SES backgrounds (N = 40 per grade, 20 per SES group). Eight MA tasks using morphological analogies and sentence completion were used that tested inflectional MA and derivational MA in SpA and in StA. Results showed a growth in inflectional and in derivational awareness across grades in both SES groups despite generally higher scores in the mid-high SES group. More interestingly, the results showed a consistent effect of morphological distance on morphological awareness in both morphological systems and in both SES groups, with MA for unique StA morphological structures lower than that for structures available in SpA. Moreover, the impact of morphological distance was more prominent in younger than in older children and in low than in mid-high SES. Finally, when morphological awareness in SpA was tested, inflectional awareness was higher than derivational awareness and showed a shorter cross-sectional developmental trajectory, reflecting universal linguistic and distributional properties of inflections. In contrast, when morphological awareness in StA was analyzed, inflectional awareness was lower than derivational awareness and showed a longer trajectory reflecting the wider linguistic distance between SpA and StA in inflectional morphology. The results underscore the significance of morphological system characteristics and morphological distance in understanding morphological awareness development in Arabic.

Child-Hayling test for French school-aged children: psychometric properties and normative data

ABSTRACT The Hayling Completion Sentence Test (HSCT) is dedicated to assess inhibition of the dominant response and includes two conditions, an automatic condition in which the participants are asked to complete sentences properly and an inhibition condition in which the participants were asked to produce a word completely unrelated to the sentence. The aim of our study was 1) to adapt, 2) to evaluate the psychometric properties and 3) to standardize the HSCT into a French-school-aged pediatric population. We developed the Child-Hayling Test, a child adaptation of the adult French version of the HSCT. The reliability and validity of the Child-Hayling Test were then evaluated in a sample of 134 children aged 6–11 years. In the inhibition condition, children had lower response latency, as they get older. No effect of gender was observed. Reliability indices were low to moderate. Concerning the convergent and divergent validity, response latencies in the Child-Hayling Test correlated with latency scores in the Barre-Joe inhibition test, whereas the Child-Hayling Test scores were not related to children’s lexical abilities. The Child-Hayling Test was then administered to 393 typically developing 6- to 11-year-old children. Normative data were calculated in the inhibition condition using a regression-based approach. Regression equations to calculate Z scores are provided for clinical use. In addition, we proposed a clear guideline on how to score children’s inhibition responses. The Child-Hayling Test provides a useful tool for assessing prepotent response inhibition in children and can be recommended for use in clinical research and practice.

A LONGITUDINAL STUDY OF ANGLAIS QUESTIONS PAPERS IN THE BEPC CERTIFICATE EXAMINATIONS IN CAMEROON

This paper analyses what and how the English Language (Anglais) was assessed at the BEPC certificate examinations in Cameroon over the period of 16 years (2009-2024). It considered Anglais question papers set under both the objective-based approach (2009 to 2016) and competency-based approach (2017 to 2024) so as to find out the change brought by the introduction of the newer approach. The content and statistical analyses of data have shown that the theoretical CBA assessment principles are yet to be fully implemented. Essential knowledge-wise, the effective implementation of the novel approach from 2018 has marked the end of testing pronunciation; it has introduced integrative testing (46.87%) in grammar (62.5%) and vocabulary (31.25%) in the forms of cloze passage and dialogue completions, with the old OBA discrete-point testing in the form of sentence completions resisting the change. Skills-wise, listening and speaking are unaccounted for in favour of reading comprehension and writing composition. While there is little change in what and how OBA and CBA assess reading comprehension, CBA has introduced new composition writing principles in structuring topics like context definition, instruction clarification and indicators or task specification, thus lengthening composition topics. The syllabus coverage in terms of situation assessment decreases as one goes from the first to the fifth situation under both OBA and CBA. Some suggestions and recommendations have been made to BEPC examination stakeholders for the effective implementation of CBA assessment principles.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0765/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

WEB-SITE DESIGN (BEHAVIORAL + EDUCATIONAL) TO HELP AUTISUM CHILDRENDISORDER

Autism is a condition in which children have difficulties interacting with others or exhibit differences in how they interact with people. Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may respond well to web-based learning because computers can offer features such as repetition, visual stimuli, and independent interactions that appeal to them. However, there have been limited studies on websites (behavioral and educational), especially outside of institutional settings. The aim of this research is to assess the effectiveness of interactive digital programs used to teach individuals with learning difficulties, tailored to their capabilities and needs. Modern technology has provided interactive and educational opportunities through picture books. This research involves designing an educational website for children with autism, including a program to teach them basic concepts necessary for daily life, such as the Arabic alphabet, to enable them to form complete words and, consequently, complete sentences. Additionally, the program teaches numbers, enabling children to count and perform arithmetic problems such as counting money and telling time. The main interface page displays eight images that change every seven seconds automatically or via navigation links on the right and left sides of the image. A six-page website was designed, covering topics such as what autism is, symptoms, diagnosis, and more. Web technologies were utilized in the website design, with HTML as the primary language. To analyze some aspects of this study's results, the use of the computer screen is intended to capture the autistic child's attention, helping them remain in one place and stay focused on the screen for as long as possible. If a mother or female teacher can keep a child engaged with the screen for 5-10 minutes, it is considered a significant achievement.

Frequency and Universal Principles in the Acquisition of Word-Initial Consonant Clusters in Palestinian Arabic.

In this article, we present the results of our study on the acquisition of word-initial consonant clusters in Palestinian Arabic. The remarkable property of word-initial clusters in Palestinian Arabic is that they often violate the Sonority Sequencing Principle, a universal constraint that disfavors sonority fall (e.g., lba:n "gum") and, to a lesser degree, sonority plateau (e.g., kta:b "book"). Given the violation of the Sonority Sequencing Principle, the acquisition of word-initial consonant clusters serves as a fruitful ground for studying the interaction of universal principles and language-specific effects. The goal of the study was to shed light on the role of universal principles in language acquisition and how they interact with frequency. We carried out picture naming and sentence completion tasks with 60 monolingual and monodialectal children aged 2;00-5;00 (years;months), equally divided into six age groups. In addition, we built a small corpus of child-directed speech (CDS) to evaluate the distribution of the three sonority profiles of word-initial consonant clusters-rise, plateau, and fall. We found a major language-specific effect in the cluster simplification strategies, with prothesis being the most common strategy (e.g., lbá:n → ilbá:n "gum"). However, this effect was not found in the youngest group (2;00-2;05), where the cross-linguistically favorite strategy of C-deletion was most common (e.g., lbá:n → bá:n "gum"). We also found a major effect of the Sonority Sequencing Principle in the children's productions, contrary to insignificant differences in CDS. Our study supports the claim that language acquisition is affected by both language-specific effects and universal principles. As for the interaction of these factors, we show that the effect of universal principles emerges under two conditions: (a) in early speech (youngest age group), before children accumulate sufficient data that allow language-specific properties to override, and/or (b) when frequency does not play a role.

La scelta dell’ausiliare nei tempi composti: Variazione nell'interlingua di apprendenti ungheresi e inglesi di italiano L2/LS

The aim of this study is to identify some factors that determine variability in the interlanguage of L2/FL learners of Italian concerning auxiliary selection (essere ‘to be’ vs avere ‘to have’) in compound past tenses. Data were collected by means of a grammaticality judgement test and a binary choice sentence completion test. The participants were L1 English and Hungarian university students of various levels of proficiency (A2, B1, B2 and C1). The results were interpreted both in correlation with certain learning variables such as L1, proficiency level, and the category the main verbs belong to according to Sorace’s Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy. Based on the results, some hypotheses are put forward on teaching material design and on the possibility of harmonising the didactic intervention and the acquisitional sequence observed.

Independent Effects of Age, Education, Verbal Working Memory, Motor Speed of Processing, Locality, and Morphosyntactic Category on Verb-Related Morphosyntactic Production: Evidence From Healthy Aging.

This study investigates the role of locality (a task/material-related variable), demographic factors (age, education, and sex), cognitive capacities (verbal working memory [WM], verbal short-term memory [STM], speed of processing [SOP], and inhibition), and morphosyntactic category (time reference and grammatical aspect) in verb-related morphosyntactic production (VRMP). A sentence completion task tapping production of time reference and grammatical aspect in local and nonlocal configurations, and cognitive tasks measuring verbal WM capacity, verbal STM capacity, motor SOP, perceptual SOP, and inhibition were administered to 200 neurotypical Greek-speaking participants, aged between 19 and 80 years. We fitted generalized linear mixed-effects models and performed path analyses. Significant main effects of locality, age, education, verbal WM capacity, motor SOP, and morphosyntactic category emerged. Production of time reference and aspect did not interact with any of the significant factors (i.e., age, education, verbal WM capacity, motor SOP, and locality), and locality did not interact with any memory system. Path analyses revealed that the relationships between age and VRMP, and between education and VRMP were partly mediated by verbal WM; and the relationship between verbal WM and VRMP was partly mediated by perceptual SOP. Results suggest that subject-, task/material- and morphosyntactic category-specific factors determine accuracy performance on VRMP; and the effects of age, education, and verbal WM on VRMP are partly indirect. The fact that there was a significant main effect of verbal WM but not of verbal STM on accuracy performance in the VRMP task suggests that it is predominantly the processing component (and not the storage component) of verbal WM that supports VRMP. Lastly, we interpret the results as suggesting that VRMP is also supported by a procedural memory system whose efficiency might be reflected in years of formal education.

Pengembangan Model Pembelajaran Discovery Learning dengan Media Kartu Kosakata untuk Meningkatkan Kemampuan Menggunakan Kalimat Lengkap Siswa Kelas IV Sekolah Dasar Negeri Girijaya

This research aims to illustrate how the development of a discovery learning model using vocabulary card media can improve the ability to use complete sentences in fourth grade elementary school students. This type of research is development research. Data was collected through questionnaires and interviews, with data sources coming from teachers and students in the six classes studied. Data was analyzed using quantitative and qualitative descriptive methods, starting by changing the qualitative assessment to quantitative to get a score, then calculating the average score, changing it back to a qualitative assessment, as well as explaining the data, discussing the research results, and concluding. The research results show that: (1) based on needs analysis, the learning model desired by students and teachers is a model that actively involves students and fosters curiosity to discover something. The learning media needed is media that is cheap, interesting, easy to use, and can increase students' vocabulary. (2) The principles of preparing learning models include the principles of motivation, experience, discovery, cooperation, language and repetition. (3) Developing a discovery learning model using vocabulary card media produces products in the form of learning models and media which are realized in the form of guidebooks.

Association between tooth loss-related speech and psychosocial impairment with cognitive function: A pilot study in Hong Kong's older population.

Tooth loss has been associated with cognitive decline, but the underlying mechanisms involving speech and psychosocial impairment remain unclear. To investigate the impact of tooth loss-related speech and psychosocial impairment on cognitive function in Hong Kong's older population. Seventy-six Cantonese-speaking participants between the ages of 51-92 were classified into three groups: patients with complete dentures (CD), partially edentulous patients with less than 10 occluding tooth pairs (OU <10), and at least 10 occluding tooth pairs (OU ≥10). Cognitive function was assessed using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Hong Kong Version, One-minute Verbal Fluency Task and Hayling Sentence Completion Test. Objective and subjective speech assessments were carried out using artificial intelligence speech recognition algorithm and a self-designed speech questionnaire. The impact of tooth loss on psychosocial condition was evaluated by the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and a self-designed questionnaire. Statistical analyses (one-way ANOVA, ANCOVA, Kruskal-Wallis test, Spearman correlation test) were performed. Tooth loss was significantly associated with lower cognitive function (p = .008), speech accuracy (p = .018) and verbal fluency (p = .001). Correlations were found between cognitive function and speech accuracy (p < .0001). No significant difference in tooth loss-related psychosocial impact was found between the three groups. While warranting larger sample sizes, this pilot study highlights the need for further research on the role of speech in the association between tooth loss and cognitive function. The potential cognitive impact of tooth retention, together with its known biological and proprioceptive benefits, supports the preservation of the natural dentition.

German Demonstrative Pronouns in Contrast

German has two demonstrative pronouns: the der, die, das paradigm and the dieser, diese, dies(es) paradigm. Previous studies mainly compared the anaphoric use of der with the personal pronoun er and observed that der refers to less prominent antecedents. However, there are only very few studies that have investigated the differences between these two demonstrative pronouns. We hypothesize that they differ in signaling topic persistence and in accessing contrastive antecedents. We tested these hypotheses in short texts that manipulated the contrast of the antecedent by inducing the expression ‘in contrast to’ vs. ‘together with’ (e.g., the cellist in contrast to the flautist vs. the cellist together with the flautist). Results from our eye-tracking reading Experiment (Experiment 1), in which participants’ eye- movements were monitored while reading sentences, show that (i) readers preferred dieser when referring to the topic of a sentence, and (ii) dieser caused less processing difficulties than der in both contrast and no-contrast contexts. Our sentence completion Experiment (Experiment 2) also confirmed that der and dieser are both used for anaphoric reference to a topical antecedent. Collectively, our experiments provide evidence that dieser functions as inducing topic persistence. These results suggest that there is a need for further experimental investigation into the semantic factors and informational structures influencing the usage of demonstrative pronouns in German.

Executive functions and their relationship with age: Insights from a novel neuropsychological Assessment Battery in Children—a pilot study

Executive functions (EFs) are a set of cognitive processes that enable individuals to manage and coordinate their thoughts and actions toward achieving specific goals. EFs include planning, organizing, initiating, and monitoring actions, and have been found to improve with age due to the maturation of the brain, especially during childhood. Therefore, our correlational study sought to determine the relationship between the performance in executive functions and age in 79 children (36 girls, 45.6%) throughout development, between the ages of 6 and 12 (mean = 9.25; SD = 2.05), using a battery designed in Chile: BEFE (Batería de Evaluación de las Funciones Ejecutivas: Executive Function Assessment Battery) based on traditional neuropsychological tests to evaluate Working Memory, Inhibitory Control, Cognitive Flexibility, and Planning skills. Our results showed various correlations between the variables age and performance in various behavioral parameters, demonstrating an increase in the number of correct responses (positive correlation) and/or a decrease in errors (negative correlation) with age (6–12) in the subtests that correspond to dimensions of Cognitive Flexibility (Semantic and Phonological Fluency, Card Sorting Game, and Tracing Tasks), Inhibitory Control (ENA-F and Sentence Completion), Working Memory (Audio-verbal WM Forward and Ordering, and Visuospatial WM Forward and Backward), and Planning (La Portada de Antofagasta and FISA Maps). These results are consistent with previous empirical evidence and support the notion of a developmental relationship between EF performance and age. Additionally, this study contributes to understanding EF development in culturally specific contexts, highlighting the importance of contextually relevant assessment tools in evaluating cognitive development.