Now you see it, now you don't: Flanker presence induces the word concreteness effect

A Blessing in Disguise: Flanking Words Can Cancel Language Switch Costs

Prior research has shown that a sentence context can decrease the necessity for language control relative to single word processing. In particular, measures of language control such as language switch costs are reduced or even absent in a sentence context. Yet, this evidence is mainly based on bilingual language production and is far from straightforward. To further investigate this issue in the comprehension modality, we relied on the lexical flanker task, which is known to introduce sentence-like processing. More specifically, Dutch-English bilinguals (n = 68) performed a classification task in mixed language blocks on target words that were either presented alone or flanked by unrelated words in the same language. While overall no L1 switch costs were observed, we only observed L2 switch costs in the no-flanker condition. This pattern of results indicates that the presence of flankers can reduce or even abolish switch costs, suggesting that the language control process can benefit from sentence(-like) processing compared to single word processing.

The advantage of being a synesthete: The behavioral benefits of ticker-tape synesthesia

As first described by Francis Galton, some persons perceive vividly and automatically in their mind's eye the written form of words that they are hearing. This phenomenon, labeled ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS), is thought to reflect an abnormally strong influence of speech processing in language areas on to orthographic representations in the visual cortex. Considering the relevance of TTS for the study of reading acquisition, we looked for objective behavioral advantages or impairments in 22 synesthetes, as compared to 22 matched control participants. In three auditory tasks relying on orthographic working memory (letters counting, backward spelling, and letter shape decision), we predicted and observed better performance in synesthetes than in controls. In two visual tasks (lexical decision and letter decision) with a concurrent auditory stimulation, we predicted that synesthetes should suffer from a larger interference by irrelevant speech than controls, but eventually found no difference between the groups. Those results, which we discuss in relation to orthographic processing, mental imagery, and working memory, promote TTS from pure subjectivity to an experimentally measurable phenomenon.