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Showing 3 results for Akbari Chermahini
Volume 0, Issue 0 (Articles accepted at the time of publication 2024)
Abstract
Autism is a neurocognitive disorder. Many children with autism do not have a change in language and usually tend to have literal interpretations of phrases, which makes it difficult to understand metaphorical language, which can be seen in both visual and visual metaphors. The aim of this study was to compare auditory and visual metaphorical perception in children with mild autism and normal children. The present study is a cross-sectional and causal-comparative study. The statistical sample of this study includes 30 boys aged 7 to 10 years with mild autism studying in educational centers for exceptional children in Mashhad and 30 normal children matched in terms of age who were selected by convenience sampling method. After initial language assessment, they were assessed by metaphorical perception test and U Mann-Whitney test and SPSS 23 software were used to analyze the data. The results of data analysis showed that in metaphorical perception in general there is a significant difference between autistic and normal children (P <0.001), also, in understanding visual and auditory metaphors, the two groups showed a significant difference (P <0/001). The obtained results indicate that compared to normal children, children with autism have a lower performance in terms of understanding visual and auditory metaphors, and considering this issue can be used in planning and designing educational content and rehabilitation interventions in order to improve educational performance and social benefit of these children.
Volume 11, Issue 4 (September, October & November (Articles in Persian) 2020)
Abstract
In cognitive linguistics, language is considered part of human cognitive abilities, and any linguistic analysis is accompanied by an analysis of human cognitive abilities. One of the human cognitive abilities is cognitive inhibition. The aim of this study was to compare cognitive inhibition in bilingual students and monolingual students. The research question is whether there is a significant difference between cognitive inhibition in bilingual and monolingual students?
The present study is a descriptive causal-comparative study. In this study, cognitive inhibition (performance in numerical stroop test) was compared between two groups of bilingual and monolingual students. The statistical population of the present study included all secondary school students in Qazvin. The sample group consisted of 90 students (45 Persian monolingual students and 45 Turkish-Persian and Kurdish-Persian bilingual students) who were selected by purposive sampling method. A demographic questionnaire and numerical stroop test were used to collect information. A demographic questionnaire and numerical stroop test were used to collect information. Due to the lack of complete cooperation of some sample people in answering the numerical strop test, the number of sample people was reduced to 39 monolingual students and 43 bilingual students.
Despite the attention of many researchers to cognitive inhibition, understanding and access to the true concept of cognitive inhibition is complex. Two strategies have been used to study cognitive processes: self-report techniques (interview and questionnaire) and the use of empirical-cognitive models. Interviews and questionnaires assess only aspects of cognition that can be verbalized, and such data can only provide relative support for cognitive models of disorders.
The existence of such problems in interviews and questionnaires has increased the use of empirical concepts and patterns. The Stroop test is one of the most effective tools that studies cognitive inhibition and selective attention in a practical way and its results are extracted directly from the individual's performance. The test was named after John Ridley Stroop (1935), who invented the color version of the test. Since then, various forms of this test such as directional stroop, odor and taste stroop, numerical stroop, shape strokes & etc have been made and used. In the present study, to measure cognitive inhibition used the numerical stroop .The Persian version of this test was made by the researcher (the first author of the present study). The reliability of the test was 86% using the retest method on 100 subjects.
The numerical stroop test consists of 96 numeric pairs, of which 48 pairs are used for physical comparison and 48 pairs are used for numerical comparison. In the 48 pairs on which the physical comparison is performed, 16 pairs of inconsistent numbers, 16 pairs of consonants and 16 pairs of numbers are neutral, and in the 48 pairs on which the numerical comparison is performed, the same order of properties is established. The subject's task is to select the number that is larger in terms of physical size in the physical comparison section and the number that is larger in terms of numerical value in the numerical comparison section.
The output of the numerical stroop test includes pairs of numbers to be compared, reaction time, subject selection, correct or incorrect answer, and type of comparison (physical comparison and numerical comparison). In order to determine the Stroop effect, the interference score is calculated by calculating the difference between the reaction time to the consonant and inconsistent numbers. Using this test, the effect of numerical stroop and the effect of physical stroop can be calculated. The larger stroop effect indicates greater interference and a lower level of cognitive inhibition.
Multivariate analysis of variance was used to measure the difference between the effect of numerical and physical stroop in bilingual and monolingual students. The results showed that there was a significant difference between bilingual and monolingual students in the numerical stroop effect and the physical stroop effect. There is a significant difference in cognitive inhibition performance between the two groups and according to the mean, monolingual students have poorer performance in cognitive inhibition.
This result is in line with the findings of Bialystok and et al. (2005), Carlson and Meltzoff (2008), Bialystok and Viswanthan (2009), Prior and Macwhinney (2020), Cushen and Wiley (2011), Poulin-Dubois et al. (2011) and Blumenfeld and Marian (2011) are consistent. In these studies, it has been concluded that the performance of bilinguals in cognitive activities such as cognitive control, flexibility and cognitive inhibition is better than monolinguals.
Cognitive inhibition involves the ability to switch between sets of responses. Bilingual students have a stronger central performer. Because more linguistic information in bilinguals is constantly challenged and acted upon, they perform better in suppressing interference with a stimulus that competes with the initial response, and are better at controlling disturbances from different tasks.
It can be said that bilinguals use more effective cognitive strategies in dealing with problems because they speak a variety of languages. The interaction of languages can be considered as a factor that confronts the bilingual person with situations that he learns to use more appropriate cognitive strategies, and these strategies improve their cognitive performance. Also, the ability of symbolic substitution in different forms causes the superiority of bilinguals in cognitive function and this effect is due to the interaction and interrelationship of two languages. Thus, because in bilinguals both languages are mutually active and have common representational regions in the brain, bilinguals have a greater ability to inhibit and selectively pay attention to cognitive processes.
Volume 15, Issue 2 (May & June 2024)
Abstract
Bilingualism affects many cognitive and emotional processes, and studies have shown emotional arousal statements influence language, specifically language selection. The present quasi-experimental research was accomplished with the aim of surveying the language selection of Turkish-Persian bilinguals at the time of processing happiness. For this purpose, using targeted sampling, we selected 20 Turkish-Persian sequential bilinguals (with an average age of 26) among university students of Tehran. Participants were first asked to fill language history, General Health, Handedness, and Positive and Negative Affect Schedule questionnaires; then they responded to a computerized task designed to induce happiness and determined the meaningfulness of Turkish and Persian words and non-words. By examining the performance of the participants in the test through repeated measures analysis of variance, it was revealed that individuals significantly spent more time on determining the meaningfulness of words in happiness inducing condition comparing to the normal one. Also, regarding the comparison of two languages in both conditions separately, paired comparison results demonstrated that participants’ reaction time to Turkish words in happiness inducing condition was significantly longer (Ps<0/05). As a result, it can be proposed that Turkish-Persian bilinguals are more involved with their first language in emotional states, especially happy state, and that Turkish has more and deeper emotional associations for them, and their emotional involvement is stronger for their native language than for their second language.
1. Introduction
Language is part of human behavior and possibly one of the most complex cognitive skills. Using language is crucial for our social and cultural lives. Emotion is also a major aspect of the way we interact with the world around us. Many researchers have remarked a close bi-directional link between language and emotions, language evokes emotions and affects emotional perception, and emotions affect language processing and use. Bilingual studies also have demonstrated that thinking in different languages fundamentally affects cognitive, emotional, and psychological aspects of our lives, and it is assumed that bilingual speakers experience different levels of emotionality in their two languages. Generally speaking, at intense emotional states, either positive or negative, one of the bilinguals’ languages becomes dominant. A wide range of literature points to the fact that emotion concepts and the linguistic means by which emotions are expressed might, to a great amount, differ across languages and cultures. Thereby, building on past research which has suggested that there is stronger emotionality in first compared to second language, the main goal of the present study was to investigate Turkish-Persian bilinguals’ language selection at the time of happiness as a positive emotion.
Research Question(s)
The primary question addressed in this study can be stated as follows:
Which language is more involved at the time of processing happiness in Turlish-Persian bilinguals, first language (L1) or second language (L2)?
2. Literature Review
Emotions are different from culture to culture and from one speech community to another which may be a result of the flexible nature of emotional experiences and concepts in various linguistic contexts. Following learning a language, emotional concepts are acquired. These concepts are largely associated with emotional words and expressions that may not exist in other languages (Alqarni & Dewaele, 2020). Specifically, in the process of learning L1, emotions are essential elements of the communicative situation and play a fundamental role in establishing semantic representations through first language processing (Sianipar et al., 2015). In bilingual studies, sequential bilinguals who acquired their L2 after their L1, have commonly reported stronger emotionality in their first compared to their second language, though they are proficient in both languages and understand the emotional meaning of the L2 words thoroughly (Ferré et al., 2013; Grosjean, 2008; Harris, 2004; Aneta Pavlenko, 2006; Aneta Pavlenko, 2012; Yuan, 2009). The present study follows the notion of different emotionality experiences in bilinguals’ first and second language.
3. Methodology
Participants of this study were 20 (10 females and 10 males) Turkish-Persian sequential bilinguals. They were students of Tehran universities between the ages of 22 and 32 years, selected using targeted sampling. To examine the effects of bilingualism on processing happiness and response latencies in L1 vs. L2, a lexical decision task was designed. The stimuli consisted of 20 pictures for inducing happiness and 20 neutral pictures. To collect the targets of the task, 206 Persian neutral words were obtained from the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon database, translated into Turkish by native Turkish speakers, and rated by 50 individuals from the target population based on the emotion they induced (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and no emotion at all), and the extent to which that emotion was induced (very little to very much). Finally, words with the lowest ratings of emotion inducement (such as tray, spoon, cotton, etc.) were selected. The experiment was divided into two blocks with a break between them. In each block, 20 pictures were presented three times on a random basis followed by a Turkish or Persian word or a non-word. The first block contained happiness-inducing pictures as primes and in the second block, the neutral pictures were demonstrated. Each trial started with a fixation cross of 1-second duration, followed by a picture for 500 milliseconds. Then, a Turkish or Persian word or a non-word was presented in randomized order and they judged if it was a meaningful word (either Turkish or Persian) or a non-word as quickly and accurately as possible using the right and left shift keys respectively while their reaction time was recorded. Each word was presented for a maximum duration of 3 seconds or disappeared immediately after the response. The experiment was run using DMDX version 5.1.3.4, and the entire experimental session lasted approximately 20 minutes.
4. Results
According to the analysis of GHQ-28, none of the participants had scores above 22 which approved their general health. Also, according to the results of PANAS, none of them had high ratings of any mood and their general mood did not intervene in inducing happiness in the task.
To evaluate the study hypotheses, the data was analyzed using SPSS repeated-measures ANOVA. The results demonstrated that the block effect was significant; the reaction time to the meaningfulness of words in both languages in block 1 (presenting happiness inducing pictures) was significantly more compared to block 2 (presenting neutral pictures), and it was more for those followed by Turkish words compared to the ones followed by Persian words. On the basis of these reaction times, we can deduce which language was selected, in other words, was more involved encountering the positive stimuli. In both Turkish and Persian languages, the mean reaction time to words following neutral stimuli was less than mean reaction time to words following happiness-inducing stimuli. The reason is that neutral stimuli did not cause any particular emotional state for subjects and were processed as usual everyday conditions, thus, processing them and following words was faster. However, happiness-inducing stimuli, due to the emotional content they had, captured subjects’ attention and had an influence on their reaction which resulted in more processing time and slower response.
Also, to make a comparison between two languages, the differences of reaction times to happiness-inducing and neutral stimuli in each language were obtained, and it was revealed that the degree of difference of reaction times in Turkish was more than Persian showing that participants responded faster to words in L2 than in L1. The pattern of results showed that Turkish-Persian bilinguals think deeper in Turkish which is quite obvious as they have acquired Turkish at home and in the context of family, but Persian has been learned at school as their second language. Consequently, the context of learning, home vs. school, has a crucial impact on their language and emotional processing. These findings are in similar line with many studies in this domain proposing that bilinguals’ second language is somehow emotionally distant comparing to their mother tongue.
1. Introduction
Language is part of human behavior and possibly one of the most complex cognitive skills. Using language is crucial for our social and cultural lives. Emotion is also a major aspect of the way we interact with the world around us. Many researchers have remarked a close bi-directional link between language and emotions, language evokes emotions and affects emotional perception, and emotions affect language processing and use. Bilingual studies also have demonstrated that thinking in different languages fundamentally affects cognitive, emotional, and psychological aspects of our lives, and it is assumed that bilingual speakers experience different levels of emotionality in their two languages. Generally speaking, at intense emotional states, either positive or negative, one of the bilinguals’ languages becomes dominant. A wide range of literature points to the fact that emotion concepts and the linguistic means by which emotions are expressed might, to a great amount, differ across languages and cultures. Thereby, building on past research which has suggested that there is stronger emotionality in first compared to second language, the main goal of the present study was to investigate Turkish-Persian bilinguals’ language selection at the time of happiness as a positive emotion.
Research Question(s)
The primary question addressed in this study can be stated as follows:
Which language is more involved at the time of processing happiness in Turlish-Persian bilinguals, first language (L1) or second language (L2)?
2. Literature Review
Emotions are different from culture to culture and from one speech community to another which may be a result of the flexible nature of emotional experiences and concepts in various linguistic contexts. Following learning a language, emotional concepts are acquired. These concepts are largely associated with emotional words and expressions that may not exist in other languages (Alqarni & Dewaele, 2020). Specifically, in the process of learning L1, emotions are essential elements of the communicative situation and play a fundamental role in establishing semantic representations through first language processing (Sianipar et al., 2015). In bilingual studies, sequential bilinguals who acquired their L2 after their L1, have commonly reported stronger emotionality in their first compared to their second language, though they are proficient in both languages and understand the emotional meaning of the L2 words thoroughly (Ferré et al., 2013; Grosjean, 2008; Harris, 2004; Aneta Pavlenko, 2006; Aneta Pavlenko, 2012; Yuan, 2009). The present study follows the notion of different emotionality experiences in bilinguals’ first and second language.
3. Methodology
Participants of this study were 20 (10 females and 10 males) Turkish-Persian sequential bilinguals. They were students of Tehran universities between the ages of 22 and 32 years, selected using targeted sampling. To examine the effects of bilingualism on processing happiness and response latencies in L1 vs. L2, a lexical decision task was designed. The stimuli consisted of 20 pictures for inducing happiness and 20 neutral pictures. To collect the targets of the task, 206 Persian neutral words were obtained from the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon database, translated into Turkish by native Turkish speakers, and rated by 50 individuals from the target population based on the emotion they induced (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and no emotion at all), and the extent to which that emotion was induced (very little to very much). Finally, words with the lowest ratings of emotion inducement (such as tray, spoon, cotton, etc.) were selected. The experiment was divided into two blocks with a break between them. In each block, 20 pictures were presented three times on a random basis followed by a Turkish or Persian word or a non-word. The first block contained happiness-inducing pictures as primes and in the second block, the neutral pictures were demonstrated. Each trial started with a fixation cross of 1-second duration, followed by a picture for 500 milliseconds. Then, a Turkish or Persian word or a non-word was presented in randomized order and they judged if it was a meaningful word (either Turkish or Persian) or a non-word as quickly and accurately as possible using the right and left shift keys respectively while their reaction time was recorded. Each word was presented for a maximum duration of 3 seconds or disappeared immediately after the response. The experiment was run using DMDX version 5.1.3.4, and the entire experimental session lasted approximately 20 minutes.
4. Results
According to the analysis of GHQ-28, none of the participants had scores above 22 which approved their general health. Also, according to the results of PANAS, none of them had high ratings of any mood and their general mood did not intervene in inducing happiness in the task.
To evaluate the study hypotheses, the data was analyzed using SPSS repeated-measures ANOVA. The results demonstrated that the block effect was significant; the reaction time to the meaningfulness of words in both languages in block 1 (presenting happiness inducing pictures) was significantly more compared to block 2 (presenting neutral pictures), and it was more for those followed by Turkish words compared to the ones followed by Persian words. On the basis of these reaction times, we can deduce which language was selected, in other words, was more involved encountering the positive stimuli. In both Turkish and Persian languages, the mean reaction time to words following neutral stimuli was less than mean reaction time to words following happiness-inducing stimuli. The reason is that neutral stimuli did not cause any particular emotional state for subjects and were processed as usual everyday conditions, thus, processing them and following words was faster. However, happiness-inducing stimuli, due to the emotional content they had, captured subjects’ attention and had an influence on their reaction which resulted in more processing time and slower response.
Also, to make a comparison between two languages, the differences of reaction times to happiness-inducing and neutral stimuli in each language were obtained, and it was revealed that the degree of difference of reaction times in Turkish was more than Persian showing that participants responded faster to words in L2 than in L1. The pattern of results showed that Turkish-Persian bilinguals think deeper in Turkish which is quite obvious as they have acquired Turkish at home and in the context of family, but Persian has been learned at school as their second language. Consequently, the context of learning, home vs. school, has a crucial impact on their language and emotional processing. These findings are in similar line with many studies in this domain proposing that bilinguals’ second language is somehow emotionally distant comparing to their mother tongue.
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