The purpose of this study is to address the acquisition of syllable structure by Russianspeaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). We report results of a pseudo-word repetition task in which syllable number and syllable complexity are manipulated. This study employed a non-equivalent groups design in which nineteen participants were classified into an SLI impaired group (6) and ...

In speaking, semantic encoding is the conversion of a non-verbal mental representation (the reference) into a semantic structure suitable for expression (the sense). In this fMRI study on sentence production we investigate how the speaking brain accomplishes this transition from non-verbal to verbal representations. In an overt picture description task, we manipulated repetition of sense (the s...

Explicitly cued task switching slows performance relative to performing the same task on consecutive trials. This effect appears to be due partly to more efficient encoding of the task cue when the same cue is used on consecutive trials and partly to an additional task-switching process. These components were examined by comparing explicitly cued and voluntary task switching groups, with extern...

The repetition effect on reaction time to words and unfamiliar faces was examined at lags of 0, 4, and 15 items between first and second presentations. For words, subjects made either a lexical decision or a decision based on the stimulus's structural attributes. In the lexical decision task, a significant repetition effect was found at all three lags for words, whereas for nonwords the effect ...

The self-face is thought to be an especially salient stimulus. Behavioral evidence suggests that self-face processing advantage is associated with enhanced processing of temporally adjacent subliminal stimuli. However, the neural basis of this self-related processing modulation has not been investigated. We studied self-face induced signal amplification through masked priming and repetition sup...

Background: Sentence repetition is gaining increasing attention as a source of information about children’s sentence-level abilities in clinical assessment, and as a clinical marker of Specific Language Impairment. However, it is widely debated what the task is testing and therefore how informative it is. Aims: The study aims to: i) evaluate the effects of different types of long-term linguisti...

How do top-down factors (e.g., task expectancy) and bottom-up factors (e.g., task recency) interact to produce an overall level of task readiness? This question was addressed by factorially manipulating task expectancy and task repetition in a task-switching paradigm. The effects of expectancy and repetition on response time tended to interact underadditively, but only because the traditional b...