Investigating the effect of multimodality and sentiments on speaking assessments: a facial emotional analysis.

This quasi-experimental study aimed to determine the relationship between (i) oral language ability and emotions represented by facial emotions, and (ii) modality of assessment (audios versus videos) and sentiments embedded in each modality. Sixty university students watched and/or listened to four selected audio-visual stimuli and orally answered follow-up comprehension questions. One stimulus was designed to evoke happiness while the other, sadness. Participants' facial emotions during the answering were measured using the FaceReader technology. In addition, four trained raters assessed the responses of the participants. An analysis of the FaceReader data showed that there were significant main and interaction effects of sentiment and modality on participants' facial emotional expression. Notably, there was a significant difference in the amount of facial emotions evoked by (i) the happy vs. sad sentiment videos and (ii) video vs. audio modalities. In contrast, sentiments embedded in the stimuli and modalities had no significant effect on the measured speaking performance of the participants. Nevertheless, we found a number of significant correlations between the participants' test scores and some of their facial emotions evoked by the stimuli. Implications of these findings for the assessment of oral communication are discussed.

A Synthetic Review of Cognitive Load in Distance Interpreting: Toward an Explanatory Model.

Distance Interpreting (DI) is a form of technology-mediated interpreting which has gained traction due to the high demand for multilingual conferences, live-streaming programs, and public service sectors. The current study synthesized the DI literature to build a framework that represents the construct and measurement of cognitive load in DI. Two major areas of research were identified, i.e., causal factors and methods of measuring cognitive load. A number of causal factors that can induce change in cognitive load in DI were identified and reviewed. These included factors derived from tasks (e.g., mode of presentation), environment (e.g., booth type), and interpreters (e.g., technology awareness). In addition, four methods for measuring cognitive load in DI were identified and surveyed: subjective methods, performance methods, analytical methods, and psycho-physiological methods. Together, the causal factors and measurement methods provide a multifarious approach to delineating and quantifying cognitive load in DI. This multidimensional framework can be applied as a tool for pedagogical design in interpreting programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. It can also provide implications for other fields of educational psychology and language learning and assessment.

The Metacognitive and Neurocognitive Signatures of Test Methods in Academic Listening.

This study aims to investigate whether and how test takers' academic listening test performance is predicted by their metacognitive and neurocognitive process under different test methods conditions. Eighty test takers completed two tests consisting of while-listening performance (WLP) and post-listening performance (PLP) test methods. Their metacognitive awareness was measured by the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ), and gaze behavior and brain activation were measured by an eye-tracker and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), respectively. The results of automatic linear modeling indicated that WLP and PLP test performances were predicted by different factors. The predictors of WLP test performance included two metacognitive awareness measures (i.e., person knowledge and mental translation) and fixation duration. In contrast, the predictors of the PLP performance comprised two metacognitive awareness measures (i.e., mental translation and directed attention), visit counts, and importantly, three brain activity measures: the dmPFC measure in the answering phase, IFG measure in the listening phase, and IFG measure in the answering phase. Implications of these findings for language assessment are discussed.

Interpersonal Synchrony in the Context of Caregiver-Child Interactions: A Document Co-citation Analysis.

Social interactions accompany individuals throughout their whole lives. When examining the underlying mechanisms of social processes, dynamics of synchrony, coordination or attunement emerge between individuals at multiple levels. To identify the impactful publications that studied such mechanisms and establishing the trends that dynamically originated the available literature, the current study adopted a scientometric approach. A sample of 543 documents dated from 1971 to 2021 was derived from Scopus. Subsequently, a document co-citation analysis was conducted on 29,183 cited references to examine the patterns of co-citation among the documents. The resulting network consisted of 1,759 documents connected to each other by 5,011 links. Within the network, five major clusters were identified. The analysis of the content of the three major clusters-namely, "Behavioral synchrony," "Towards bio-behavioral synchrony," and "Neural attunement"-suggests an interest in studying attunement in social interactions at multiple levels of analysis, from behavioral to neural, by passing through the level of physiological coordination. Furthermore, although initial studies on synchrony focused mostly on parent-child interactions, new hyperscanning paradigms are allowing researchers to explore the role of biobehavioral synchrony in all social processes in a real-time and ecological fashion. Future potential pathways of research were also discussed.

Developmental disabilities across the world: A scientometric review from 1936 to 2020.

BACKGROUND: Developmental disabilities have been largely studied in the past years. Their etiological mechanisms have been underpinned to the interactions between genetic and environmental factors. These factors show variability across the world. Thus, it is important to understand where the set of knowledge obtained on developmental disabilities originates from and whether it is generalizable to low- and middle-income countries. AIMS: This study aims to understand the origins of the available literature on developmental disabilities, keeping a focus on parenting, and identify the main trend of research. METHODS AND PROCEDURE: A sample of 11,315 publications from 1936 to 2020 were collected from Scopus and a graphical country analysis was conducted. Furthermore, a qualitative approach enabled the clustering of references by keywords into four main areas: "Expression of the disorder", "Physiological Factors", "How it is studied" and "Environmental factors". For each area, a document co-citation analysis (DCA) on CiteSpace software was performed. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Results highlight the leading role of North America in the study of developmental disabilities. Trends in the literature and the documents' scientific relevance are discussed in details. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Results demand for investigation in different socio-economical settings to generalize our knowledge. What this paper adds? The current paper tries to provide insight into the origins of the literature on developmental disabilities with a focus on parenting, together with an analysis of the trends of research in the field. The paper consisted of a multi-disciplinary and multi-method review. In fact, the review tried to integrate the analysis of the relation between developmental disabilities with a closer look at the scientific contributions to the field across the world. Specifically, the paper integrates a total of 11,315 papers published on almost a century of research (from 1936 to 2020). An initial qualitative analysis on keywords was combined to a subsequent quantitative approach in order to maximize the comprehension of the impact of almost a century of scientific contributions. Specifically, documents were studied with temporal and structural metrics on a scientometric approach. This allowed the exploration of patterns within the literature available on Scopus in a quantitative way. This method not only assessed the importance of single documents within the network. As a matter of fact, the document co-citation analysis used on CiteSpace software provided insight into the relations existing between multiple documents in the field of research. As a result, the leading role of North America in the literature of developmental disabilities and parenting emerged. This was accompanied by the review of the main trends of research within the existing literature.

A Scientometric Review of Alexithymia: Mapping Thematic and Disciplinary Shifts in Half a Century of Research.

The term "alexithymia" was introduced in the lexicon of psychiatry in the early '70s by Sifneos to outline the difficulties manifested by some patients in identifying and describing their own emotions. Since then, the construct has been broadened and partially modified. Today this describes a condition characterized by an altered emotional awareness which leads to difficulties in recognizing your own and others' emotions. In half a century, the volume of scientific products focusing on alexithymia has exceeded 5,000. Such an expansive knowledge domain poses a difficulty for those willing to understand how alexithymia research has developed. Scientometrics embodies a solution to this issue, employing computational, and visual analytic methods to uncover meaningful patterns within large bibliographical corpora. In this study, we used the CiteSpace software to examine a corpus of 4,930 publications on alexithymia ranging from 1980 to 2020 and their 100,251 references included in Web of Science. Document co-citation analysis was performed to highlight pivotal publications and major research areas on alexithymia, whereas journal co-citation analysis was conducted to find the related editorial venues and disciplinary communities. The analyses suggest that the construct of alexithymia experienced a gradual thematic and disciplinary shift. Although the first conceptualization of alexithymia came from psychoanalysis and psychosomatics, empirical research was pushed by the operationalization of the construct formulated at the end of the '80s. Specifically, the development of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, currently the most used self-report instrument, seems to have encouraged both the entrance of new disciplines in the study of alexithymia (i.e., cognitive science and neuroscience) and an implicit redefinition of its conceptual nucleus. Overall, we discuss opportunities and limitations in the application of this bottom-up approach, which highlights trends in alexithymia research that were previously identified only through a qualitative, theory-driven approach.

An Extensive Knowledge Mapping Review of Measurement and Validity in Language Assessment and SLA Research.

This study set out to investigate intellectual domains as well as the use of measurement and validation methods in language assessment research and second language acquisition (SLA) published in English in peer-reviewed journals. Using Scopus, we created two datasets: (i) a dataset of core journals consisting of 1,561 articles published in four language assessment journals, and (ii) a dataset of general journals consisting of 3,175 articles on language assessment published in the top journals of SLA and applied linguistics. We applied document co-citation analysis to detect thematically distinct research clusters. Next, we coded citing papers in each cluster based on an analytical framework for measurement and validation. We found that the focus of the core journals was more exclusively on reading and listening comprehension assessment (primary), facets of speaking and writing performance such as raters and validation (secondary), as well as feedback, corpus linguistics, and washback (tertiary). By contrast, the primary focus of assessment research in the general journals was on vocabulary, oral proficiency, essay writing, grammar, and reading. The secondary focus was on affective schemata, awareness, memory, language proficiency, explicit vs. implicit language knowledge, language or semantic awareness, and semantic complexity. With the exception of language proficiency, this second area of focus was absent in the core journals. It was further found that the majority of citing publications in the two datasets did not carry out inference-based validation on their instruments before using them. More research is needed to determine what motivates authors to select and investigate a topic, how thoroughly they cite past research, and what internal (within a field) and external (between fields) factors lead to the sustainability of a Research Topic in language assessment.

Corrigendum: An Extensive Knowledge Mapping Review of Measurement and Validity in Language Assessment and SLA Research.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01941.].

A Scientometric Review of Rasch Measurement: The Rise and Progress of a Specialty.

A recent review of the literature concluded that Rasch measurement is an influential approach in psychometric modeling. Despite the major contributions of Rasch measurement to the growth of scientific research across various fields, there is currently no research on the trends and evolution of Rasch measurement research. The present study used co-citation techniques and a multiple perspectives approach to investigate 5,365 publications on Rasch measurement between 01 January 1972 and 03 May 2019 and their 108,339 unique references downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS). Several methods of network development involving visualization and text-mining were used to analyze these data: author co-citation analysis (ACA), document co-citation analysis (DCA), journal author co-citation analysis (JCA), and keyword analysis. In addition, to investigate the inter-domain trends that link the Rasch measurement specialty to other specialties, we used a dual-map overlay to investigate specialty-to-specialty connections. Influential authors, publications, journals, and keywords were identified. Multiple research frontiers or sub-specialties were detected and the major ones were reviewed, including "visual function questionnaires", "non-parametric item response theory", "valid measures (validity)", "latent class models", and "many-facet Rasch model". One of the outstanding patterns identified was the dominance and impact of publications written for general groups of practitioners and researchers. In personal communications, the authors of these publications stressed their mission as being "teachers" who aim to promote Rasch measurement as a conceptual model with real-world applications. Based on these findings, we propose that sociocultural and ethnographic factors have a huge capacity to influence fields of science and should be considered in future investigations of psychometrics and measurement. As the first scientometric review of the Rasch measurement specialty, this study will be of interest to researchers, graduate students, and professors seeking to identify research trends, topics, major publications, and influential scholars.