Are Dyslexic People more Creative? Myth or Reality: A Meta-analysis / ¿Son las personas disléxicas más creativas? Mito o realidad: metaanálisis

The claim that people with dyslexia are more creative than people without this learning disorder is widespread. But the complexity of creativity and the way it is measured means that this statement is sometimes inconsistent. The aim of this review is, on the one hand, to explore the relationship between dyslexia and creativity, as well as to analyze the categories of divergent thinking: fluency, originality, abstractness, elaboration, and flexibility. On the other hand, it also aims to identify moderators that may be influencing this relationship, such as age, country, or the test used. We retrieved 13 empirical studies that provided 39 effect sizes. The results show that there are no significant differences between people with and without dyslexia in terms of creativity when considering the construct as a whole. However, a significant relationship between the two constructs is observed when analyzing the categories of divergent thinking isolated.(AU)

La afirmación de que las personas con dislexia son más creativas que las personas sin este trastorno específico del aprendizaje está muy extendida. Pero la complejidad del constructo de creatividad y la forma en que esta se mide, hace que esta afirmación sea contradictoria. El objetivo de esta revisión es doble; por un lado, pretende explorar la relación entre dislexia y creatividad, así como analizar las categorías del pensamiento divergente: fluidez, originalidad, abstracción, elaboración y flexibilidad; por otro, pretende identificar moderadores que puedan estar influyendo en esta relación, como la edad, el país o la prueba utilizada. Se recuperaron trece estudios empíricos, con un total de 39 tamaños de efecto. Los resultados muestran que no existen diferencias significativas en cuanto a la creatividad entre personas con dislexia y sin ella cuando se considera el constructo como un todo. Sin embargo, se observa una relación significativa entre ambos al analizar las categorías de pensamiento divergente de forma aislada.(AU)

Forgetting "Novel" but Not "Dragon": The Role of Age of Acquisition on Intentional and Incidental Forgetting.

Two experiments studied how the age at which words are acquired (Age of Acquisition, AoA) modulates forgetting. Experiment 1 employed the retrieval-practice paradigm to test the effect of AoA on the incidental forgetting that emerges after solving competition during retrieval (i.e., retrieval-induced forgetting, RIF). Standard RIF appeared with late-acquired words, but this effect disappeared with early-acquired words. Experiment 2 evaluated the effect of AoA on intentional forgetting by employing the list-method directed forgetting paradigm. Results showed a standard directed forgetting effect only when the to-be-forgotten words were late-acquired words. These findings point to the prominent role of AoA in forgetting processes.

Effects of the psycholinguistic variables on the lexical decision task in Spanish: a study with 2,765 words.

In order to explore the role of the main psycholinguistic variables on visual word recognition, several mega-studies have been conducted in English in recent years. Nevertheless, because the effects of these variables depend on the regularity of the orthographic system, studies must also be done in other languages with different characteristics. The goal of this work was to conduct a lexical decision study in Spanish, a language with a shallow orthography and a high number of words. The influence of psycholinguistic variables on latencies corresponding to 2,765 words was assessed by means of linear mixed-effects modeling. The results show that some variables, such as frequency or age of acquisition, have significant effects on reaction times regardless of the type of words used. Other variables, such as orthographic neighborhood or imageability, were significant only in specific groups of words. Our results highlight the importance of taking into account the peculiarities of each spelling system in the development of reading models.

Lexical and semantic age-of-acquisition effects on word naming in Spanish.

We report a study of the factors that affect reading in Spanish, a language with a transparent orthography. Our focus was on the influence of lexical semantic knowledge in phonological coding. This effect would be predicted to be minimal in Spanish, according to some accounts of semantic effects in reading. We asked 25 healthy adults to name 2,764 mono- and multisyllabic words. As is typical for psycholinguistics, variables capturing critical word attributes were highly intercorrelated. Therefore, we used principal components analysis (PCA) to derive orthogonalized predictors from raw variables. The PCA distinguished components relating to (1) word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and familiarity; (2) word AoA, imageability, and familiarity; (3) word length and orthographic neighborhood size; and (4) bigram type and token frequency. Linear mixed-effects analyses indicated significant effects on reading due to each PCA component. Our observations confirm that oral reading in Spanish proceeds through spelling-sound mappings involving lexical and sublexical units. Importantly, our observations distinguish between the effect of lexical frequency (the impact of the component relating to frequency, AoA, and familiarity) and the effect of semantic knowledge (the impact of the component relating to AoA, imageability, and familiarity). Semantic knowledge influences word naming even when all the words being read have regular spelling-sound mappings.

SUBTLEX-ESP: Spanish word frequencies based on film subtitles

Estudios recientes han mostrado que las estimaciones de frecuencia de las palabras obtenidas de los subtítulos de películas y series de televisión predicen mejor los resultados de los experimentos de reconocimiento de palabras que la tradicional estimación de frecuencia basada en libros y periódicos. En este estudio presentamos una lista de frecuencias de las palabras basada en los subtítulos para el español, uno de los idiomas más extendidos en el mundo. La frecuencia de los subtítulos fue obtenida a partir de un corpus de 41 millones de palabras tomadas de películas y series de televisión (de entre los años 1990 y 2009). Además, las frecuencias fueron validadas al correlacionarlas con los tiempos de reacción de dos megaestudios realizados sobre 2764 palabras cada uno (con las tareas de decisión léxica y lectura en voz alta). La frecuencia de los subtítulos explicaban un 6% más de la varianza que las frecuencias escritas en la tarea de decisión léxica y un 2% extra en lectura en voz alta(AU)

Recent studies have shown that word frequency estimates obtained from films and television subtitles are better to predict performance in word recognition experiments than the traditional word frequency estimates based on books and newspapers. In this study, we present a subtitle-based word frequency list for Spanish, one of the most widely spoken languages. The subtitle frequencies are based on a corpus of 41M words taken from contemporary movies and TV series (screened between 1990 and 2009). In addition, the frequencies have been validated by correlating them with the RTs from two megastudies involving 2,764 words each (lexical decision and word naming tasks). The subtitle frequencies explained 6% more of the variance than the existing written frequencies in lexical decision, and 2% extra in word naming(AU)

Determining the time course of lexical frequency and age of acquisition using ERP.

OBJECTIVE: The main goal of the present study was to dissociate the effects on reading of frequency, age of acquisition (AoA) and imageability using the evoked response potential paradigm. METHOD: Twenty participants read words from three experimental conditions: high and low frequency, late and early age of acquisition and high and low imageability. RESULTS: High frequency words produced more positive mean amplitude than low frequency words in the 175-360 ms post-stimulus onset time window and late AoA produced more negative amplitudes than early AoA in the 400-610 ms window. Imageability did not produce any effect in any time window tested. Brain electromagnetic tomography showed the most activated cortical areas for each category of stimuli. CONCLUSIONS: The lexical frequency of words seems to affect an early phase in the recognition process, perhaps at the level of the orthographic input lexicon, while AoA was observed at a later stage, indicating that this variable influence processing at a semantic level or at the links between semantics and phonology. SIGNIFICANCE: EEG permits the researcher to investigate the time course, and approximate location in the brain, of psycholinguistic variables.

Efectos de la edad de adquisición en tareas de categorización semántica / Age-of-acquisition effects in semantic categorization tasks

Numerosos experimentos de denominación de dibujos realizados en losúltimos años muestran que la edad de adquisición es una de las variablesmás determinantes de los tiempos de respuesta. La interpretación quemayoritariamente se ha dado a este resultado es que la edad de adquisicióninfluye en el proceso de acceso léxico, esto es, en el momento derecuperación del nombre del dibujo. Sin embargo, recientes investigacionessostienen que los efectos de esta variable podrían localizarse también en elnivel semántico. El objetivo de este estudio fue poner a prueba esta hipótesissemántica y para ello, se realizaron tres experimentos de categorizaciónsemántica en los que se introducían como predictores de los tiempos dereacción las principales variables léxicas y semánticas: frecuencia, edad deadquisición, imaginabilidad, tipicidad, disponibilidad y familiaridad. Losresultados muestran que las únicas variables que predicen los tiempos derespuesta son la tipicidad, la disponibilidad y marginalmente laimaginabilidad. Se concluye que los efectos de la edad de adquisición sesitúan en el acceso léxico y no en el sistema semántico

Severalpicture naming experiments conducted in the last years show that the age ofacquisition is the most influential variable on reaction times. The commoninterpretation given to this result is that the age of acquisition influences thelexical access process during the retrieval of the picture´s name. However,recent investigations claim that the effects of that variable could be locatedas well at a semantic level. The goal of this study was to test this semantichypothesis. Accordingly, three semantic categorization task experimentswere carried out. The main lexical and semantic variables, such asfrequency, age of acquisition, imageability, typicality, availability andfamiliarity were tested. In the semantic categorization tasks the only variables which predicted the reaction times were typicality, availability andimageability. The conclusion is that age of acquisition effects are located atthe lexical access