Physiological correlates of anxiety in childhood and adolescence: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Anxiety is one of the most prevalent problems that affects children and adolescents. The vast majority of diagnostic tools for anxiety depend on written or verbal reports from children and adolescents or their significant others. The validity and reliability of such reports can be compromised by their subjective nature. Thus, there is growing interest in whether anxiety can be indexed with objective physiological measures. The key aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis was to determine which physiological measures are most reliably associated with elevated levels of anxiety amongst children and adolescents. Online databases (e.g., PsycINFO, Embase, Medline) were searched for relevant studies according to pre-determined criteria. Twenty-five studies comprising 2502 participants (N = 1160 with high anxiety) met inclusion, identifying 11 groups of physiological measures. Our meta-analysis revealed that skin conductance level is the most sensitive measure of anxiety (d = 0.83), followed by electromyography (EMG) measures (d = 0.71) and skin conductance response (d = 0.58). However, the included studies varied in terms of subjective measures, study designs, experimental task measures, and physiological measures. Consideration of these differences in methodology offer potential directions for future research.

Spoken verb learning in children with language disorder.

The current study examined spoken verb learning in elementary school children with language disorder (LD). We aimed to replicate verb learning deficits reported in younger children with LD and to examine whether verb instrumentality, a semantic factor reflecting whether an action requires an instrument (e.g., "to chop" is an instrumental verb), influenced verb learning. The possible facilitating effect of orthographic cues presented during training was also evaluated. In an exploratory analysis, we investigated whether language and reading skills mediated verb learning performance. General language skills and verb learning were assessed in Dutch children with LD and age-matched typically developing controls (n = 25 per group) aged 8 to 12 years (M = 9;9 [years;months], SD = 1;3). Using video animations, children learned 20 nonwords depicting actions comprising 10 instrumental and 10 noninstrumental verbs. Half of the items were trained with orthographic information present. Verb learning was assessed using an animation-word matching and animation naming task. Linear mixed-effects models showed a main effect of group for all verb learning measures, demonstrating that children with LD learned fewer words and at a slower rate than the control group. No effect of verb instrumentality, presence of orthographic information, or the included mediators was found. Our results emphasize the importance of continued vocabulary instruction in elementary school to strengthen verb encoding. Given that our findings are inconsistent with the overall literature showing an orthographic facilitation effect, future studies should investigate whether participants pay attention to the written word form in learning contexts with moving stimuli.

Are comorbidities of poor reading related to elevated anxiety in children?

Studies of the association between dyslexia and mental health have typically tried to minimise the influence of dyslexia comorbidities on the outcomes. However, in the "real world", many children with dyslexia have these comorbidities. In this study, we tested (1) if children with dyslexia with three common comorbidities - inattention, hyperactivity, language difficulties - experience more anxiety than children with dyslexia without these comorbidities; and (2) if any type of comorbidity is related to a certain type of anxiety (reading, social, generalised, or separation). The data of 82 children with dyslexia (mean age = 9 years and 4 months; 25 girls) were analysed using Fisher exact tests, which revealed that those with inattention (40.54%) or hyperactivity (42.30%) were statistically significantly more likely to experience elevated anxiety than children with dyslexia without these comorbidities (8.11 and 14.28%, respectively). This was not the case for language difficulties (24.5% versus 30%). Spearman ρ correlations (α = .05) indicated significant moderate relationships between inattention and reading anxiety (.27), social anxiety (.37), and generalised anxiety (.24); and between hyperactivity and social anxiety (.24) and generalised anxiety (.28). There were no significant correlations between language and anxiety. Examination of highly inter-correlated variables suggested a specific relationship between one type of comorbidity (inattention) and one type of anxiety (reading anxiety).

Nap effects on preschool children's learning of letter-sound mappings.

This study explored whether a daytime nap aids children's acquisition of letter-sound knowledge, which is a fundamental component for learning to read. Thirty-two preschool children in Sydney, Australia (Mage  = 4 years;3 months) were taught letter-sound mappings in two sessions: one followed by a nap and the other by a wakeful period. Learning was assessed by explicit letter-sound mappings ("Which sound does this letter make?") and knowledge generalization tasks ("Here's Tav and Cav, which one is /kav/?"). Results from the knowledge generalization task showed better performance after a nap than after wake. However, no nap benefit was found for explicit letter-sound knowledge. This study provides initial evidence that naps could be beneficial for preschool children's learning of letter-sound mappings.

Variations in the use of simple and context-sensitive grapheme-phoneme correspondences in English and German developing readers.

Learning to read in most alphabetic orthographies requires not only the acquisition of simple grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) but also the acquisition of context-sensitive GPCs, where surrounding letters change a grapheme's pronunciation. We aimed to explore the use and development of simple GPCs (e.g. a ➔ /æ/) and context-sensitive GPCs (e.g. [w]a ➔ /ɔ/, as in "swan" or a[l][d] ➔ /o:/, as in "bald") in pseudoword reading. Across three experiments, English- and German-speaking children in grades 2-4 read aloud pseudowords, where vowel graphemes had different pronunciations according to different contexts (e.g. "hact", "wact", "hald"). First, we found that children use context-sensitive GPCs from grade 2 onwards, even when they are not explicitly taught. Second, we used a mathematical optimisation procedure to assess whether children's vowel responses can be described by assuming that they rely on a mix of simple and context-sensitive GPCs. While the approach works well for German adults (Schmalz et al. in Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 26, 831-852, 2014), we found poor model fits for both German- and English-speaking children. Additional analyses using an entropy measure and data from a third experiment showed that children's pseudoword reading responses are variable and likely affected by random noise. We found a decrease in entropy across grade and reading ability across all conditions in both languages. This suggests that GPC knowledge becomes increasingly refined across grades 2-4.

Who are the noisiest neighbors in the hood? Using error analyses to study the acquisition of letter-position processing.

This research examines the acquisition of letter-position processing. Study 1 investigated letter-position processing in Grades 1-6 and adult readers, using the occurrence of specific error types as the outcome measure. Between Grades 1 and 2, there was a shift from making more other-word to making more letter-position errors. This shift was a function of reading proficiency, not of years of reading instruction. Based on the multiple-route model of reading development (Grainger, Lété, Bertand, Dufau, & Ziegler, 2012), we argue that the fact that children make fewer other-word errors (i.e., mostly letter-identity errors) opens up the opportunity for them to make "the more advanced" letter-position errors. Finally, skilled adult readers still made fewer letter-position errors than typical readers in Grade 6, suggesting that the acquisition process is not finalized by the end of primary school. In Study 2, we directly compared letter-position processing with letter-identity processing. Thirty children in Grade 3 and 30 children in Grade 4 read aloud words with and without higher-frequency distractors. Children more often misread a word with a higher-frequency distractor than without such a distractor and this effect was stronger for below-average than for above-average readers. Converging with the results of Study 1, we found that a letter-position distractor is more disruptive than a letter-identity distractor. These results confirm that the acquisition of letter-position processing lags behind of that of letter-identity processing. The results are discussed within the framework of the Lexical Tuning Hypothesis (Castles, Davis, Cavalot, & Forster, 2007), which stresses the importance of feedback between letter (identity and position) coding and (developing) orthographic representations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Children reading spoken words: interactions between vocabulary and orthographic expectancy.

There is an established association between children's oral vocabulary and their word reading but its basis is not well understood. Here, we present evidence from eye movements for a novel mechanism underlying this association. Two groups of 18 Grade 4 children received oral vocabulary training on one set of 16 novel words (e.g., 'nesh', 'coib'), but no training on another set. The words were assigned spellings that were either predictable from phonology (e.g., nesh) or unpredictable (e.g., koyb). These were subsequently shown in print, embedded in sentences. Reading times were shorter for orally familiar than unfamiliar items, and for words with predictable than unpredictable spellings but, importantly, there was an interaction between the two: children demonstrated a larger benefit of oral familiarity for predictable than for unpredictable items. These findings indicate that children form initial orthographic expectations about spoken words before first seeing them in print. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/jvpJwpKMM3E.

Reading Aloud: Discrete Stage(s) Redux.

Interactive activation accounts of processing have had a broad and deep influence on cognitive psychology, particularly so in the context of computational accounts of reading aloud at the single word level. Here we address the issue of whether such a framework can simulate the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency (which have been shown to produce both additive and interactive effects depending on the context). We extend previous work on this question by considering an alternative implementation of a stimulus quality manipulation, and the role of interactive activation. Simulations with a version of the Dual Route Cascaded model (a model with interactive activation dynamics along the lexical route) demonstrate that the model is unable to simulate the entire pattern seen in human performance. We discuss how a hybrid interactive activation model that includes some context dependent staged processing could accommodate these data.

Bedding down new words: Sleep promotes the emergence of lexical competition in visual word recognition.

Lexical competition processes are widely viewed as the hallmark of visual word recognition, but little is known about the factors that promote their emergence. This study examined for the first time whether sleep may play a role in inducing these effects. A group of 27 participants learned novel written words, such as banara, at 8 am and were tested on their learning at 8 pm the same day (AM group), while 29 participants learned the words at 8 pm and were tested at 8 am the following day (PM group). Both groups were retested after 24 hours. Using a semantic categorization task, we showed that lexical competition effects, as indexed by slowed responses to existing neighbor words such as banana, emerged 12 h later in the PM group who had slept after learning but not in the AM group. After 24 h the competition effects were evident in both groups. These findings have important implications for theories of orthographic learning and broader neurobiological models of memory consolidation.

Word and pseudoword superiority effects on letter position processing in developing and skilled readers.

Studies have shown that letter position processing changes as reading develops. Whether these changes are driven by the development of the orthographic lexicon is currently unclear. In this study, we administered a novel variant of the Reicher-Wheeler task to children aged 7-12 years (Experiment 1) and adults (Experiment 2) to clarify the role of the developing lexicon in letter position processing. The task required participants to report the identity of a letter at a specified position within 3 orthographic contexts: anagram words (e.g., slime - which has the anagram partner, smile), pseudowords (e.g., blire - brile), and illegal nonwords (e.g., bfgsv - bsgfv). The influence of a reader's whole-word orthographic representations was investigated by comparing the performance of words to pseudowords (word superiority effect or WSE), and the influence of their knowledge of orthotactic constraints was investigated by comparing pseudowords to illegal nonwords (pseudoword superiority effect or PSE). While the PSE increased with developing orthographic skills (as indexed by irregular word reading) in primary schoolchildren, the WSE emerged only in adult readers. Furthermore, the size of the WSE increased with orthographic skill in adults. The findings are discussed in regards to current models and theories of visual word recognition and reading development. (PsycINFO Database Record

Beliefs about hearing voices.

People who experience auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) vary in whether they believe their AVHs are self-generated or caused by external agents. It remains unclear whether these differences are influenced by the "intensity" of the voices, such as their frequency or volume, or other aspects of their phenomenology. We examined 35 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who experienced AVHs. Patients completed a detailed structured interview about their AVHs, including beliefs about their cause. In response, 20 (57.1%) reported that their AVHs were self-generated, 9 (25.7%) were uncertain, and 6 (17.1%) reported that their AVHs were caused by external agents. Several analytical approaches revealed little or no evidence for associations between either AVH intensity or phenomenology and beliefs about the AVH's cause; the evidence instead favoured the absence of these associations. Beliefs about the cause of AVHs are thus unlikely to be explained solely by the phenomenological qualities of the AVHs.

Conflict resolved: On the role of spatial attention in reading and color naming tasks.

The debate about whether or not visual word recognition requires spatial attention has been marked by a conflict: the results from different tasks yield different conclusions. Experiments in which the primary task is reading based show no evidence that unattended words are processed, whereas when the primary task is color identification, supposedly unattended words do affect processing. However, the color stimuli used to date does not appear to demand as much spatial attention as explicit word reading tasks. We first identify a color stimulus that requires as much spatial attention to identify as does a word. We then demonstrate that when spatial attention is appropriately captured, distractor words in unattended locations do not affect color identification. We conclude that there is no word identification without spatial attention.

Context-dependent similarity effects in letter recognition.

In visual word recognition tasks, digit primes that are visually similar to letter string targets (e.g., 4/A, 8/B) are known to facilitate letter identification relative to visually dissimilar digits (e.g., 6/A, 7/B); in contrast, with letter primes, visual similarity effects have been elusive. In the present study we show that the visual similarity effect with letter primes can be made to come and go, depending on whether it is necessary to discriminate between visually similar letters. The results support a Bayesian view which regards letter recognition not as a passive activation process driven by the fixed stimulus properties, but as a dynamic evidence accumulation process for a decision that is guided by the task context.

Hierarchical clustering analysis of reading aloud data: a new technique for evaluating the performance of computational models.

DRC (Coltheart et al., 2001) and CDP++ (Perry et al., 2010) are two of the most successful models of reading aloud. These models differ primarily in how their sublexical systems convert letter strings into phonological codes. DRC adopts a set of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion rules (GPCs) while CDP++ uses a simple trained network that has been exposed to a combination of rules and the spellings and pronunciations of known words. Thus far the debate between fixed rules and learned associations has largely emphasized reaction time experiments, error rates in dyslexias, and item-level variance from large-scale databases. Recently, Pritchard et al. (2012) examined the models' non-word reading in a new way. They compared responses produced by the models to those produced by 45 skilled readers. Their item-by-item analysis is informative, but leaves open some questions that can be addressed with a different technique. Using hierarchical clustering techniques, we first examined the subject data to identify if there are classes of subjects that are similar to each other in their overall response profiles. We found that there are indeed two groups of subject that differ in their pronunciations for certain consonant clusters. We also tested the possibility that CDP++ is modeling one set of subjects well, while DRC is modeling a different set of subjects. We found that CDP++ does not fit any human reader's response pattern very well, while DRC fits the human readers as well as or better than any other reader.

Visual similarity effects on masked priming.

We investigated the role of the visual similarity of masked primes to targets in a lexical decision experiment. In the primes, some letters in the target (e.g., A in ABANDON) had either visually similar letters (e.g., H), dissimilar letters (D), visually similar digits (4), or dissimilar digits (6) substituted for them. The similarities of the digits and letters to the base letter were equated and verified in a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) perceptual identification task. Using targets presented in lowercase (e.g., abandon) and primes presented in uppercase, visually similar digit primes (e.g., 484NDON) produced more priming than did visually dissimilar digit primes (676NDON), but little difference was found between the visually similar and dissimilar letter primes (HRHNDON vs. DWDNDON). These results were explained in terms of task-driven competition between the target letter and the visually similar letter.

Basic processes in reading aloud and colour naming: towards a better understanding of the role of spatial attention.

Whether or not lexical access from print requires spatial attention has been debated intensively for the last 30 years. Studies involving colour naming generally find evidence that "unattended" words are processed. In contrast, reading-based experiments do not find evidence of distractor processing. One theory ascribes the discrepancy to weaker attentional demands for colour identification. If colour naming does not capture all of a subject's attention, the remaining attentional resources can be deployed to process the distractor word. The present study combined exogenous spatial cueing with colour naming and reading aloud separately and found that colour naming is less sensitive to the validity of a spatial cue than is reading words aloud. Based on these results, we argue that colour naming studies do not effectively control attention so that no conclusions about unattended distractor processing can be drawn from them. Thus we reiterate the consistent conclusion drawn from reading aloud and lexical decision studies: There is no word identification without (spatial) attention.

When benefits outweigh costs: reconsidering "automatic" phonological recoding when reading aloud.

Skilled readers are slower to read aloud exception words (e.g., PINT) than regular words (e.g., MINT). In the case of exception words, sublexical knowledge competes with the correct pronunciation driven by lexical knowledge, whereas no such competition occurs for regular words. The dominant view is that the cost of this "regularity" effect is evidence that sublexical spelling-sound conversion is impossible to prevent (i.e., is "automatic"). This view has become so reified that the field rarely questions it. However, the results of simulations from the most successful computational models on the table suggest that the claim of "automatic" sublexical phonological recoding is premature given that there is also a benefit conferred by sublexical processing. Taken together with evidence from skilled readers that sublexical phonological recoding can be stopped, we suggest that the field is too narrowly focused when it asserts that sublexical phonological recoding is "automatic" and that a broader, more nuanced and contextually driven approach provides a more useful framework.

Visual word recognition: evidence for global and local control over semantic feedback.

Two lexical decision experiments examined the joint effects of stimulus quality, semantic context, and cue-target associative strength when all factors were intermixed in a block of trials. Both experiments found a three-way interaction. Semantic context and stimulus quality interacted when associative strength between cue-target pairs was strong, and the interaction was eliminated when the strength was weak. These results support a role for a local mechanism that relies on trial specific information, in addition to a mechanism that makes use of global information available across a block of trials. The absence of an interaction between the joint effects of semantic context and stimulus quality is attributed to blocking the feedback from the semantic system to the orthographic system, functionally separating the orthographic and semantic modules.

On the joint effects of stimulus quality, regularity, and lexicality when reading aloud: new challenges.

A number of computational models have been developed over the last 2 decades that are remarkably successful at explaining the process of translating print into sound. Nevertheless, 2 of the most successful computational accounts on the table fail to simulate the results from factorial experiments reported in this article in which university students read aloud letter strings that varied in terms of spelling-sound regularity and lexicality (regular words vs. exception words vs. nonwords) and stimulus quality (bright vs. dim). Skilled readers yielded additive effects of regularity and stimulus quality and additive effects of lexicality and stimulus quality on both RT and errors when nonwords were mixed with words. When only words appeared in the list, there was an interaction in which exception words were less affected by low stimulus quality than regular words were; no existing account anticipates or explains these results. We advance a hypothesis that assumes a novel module that accommodates these data and provide an existence proof in the form of a simulation.

Reading aloud: evidence for contextual control over lexical activation.

Can readers exert control (albeit unconsciously) over activation at particular loci in the reading system? The authors addressed this issue in 4 experiments in which participants read target words aloud and the factors of prime-target relation (semantic, repetition), context (related, unrelated), stimulus quality (bright, dim), and relatedness proportion (RP; high, low) were manipulated. In the high RP condition (RP = .5), an interaction between semantic context and stimulus quality was observed in which low stimulus quality slowed unrelated targets more than related ones, replicating previous work. In contrast, the low RP condition (RP = .25) yielded additive effects of semantic context and stimulus quality. However, when low RP was examined within the context of repetition priming, context and stimulus quality once again interacted. These results are discussed in the context of a widely endorsed framework with the addition of the central assumption that there is control over feedback between various levels.