INS NYC 2024 Program

Poster	Poster Session 11 Program Schedule 02/17/2024 10:45 am - 12:00 pm Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60) Poster Session 11: Cultural Neuropsychology \| Education/Training \| Professional Practice Issues Final Abstract #18 Can Literacy Act as a Refiner of Conceptual Representations? Susana Araújo, Faculty of Psycholgy, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal Tânia Fernandes, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal Margarida Cipriano, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal Laura Mealha, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal Catarina Silva-Nunes, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal Falk Huettig, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands Category: Cross Cultural Neuropsychology/ Clinical Cultural Neuroscience Keyword 1: acculturation Keyword 2: naming Keyword 3: semantic processing Objective: Conceptual knowledge is one of the most defining properties of human cognition, which is highly permeable to enrichment experiences. Therefore, education, schooling, and learning to read (i.e., literacy) can act as gateways to the acquisition of new words and concepts. In the present study we tested the potential impact of schooling and literacy on the efficiency of accessing conceptual knowledge and whether such impact was a mere side-effect of vocabulary expansion promoted by education. Participants and Methods: Sixty-nine adults from the same residential, cultural, and socioeconomic background participated. They were from three groups based on schooling and literacy skills, matched for age and sex: 31 fully illiterate (Mage= 40.7 yrs.; 21 female); 19 unschooled ex‐illiterate (Mage= 45.7 yrs.; 13 female) who already had finished an adulthood alphabetization course; 19 early-schooled literate (Mage= 41.1 yrs.; 13 female) who had, on average, 8 years of formal education. None showed signs of neurological or cognitive impairment. It was strictly for cultural/socioeconomic reasons that (ex-)illiterates did not attend school during childhood. In two experiments, participants were tested on continuous, rapid automatized naming (RAN) and on single naming of common everyday objects (concrete concepts) and basic color patches (abstract concepts). Estimates of receptive vocabulary size were also collected and entered the analyses as a continuous predictor. Results: In both tasks, naming accuracy was high and equivalent in the three groups. On response times, linear mixed effects (LME) models including the vocabulary scores as covariate indicated a Group by Stimulus category interaction, robust in both RAN and single naming tasks. The performance of readers, regardless of schooling (either literate or ex-illiterate) was not significantly affected by stimulus category, whereas illiterates were much slower on color naming than object naming. The literacy advantage was also larger for colors than objects. Vocabulary had no significant impact in performance and neither interacted with other variables. Conclusions: Our findings indicated that learning to read and education has a substantial impact in the automaticity with which visual nonlinguistic stimuli can be retrieved and named. Notably, literacy per se (regardless of schooling) led to faster naming of (depicted) concepts, especially of more abstract categories such as colors. This literacy-related advantage is not mere consequence of the vocabulary expansion promoted by education. A strong possibility then is that literacy-induced lexical quality (i.e., sharpened lexical representations) affects the efficiency of either lexical-semantic or conceptual processing.

Poster

02/17/2024
10:45 am - 12:00 pm
Room: Shubert Complex (Posters 1-60)

Poster Session 11: Cultural Neuropsychology | Education/Training | Professional Practice Issues

Final Abstract #18

Can Literacy Act as a Refiner of Conceptual Representations?

Susana Araújo, Faculty of Psycholgy, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Tânia Fernandes, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Margarida Cipriano, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Laura Mealha, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Catarina Silva-Nunes, Faculty of Psychology, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Falk Huettig, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Category: Cross Cultural Neuropsychology/ Clinical Cultural Neuroscience

Keyword 1: acculturation
Keyword 2: naming
Keyword 3: semantic processing

Objective:

Conceptual knowledge is one of the most defining properties of human cognition, which is highly permeable to enrichment experiences. Therefore, education, schooling, and learning to read (i.e., literacy) can act as gateways to the acquisition of new words and concepts. In the present study we tested the potential impact of schooling and literacy on the efficiency of accessing conceptual knowledge and whether such impact was a mere side-effect of vocabulary expansion promoted by education.

Participants and Methods:

Sixty-nine adults from the same residential, cultural, and socioeconomic background participated. They were from three groups based on schooling and literacy skills, matched for age and sex: 31 fully illiterate (Mage= 40.7 yrs.; 21 female); 19 unschooled ex‐illiterate (Mage= 45.7 yrs.; 13 female) who already had finished an adulthood alphabetization course; 19 early-schooled literate (Mage= 41.1 yrs.; 13 female) who had, on average, 8 years of formal education. None showed signs of neurological or cognitive impairment. It was strictly for cultural/socioeconomic reasons that (ex-)illiterates did not attend school during childhood. In two experiments, participants were tested on continuous, rapid automatized naming (RAN) and on single naming of common everyday objects (concrete concepts) and basic color patches (abstract concepts). Estimates of receptive vocabulary size were also collected and entered the analyses as a continuous predictor.

Results:

In both tasks, naming accuracy was high and equivalent in the three groups. On response times, linear mixed effects (LME) models including the vocabulary scores as covariate indicated a Group by Stimulus category interaction, robust in both RAN and single naming tasks. The performance of readers, regardless of schooling (either literate or ex-illiterate) was not significantly affected by stimulus category, whereas illiterates were much slower on color naming than object naming. The literacy advantage was also larger for colors than objects. Vocabulary had no significant impact in performance and neither interacted with other variables.

Conclusions:

Our findings indicated that learning to read and education has a substantial impact in the automaticity with which visual nonlinguistic stimuli can be retrieved and named. Notably, literacy per se (regardless of schooling) led to faster naming of (depicted) concepts, especially of more abstract categories such as colors. This literacy-related advantage is not mere consequence of the vocabulary expansion promoted by education. A strong possibility then is that literacy-induced lexical quality (i.e., sharpened lexical representations) affects the efficiency of either lexical-semantic or conceptual processing.