Construct validity is essential to evaluate the generalizability of findings on literacy and dyslexia. Operational definitions of reading literacy determine the measurement method, yielding territory or country-wide literacy rates. This practice echoes the norm in diagnosis and prevalence estimates of dyslexia. International Large-Scale Assessments (ILSA) of literacy such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) compare countries' performances in relation to how well their students are reading. In this paper, we reexamine the validity claims and evidence using the examples of countries in Southeast Asia-Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, purported to have high proportions of poor readers. The challenge of characterizing reading performance and designing suitable measures for valid international comparisons is similar across phases of reading development and proficiency. The importance of the specificity of scripts and languages for reading abilities and impairments is highlighted. We suggest ways in which researchers can approach the assessment of reading proficiency from a cross-cultural and an interdisciplinary perspective. These can foster contextual caveats for generating and interpreting evidence.

The current study investigates whether the types of pronominal errors children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make are different from those of their TD peers at similar stages of language development. A recent review about language acquisition in ASD argues that these children show relative deficits in assigning/extending lexical meaning alongside relative strengths in morpho-syntax (Naigles & Tek, 2017). Pronouns provide an ideal test case for this argument because they are marked both for grammatical features (case) and features that reflect qualities of the referent itself (gender and number) or the referent's role in conversation (person). The form-meaning hypothesis predicts that children with ASD should struggle more with these latter features. The current study tests this hypothesis with data from a caregiver report, completed by caregivers of 151 children with and without ASD. Reported pronominal errors were categorized as meaning or form and compared across groups. In accordance with the form-meaning hypothesis, a higher proportion of children with ASD make meaning errors than they do form errors, and significantly more of them make meaning errors than TD children do.

One of the advantages of being bilingual is the ability to translate from one language to the other. From language learners to professional interpreters, many different types of bilinguals engage in translation in their daily lives. How successful they are, however, depends on a wide range of factors. The current study aimed to identify the cognitive and linguistic variables that predict how quickly and accurately bilinguals are able to translate single words. Eighteen Chinese-English bilinguals listened to words in their second language (L2 English) and verbally translated them into their native tongue (L1 Chinese). We observed that translation performance was predicted by factors related to language background, such as second language competence and language exposure, as well as domain-general cognitive abilities, such as inhibitory control. Translation performance was additionally influenced by features of the source language, such as word frequency, neighborhood density, and bi-gram/bi-phone probability. By examining factors relating to language experience, cognitive ability, and linguistic input, we shed light on the dynamic interaction that is required among multiple variables for successful translation.

When processing spoken language sentences, listeners continuously make and revise predictions about the upcoming linguistic signal. In contrast, during comprehension of American Sign Language (ASL), signers must simultaneously attend to the unfolding linguistic signal and the surrounding scene via the visual modality. This may affect how signers activate potential lexical candidates and allocate visual attention as a sentence unfolds. To determine how signers resolve referential ambiguity during real-time comprehension of ASL adjectives and nouns, we presented deaf adults (n = 18, 19-61 years) and deaf children (n = 20, 4-8 years) with videos of ASL sentences in a visual world paradigm. Sentences had either an adjective-noun ("SEE YELLOW WHAT? FLOWER") or a noun-adjective ("SEE FLOWER WHICH? YELLOW") structure. The degree of ambiguity in the visual scene was manipulated at the adjective and noun levels (i.e., including one or more yellow items and one or more flowers in the visual array). We investigated effects of ambiguity and word order on target looking at early and late points in the sentence. Analysis revealed that adults and children made anticipatory looks to a target when it could be identified early in the sentence. Further, signers looked more to potential lexical candidates than to unrelated competitors in the early window, and more to matched than unrelated competitors in the late window. Children's gaze patterns largely aligned with those of adults with some divergence. Together, these findings suggest that signers allocate referential attention strategically based on the amount and type of ambiguity at different points in the sentence when processing adjectives and nouns in ASL.

Smiling is believed to make people look younger. Ganel and Goodale (Psychon Bull Rev 25(6):612-616, 10.3758/s13423-017-1306-8, 2018) proposed that this belief is a misconception rooted in popular media, based on their findings that people actually perceive smiling faces as older. However, they did not clarify whether this misconception can be generalized across cultures. We tested the cross-cultural validity of Ganel and Goodale's findings by collecting data from Japanese and Swedish participants. Specifically, we aimed to replicate Ganel and Goodale's study using segregated sets of Japanese and Swedish facial stimuli, and including Japanese and Swedish participants in groups asked to estimate the age of either Japanese or Swedish faces (two groups of participants × two groups of stimuli; four groups total). Our multiverse analytical approach consistently showed that the participants evaluated smiling faces as older in direct evaluations, regardless of the facial stimuli culture or their nationality, although they believed that smiling makes people look younger. Further, we hypothesized that the effect of wrinkles around the eyes on the estimation of age would vary with the stimulus culture, based on previous studies. However, we found no differences in age estimates by stimulus culture in the present study. Our results showed that we successfully replicated Ganel and Goodale (2018) in a cross-cultural context. Our study thus clarified that the belief that smiling makes people look younger is a common cultural misconception.

This study investigated the universality of emotional prosody in perception of discrete emotions when semantics is not available. In two experiments the perception of emotional prosody in Hebrew and German by listeners who speak one of the languages but not the other was investigated. Having a parallel tool in both languages allowed to conduct controlled comparisons. In Experiment 1, 39 native German speakers with no knowledge of Hebrew and 80 native Israeli speakers rated Hebrew sentences spoken with four different emotional prosodies (anger, fear, happiness, sadness) or neutral. The Hebrew version of the Test for Rating of Emotions in Speech (T-RES) was used for this purpose. Ratings indicated participants' agreement on how much the sentence conveyed each of four discrete emotions (anger, fear, happiness and sadness). In Experient 2, 30 native speakers of German, and 24 Israeli native speakers of Hebrew who had no knowledge of German rated sentences of the German version of the T-RES. Based only on the prosody, German-speaking participants were able to accurately identify the emotions in the Hebrew sentences and Hebrew-speaking participants were able to identify the emotions in the German sentences. In both experiments ratings between the groups were similar. These findings show that individuals are able to identify emotions in a foreign language even if they do not have access to semantics. This ability goes beyond identification of target emotion; similarities between languages exist even for "wrong" perception. This adds to accumulating evidence in the literature on the universality of emotional prosody.