Recently, LexiaD, a dyslexia-specific Cyrillic font, was tested alongside the widely used Arial font in an experiment during which adolescents with and without dyslexia silently read sentences on a computer screen (Alexeeva et al., 2022). LexiaD showed a worse performance than Arial at the beginning of the experiment, but by the end of it, LexiaD demonstrated a positive effect in feature extraction and similar performance in lexical access, text integration, and global reading processing. We suggest that Arial’s initial advantage can be explained either by its familiarity or by its design features. The current study aims to test these assumptions in adolescents without dyslexia by comparing LexiaD with two popular fonts familiar to adolescents: Times New Roman and Roboto (a default font for the Google applications that is similar to Arial). Participants silently read printed versions of three texts (one in each of the three fonts) while their eye movements were recorded using a mobile eye tracker (Pupil Core glasses). In reading speed measures, Roboto outperformed LexiaD, whereas we found no evidence that Times New Roman’s performance was better than that of LexiaD. Moreover, there was no evidence that the control fonts differed in terms of subjective font familiarity. Therefore, we speculate that it was the design features that contributed the most to Arial becoming a facilitating font in the previous experiment. A study that investigates the efficiency of LexiaD, Arial/Roboto, and Times New Roman in a less experienced group (with participants less accustomed to particular fonts) is required to replicate our results. Involving people with dyslexia in future studies is extremely important.

No abstract

Simultaneous interpreting is one of the most comprehensive and energy-consuming types of cognitive activity. To work successfully, a simultaneous interpreter must have a specific functional state. The aim of our study was to find out the basic mechanisms of this functional state, the effect of the simultaneous interpreting on cognitive function changes, and the main factors influencing the degree of the regulatory systems strain. Materials and Methods. 33 individuals participated in the study: 22 linguists specially trained in simultaneous translation composed the experimental group and 11 language-qualified people having no skills of simultaneous translation represented the control group. In compliance with the study design, the measurements were performed under the conditions similar to the real work of simultaneous interpreters: the participants working in succession performed professional tasks: shadowing in the native and foreign languages (German and English), simultaneous interpretation of the reports from the native language to the foreign, and vice versa. The interpreters were psychologically tested using ApWay.ru Web platform before and after the performance on the professional tasks: computer campimetry, test for a simple sensorimotor activity, Stroop test, and test for emotional disadaptation level. Cardiointervalogram was telemetrically recorded during the entire experiment. Results. Some specific aspects of autonomic provision of simultaneous interpreting have been unraveled. A significantly greater tension of the autonomic regulation is manifested by the simultaneous interpreters compared to the control group. It was most prominent when translation was done from the foreign language. The total level of stress during the performance on the linguistic tasks appeared to be higher in the control group. In the simultaneous interpreters, in contrast to the control group, there was registered a high activity level of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and a marked integration of the cardiac rhythm regulation circuits over the entire period of performing the linguistic tasks. The psychological tests have demonstrated a significantly more confident cognitive control relative to the control group. Thus, a specific functional system has been formed in the simultaneous interpreters providing a successful interaction of various information images (or codes) and consolidation of autonomic and cognitive resources during the performance on professional tasks. Lack of the necessary skills and, consequently, of the task-oriented functional system in the participants of the control group resulted in the enhancement of the non-specific (less effective) stress response.

No abstract

There have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.