De plus en plus d’individus sont concernes par les effets du vieillissement sur leurs facultes mentales (e.g., declin de la memoire) et la crainte de developper une maladie d’Alzheimer. Si leur plainte mnesique est confirmee par des performances de memoire inferieures a celles de sujets sains de meme âge, ces personnes recoivent le diagnostic de trouble cognitif leger (MCI, Mild Cognitive Impairment), un syndrome qui evolue parfois vers la maladie d’Alzheimer. Toutefois, tous les patients MCI ne developpent pas de maladie d’Alzheimer, certains restent stables et d’autres reviennent meme a la normale. Un des facteurs explicatifs pourrait etre l’effet de menace du stereotype qui conduirait les patients a produire une contre-performance lors des bilans neuropsychologiques, amenant ainsi, a tort, a un diagnostic de trouble cognitif leger. Plusieurs etudes en laboratoire ont montre que les stereotypes negatifs sur le vieillissement (croyances que le vieillissement entraine inevitablement un declin cognitif) peuvent perturber le fonctionnement cognitif normal des personnes âgees en bonne sante, les amenant a obtenir des performances en dessous de leurs veritables capacites. Cet effet deletere des stereotypes sur les performances est connu sous le nom de « menace du stereotype ». Quelques etudes seulement ont examine l’effet de menace du stereotype sur les performances de personnes âgees a des tests neuropsychologiques classiquement utilises en clinique, mais uniquement en situation de laboratoire. Cet article presente ces etudes ainsi que le protocole d’une experimentation qui vise a tester, pour la premiere fois, l’effet de menace du stereotype lors d’un examen neuropsychologique en situation clinique chez des patients venant pour une premiere consultation memoire. Les enjeux cliniques d’une telle etude sont discutes.

Stereotype threat is a situational threat that arises when individuals feel at risk of confirming a negative stereotype about their group's ability in a performance domain, resulting in underperformance on stereotype-relevant tests. While early works mainly focused on stereotype threat effects among ethnic minorities (especially African Americans) in the domain of verbal intelligence and among women in mathematics, a growing body of research then examined these effects on older adults’ cognitive performance. The culturally shared belief that older adults inescapably experience memory decline and neurodegenerative disease is prevalent in our societies. These negative stereotypes of aging may create additional pressure and stress for older adults during testing, which may interfere with their cognitive resources and lead them to underperform. Over the past twenty years, several laboratory experiments have demonstrated stereotype threat effects, documented their underlying mechanisms, and provided various interventions to overcome their detrimental consequences on performance, including among older adults on memory tests. The present article offers an overview of this research, addresses the current debate about a potential difference between younger and older adults in the mechanisms behind stereotype threat effects, and draws attention to a confusion surrounding the no-threat control condition. Finally, this review outlines that there is now enough evidence to hypothesize that the stereotype threat effect is likely to bias the assessment of normal cognitive aging outside the laboratory, within the clinical setting during real neuropsychological testing.

As life expectancy increases, aging has become a major health challenge, resulting in a huge effort to better discriminate between normal and pathological cognitive decline. It is thus essential that cognitive tests and their administration are as fair as possible. However, an important source of bias during cognitive testing comes from negative aging stereotypes that can impair the memory performance of older adults and inflate age differences on cognitive tasks. The fear of confirming negative aging stereotypes creates an extra pressure among older adults which interferes with their intellectual functioning and leads them to perform below their true abilities. Here, we present a protocol that highlights simple but efficient interventions to alleviate this age-based stereotype threat effect. The first study showed that simply informing older participants about the presence of younger participants (threat condition) led older adults to underperform on a standardized memory test compared with younger participants, and that this performance difference was eliminated when the test was presented as age-fair (reduced-threat condition). The second study replicated these findings on short cognitive tests used to screen for predementia in clinical settings and showed that teaching older adults about stereotype threat inoculated them against its effects. These results provide useful recommendations about how to improve older adults' memory assessment both in Iab studies and in clinical settings.

This study aimed at investigating attentional mechanisms in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) by analysing how visual search processes are modulated by normal and obsession-related distracting information in OCD patients and whether these modulations differ from those observed in healthy people. OCD patients were asked to search for a target word within distractor words that could be orthographically similar to the target, semantically related to the target, semantically related to the most typical obsessions/compulsions observed in OCD patients, or unrelated to the target. Patients' performance and eye movements were compared with those of individually matched healthy controls. In controls, the distractors that were visually similar to the target mostly captured attention. Conversely, patients' attention was captured equally by all kinds of distractor words, whatever their similarity with the target, except obsession-related distractors that attracted patients' attention less than the other distractors. OCD had a major impact on the mostly subliminal mechanisms that guide attention within the search display, but had much less impact on the distractor rejection processes that take place when a distractor is fixated. Hence, visual search in OCD is characterized by abnormal subliminal, but not supraliminal, processing of obsession-related information and by an impaired ability to inhibit task-irrelevant inputs.

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. How long to find the cause? An on-line investigation of implicit causality in sentence production. Michèle Guerry, Manuel Gimenes, D. Caplan, François Rigalleau

Objectives There is today ample evidence that negative aging stereotypes impair healthy older adults' performance on cognitive tasks. Here, we tested whether these stereotypes also decrease performance during the screening for predementia on short cognitive tests widely used in primary care. Method An experiment was conducted on 80 healthy older adults taking the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) under Threat or Reduced-threat condition. Results Stereotype threat significantly impaired older adults' performance on both tests, resulting in 40% of older adults meeting the screening criteria for predementia, compared with 10% in Reduced-threat condition (MMSE and MoCA averaged). Discussion Our research highlights the influence of aging stereotypes on short cognitive tests used to screen for predementia. It is of critical importance that physicians provide a threat-free testing environment. Further research should clarify whether this socially induced bias may also operate in secondary care by generating false positives.

Some research on written production has focused on the role of the syllable as a processing unit. However, the precise nature of this syllable unit has yet to be elucidated. The present study examined whether the nature of this processing unit is orthographic (i.e., an ortho-syllable) or phonological. We asked French adults to copy three-syllable and two-syllable words with or without a mute e. In French, a silent e may affect the orthographic syllabification of a word and increase the number of ortho-syllables. In Experiment 1, the mute e was in final position. The presence of the mute e increased writing latencies. In Experiment 2, which compared words with or without an internal mute e, the latencies for three-syllable words did not differ from those for two-syllable words containing a mute e. These results support the hypothesis that handwriting has a specific orthographic processing unit based on graphemic constituents.

There is now evidence that negative age-related stereotypes about memory reduce older adults' memory performance, and inflate age differences in this domain. Here, we examine whether stereotype threat may also influence the basic feeling that one is more or less able to remember. Using the Remember/Know paradigm, we demonstrated that stereotype threat conducted older adults to a greater feeling of familiarity with events, while failing to retrieve any contextual detail. This finding indicates that stereotype threat alters older adults' subjective experience of memory, and strengthens our understanding of the mechanisms underlying stereotype threat effects.

Because of a dramatic increase of older people worldwide, screening for prodromal state of Alzheimer disease (AD) is a major societal challenge. Many individuals diagnosed with prodromal AD, do not convert to AD, some remaining stable and others reversing back to normal. We argue that an important source of this overdiagnosis comes from negative aging stereotypes (eg, the culturally shared beliefs that aging inescapably causes severe cognitive decline and diseases). Many laboratory studies show that such stereotypes impair memory performance in healthy older adults, producing inflated age differences. Research is needed to examine how aging stereotypes implicitly permeate neuropsychological testing and contribute to false positives.

Recent studies about the implicit causality of inter-personal verbs showed a symmetric implicit consequentiality bias for psychological verbs. This symmetry is less clear for action verbs because the verbs assigning the implicit cause to the object argument (e.g. “Peter protected John because he was in danger.”) tend to assign the implicit consequence to the same argument (e.g. “Peter protected John so he was not hurt.”). We replicated this result by comparing continuations of inter-personal events followed by a causal connective “because” or a consequence connective “so”. Moreover, we found similar results when the consequence connective was replaced by a contrastive connective “but”. This result was confirmed in a second experiment where we measured the time required to imagine a consistent continuation for a fragment finishing with “but s/he ...”. The results were consistent with a contrastive connective introducing a denial of a consequence of the previous event. The results were consistent with a model suggesting that thematic roles and connectives can predict preferred co-reference relations.

We analyzed the differential processing of nouns and verbs in a lexical-decision task (LDT). Both nouns and verbs referred to dynamic or static situations. The characteristics of our material were specified at both the formal level (number of letters, number of orthographic neighbors, frequency and age of acquisition), and at the semantic level (dynamicity, imageability, number and strength of associations, number of meanings, context dependency). A hierarchical regression analysis indicated an effect of number of letters and, more importantly, enabled us to conclude that semantic effects were involved, in particular as a result of the contrast between the representations of static and dynamic situations. In contrast, imageability, a semantic factor that is sometimes claimed to account for the noun advantage in LDT, did not appear to be involved.

We analyzed the differential processing of nouns and verbs in a lexical decision task. Moderate and high-frequency nouns and verbs were compared. The characteristics of our material were specified at the formal level (number of letters and syllables, number of homographs, orthographic neighbors, frequency and age of acquisition), and at the semantic level (imagery, number and strength of associations, number of meanings, context dependency). A regression analysis indicated a classical frequency effect and a word-type effect, with latencies for verbs being slower than for nouns. The regression analysis did not permit the conclusion that semantic effects were involved (particularly imageability). Nevertheless, the semantic opposition between nouns as prototypical representations of objects, and verbs as prototypical representation of actions was not tested in this experiment and remains a good candidate explanation of the response time discrepancies between verbs and nouns.

The threat of being judged stereotypically (stereotype threat) may impair memory performance in older adults, thereby producing inflated age differences in memory tasks. However, the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat in older adults or other stigmatized groups remain poorly understood. Here, we offer evidence that stereotype threat consumes working memory resources in older adults. More important, using a process-dissociation procedure, we found, for the first time, that stereotype threat undermines the controlled use of memory and simultaneously intensifies automatic response tendencies. These findings indicate that competing models of stereotype threat are actually compatible and offer further reasons for researchers and practitioners to pay special attention to age-related stereotypes during standardized neuropsychological testing.

Résumé L’amorçage syntaxique est un phénomène de réutilisation de la structure syntaxique d’une phrase « amorce » qu’un locuteur vient de percevoir ou de produire. Dans cet article, nous définissons dans un premier temps l’amorçage syntaxique, en détaillant le contexte de sa découverte et en précisant les arguments en faveur d’un amorçage purement syntaxique. Nous évoquons notamment les arguments suggérant que cet amorçage ne dépend pas d’aspects non-syntaxiques. Puis nous envisageons deux facteurs influençant l’amorçage syntaxique : la similarité lexicale entre la phrase amorce et la phrase cible, et la fréquence des structures syntaxiques. Dans un deuxième temps, nous abordons cet effet d’amorçage sur un plan théorique, en le situant dans les modèles de production verbale. Nous évoquons aussi la contribution mnésique que l’amorçage syntaxique nécessite. Enfin nous considérons le lien qu’il suggère entre les représentations syntaxiques en compréhension et en production.

Syntactic priming (SP) refers to speaker's tendency to reuse in the current sentence (the target sentence) the syntactic structure of a priming sentence that was previously perceived or produced. In this paper, after recalling the initial experimental evidences of this effect, we review the arguments suggesting that this effect is not related to a tendency to reuse non-syntactic aspects of a sentence. Then we examine two factors influencing SP: the lexical similarity between the prime and the target, and the frequency of the priming structure. Secondly, we discuss the SP effect in the models of language production. We also consider which memory system is required to explain syntactic priming. Finally, we consider how SP can shed some light on the link between the syntactic representations in comprehension and in production.

Motivation -- To reduce user linguistic variability in human-system interaction. Research approach -- An experiment was conducted in which 72 participants interacted over the phone with a simulated natural language dialogue system. The main manipulation concerned the lexical content and the structure of the message prompts. Findings/Design -- The results confirm that users align with the system on the lexical and structural levels in human-system dialogue. However, the strength of the syntactic alignment depends on the content of the prime. Research limitations/Implications -- This experiment should be replicated user a greater number of different prime system messages. Originality/Value -- By manipulating prime content, this study allows investigating alignment strength as a function of word frequency and user preferences. Take-away message -- Lexical and syntactic priming can be used to reduce user linguistic variability in human-system interaction, but the strength of these phenomena depends on the content of the prime.

Double centre-embedded structures such as “the rat the cat the boy chased ate was brown” seem ungrammatical to many human subjects. Using an offline complexity judgement task, Gibson and Thomas (1999) demonstrated that people found such sentences no more difficult to understand when the second verb phrase (VP) was omitted, relative to a condition where all the required VPs were present. According to the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT; Gibson, 1998), this syntactic illusion is determined by the high working memory cost associated with the integration of the second VP. This cost could be reduced by replacing the third noun phrase (the boy) by a pronoun, making the reader more sensitive to the omission of the second VP. This hypothesis was tested in two experiments using French sentences. Both experiments confirmed the syntactic illusion when the second VP was not a pronoun. The second experiment measured the reading times of the VPs and showed that the pronoun induced a longer reading time of the final VP when the second VP was omitted. The overall results indicate a condition under which human subjects could process the most complex part of a sentence with more than one embedded relative clause. The overall results are consistent with most of the hypotheses derived from the SPLT although offline complexity judgements could not be the most sensitive measure to test some of these hypotheses.

Using an off-line complexity judgement task, Gibson and Thomas (1999) demonstrated that people found sentences with double centre-embedded relative clauses as easy to understand when the second verb phrase (VP) was omitted as when there were the three required verb phrases. This paper reports a self-paced reading experiment testing this syntactic illusion in French language. The results showed that readers rated the sentences where the second VP was omitted as easier to understand than the grammatical versions, even though the reading time of the last VP was longer for the ungrammatical version. The overall results support theories predicting that the sentence acceptability rating can be enhanced when a syntactically required word with an excessive integration cost is removed. The results are consistent with resource-based theories of sentence processing.