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Biomedical subjects

A Wingfield

Publications and source records attributed to A Wingfield.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources
PubMed1984

Cerebral specialization and hemispheric performance asymmetries in narrative memory.

Data on cerebral specialization derived from studies of human head-injuries have long implicated the left hemisphere's critical role in speech processing and verbal memory. We report a relatively simple paradigm which demonstrates an analogous asymmetry in narrative recall performance in normal subjects when either one hemisphere or the other is concurrently engaged with control of a secondary motor task. Caution in generalizing these data to performance asymmetries in brain-injured patients is nevertheless required.

Attention↗
PubMed1979

Intonation and intelligibility of time-compressed speech. Supplementary report: English vs. French.

Comparative data are reported for the intelligibility of English and of French time-compressed speech when heard spoken either in normal intonation or in intonation patterns conflicting with underlying syntactic structure. Within an overall decrement in intelligibility with increasing compression, both French and English show similar superiority functions for sentences heard in normal intonation. Results suggest a role of prosodic features in perceptual processing of French comparable to that previously reported for English.

Adult↗
PubMed1975

Acoustic redundancy and the perception of time-compressed speech.

An experiment is reported in which time-compressed sentences were heard spoken either in normal intonation or in intonation patterns that conflicted with their underlying syntactic structure. Although there was an overall decrement in intelligibility with increasing compression, sentences heard in normal intonation were significantly better able to withstand the debilitating effects of compression than those with anomalous intonation. An error analysis of subject responses suggests that intonation normally operates to supply supplemental cues for determining syntactic structures as a step in the perceptual coding of heard speech.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed1971

Recognition and naming of object-drawings by men with focal brain wounds.

The ability to name object-drawings, measured by score and response latency, was examined in men with chronic, focal brain lesions due to missile injury. The group with left hemisphere lesions was significantly impaired on both measures and this impairment was clearly related to the incidence of clinically detectable dysphasia. In contrast, the impairment of the bilateral group was not closely associated with dysphasia; it was characterized by long response latencies which exceeded the sum of unilateral deficits in the task. Analysis of response errors showed that both misnaming and misidentification occurred but were often dissociated. Difficulty in naming was noted in men with lesions involving the left temporal lobe. Misidentification was not common; it occured more frequently in the bilateral group, in men with lesions of the occipital areas of the brain. Dissociated deficits were also noted within the group of men with residual dysphasia.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The role of prosody in the mental lexicon.

Current models of spoken word recognition take into account factors such as word frequency, word onset cohort size, and phonological neighborhood density. Using the word onset gating technique we tested word recognition when bandpass filtering was used to allow subjects to hear the full prosodic pattern of a word (number of syllables and syllabic stress), deprived of segmental information beyond that contained in the onset gate. Subjects also heard either word onsets plus duration information or only word onsets. Results suggest that word prosody is represented in the mental lexicon and is effectively used by listeners in spoken word recognition.

Cognition↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Adult aging and listening patterns for spoken prose: spontaneous segmentation versus self-paced listening.

Young and older adults were allowed to control the delivery rate of spoken prose for later recall using two methods. In one method (spontaneous segmentation), participants were allowed to interrupt speech passages whenever they wished. In the other method (self-paced listening), speech passages were presented in segments, with participants allowed to initiate presentation of subsequent segments via a key-press. Older adults' segment sizes in the spontaneous segmentation condition were unchanged when the passages were presented for a second time. By contrast, pause latencies to initiating subsequent segments in the self-paced listening condition were affected by experience with the passage. Results suggested that the segment sizes selected in the spontaneous segmentation condition were driven by the linguistic structure and prosody of the speech, rather than reflecting ineffective metamemory on the part of the older adults.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Does the capacity of working memory change with age?

Young and elderly adults were compared for recall performance on simple digit and word spans (traditional tests of primary memory), versus a "loaded" auditory word span test designed to emphasize working memory capacity. Although digit spans were identical for the two age groups, there were small but significant age differences in word span, and even larger differences in working memory performance. An analysis of correlations between span measures and verbal ability scores supported the position that working memory loading represents a special problem for the elderly.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Passage difficulty, speech rate, and age differences in memory for spoken text: speech recall and the complexity hypothesis.

Memory for speech in young and elderly adults was studied by varying speech rate and average predictability of prose passages (measured by a "cloze" procedure). Increased speech rate and decreased predictability yielded poorer memory performance on three retention measures (free recall, cued recall, and multiple-choice recognition), confirming passage predictability as a good predictor of empirical difficulty of a speech passage. Older adults recalled less than young adults on all three measures, with increasing speech rates producing special difficulty for the elderly subjects relative to the young. Although there was a suggestion that elderly subjects were less able to take advantage of passage predictability than the young in recall of very rapid speech, neither age group showed an interaction between passage predictability and speech rate. Results are discussed in terms of a simple extension of the complexity hypothesis to speech recall.

Aged↗