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PubMed2006

[A linguistic analysis of Norwegian medical discourse].

BACKGROUND: Recent studies show that the traditional conception of academic writing practices as neutral and deprived of personal elements needs to be revised. The KIAP project investigates whether there is such a thing as cultural identity in academic prose and to what extent it may be related to discipline or language. The genre "research article" is analysed with respect to specific linguistic devises which may indicate similarities and differences between articles written in different languages (English, French, Norwegian) and within different disciplines (economics, linguistics, medicine). MATERIALS AND METHODS: The material consists of an electronic corpus containing 450 refereed articles taken from recognised journals. The methods used are both quantitative and qualitative. RESULTS AND INTERPRETATION: The results confirm the main hypothesis that discipline is more important than language for the explanation of similarities and differences between the nine sub-corpora. Medical articles in all languages are characterised by relatively few occurrences of first person pronouns, indefinite pronouns, meta-textual elements, negations and concessive constructions; on the other hand, medical articles have the highest frequency as regards bibliographical references. These observations may to some extent be explained by different academic traditions, different objects of study and different methods. Norwegian medical articles contain relatively more occurrences of the studied linguistic phenomena than the English and French articles.

Communication↗
PubMedDate not supplied

[An introductive approach to linguistics (author's transl)].

The author proposes an information on the semiological approach to language starting from the systemic perspective (later to be said structuralist) which has been introduced by the Saussure. A group of notions can be delineated, which are distributed in binomial oppositions: language and verb, synchronia and diachronia, meaning and signified (which define the linguistic sign, which arbitrary character is being discussed) and other oppositions. The descriptive study of linguistic units of the chain concerns phonetics and phonology. The regulations for constructing a coherent message concern grammar (or syntax), where the traditional, normative approach is in opposition with actual research, descriptive and structural: distributionnal grammar, transforming, categorial, functional. The application of new linguistic methods to human sciences is very promising and opens the way of an interesting meditation on human condition.

Linguistics↗
PubMed1995

On the linguistic representation of medical information: natural language, controlled language, and formal language.

Language is indispensable for the representation of medical information. We classified the methods of linguistic representation into three items: natural language, controlled language, and formal language. The characteristics of these are discussed; we focus especially on the preparation of data and data quality. We present the perspective that linguistic research in medical informatics can be considered as an effort to convert natural language into formal language and vice versa. The problems related to the conversion and the role of controlled language in medical linguistics are discussed in detail.

Language↗
PubMed1996

Mitochondrial DNA sequence variation across linguistic and geographic boundaries in Italy.

A previous investigation demonstrated the existence of extensive allele frequency diversity within an area of northern Italy crossed by a linguistic (dialect) boundary and by the Po River, either of them or both presumably constraining gene flow. We obtained hair samples from 45 school pupils from 9 localities in that area and sequenced a 255-bp segment of the mtDNA D loop. Estimates of the minimum number of migration events from gene genealogies suggest that the linguistic barrier impaired gene flow more than the river did. However, an analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) showed that most sequence diversity occurs within rather than between populations and that the differences between groups of populations, defined either by linguistic or geographic criteria, do not reach significance. Three areas of rapid genetic variation were identified; their locations suggest that populations of the western part of the study area evolved in relative isolation. Therefore mtDNA sequence variation does not seem to reflect the same processes--drift and presence of dispersal barriers--that led to the observed distributions of nuclear allele frequencies.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

The distinction between linguistic and conceptual semantics in medical terminology and its implication for NLP-based knowledge acquisition.

Natural language understanding systems have to exploit various kinds of knowledge in order to represent the meaning behind texts. Getting this knowledge in place is often such a huge enterprise that it is tempting to look for systems that can discover such knowledge automatically. We describe how the distinction between conceptual and linguistic semantics may assist in reaching this objective, provided that distinguishing between them is not done too rigorously. We present several examples to support this view and argue that in a multilingual environment, linguistic ontologies should be designed as interfaces between domain conceptualizations and linguistic knowledge bases.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1996

Disorders of affective and linguistic prosody in children after early unilateral brain damage.

Prosody is that quality of speech that imparts meaning by changes in intonation, pitch, and stress. The right hemisphere (RH) appears to be dominant for affective prosody in adults, while the left hemisphere (LH) mediates the more linguistic aspects of nonverbal communication. Few similar studies have been reported of individuals who suffered early unilateral brain damage, when brain reorganization or plasticity might be expected to play a role in ameliorating the adverse effects of focal brain damage. In this study, comprehension and expression of affective and linguistic prosody were tested in subjects with documented unilateral brain damage of pre- or perinatal onset and in matched controls. Both RH- and LH-lesion groups demonstrated difficulty on tasks involving expression of affective prosody, and on tests of linguistic prosody, compared with controls. Only the RH-lesion group was impaired on an affective comprehension task. The results indicate that even after very early unilateral brain damage, prosodic deficits may be present. However, only for affective comprehension does the side of the lesion appear to determine such deficits. The findings suggest that during brain development there is not clear brain lateralization for prosody and there may be bilateral representation for these skills during early development. There may be limitations to the ability of the developing brain to reorganize after early injury.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Prosody, linguistic demands, and auditory comprehension in aphasia.

Prosody plays a clear role in the auditory comprehension of narratives by aphasic listeners. Previous research, however, has pointed to questions regarding variables which increase task complexity (e.g., memory, reading level) and the influence of the severity of aphasia. This study examined the role of the severity of aphasia and linguistic complexity in narrative comprehension by aphasic listeners. Findings indicate that while all subject groups improved their auditory comprehension when emphasis was present, people with severe aphasia improved significantly more, but only in a low linguistic complexity condition. However, subjects had additional opportunity for improved performance in both low and high linguistic complexity conditions. These results pose additional questions about perceived task difficulty (and performance) and resource allocation strategies.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Development of the ability to perceive ambiguities: evidence for the task specificity of a linguistic skill.

This study asked whether children's ability to perceive linguistic ambiguities was correlated with that of perceiving pictorial ambiguities. A total of 48 ambiguous sentences and 24 ambiguous pictures were selected for comprehensibility. Half the sentences and pictures were symbolic ambiguities (i.e., they contained symbols that stood for two different objects) and half were structural ambiguities (i.e., the structures of the sentences or pictures could be broken up two different ways). No significant correlations were found between the linguistic and pictorial modes. In both modes, correct performance on the symbolic ambiguities was better and was observed earlier than that for structural ambiguities. After taking into account certain methodological problems with nonsignificant correlations and ambiguous sentences, it was concluded that at least some nontrivial component of the linguistic ambiguity detector was task specific to language.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1986

The effect of stress on the linguistic generalization of bilingual individuals.

Spanish-English coordinate bilinguals were subjects in a GSR linguistic conditioning experiment using strong and mild buzzer conditions and spoken stimuli. Each subject was randomly assigned to one of two lists of words and one of two levels of buzzer sounds. A Spanish word from the Spanish list and an English word from the English list functioned as a conditioned word (CS). The lists were Spanish and English words related semantically and phonemically and unrelated to the CS. Generalization was studied under conscious and unconscious conditions. We found that both buzzer conditions resulted in significantly greater GSR responses to semantic and phonemic words than to words unrelated to the CS. Generalization to semantic words was not significantly greater than to phonemic words. There was a tendency toward greater phonemic than semantic generalization in the strong buzzer condition. The opposite was observed regarding the mild buzzer. The results were the same in both lists and languages. Under a conscious and unstressful condition, generalization to semantic words was found to be more prominent than to phonemic words. This suggests that under normal condition semantic generalization is mediated by conscious cognition. We concluded that strong emotion produces an increase in phonemic, as compared to semantic, generalization in both languages. Hence, primitivization of the subjects' cognitive and linguistic functioning is assumed to have occurred. These results are important in understanding the deleterious effect that stressful situations may have on linguistic functioning and cognition in bilinguals.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

A partial solution to the homonym problem: parents' linguistic input to young children.

During early word learning, children may assume a unique form-meaning relationship: that a unique form corresponds to each meaning (Clark, 1987) and vice versa (Slobin, 1985). Homonyms appear to violate this one-to-one mapping, and therefore might prove problematic; for example, all things labeled bat might be put into the odd category 'things that fly and are used to play ball.' We asked whether parents' descriptions of homonyms to their young children provide linguistic information that could help children to differentiate conceptually and linguistically these cases. Fifteen parents described pictured sets of concrete object homonyms and categorically related objects to their young children. Parents described homonyms by using explicit statements of category inclusion, subordinate forms (compounds, e.g., kiwi-bird), and specific forms that flagged the unusual homonym relationship. Parents especially provided distinctive alternating forms for homonym pairs (e.g., iceskate vs. skate-fish) suggesting that they were attempting to preserve the unique form-meaning relationship violated by homonyms. We discuss how such linguistic information might be used by children to differentiate homonyms.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2006

Self-report and linguistic indicators of emotional expression in narratives as predictors of adjustment to cancer.

Emotional expression and cognitive efforts to adapt to cancer have been linked to better psychological adjustment. However, little is known about the relationship between linguistic indicators of emotional and cognitive coping efforts and corresponding self-report measures of related constructs. In this study, we sought to evaluate the interrelationships between self-reports of emotional suppression and linguistic indicators of emotional and cognitive coping efforts in those living with cancer. Seventy-one individuals attending a community cancer support group completed measures of emotional suppression and mood disturbance and provided a written narrative describing their cancer experience. Self-reports of emotional suppression were associated with more rather than less distress. Although linguistic indicators of both emotional expression and cognitive processing were generally uncorrelated with self-report measures of emotional suppression and mood disturbance, a significant interaction was observed between emotional suppression and use of cognitive words on mood disturbance. Among those using higher levels of emotional suppression, increasing use of cognitive words was associated with greater levels of mood disturbance. These findings have implications for a) the therapeutic use of emotion in psychosocial interventions and b) the use of computer-assisted technologies to conduct content analysis.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1992

Using children's humor to clarify the relationship between linguistic awareness and early reading ability.

This study uses linguistic humor to show that an awareness of only those linguistic units transcribed by the orthography bears a special relation to early reading success. The subjects were 48 second-grade children tested on ten "phoneme/morpheme" riddles which manipulate phonemes and bound morphemes and ten "control" riddles which depend on awareness of other aspects of linguistic structure and "common sense". Each child also received the Word Identification and Word Attack subtests of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test. Reading ability was significantly related to correct resolution of the phoneme/morpheme riddles but not to correct resolution of the control riddles. PPVT scores were significantly related to performance on both types of riddles but not to reading ability. Thus, while IQ is related to the resolution of riddles in general, reading ability has a special relation to riddles which manipulate phonemes and morphemes, consistent with the morphophonological nature of English orthography.

Child↗
PubMed1988

The role of the right hemisphere in the production of linguistic stress.

Recent research has proposed a general prosodic disturbance associated with right hemisphere damage (RHD), one encompassing both affective and linguistic functions. The present study attempted to explore whether the ability to produce linguistic prosody was impaired in this patient population. Productions of phonemic stress tokens (e.g., Re'dcoat vs. red coa't) as well as examples of contrastive stress, or sentential emphasis (e.g., Sam hated the movie), were elicited from eight male speakers with unilateral right hemisphere CVAs and seven male control subjects. Two types of analyses were conducted on these utterances. Acoustic analysis focused on the correlates associated with word stress, namely changes in amplitude, duration, and fundamental frequency. The perceptual saliency of emerging cues to stress was also examined by presentation of test tokens to phonetically trained listeners for identification of stress placement. The patients as a group produced fewer acoustic cues to stress compared to the normal subjects, but no statistical differences were found between groups for either stress at the phrase level or at the sentence level. In the perceptual analysis, stress produced by the patient group was judged to be less salient than that for the normal group, although a high degree of variability was evident in both populations. The data suggest a spared processing mechanism for linguistic prosody in RHD speakers, thus mitigating against the view of a general dysprosody tied to RHD.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Recognition of affective and noncanonical linguistic facial expressions in hearing and deaf subjects.

This study explores the use of two types of facial expressions, linguistic and affective, in a lateralized recognition accuracy test with hearing and deaf subjects. The linguistic expressions represent unfamiliar facial expression for the hearing subjects whereas they serve as meaningful linguistic emblems for deaf signers. Hearing subjects showed left visual field advantages for both types of signals while deaf subjects' visual field asymmetries were greatly influenced by the order of presentation. The results suggest that for hearing persons, the right hemisphere may predominate in the recognition of all forms of facial expression. For deaf signers, hemispheric specialization for the processing of facial signals may be influenced by the differences these signals serve in this population. The use of noncanonical facial signals in laterality paradigms is encouraged as it provides an additional avenue of exploration into the underlying determinants of hemispheric specialization for recognition of facial expression.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Parental reassurance and pediatric procedural pain: a linguistic description.

UNLABELLED: Certain parental behaviors are associated with child coping and others with child distress when children undergo painful medical procedures. The finding that parental reassurance is linked with increases in child distress is perplexing and counterintuitive. The objective of the present study was to provide a detailed linguistic description of the speech functions and tones parents use when reassuring during painful medical procedures. Videotapes of 28 5-year-old children (12 boys, 16 girls) receiving immunizations who were accompanied by their parents were examined. The majority of reassuring verbalizations were statements; minor clauses (eg, "okay") were the next most frequent type of utterance. Half of the reassuring verbalizations were spoken with a falling tone, which is indicative of speaker certainty and protectiveness. This detailed linguistic approach offers new insights into the qualities of parental reassurance during painful medical procedures. Further research is needed to elucidate the complex interactions of tone, speech function, and reassurance and their effects on child distress. PERSPECTIVE: This article presents a detailed description of parental reassurance during pediatric immunizations. The description of the linguistic qualities of reassurance can help inform future research examining which characteristics of reassurance are associated with child distress and can help guide parental behavior during immunizations.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2006

Impact of modality and linguistic complexity during reading and listening tasks.

Reading and understanding speech are usually considered as different manifestations of a single cognitive ability, that of language. In this study, we were interested in characterizing the specific contributions of input modality and linguistic complexity on the neural networks involved when subjects understand language. We conducted an fMRI study during which 10 right-handed male subjects had to read and listen to words, sentences and texts in different runs. By comparing reading to listening tasks, we were able to show that the cerebral regions specifically recruited by a given modality were circumscribed to unimodal and associative unimodal cortices associated with the task, indicating that higher cognitive processes required by the task may be common to both modalities. Such cognitive processes involved a common phonological network as well as lexico-semantic activations as revealed by the conjunction between all reading and listening tasks. The restriction of modality-specific regions to their corresponding unimodal cortices was replicated when looking at brain areas showing a greater increase during the comprehension of more complex linguistic units than words (such as sentences and texts) for each modality. Finally, we discuss the possible roles of regions showing pure effect of linguistic complexity, such as the anterior part of the superior temporal gyrus and the ventro-posterior part of the middle temporal gyrus that were activated for sentences and texts but not for isolated words, as well as a text-specific region found in the left posterior STS.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1982

Children's memory for recurring linguistic and nonlinguistic material in relation to reading ability.

Good beginning readers typically surpass poor beginning readers in memory for linguistic material such as syllables, words, and sentences. Here we present evidence that this interaction between reading ability and memory performance does not extend to memory for nonlinguistic material like faces and nonsense designs. Using an adaptation of the continuous recognition memory paradigm of Kimura (1963) we assessed the ability of good and poor readers in the second grade to remember three different types of material: photographs of unfamiliar faces, nonsense designs, and printed nonsense syllables. For both faces and designs, the performance of the two reading groups was comparable; only when remembering the nonsense syllables did the good readers perform at a significantly superior level. These results support other evidence that distinctions between good and poor beginning readers do not turn on memory, per se, but rather on memory for linguistic material. Thus they extend our previous finding that poor readers encounter specific difficulty with the use of linguistic coding in short-term memory.

Child↗
PubMed2000

Linguistic development in cleft palate patients with and without compensatory articulation disorder.

INTRODUCTION: Cleft palate patients frequently show compensatory articulation disorder (CAD). CAD severely affects speech intelligibility and requires a prolonged period of speech intervention. CAD has been considered a phonologic disorder. Thus, it seems necessary to explore the relationship between CAD and language development. OBJECTIVE: To study the relationship between language development and the presence of CAD in cleft palate patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cleft palate children with residual velopharyngeal insufficiency (VPI) after palatal closure, with and without CAD were studied. Only patients with an age ranging from 3 to 8 years were included in the study group. Twenty-nine cleft palate patients with residual VPI and CAD were included in the first group (active). The second group was assembled with 29 cleft palate patients with residual VPI without CAD, matched by age and sex (control). For evaluating language development, all patients were analyzed using the Situational-Discourse-Semantic (SDS) Model [13]. This Model is a valuable tool for conducting naturalistic observation and descriptive assessment of language development. The SDS Model provides a detailed description of three contexts (situational, discourse, and semantic) in ten levels of cognitive and linguistic organization. RESULTS: In all contexts considered by the model of cognitive and linguistic organization used for this study, i.e. SDS, a Fischer exact test demonstrated that patients with CAD showed a significantly higher frequency of language delay as compared with patients without CAD. None of the patients present with CAD showed an adequate level of language development. The degree of language delay was greater in the situational context as compared to the semantic and discourse contexts. CONCLUSIONS: Cleft palate patients present with CAD, demonstrated a significantly higher frequency of delay in language development as compared with cleft palate patients present with VPI without CAD. From the results of this paper, it seems that a detailed evaluation of all aspects of cognitive and linguistic organization should be performed in cleft palate patients, especially in patients present with CAD. Moreover, it seems that speech intervention in cleft palate patients with CAD should address not only the articulation process, but also specific aspects of language development.

Adaptation, Physiological↗