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PubMed1999

Syntactic-semantic tagging as a mediator between linguistic representations and formal models: an exercise in linking SNOMED to GALEN.

Natural language understanding applications are good candidates to solve the knowledge acquisition bottleneck when designing large scale concept systems. However, a necessary condition is that systems are built that transform sentences into a meaning representation that is independent of the subtleties of linguistic structure that nevertheless underly the way language works. The Cassandra II syntactic-semantic tagging system fulfills this goal partially. Within the GALEN-IN-USE project, it is used to transform linguistic representations of surgical procedure expressions into conceptual representations. In this paper, the proctology chapter of the SNOMED V3.1 procedure axis was used as a testbed to evaluate the usefulness of this approach. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data obtained is presented, showing that the Cassandra system can indeed complement the manual modelling efforts being conducted in the GALEN-IN-USE project. The different requirements related to linguistic modelling versus conceptual modelling can partly be accounted for by using an interface ontology, of which the fine tuning will however remain an important effort.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1998

Cerebellar contribution to linguistic processing efficiency revealed by focal damage.

The cerebellum's role in cognitive skills was examined in a child (L.C.) with focal injury to the left cerebellum. Initial symptoms included aphasia and dysarthria. At 3 and 9 months post-injury, clinical neuropsychological tests revealed persistent psychomotor slowing as well as deficits in executive functions. Further cognitive testing at 13 and 16 months post-injury demonstrated that L.C. processed information from both the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains more slowly than age-, grade- and sex-matched controls. Notably, her linguistic processing was more than twice as slow as that of her peers, whereas her nonlinguistic processing was only approximately 20% slower. Within each domain the degree of cognitive slowing was approximately the same across diverse tasks. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of a cerebellar contribution to cognitive processing, particularly the processing of linguistic information.

Cerebellar Diseases↗
PubMed1990

Suffix interference in the recall of linguistically coherent speech.

Four experiments are presented that address the stimulus suffix effect for linguistically coherent spoken materials. In Experiment 1, definitions of low-frequency words were presented for online written recall. Each definition was followed by a nonword speech suffix presented in the same voice as the definition, the same nonword presented in a different voice, or a tone. The results yielded a significant reduction in the recall of the terminal words of the definitions in the speech suffix conditions compared with the tone control. This general pattern was replicated in Experiment 2, in which subjects did not begin their recall until the suffix item or tone was presented, although the magnitude of the suffix effect was reduced in this experiment. In Experiment 3, sentences that were part of a cohesive story were presented for on-line recall. Here, the suffix effect was considerably reduced compared with the suffix effect found with the definitions presented in Experiments 1 and 2. This pattern was replicated in Experiment 4, in which subjects did not begin their recall of the story sentences until the speech suffix or tone was presented. Overall, the results suggest that auditory memory interference can take place for linguistically coherent speech, although the magnitude of the interference decreases as one increases the level of linguistic structure in the to-be-recalled materials. Implications of the present results for current models of natural language processing are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Intervention with linguistically diverse preschool children: a focus on developing home language(s).

PURPOSE: This article addresses a series of questions that are critical to planning and implementing effective intervention programs for young linguistically diverse learners with primary language impairment (LI). Linguistically diverse learners in the United States include children whose families speak languages such as Spanish, Korean, Cantonese, Hmong, Vietnamese, or any language other than, or in addition to, English. METHOD: A narrative review of the relevant literature addresses clinical questions including (a) Why support the home language when it is not the language used in school or the majority community? (b) Does continued support for the home language undermine attainment in a second language? (c) Should we support the home language when it includes the code switching or mixing of two traditionally separate languages? and (d) What are some strategies that can be used to support the home language when it is a language that the speech-language pathologist (SLP) does not speak? CONCLUSION: SLPs should provide services to linguistically diverse preschool-age children with LI in a manner that effectively supports the development of the home language. Parent and paraprofessional training along with peer-mediated models of intervention are presented as two possible methods for facilitating the home language in children with LI.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1977

Bedtime soliloquies and linguistic competence in autism.

This study investigates the linguistic competence of an autistic child by means of her bedtime soliloquies. It suggests the usefulness of such monologues as a diagnostic tool and addresses the question of the interrelationship between echolalia and language development. Three bedtime soliloquies of an eight-year-old echolalic autistic child are analyzed along the dimensions of echolalia versus propositional speech, types of ungrammaticality produced, and analysis of connected discourse. The results are compared with those of a normal child reported earlier in the literature. The present analysis demonstrates the difficulties in the judgement of propositional versus echolalic speech. The types of ungrammaticality were found to be useful indicators of apparent differences between the acquisition process in the normal and the autistic child. They revealed that the autistic child may use specific linguistic strategies only minimally utilized by the normal child. The discourse analysis points up additional differences as well as similarities in the way the autistic subject organizes her utterances in connected discourse. It also shows that the autistic child has specific but limited linguistic competence. It is hypothesized that the autistic subject acquires more functional, useful language by a process of gradually breaking down echolalic patterns. In terms of therapy, these findings would support the use of echolalia as a basis for language training.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1995

Childhood hearing impairment: auditory and linguistic interactions during multidimensional speech processing.

Children with mild-severe sensorineural hearing losses often use hearing aids and aural/oral language as their primary mode of communication, yet we know little about how speech is processed by these children. The purpose of this research was to investigate how the multidimensional information underlying accurate speech perception is processed by children with mild-severe hearing impairments. The processing of the auditory and linguistic dimensions of speech was assessed with a speeded selective-attention task (Garner, 1974a). Listeners were required to attend selectively to an auditory dimension (gender of the talker) and ignore a linguistic dimension (word) and vice versa. The hypothesis underlying the task is that performance for the target dimension will be unaffected by what is happening on the nontarget dimension if the dimensions are processed independently. On the other hand, if the dimensions are not processed independently, listeners will not be able to attend selectively and performance for the relevant dimension will be affected by what is happening on the irrelevant dimension (termed "Garner" interference). Both children with normal hearing (N = 90) and children with hearing impairment (N = 40) showed some degree of Garner interference, implying that the dimensions of speech are not processed independently by these children. However, relative to the children with normal hearing, the children with hearing impairment showed normal Garner interference when attending selectively to the word dimension (normally effective at ignoring talker-gender input) and reduced Garner interference when attending selectively to the talker-gender dimension (more effective at ignoring word input). This pattern of results implies that the auditory dimension has a normal strength-of-processing level that makes it normally distracting and that the linguistic dimension has an underdeveloped strength-of-processing level that makes it easier to ignore in children with hearing impairment.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Reconstruction of human evolution: bringing together genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data.

The genetic information for this work came from a very large collection of gene frequencies for "classical" (non-DNA) polymorphisms of the world aborigines. The data were grouped in 42 populations studied for 120 alleles. The reconstruction of human evolutionary history thus generated was checked with statistical techniques such as "boot-strapping". It changes some earlier conclusions and is in agreement with more recent ones, including published and unpublished DNA-marker results. The first split in the phylogenetic tree separates Africans from non-Africans, and the second separates two major clusters, one corresponding to Caucasoids, East Asians, Arctic populations, and American natives, and the other to Southeast Asians (mainland and insular), Pacific islanders, and New Guineans and Australians. Average genetic distances between the most important clusters are proportional to archaeological separation times. Linguistic families correspond to groups of populations with very few, easily understood overlaps, and their origin can be given a time frame. Linguistic superfamilies show remarkable correspondence with the two major clusters, indicating considerable parallelism between genetic and linguistic evolution. The latest step in language development may have been an important factor determining the rapid expansion that followed the appearance of modern humans and the demise of Neanderthals.

Archaeology↗
PubMed2000

Interpretation and comprehension of linguistic humour by adolescents with head injury: a group analysis.

The aim of the present study was to determine the ability of adolescents with a head injury to interpret and comprehend linguistic humour. Nine adolescents with head injury aged between 12 years 1 month and 15 years 4 months, and nine individually matched adolescents aged between 12 years 1 month and 16 years 1 month were administered a humour test, a standard language battery, the CELF-3, and the Self-Esteem Index. The test of humour abilities required each subject to recognize and select an explanation from a group of three, as to what made each item funny. Items were based on morphological, semantic and syntactic humour elements. Comparison at a group level demonstrated that adolescents with head injury performed significantly poorer in the interpretation and comprehension of linguistic humour than a group of individually matched peers. Contrary to expectations, a relationship between the level of self-esteem and humour comprehension did not exist. The findings of the present study suggest that further research into the effects of head injury on linguistic humour in adolescents is warranted, particularly from a case-by-case perspective.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1990

Linguistic measure of taxonomic and functional relatedness of nucleotide sequences.

The frequencies of "words", oligonucleotides within nucleotide sequences, reflect the genetic information contained in the sequence "texts". Nucleotide sequences are characteristically represented by their contrast word vocabularies. Comparison of the sequences by correlating their contrast vocabularies is shown to reflect well the relatedness (unrelatedness) between the sequences. A single value, the linguistic similarity between the sequences, is suggested as a measure of sequence relatedness. Sequences as short as 1000 bases can be characterized and quantitatively related to other sequences by this technique. The linguistic sequence similarity value is used for analysis of taxonomically and functionally diverse nucleotide sequences. The similarity value is shown to be very sensitive to the relatedness of the source species, thus providing a convenient tool for taxonomic classification of species by their sequence vocabularies. Functionally diverse sequences appear distinct by their linguistic similarity values. This can be a basis for a quick screening technique for functional characterization of the sequences and for mapping functionally distinct regions in long sequences.

Animals↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Effect of sentence length and complexity on working memory performance in Hungarian children with specific language impairment (SLI): A cross-linguistic comparison.

BACKGROUND: English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) perform more poorly than their typically developing peers in verbal working memory tasks where processing and storage are simultaneously required. Hungarian is a language with a relatively free word order and a rich agglutinative morphology. AIMS: To examine the effect of linguistic structure on working memory performance. It was examined whether syntactic complexity has a larger impact on working memory performance than sentence length in Hungarian-speaking children, similar to the findings in English speaking children. METHODS & PROCEDURES: In Experiment 1, performance accuracy was measured with two linguistic span tasks that included stimuli with varying sentence length and syntactic complexity. Experiment 2 examined the impact of sentence length and morphological complexity on working memory performance. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Children with SLI performed more poorly than their age-matched peers in all working memory tasks. Their error patterns differed from those of children with typical language development. Children with SLI produced a high number of interference errors that indicate poor executive functions. The findings were compared with previous results of English-speaking children. Complexity affected working memory performance accuracy differently across languages. In English, it was the increase of syntactic complexity that resulted in a decrease in performance accuracy, whereas in Hungarian, it was the morphological complexity that had a large impact on working memory performance. CONCLUSIONS: Working memory performance depends on the linguistic characteristics of the language tested. In both English- and Hungarian-speaking children, complexity has a larger effect on verbal working memory performance than the length of the stimuli. However, complexity affects working memory performance accuracy differently across languages.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1996

Can the linguistic interdependence theory support a bilingual-bicultural model of literacy education for deaf students?

Drawing on Cummins' (1989) linguistic interdependence model, proponents of bilingual-bicultural models of literacy education for deaf students claim that, if ASL is well established as the L1, then literacy in English (L2) can be achieved by means of reading and writing without exposure to English through either speech or English-based sign. In our opinion, this claim is based on a false analogy: the situation of the deaf learner of English literacy does not match the conditions assumed by the linguistic interdependence model. We draw on the work of Vygotsky and Halliday to develop a conceptualization of the processes involved in becoming literate, examining the particular and unique challenges that deaf students face as they strive to become members of the linguistic community of users of written English. We argue that becoming literate involves mastering three modes of lanuage use: 'social speech,' 'inner speech,' and written text. In some respects the educational context for deaf students is analogous to that of other bilingual learners; in some crucial aspects, it is very different.

Journal Article↗
PubMed1994

Linguistic impairment in early psychosis.

Twenty-four, first-admission, psychotic subjects and 24 control subjects were administered a linguistic instrument to elicit impairments in syntax, semantics, cohesion, and use of metaphors. In the same session, the subjects were also rated on the Scale for Thought, Language, and Communication Disorders (TLC). Results indicated a significant impairment of all four linguistic categories in psychotic subjects. The impairment in semantics, however, was differentiated the most between the patient and control groups. The psychotic patients scored significantly higher on the TLC. Scores of impairment on the linguistic tasks did not correlate with scores on the TLC.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Low-vision reading speed: influences of linguistic inference and aging.

PURPOSE: Reading is a dynamic task involving both linguistic and visual analysis. In this study, we asked how two types of linguistic information--characters used in segmenting words from one another, and sentence context--differ in their usefulness for people with normal and low vision. Given evidence for age-related differences in some forms of cognitive processing, we also investigated the effect of age. METHODS: There were four groups of 10 participants: vision status (normal, low) crossed with age (young, <35 years; old, >65 years). Reading speeds were compared for regularly spaced text and text in which the spaces were removed, a manipulation intended to eliminate local cues for text segmentation and force attention to clusters of letters or whole words. We also evaluated the effect of sentence context by comparing reading speeds for regular sentences and sentences in which word order was scrambled. RESULTS: Removal of spaces had a greater impact on low vision than normal vision, reducing average speeds to 45% and 66% of speeds for regularly spaced text, respectively. We interpret this to mean that people with low vision have less access to spatially distributed linguistic regularities of text such as prefixes, suffixes, or word length. Removal of sentence context through scrambling had a greater impact on normal vision than low vision, reducing mean reading speed to 53% and 66%, respectively. Finally, comparison of our young and old readers showed no major differences in the use of sentence context or in the impact of removing spaces between words. CONCLUSIONS: People with low vision appear to rely more on spacing information in sentences, whereas people with normal vision appear to make better use of sentence context, irrespective of age.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Qualitative analysis of sketched route maps: translating a sketch into linguistic descriptions.

In this correspondence, we introduce our work on sketch understanding, focusing here on the analysis of a sketched route map. A route map is drawn to help someone navigate along a path for the purpose of reaching a goal. A hand-sketched route map does not generally contain complete map information and is not necessarily drawn to scale, but yet it contains the correct qualitative information for route navigation. Here we propose a methodology for extracting a qualitative model of a sketched route map, based on human navigation strategies, using spatial relationships. Linguistic descriptions are generated from the sketch, both in the form of detailed descriptions at discrete path steps and also as a high-level route description. To describe the path linguistically, one must first be able to understand the path in a qualitative sense. We assert that the translation of a sketch into linguistic descriptions illustrates that the essential qualitative path knowledge has been extracted. The methodology is demonstrated using example sketches drawn on a handheld PDA.

Letter↗
PubMed2004

Psychopathology and pediatric complex partial seizures: seizure-related, cognitive, and linguistic variables.

PURPOSE: This study examined the role of cognition, language, seizure-related, and demographic variables in the psychopathology of children with complex partial seizure disorder (CPS) of average intelligence. METHODS: One-hundred one CPS and 102 normal children, aged 5.1 to 16.9 years, had a structured psychiatric interview and cognitive and language testing. Parents provided demographic, perinatal, and seizure-related information, as well as behavioral information through the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) and a structured psychiatric interview about the child. RESULTS: Significantly more CPS patients had psychopathology, cognitive deficits, and linguistic deficits than did those in the normal group. Among the patients, Verbal IQ predicted the presence of a psychiatric diagnosis, as well as CBCL scores in the borderline/clinical range. Seizure, linguistic, and demographic variables were unrelated to psychopathology. The cognitive and linguistic deficits of the CPS group, however, were predicted by seizure factors (e.g., prolonged seizures/febrile convulsions; seizure frequency/number of antiepileptic drugs) and demographic factors (e.g., minority status). CONCLUSIONS: Because subtle verbal cognitive deficits predict behavioral disturbances in pediatric CPSs, the study's findings highlight the importance of assessing behavior, cognition, and language in these children. They also underscore the negative impact of prolonged seizures, febrile convulsions, seizure frequency, and antiepileptic drug polytherapy on cognition and language in pediatric CPSs.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Multivariate modelling and personality organization: a comparative study of the Defense Mechanism Test and linguistic expressions.

The main aim of the study is to establish an empirical connection between perceptual defences as measured by the Defense Mechanism Test (DMT)--a projective percept-genetic method--and manifest linguistic expressions based on word pattern analyses. The subjects were 25 psychiatric patients with the diagnoses neurotic personality organization (NPO), borderline personality organization (BPO) and psychotic personality organization (PPO) in accordance with Kernberg's theory. A set of 130 DMT variables and 40 linguistic variables were analyzed by means of partial least squares (PLS) discriminant analysis separately and then pooled together. The overall hypothesis was that it would be possible to define the personality organization of the patients in terms of an amalgam of perceptual defences and word patterns, and that these two kinds of data would confirm each other. The result of the combined PLS analysis revealed a very good separation between the diagnostic groups as measured by the pooled variable sets. Among other things, it was shown that NPO patients are principally characterized by linguistic variables, whereas BPO and PPO patients are better defined by perceptual defences as measured by the DMT method.

Borderline Personality Disorder↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Linguistic validation of the US Spanish work productivity and activity impairment questionnaire, general health version.

INTRODUCTION: There are no measures of health-related absenteeism and presenteeism validated for use in the large and increasing US Spanish-speaking population. Before using a Spanish translation of an available English-language questionnaire, the linguistic validity of the Spanish version must be established to ensure its conceptual equivalence to the original and its cultural appropriateness. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to evaluate the linguistic validity of the US Spanish version of the Work Productivity and Activity Impairment questionnaire, General Health Version (WPAI:GH). METHODS: A US Spanish translation of the US English WPAI:GH was created through a reiterative process of creating harmonized forward and back translations by independent translators. Spanish-speaking and English-speaking subjects residing in the US self-administered the WPAI:GH in their primary language and were subsequently debriefed by a bilingual (Spanish-English) interviewer. RESULTS: US Spanish subjects (N = 31) and English subjects (N = 35), stratified equally by educational level, with and without a high school degree participated in the study. The WPAI-GH item comprehension rate was 98.6% for Spanish and 99.6% for English. Response revision rates during debriefing were 1.6% for Spanish and 0.5% for English. Responses to hypothetical scenarios indicated that both language versions adequately differentiate sick time taken for health and non-health reasons and between absenteeism and presenteeism. CONCLUSION: Linguistic validity of the US Spanish translation of the WPAI:GH was established among a diverse US Spanish-speaking population, including those with minimal education.

Absenteeism↗
PubMed2005

Linguistic validation of the Cardiff Wound Impact Schedule into French, German and US English.

OBJECTIVE: Chronic leg wounds can represent a major health problem and have a negative emotional impact on patients' lives. The Cardiff Wound Impact Schedule (CWIS) was developed by the Wound Healing Research Unit at University of Wales College of Medicine to assess the quality of life in patients with chronic wounds. METHOD: To perform the linguistic validation (translation) of the CWIS into German, French and US English as a first step in making the questionnaire available globally. The standard linguistic validation process employed by the Mapi Research Institute was used to translate the CWIS into French and German. An adjusted process was used for the US English translation. RESULTS: The linguistic validation of the US English version was straightforward as it shares the same root language with the original UK version. The problems encountered in the French and German translations were mostly related to semantics and syntax. CONCLUSION: The CWIS is now available for further validation testing by the international community (the psychometric evaluation of each translated questionnaire). These translations will be useful to health-care providers undertaking formal quality-of-life assessments of patients with chronic leg wounds.

Activities of Daily Living↗