Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Word Processing”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 271 records · Page 15Linked to original sources
PubMed1999

Selective attention in perceptual adjustments to voice.

The effects of perceptual adjustments to voice information on the perception of isolated spoken words were examined. In two experiments, spoken target words were preceded or followed within a trial by a neutral word spoken in the same voice or in a different voice as the target. Over-all, words were reproduced more accurately on trials on which the voice of the neutral word matched the voice of the spoken target word, suggesting that perceptual adjustments to voice interfere with word processing. This result, however, was mediated by selective attention to voice. The results provide further evidence of a close processing relationship between perceptual adjustments to voice and spoken word recognition.

Attention↗
PubMed1997

[A test of a hypothesis of automatic phonological processing of Kanji words].

This paper aims to examine a hypothesis that phonological processing should occur in Japanese Kanji words as well as in Kana words, but automatic in Kanji words. In Experiment 1, subjects performed concurrent articulation or finger tapping during a semantic processing task of Kana words with 2 to 4 phonemes, for which phonological processing should be indispensable. Concurrent articulation was found to eliminate the phoneme number effect found in the control condition, but finger tapping was not. This result indicates the effectiveness of concurrent articulation in articulatory suppression. In Experiment 2, the materials were changed to Kanji words, for which phonological processing had been supposed to be dispensable, and subjects performed the same task. The results showed no phoneme number effect even in the control condition, and the reaction time in the concurrent articulation condition was delayed significantly. These results suggest the existence of automatic phonological processing of Kanji words. Finally, the pertinence of this hypothesis was confirmed by applying it to the explanations of 3 kinds of Japanese dyslexia.

Adult↗
PubMed1996

Semantic and spatial components of selective attention.

Semantic and spatial effects on selective processing were examined. A prime presented 250 ms or 1,000 ms before a pair of masked words was related to 1 of the words on 1/3 of the trials. Although Experiments 1 and 2 required report of both words, processing was selective; typically, just 1 word could be reported. In Experiment 1, reported words were more often top words, showing spatial selectivity, and more often words related to the prime, showing semantic selectivity. Experiment 2 included to-be-ignored peripheral cues 50 ms before the pair. Related words were reported more often at both delays, and cuing produced an additive benefit at 1,000 ms. Experiment 3 required report of just the cued word and included 100-ms cues. Cued words were reported more often, especially at 1,000 ms and with 100-ms cues, but semantic selectivity also occurred. Selectivity via semantic priming and via location reflect separate attentional mechanisms.

Attention↗
PubMed1995

Words and sentences: event-related brain potential measures.

Interactions between sentences and the individual words that comprise them are reviewed in studies using the event-related brain potential (ERP). Results suggest that, for ambiguous words preceded by a biasing sentence context, context is used at an early stage to constrain the relevant sense of a word rather than select among multiple active senses. A study comparing associative single-word context and sentence-level context also suggests that sentence context influences the earliest stage of semantic analysis, but that the ability to use sentence context effectively is more demanding of working memory than the ability to use single-word contexts. Another indication that sentence context has a dramatic effect on single-word processing was the observation that high- and low-frequency words elicit different ERPs at the beginnings of sentences but that this effect is suppressed by a meaningful sentence context.

Evoked Potentials↗
PubMed1987

Visual field effects for processing content and function words.

This study investigated the processing of content and function words when input to the left vs right hemispheres. For both lexical decision and naming there was a larger RVF advantage for function as compared to content words: function words were processed more slowly than content in the LVF, but not in the RVF. These results do not replicate the previous report of Bradley and Garrett, Neuropsychologia 21, 155-159, 1983, and provide some support for the view that function words are less accessible to the right hemisphere. In a second experiment, there was no difference in VF asymmetry when acceptability judgments were required for function vs content word phrases. Grammaticality judgments, of any sort, may be predominantly processed in the left hemisphere.

Female↗
PubMed1995

Brain potentials in developmental dyslexia: differential effects of word frequency in human subjects.

The differences of word processing between a group of adult developmental dyslexics and control subjects were examined with the event-related potential (ERP) technique. In particular, the effects of word frequency and word recognition were assessed. The subjects viewed a series of frequently and infrequently used words, most of which were repeated after some intervening items and they discriminated between first and second presentations of the words. It can be shown that in the range from 300 to 550 ms post stimulus the amplitude of the N400 component, an ERP measure of semantic processing, is reduced for high frequency words. This effect is more pronounced in the dyslexic group and the effects of word recognition are also reduced in the dyslexic group for high frequency words. These findings are discussed with respect to current concepts of dyslexia and of semantic processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

The balance of storage and computation in morphological processing: the role of word formation type, affixal homonymy, and productivity.

This article is concerned with the way in which the balance of storage-storing and processing words through full-form representations-and computation-storing and processing words through morpheme-based representations-in lexical processing in the visual modality is affected by the following 3 factors: word formation type (roughly, inflection vs. derivation), productivity, and affixal homonymy. Experimental results for 5 different Dutch suffixes, combined with previous results obtained for 4 comparable Finnish suffixes (R. Bertram, M. Laine, & K. Karvinen, 1999) and 2 Dutch suffixes (R. H. Baayen, T. Dijkstra, & R. Schreuder, 1997), show that none of these factors in isolation is a reliable cross-linguistic predictor of the balance of storage and computation. The authors offer a general framework that outlines how morphological processing is influenced by the interaction of word formation type, productivity, and affixal homonymy.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Psychophysiological components of imagery.

McGuigan's neuromuscular model of information processing (1978a, 1978b, and 1989) was investigated by electrically recording eye movements (electro-oculograms), covert lip and preferred arm responses (electromyograms), and electroencephalograms. This model predicts that codes are generated as the lips are uniquely activated when processing words beginning with bilabial sounds like "p" or "b," as is the right arm to words like "pencil" that refer to its use. Twelve adult female participants selected for their high imagery ratings were asked to form images to three orally presented linguistic stimuli: the letter "p," the words "pencil" and "pasture," and to a control stimulus, the words "go blank." The following findings were significant beyond the 0.05 level: an increased covert lip response only to the letter "p," increased vertical eye activity to "p" and to the word "pencil," right arm response only to the word "pencil," and a decreased percentage of alpha waves from the right 02 lead only to the word "pasture." Since these covert responses uniquely occurred during specific imagery processes, it is inferred that they are components of neuromuscular circuits that function in accord with the model of information processing tested.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Lateral differences in lexical access: word length vs. stimulus length.

A. W. Young and A. W. Ellis (1985, Brain and Language, 24, 326-358) have shown that visual length of stimuli is a major determinant of lateral differences in word processing. They suggest that the right hemisphere must first code the words in graphemic form and, therefore, is affected by the word length. They demonstrated that visual length is best defined as the number of letters. The present experiment was conducted with 36 normal subjects to test this definition of the visual length by contrasting the number of letters and the physical length in the visual field. Spaces were inserted in the short words (4-letter) so that they matched the physical length of the long words (7-letter). Our results replicated those of Young and Ellis and confirmed that visual length can be defined by the number of letters. In addition, the imagery value of the words tended to affect this Hemifield x Length effect, a result not obtained by Young and Ellis.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Language processing in aphasia: changes in lateralization patterns during recovery reflect cerebral plasticity in adults.

During single word processing the negative cortical DC-potential reveals a left frontal preponderance in normal right-handers as well as in patients with a history of transient aphasia. Lateralization of DC-negativity therefore provides a reliable and robust method for the assessment of language dominance. In 11 stroke patients with permanent aphasia this physiological pattern changed to bilateral activation reflecting an additional right-hemispheric involvement in compensatory mechanisms in aphasia. Along with complete clinical recovery the classical aphasic syndromes revealed specific differences in changes of their lateralization patterns. In Broca's aphasia the initial right-hemispheric preponderance changed to a left frontal lateralization while in Wernicke's aphasia a presumably permanent shift towards the right hemisphere occurred. Differences in lateralization patterns might reflect different mechanisms of recovery such as the initial disinhibition of homologous areas contralaterally and subsequent collateral sprouting and synaptic modulation. The assessment of changes in lateralization of the cortical DC-potential during language tasks in a non-invasive, safe method with excellent time resolution that might provide further insights in the neural basis of recovery from aphasia.

Action Potentials↗
PubMed1994

Effects of level of processing on implicit and explicit tasks.

The series of experiments presented in this article replicate the interaction that B. H. Challis and D. R. Brodbeck (1992) reported between list design (blocked or mixed) and level of processing for word fragment completion: The advantage for semantically processed words over shallowly processed words was greater when the conditions were blocked than when they were mixed on the study list. A similar interaction was found for perceptual identification (a data-driven implicit task) and priming in general knowledge questions (a conceptually driven implicit task). However, both data-driven and conceptually driven explicit tasks failed to reveal such a pattern.

Humans↗
PubMed1996

The effect of varying stimulus rate and duration on brain activity during reading.

The effect of the presentation rate and exposure duration of visually presented words on brain activity was investigated using positron emission tomography. Subjects either read aloud or silently mouthed the names of words. In regions associated with early visual analysis, activity increased with both rate and duration; in regions associated with response generation, activity increased with increasing rate but was unaffected by duration; and in regions associated with word recognition, activity decreased with increasing duration. The variable responses of different brain regions illustrate the functional segregation of these regions. Of particular interest was the dissociation between activity in the posterior fusiform gyri and that in the medial lingual gyrus--in the former, activity increased with rate and duration but the latter was unaffected by either variable. This finding suggests that word processing in the lingual gyrus during reading is distinct from that in the posterior fusiform gyri. A further observation was that during reading aloud, when subjects can hear the sound of their own voice, the response in the primary auditory cortices increased with stimulus rate, demonstrating that subjects process the sound of their own voice in a qualitatively similar way to words spoken by another.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

The function of sentence accents and given/new information in speech processing: different strategies for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners?

Two experiments were carried out to investigate how the correspondence between sentence accentuation and distribution of information is used in human word processing. A forced-choice task with target words embedded in sentences was employed for this purpose. Target words provided either 'given' or 'new' information, and were either accented or unaccented. The subjects had to choose between two words that differed in the last consonant by one phonetic feature (e.g., mouth/mouse). The first experiment involved both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. A fixed amount of noise was used to reduce the quality of speech for normal-hearing listeners, in order to enable a comparison between the two listener groups. The results of the first experiment showed different processing patterns for normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. The hearing-impaired listeners were more accurate with words that were properly accented for their information value, whereas the normal-hearing subjects were more accurate with accented than unaccented words regardless of their information value. A new group of normal-hearing subjects was tested in a second experiment with speech of more severely reduced quality. The results indicated that, under these circumstances, the normal-hearing listeners changed their strategy and also showed an interaction between information value and accent. It seems that, as speech becomes less intelligible, listeners depend increasingly on linguistic expectations stemming from the correlation between information value and accentuation.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

Electrocortical distinction of vocabulary types.

Psycholinguistic theories propose that words of the 2 major vocabulary classes, content (open-class) and function (closed-class) words, are computationally distinct and have different neuronal generators. This predicts distinct EEG patterns elicited by words of these 2 classes. To test this prediction, content and function words, together with matched pseudowords, were presented in a lexical decision task (where subjects had to decide whether stimuli were meaningful words or not). Evoked potentials were recorded from 17 electrodes 12 of which were located in close vicinity of the perisylvian cortices. Already 160 msec post stimulus onset, substantial differences in activity patterns distinguish the 2 vocabulary classes. A hemisphere by word class interaction revealed interhemispheric differences for function words but not for content words. Potentials evoked by function words were more negative over the left hemisphere compared to the right. These results evidence that brain mechanisms underlying function and content word processing are different. The following explanation of the data is proposed: content words correspond to neuronal assemblies equally distributed over both hemispheres, while assemblies corresponding to function words are strongly lateralized to the left hemisphere and primarily located in the perisylvian region.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Converging evidence for the role of occipital regions in orthographic processing: a case of developmental surface dyslexia.

Recently, there have been several reports focusing on the neural basis for word recognition. Two different views have emerged: one emphasizing the role of the left angular gyrus in recognizing printed words, and the second view suggesting that visual word processing activates the left extrastriate cortex. This paper describes the case of EBON, a 14-year-old girl with an extensive early (most likely congenital) brain lesion in the left occipital lobe. She demonstrates a clear pattern of developmental surface dyslexia in that she is more successful at reading and spelling regular words than irregular words and makes frequent regularization errors. Thus, EBON is the first case reported with the potential to establish converging evidence for the role of extrastriate regions in the left hemisphere in the acquisition of orthographic representations.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

Selective processing of food words in anorexia nervosa.

The selective processing of food- and body size-related information was investigated using a modified version of the Stroop task. Anorexic subjects were generally slower than controls in colour-naming all words, and particularly slow with food-related words. This interference effect appeared to operate maximally amongst subjects who fell into the higher end of the anorexic weight range. The findings appeared to be a reflection of current concerns with food and eating.

Anorexia Nervosa↗
PubMed1989

On the role of word frequency in the detection of component letters.

The experiments reported in this study were conducted to explore the issue of race models versus holistic models of word processing. In both types of model, it is assumed that an available word-level encoding for a display will conceal letter information, and thereby inhibit component-letter detection. However, whereas in holistic models it is assumed that encoding always should occur at the word or pattern level first, in the race models it is assumed that encoding occurs at all levels (e.g., feature, letter, and word) simultaneously, with the final level of encoding being at whatever level has been completed first. If the rate of word-level encoding is facilitated by increasing word frequency, the holistic models predict a generally declining latency for letter detection, because the initial step in letter detection (i.e., word-level encoding) will be occurring more rapidly. The race models, on the other hand, predict that with increasing word frequency there will be an increasing chance that the word-level encoding will win the encoding race, resulting in an increase in the latency for letter detection (i.e., the word code will conceal the letter codes). Two experiments are reported, and the obtained pattern of latency data appears to be most consistent with the race models.

Adult↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Use of a database for managing qualitative research data.

In this article, a process for handling text data in qualitative research projects by using existing word-processing and database programs is described. When qualitative data are managed using this method, the information is more readily available and the coding and organization of the data are enhanced. Furthermore, the narrative always remains intact regardless of how it is arranged or re-arranged, and there is a concomitant time savings and increased accuracy. The author hopes that this article will inspire some readers to explore additional methods and processes for computer-aided, nonstatistical data management. The study referred to in this article (Ross, 1991) was a qualitative research project which sought to find out how teaching faculty in nursing and education used computers in their professional work. Ajzen and Fishbein's (1980) Theory of Reasoned Action formed the theoretical basis for this work. This theory proposes that behavior, in this study the use of computers, is the result of intentions and that intentions are the result of attitudes and social norms. The study found that although computer use was sometimes the result of attitudes, more often it seemed to be the result of subjective (perceived) norms or intervening variables. Teaching faculty apparently did not initially make reasoned judgments about the computers or the programs they used, but chose to use whatever was required or available.

Data Collection↗