SEARCH · Search PubMed
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.
An analysis of the ethical and functional linguistic content of Canadian hospital mission statements was conducted. The ethical content analysis identified deontology as the dominant ethical orientation. The functional linguistic analysis revealed a trend toward the depersonalization and objectification of action. Implications for formulating effective mission statements were discussed.
We extend the Zipf approach to analyzing linguistic texts to the statistical study of DNA base pair sequences and find that the noncoding regions are more similar to natural languages than the coding regions. We also adapt the Shannon approach to quantifying the "redundancy" of a linguistic text in terms of a measurable entropy function, and demonstrate that noncoding regions in eukaryotes display a smaller entropy and larger redundancy than coding regions, supporting the possibility that noncoding regions of DNA may carry biological information.
The growing use of small groups in educational settings, therapy and counselling contains a danger of confusion in the purposes of the three modes. A university course in psychosexual counselling (containing, therefore, elements of education, therapy and counselling) is analysed using a linguistic framework. The similarities the three modes have with each other are examined and the differences between therapy and counselling on the one hand, and education on the other, are illustrated. It is suggested that some understanding of the different linguistic rules used in the three modes will permit students on a university course of this kind to make more rapid progress, and will provide both students and tutors with greater satisfaction.
From our earliest practice of family therapy at medical schools, private family therapy institutes, and public agencies, our work with difficult populations that do not respond to current treatment technologies has reminded us of the inadequacies of our theoretical descriptions and the limitations of our expertise. This work has influenced our current, evolving clinical theory as we move from thinking of human systems as social systems defined by social organization (role and structure) to thinking of them as distinguished on the basis of linguistic and communicative markers. Hence, for us, the social unit we work with in therapy is a linguistic system distinguished by those who are "in language" about a problem, rather than by arbitrary and predetermined concepts of social organization. We call the therapy system a problem-organizing, problem-dis-solving system.
In this article I investigate how the narrative therapy process facilitates client change. The kind of change that I focus on is linguistic-semiotic; that is, how clients develop their meaning potential through language. What I will demonstrate is how an examination of the linguistic-semiotic level provides new insights into narrative therapy's role in endowing clients with the semiotic materials to make new meanings. An examination of six conjoint sessions involving a narrative therapist with one couple revealed that client change or ontogenesis is composed of three semiotic phases. In the first phase of ontogenesis clients display a beginning semiotic repertoire by formulating "extreme case" descriptions of self and other's behaviors. In the second phase clients are scaffolded by therapist's questions and reformulations into construing events as problems and problems as the agents of negative behaviors. In the final phase clients display a development in their semiotic potential. Clients are able to eliminate problems and construe themselves as agents without prior therapist scaffolding. Therefore, in the latter stages of the narrative process clients are able to deploy meanings that have been generated throughout therapy, in order to produce narratives of self agency and self control.
Serological HLA types (A, B, C, DR and DQ loci) were studied in five different Indian tribes (Cubeo, Tucano, Coreguaje, Embera and Noanama) belonging to two distinct linguistic families. For all the MHC loci, the range of variation among the five tribes was enormous. Two tribes, Cubeo and Tucano, showed a wide spectrum of antigenic specificities which seemed to be due to admixture from non-tribal groups, while in the other three tribes the polymorphisms of various HLA loci showed restricted distributions. The gene frequency data, when converted to a kinship matrix and a two-dimensional eigenvector plot, indicated that members of the same linguistic family tend to have greater genetic affinity.
Modeling phonological units of speech is a critical issue in speech recognition. In this paper, our recent development of an overlapping-feature-based phonological model that represents long-span contextual dependency in speech acoustics is reported. In this model, high-level linguistic constraints are incorporated in automatic construction of the patterns of feature-overlapping and of the hidden Markov model (HMM) states induced by such patterns. The main linguistic information explored includes word and phrase boundaries, morpheme, syllable, syllable constituent categories, and word stress. A consistent computational framework developed for the construction of the feature-based model and the major components of the model are described. Experimental results on the use of the overlapping-feature model in an HMM-based system for speech recognition show improvements over the conventional triphone-based phonological model.
The results of an articulatory investigation of the supraglottal correlates of linguistic prominence in English, and a proposal of a unified description of linguistic stress are reported. Three models of stress are evaluated: that prominence expands jaw movement, that stress expands an abstract articulatory scale involving the opening and closing of the vocal tract, and that stress involves a localized shift toward hyperarticulate speech. A corpus of x-ray microbeam records of sensible speech is studied, within which the stress pattern is controlled and is checked by means of an intonational analysis. Jaw movement data yield similar results to earlier studies, but kinematic differences interpreted with reference to a gestural theory suggest that different subjects use different articulatory strategies to articulate stress contrasts. In addition, the jaw, lip, and tongue interact in the articulation of stress in subject dependent ways. Thus the articulation of stress should be formulated in terms of abstract articulatory goals, rather than in terms of individual articulator positioning. Finally, the data show that stress affects the articulation of nonsonority distinctions such as backness in vowels and point of articulation in consonants. A hyperarticulation model of stress is discussed in terms of these results.
We present evidence supporting the idea that the DNA sequence in genes containing noncoding regions is correlated, and that the correlation is remarkably long range--indeed, base pairs thousands of base pairs distant are correlated. We do not find such a long-range correlation in the coding regions of the gene. We resolve the problem of the "non-stationary" feature of the sequence of base pairs by applying a new algorithm called Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). We address the claim of Voss that there is no difference in the statistical properties of coding and noncoding regions of DNA by systematically applying the DFA algorithm, as well as standard FFT analysis, to all eukaryotic DNA sequences (33 301 coding and 29 453 noncoding) in the entire GenBank database. We describe a simple model to account for the presence of long-range power-law correlations which is based upon a generalization of the classic Levy walk. Finally, we describe briefly some recent work showing that the noncoding sequences have certain statistical features in common with natural languages. Specifically, we adapt to DNA the Zipf approach to analyzing linguistic texts, and the Shannon approach to quantifying the "redundancy" of a linguistic text in terms of a measurable entropy function. We suggest that noncoding regions in plants and invertebrates may display a smaller entropy and larger redundancy than coding regions, further supporting the possibility that noncoding regions of DNA may carry biological information.
In this report, the newest of the functional imaging methods, magnetoencephalography, is described, and its use in addressing the issue of brain reorganization for basic sensory and linguistic functions is documented in a series of 10 children and young adults. These patients presented with a wide variety of conditions, ranging from tumors and focal epilepsy to reading disability. In all cases, clear evidence of reorganization of the brain mechanisms of either somatosensory or linguistic functions or both was obtained, demonstrating the utility of magnetoencephalography in studying, completely noninvasively, the issue of plasticity in the developing brain.
Supported by several theoretical perspectives on motivation, we based an experiment on the idea that threat motivates people to become defensive and to choose that which is familiar and unequivocal in a given situation. The present field experiment confirmed that a general relevant threat can motivate people in a linguistic multiculture to conform more rigidly to their own language, and hence accentuate their own linguistic singularity. In addition, an exploratory analysis of tolerance towards the competing language revealed that non-threatened people tended to open up toward the other language. A dual-motive model that accounts for opening-up versus defensive reactions is proposed.
Linguistic and cognitive profiles were examined in 18 children with autism and 18 children with fragile X syndrome (mean ages = 34 months). State-of-the-art diagnostic procedures for autism symptom identification were administered. Eight children with fragile X met criteria for autism. Comparison of linguistic and cognitive profiles (autism, fragile X without autism, fragile X with autism) revealed that children with fragile X (with autism) were more impaired in nonverbal cognition and expressive language. Receptive language was a relative strength for children with fragile X (without autism). There were no differences in receptive language in children with autism, regardless of fragile X status. Low receptive language may be a marker for autism symptoms in young children with fragile X.
The present research compared the semantic information processing of linguistic stimuli with semantic elaboration of nonlinguistic facial stimuli. To explore brain potentials (ERPs, event-related potentials) related to decoding facial expressions and the effect of semantic valence of the stimulus, we analyzed data for 20 normal subjects (M age = 23.6 yr., SD = 0.2). Faces with three basic emotional expressions (fear, happiness, and sadness from the 1976 Ekman and Friesen database), with three semantically anomalous expressions (with respect to their emotional content), and the neutral stimuli (face without an emotional content) were presented in a random order. Differences in peak amplitude of ERP were observed later for anomalous expressions compared with congruous expressions. In fact, the results demonstrated that the emotional anomalous faces elicited a higher negative peak at about 360 msec., distributed mainly over the posterior sites. The observed electrophysiological activity may represent specific cognitive processing underlying the comprehension of facial expressions in detection of semantic anomaly. The evidence is in favour of comparability of this negative deflection with the N400 ERP effect elicited by linguistic anomalies.
Two groups of 14 college women, equated on College Entrance Examination Board Scholastic Aptitude Test scores but showing a discrepancy of at least 150 points between the scores on the Verbal and Mathematical Aptitude Test, were compared on two visual serial-search tasks; a 2 X 2 mixed factorial design was used. There was a trend in the direction of more rapid visual serial-search by the low linguistic-high quantitative subjects than for the high linguistic-low quantitative subjects. Consonant with earlier findings, visual serial-search time was significantly faster for number targets than for letter targets. Between ability patterns and target characteristics there was no significant interaction. The need to include more complex visual serial-tracking tasks in any reexamination of the observed results was noted.
This study was undertaken to determine the effect of linguistic background on scores obtained by native and non-native subjects on two dichotic speech tests in American English, the staggered spondaic word (SSW) and the dichotic consonant-vowel (CV) tests. Thirty subjects whose native languages were either Hindi or Arabic were tested. Test findings were compared to results obtained from 10 native English-speaking subjects. The non-native English speakers showed abnormally high error scores on the SSW test while the native speakers performed with no errors on that test. Performance on the dichotic CV test was comparable for both the native English and the Hindi subjects, while the Arabic subjects performed significantly worse than the two other groups. These data indicate that tests of speech perception using English must be interpreted with caution when administered to non-native English speakers, and that neither the SSW nor the dichotic CV tests may be assumed to be free of linguistic bias.
This study investigated whether the quality and specification of phonological representations in early language development would predict later skilled reading. Two perceptual identification experiments were performed with skilled readers. In Experiment 1, spelling difficulties in Grade 1 were used as a proxy measure for poorly specified representations in early language development. In Experiment 2, difficulties in perceiving and representing liquid and nasalized phonemes in final consonant clusters were used for the same purpose. Both experiments showed that words that were more likely to develop underspecified lexical representations in early language development remained more difficult in skilled reading. This finding suggests that early linguistic difficulties in speech perception and structuring of lexical representations may constrain the long-term organization and dynamics of the skilled adult reading system. The present data thus challenge the assumption that skilled reading can be fully understood without taking into account linguistic constraints acting upon the beginning reader.
Cognitive Pragmatics theory is concerned with analyzing the cognitive processes underlying communication. In previous works we have explained the emergence of communication in context, as revealed by very young children, and the communicative deficits shown by closed head injury patients. The aim of the present work is an extension of Cognitive Pragmatics to the emergence and the decay of extra-linguistic communication. In particular, we investigate the performance of 2- to 7-year-old children and that of Alzheimer's patients in standard and nonstandard (irony and deceit) pragmatic tasks. The predictions derived by Cognitive Pragmatics are confirmed. Comprehension of pragmatic phenomena which are more complex according to the theory emerges later in the development (Experiment 1), and their decay is most severe in Alzheimer's patients (Experiment 2). We conclude that the framework provided by Cognitive Pragmatics can accommodate both the development and the decay of extra-linguistic communication.
A case study of Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is presented with discussion of anatomical localization of injury and comparisons of pre- and postinjury linguistic, phonetic, and acoustic speech characteristics. Because the patient's injury and symptoms were unrelated to previously injured left frontal cortex, and in light of another case history (Moonis et al., 1996), we suggest that FAS has a primary subcortical involvement. We also show that this case is accompanied by a deficit in linguistic, but not affective, prosodic expression. We agree that the "foreign" quality of the FAS speech is a perceptual impression of the listener and not inherent in the patient's vocalization. Finally, we suggest a battery of tests for future FAS cases to further our study and understanding of the syndrome.