Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “LINGUISTICS”

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 523 records · Page 29Linked to original sources
PubMed2003

Distinct subsystems for the parafoveal processing of spatial and linguistic information during eye fixations in reading.

Two experiments examined readers' use of parafoveally obtained word length information for word recognition. Both experiments manipulated the length (number of constituent characters) of a parafoveally previewed target word so that it was either accurately or inaccurately specified. In Experiment 1, previews also either revealed or denied useful orthographic information. In Experiment 2, parafoveal targets were either high- or low-frequency words. Eye movement contingent display changes were used to show the intact target upon its fixation. Examination of target viewing duration showed completely additive effects of word length previews and of ortho-graphic previews in Experiment 1, viewing duration being shorter in the accurate-length and the orthographic preview conditions. Experiment 2 showed completely additive effects of word length and word frequency, target viewing being shorter in the accurate-length and the high-frequency conditions. Together these results indicate that functionally distinct subsystems control the use of parafoveally visible spatial and linguistic information in reading. Parafoveally visible spatial information appears to be used for two distinct extralinguistic computations: visual object selection and saccade specification.

Fixation, Ocular↗
PubMed2000

Linguistic analysis in phylogeny estimation: a case study of mtDNAs of Bovidae.

Molecular phylogenetic studies are executed by the alignment of protein or nucleotide sequences, followed by the construction of trees according either to distance, parsimony or maximum likelihood methods. Linguistic analysis was investigated here as an alternative method to aligning sequences. In an empirical study, we inferred trees for a variable number of Bovidae and sister taxa based on three different mitochondrial orthologous sequences. Comparison of our results with existing phylogenies indicated that the method, except for some still disputable points, was able to establish sensible systematic relationships, similar to patterns of radiation of the family found in recent studies.

Animals↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Early effects of traumatic brain injury on young children's language performance: a preliminary linguistic analysis.

Language skills undergo rapid development during the early childhood years, so that by the time children start school they are competent communicators with well established syntactic, semantic and pragmatic abilities for their age. Little is known about the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on the acquisition of these language skills during the early childhood years. This study used a prospective, cross-sectional design to compare the language abilities of young children following their head injury. Fifteen brain injured children, aged between 4-6 years, were divided into three injury groups depending on severity of injury, i.e. mild, moderate and severe, and compared with a matched community control group. They were assessed within 3 months of sustaining their injury on a range of expressive and receptive language tests, and free speech conversation samples, which were analysed pragmatically and syntactically. Results indicated that the severe group performed most poorly on language tasks. It is suggested that linguistic evaluation is an important component of follow up at least for the severe head injured population.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2005

Nonverbatim captioning in Dutch television programs: a text linguistic approach.

In the Netherlands, as in most other European countries, closed captions for the deaf summarize texts rather than render them verbatim. Caption editors argue that in this way television viewers have enough time to both read the text and watch the program. They also claim that the meaning of the original message is properly conveyed. However, many deaf people demand verbatim subtitles so that they have full access to all original information. They claim that vital information is withheld from them as a result of the summarizing process. Linguistic research was conducted in order (a) to identify the type of information that is left out of captioned texts and (b) to determine the effects of nonverbatim captioning on the meaning of the text. The differences between spoken and captioned texts were analyzed on the basis of on a model of coherence relations in discourse. One prominent finding is that summarizing affects coherence relations, making them less explicit and altering the implied meaning.

Humans↗
PubMed1991

Word onset gating and linguistic context in spoken word recognition by young and elderly adults.

Young and elderly adults heard recorded words that increased in word-onset duration ("gated" words). Without context, both age groups could recognize spoken words after hearing only 50% to 60% of word onset information. When these words were embedded in sentence contexts, subjects required only 20% to 30% of word onset for recognition. An analysis of pre-recognition responses was used to examine use of linguistic context by both age groups to produce correct word recognition in the absence of a complete, or completely processed, acoustic input.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Recurrent otitis media during infancy and linguistic skills at the age of nine years.

OBJECTIVE: To assess the effects of early recurrent otitis media on linguistic development in children. We especially wanted to determine the possible significant consequences of early recurrent otitis media at school age. METHODS: We collected data retrospectively on recurrent otitis media episodes from the parents of 394 children in 18 school classes selected at random in a middle-sized city in Finland. Auditory comprehension was tested with a subtest of the Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Ability, picture vocabulary with the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (revised test version), morphologic competence with a Finnish Morphological Test and reading comprehension with a test designed for this purpose. RESULTS: Children with more than four otitis episodes before the age of 3 years performed less well in the reading comprehension test (P = 0.01 to 0.02) than children with fewer otitis media episodes. Multiple regression analysis adjusted for the confounding variables showed early otitis media to be associated with impaired reading comprehension test scores (regression coefficient -0.1245, 95% confidence interval -0.2245 to -0.0245, P = 0.01), which also correlated significantly with the teachers' evaluation of the student's reading comprehension (Spearman rank correlation r = 0.5, P < 0.01). Otitis episodes after the age of 3 years were not associated with abnormal test results. CONCLUSION: Middle ear disease in infancy had a significant adverse effect on reading comprehension as late as 9 years of age, even among children whose acute episodes were effectively treated.

Age of Onset↗
PubMed1995

Systematic analysis of coding and noncoding DNA sequences using methods of statistical linguistics.

We compare the statistical properties of coding and noncoding regions in eukaryotic and viral DNA sequences by adapting two tests developed for the analysis of natural languages and symbolic sequences. The data set comprises all 30 sequences of length above 50 000 base pairs in GenBank Release No. 81.0, as well as the recently published sequences of C. elegans chromosome III (2.2 Mbp) and yeast chromosome XI (661 Kbp). We find that for the three chromosomes we studied the statistical properties of noncoding regions appear to be closer to those observed in natural languages than those of coding regions. In particular, (i) a n-tuple Zipf analysis of noncoding regions reveals a regime close to power-law behavior while the coding regions show logarithmic behavior over a wide interval, while (ii) an n-gram entropy measurement shows that the noncoding regions have a lower n-gram entropy (and hence a larger "n-gram redundancy") than the coding regions. In contrast to the three chromosomes, we find that for vertebrates such as primates and rodents and for viral DNA, the difference between the statistical properties of coding and noncoding regions is not pronounced and therefore the results of the analyses of the investigated sequences are less conclusive. After noting the intrinsic limitations of the n-gram redundancy analysis, we also briefly discuss the failure of the zeroth- and first-order Markovian models or simple nucleotide repeats to account fully for these "linguistic" features of DNA. Finally, we emphasize that our results by no means prove the existence of a "language" in noncoding DNA.

Animals↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Want that is understood well before say that, think that, and false belief: a test of de Villiers's linguistic determinism on German-speaking children.

Two experiments with 79 monolingual German speaking children between 2.5 and 4.5 years showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. For instance, when John is still playing and mother says, "John should be going to bed," more than 70% answered correctly that mother wanted John to go to bed. However, when mother said, "John is going to bed," about 70% answered wrongly that she thought/said that he was still playing. Correct answers emerged with the mastery of the false-belief task. In German, want sentences (about something to happen) obligatorily take the same grammatical that complement as say or think sentences. Therefore, the observed gap constrains de Villier's (1995) linguistic determinism, which claims that acquisition of the necessary grammatical structures for talking about the mind drives children's ability to think about the mind.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2001

Linguistically mediated visual search.

During an individual's normal interaction with the environment and other humans, visual and linguistic signals often coincide and can be integrated very quickly. This has been clearly demonstrated in recent eye tracking studies showing that visual perception constrains on-line comprehension of spoken language. In a modified visual search task, we found the inverse, that real-time language comprehension can also constrain visual perception. In standard visual search tasks, the number of distractors in the display strongly affects search time for a target defined by a conjunction of features, but not for a target defined by a single feature. However we found that when a conjunction target was identified by a spoken instruction presented concurrently with the visual display, the incremental processing of spoken language allowed the search process to proceed in a manner considerably less affected by the number of distractors. These results suggest that perceptual systems specializedfor language and for vision interact more fluidly than previously thought.

Attention↗
PubMed2004

Linguistic markers of psychological change surrounding September 11, 2001.

The diaries of 1,084 U.S. users of an on-line journaling service were downloaded for a period of 4 months spanning the 2 months prior to and after the September 11 attacks. Linguistic analyses of the journal entries revealed pronounced psychological changes in response to the attacks. In the short term, participants expressed more negative emotions, were more cognitively and socially engaged, and wrote with greater psychological distance. After 2 weeks, their moods and social referencing returned to baseline, and their use of cognitive-analytic words dropped below baseline. Over the next 6 weeks, social referencing decreased, and psychological distancing remained elevated relative to baseline. Although the effects were generally stronger for individuals highly preoccupied with September 11, even participants who hardly wrote about the events showed comparable language changes. This study bypasses many of the methodological obstacles of trauma research and provides a fine-grained analysis of the time line of human coping with upheaval.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed2005

Linguistic constraints on statistical computations: the role of consonants and vowels in continuous speech processing.

Speech is produced mainly in continuous streams containing several words. Listeners can use the transitional probability (TP) between adjacent and non-adjacent syllables to segment "words" from a continuous stream of artificial speech, much as they use TPs to organize a variety of perceptual continua. It is thus possible that a general-purpose statistical device exploits any speech unit to achieve segmentation of speech streams. Alternatively, language may limit what representations are open to statistical investigation according to their specific linguistic role. In this article, we focus on vowels and consonants in continuous speech. We hypothesized that vowels and consonants in words carry different kinds of information, the latter being more tied to word identification and the former to grammar. We thus predicted that in a word identification task involving continuous speech, learners would track TPs among consonants, but not among vowels. Our results show a preferential role for consonants in word identification.

Humans↗
PubMed1995

Linguistic entrapment: medico-nursing biographies as fictions.

This paper argues that in their trainings health professionals are encouraged to use language naively as if it were a transparent medium of scientific communication. We contend that language use, particularly in the field of mental health care, should be studied in terms of its social functions and attention should be paid to the inevitably constructive nature of language in patients' records, in order that a 'fictional distance' opens up between patients and their records. Recent developments in literary theory and narrative analysis can be deployed as theoretical frameworks to understand this process, and we suggest that more attention to the use of language should be included in the educational programmes for health care professionals to counteract the risk of 'linguistic entrapment' or 'incarceration'.

Linguistics↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: spanish, dutch, French, hebrew, italian, korean, and american english.

The composition of young children's vocabularies in 7 contrasting linguistic communities was investigated. Mothers of 269 twenty-month-olds in Argentina, Belgium, France, Israel, Italy, the Republic of Korea, and the United States completed comparable vocabulary checklists for their children. In each language and vocabulary size grouping (except for children just learning to talk), children's vocabularies contained relatively greater proportions of nouns than other word classes. Each word class was consistently positively correlated with every other class in each language and for children with smaller and larger vocabularies. Noun prevalence in the vocabularies of young children and the merits of several theories that may account for this pattern are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1982

Temporary regression during language acquisition: a linguistic analysis of a 2 1/2-year-old child with epileptic aphasia.

A 2 1/2-year-old child suffered a brief and temporary regression of speech, with complete recovery, on two separate occasions. During the second episode, clinical evaluation and electroencephalographic data led to the diagnosis of epileptic aphasia. The child's conversations at home were tape-recorded by the mother during the acute phase of the disorder and the recovery period, and transcripts of the conversations were analysed by means of a linguistic profile. These analyses confirmed the clinical improvement in the child's language abilities, which occurred within a few days. This case illustrates the remarkably specialised and localised cerebral function which underlies speech production at an early age. It indicates that this function can be interfered with selectively and temporarily, without any significant effect on general behaviour.

Aphasia↗
PubMed2006

Linguistic disparities in health care access and health status among older adults.

BACKGROUND: English proficiency may be important in explaining disparities in health and health care access among older adults. SUBJECTS: Population-based representative sample (N=18,659) of adults age 55 and older from the 2001 California Health Interview Survey. METHODS: We examined whether health care access and health status vary among older adults who have limited English proficiency (LEP), who are proficient in English but also speak another language at home (EP), and who speak English only (EO). Weighted bivariate and multivariate survey logit analyses were conducted to examine the role of language ability on 2 aspects of access to care (not having a usual source of care, delays in getting care) and 2 indicators of health status (self-rated general health and emotional health). RESULTS: Limited-English proficient adults were significantly worse off (1.68 to 2.49 times higher risk) than EO older adults in 3 of our 4 measures of access to care and health status. Limited-English proficient older adults had significantly worse access to care and health status than EP older adults except delays in care. English proficient adults had 52% increased risk of reporting poorer emotional health compared with EO speakers. CONCLUSIONS: Provision of language assistance services to patients and training of providers in cultural competence are 2 means by which health care systems could reduce linguistic barriers, improve access to care, and ultimately improve health status for these vulnerable populations.

Aged↗
PubMed1987

Positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia and linguistic performance.

Selected subjects from a group of first onset schizophrenics (aged under 30 years) were taken from a previous study and placed in one of two groups depending upon whether they had exclusively positive symptoms (n = 9) or a mixture of positive and negative symptoms (n = 9). Their linguistic profiles were compared with those of a group of controls (n = 10) matched for educational attainment and parental social class. Both groups of schizophrenics had significantly lower integrity scores, suggesting that they made more syntactic and semantic errors. Those patients who presented with negative symptoms tended to have speech of lower syntactic complexity than the other two groups, although the difference just failed to reach statistical significance. It is suggested that syntactic and semantic errors are state dependent features associated with positive symptoms, whereas low syntactic complexity may be a more enduring feature associated with the presence of negative symptoms.

Acute Disease↗
PubMed1996

Neuropsychological and linguistic follow-up studies of children with galactosaemia from an unscreened population.

Many galactosaemics appear to have neuropsychological and/or linguistic problems in spite of dietary treatment. Because the neonatal screening program in Norway does not include galactosaemia, we have re-examined Norwegian galactosaemics. Of 16 known patients, 8 patients participated in the study. They had been diagnosed between 2 and 11 weeks of age, and were between 9 months and 19 years old at the time of this study. All had very low or 0 activity of galactose-1-phosphate uridyl transferase. As part of the study all were examined neurologically, and had an age-appropriate developmental/IQ test, an ABR and an EEG, and a comprehensive psycholinguistic evaluation. The three youngest patients had normal developmental/IQ tests, while the five older patients had IQ scores in or below low range of normal. The majority had delayed language development and three patients were classified as having verbal dyspraxia. ABR and EEG showed mild pathology in the oldest patient only. Galactosaemia appears to be associated with significant risks of developmental and language delays in this unscreened population.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

On the clinical relevance of early deficits in critical linguistic functions.

UNLABELLED: The clinical significance of patterns of deficits in semantic and phonological representations observed by Miniscalco et al. is discussed in light of an ecological approach to language development. CONCLUSION: Deficits in semantic representations reflect problems in capturing the core linguistic referential function and should be taken as serious early warning signals for language delay.

Child↗