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PubMed1981

Linguistic timing factors in combination.

This study attempts to determine the ways in which linguistic timing factors combine with each other in the production of English and specifically, to test and explore aspects of the timing model of Klatt [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 59, 1208-1221 (1976)]. In two experiments the tensity feature of a sentence stressed vowel and the voicing of the following stop were changed along with a variable that alters the length of the VB syllable. The duration of both the vowel, V, and the following stop closure, C were measured. In the first experiment either one or two unstressed syllables are added to the word and in the second speaking tempo is changed. The significant results of both experiments are accounted for with a formal timing model that separately specifies (1) the Vm + C duration (where Vm = mean duration across the two vowels /i/ and /I/) depending on tempo or word length, (2) the ratio Vm/C depending on the voicing of the stop (/b/ or /p/), and (3) as a final ordered step, a rule that adjusts the vowel length by a constant ratio depending on the identity of the vowel. This integrated model provides for (1) the "incompressiblity" effects, (2) prosodic properties, and (3) the constant V/C ratios for values of the voicing feature found in perception experiments.

Humans↗

PubMed1995

Linguistic influences in adult perception of non-native vowel contrasts.

Perception of natural productions of two German vowels contrasts, /y/ vs /u/ and /Y/ vs /U/, was examined in monolingual English-speaking adults. Subjects were tested on multiple exemplars of the contrasting vowels produced in a dVt syllable by a native German speaker. Discrimination accuracy in an AXB discrimination task was well above chance for both contrasts. Most of the English adults failed to attain "nativelike" discrimination accuracy for the lax vowel pair /U/ vs /Y/, whereas all subjects showed nativelike performance in discriminating the tense vowel pair /u/ vs /y/. Results of a keyword identification and rating task provided evidence that English listeners' mapping of the German vowel to English vowel categories can be characterized as a category goodness difference assimilation, and that the difference in category goodness was more pronounced for the tense vowel pair than for the lax vowel pair. The results failed to support the hypothesis that the acoustic structure of vowels consistently favors auditory coding. Overall, the findings are compatible with existing data on discrimination of cross-language consonant contrasts in natural speech and suggest that linguistic experience shapes the discrimination of vowels and consonants as phonetic segmental units in similar ways.

Adult↗

PubMed1996

Two cross-linguistic factors underlying tongue shapes for vowels.

Desirable characteristics of a vocal-tract parametrization include accuracy, low dimensionality, and generalizability across speakers and languages. A low-dimensional, speaker-independent linear parametrization of vowel tongue shapes can be obtained using the PARAFAC three-mode factor analysis procedure [Harshman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 62, 693-707 (1977)]. Harshman et al. applied PARAFAC to midsagittal x-ray vowel data from five English speakers, reporting that two speaker-independent factors are required to accurately represent the tongue shape measured along anatomically normalized vocal-tract diameter grid lines. Subsequently, the cross-linguistic generality of this parametrization was brought into question by the application of PARAFAC to Icelandic vowel data, where three nonorthogonal factors were reported [Jackson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 84, 124-143 (1988)]. This solution is shown to be degenerate; a reanalysis of Jackson's Icelandic data produces two factors that match Harshman et al.'s factors for English vowels, contradicting Jackson's distinction between English and Icelandic language-specific "articulatory primes". To obtain vowel factors not constrained by artificial measurement grid lines, x-ray tongue shape traces of six English speakers were marked with 13 equally spaced points. PARAFAC analysis of this unconstrained (x,y) coordinate data results in two factors that are clearly interpretable in terms of the traditional vowel quality dimensions front/back, high/low.

Cross-Cultural Comparison↗

PubMed2001

Sentence and text comprehension: roles of linguistic structure.

Readers and listeners use linguistic structure in comprehending sentences and texts. We review research, mostly published in the past five years, that addresses the question of how they use it. We consider effects of syntactic, lexical, prosodic, morphological, semantic, and discourse structure, as well as reviewing research on how discourse context and frequency of experience, the contents of long-term memory, and the mental models being constructed by a reader or listener affect sentence and text comprehension. We point out areas of theoretical debate including depth-first versus breadth-first models of parsing and memory-based versus constructionist models of discourse comprehension, attempt to show how the empirical effects we review bear on such theoretical questions, and discuss how new lines of research, including research on languages other than English, may enrich the discussion of these questions.

Cognition↗

PubMed1984

Common origin of linguistic and movement abilities.

We start with the view that the development of systems of symbols is rooted in the regulation of cellular processes and the behavior of unicellular animals. Animals would thereafter start to externalize these internal symbol systems, to coordinate movements with each other. We propose that the brains of multicellular animals can be understood as a continuing elaboration of the early chemical symbol systems of unicellular animals: the labile symbols of the unicellular animal are replaced by hormones, more stable chemical compounds, and nerves that are seen as more stable and more specific routes of activation; and brains developed layers of symbols such that the domain of a symbol is not a set of bodily processes but rather a set of brain processes. Human language is very much in the "style" of the rule-governed symbol manipulation required by all behaving animals, although unique in its complexity. We suggest that the essential question is not how humans have evolved symbolic and linguistic abilities from a primitive sensorimotor brain but rather how do symbols come to exist in biological systems and what is useful and necessary about a system of symbols for the coordination of action within animals and among animals.

Animals↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Cognitive and linguistic profiles of specific language impairment and semantic-pragmatic disorder in bilinguals.

This study explored the notion that the extent to which language-impaired children can become bilingual depends on the type of language impairment. Single-case studies were conducted on two 7-year-old bilingual children, who had both been exposed to English and Afrikaans consistently and regularly from an early age. The subjects presented with specific language impairment (SLI) and semantic-pragmatic disorder (SPD), respectively. They were assessed on a battery of cognitive and linguistic tests in both their languages. Results indicate that the SLI subject, who presented with a deficit in successive processing on the Cognitive Assessment System, had difficulty in acquiring the surface features of both languages. She developed much better proficiency in English than in Afrikaans, despite substantial exposure to the latter. The SPD subject, whose cognitive profile was characterised by planning and attention deficits, but a strength in successive processing, presented with equal proficiency in both languages. The theoretical and clinical implications of this research are discussed.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Linguistic analysis to assess medically related posttraumatic stress symptoms.

The authors examined the presence of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) in 20 patients requiring ventilation after acute respiratory distress. The subjects completed a semistructured interview about their ventilation experience that was subject to content and linguistic analysis. Subjects also completed two self-report measures to assess PTSS and socioemotional adjustment. Subjects who endorsed PTSS were more likely to use a narrative style suggesting emotional involvement in their recall of the stressful event. The authors indicate that the presence of PTSS is a common consequence of traumatic medical experiences and that denial of distress may be an adaptive short-term coping strategy.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Sensory, cognitive, and linguistic factors in the early academic performance of elementary school children: The Benton-IU project.

Standardized sensory, perceptual, linguistic, intellectual, and cognitive tests were administered to 470 children, approximately 96% of the students entering the first grade in the four elementary schools of Benton County, Indiana, over a 3-year period (1995--1997). The results of 36 tests and subtests administered to entering first graders were well described by a 4-factor solution. These factors and the tests that loaded most heavily on them were reading-related skills (phonological awareness, letter and word identification); visual cognition (visual perceptual abilities, spatial perception, visual memory); verbal cognition (language development, vocabulary, verbal concepts); and speech processing (the ability to understand speech under difficult listening conditions). A cluster analysis identified 9 groups of children, each with a different profile of scores on the 4 factors. Within these groups, the proportion of students with unsatisfactory reading achievement in the first 2 years of elementary school (as reflected in teacher-assigned grades) varied from 3% to 40%. The profiles of factor scores demonstrated the primary influence of the reading-related skills factor on reading achievement and also on other areas of academic performance. The second strongest predictor of reading and mathematics grades was the visual cognition factor, followed by the verbal cognition factor. The speech processing factor was the weakest predictor of academic achievement, accounting for less than 1% of the variance in reading achievement. This project was a collaborative effort of the Benton Community School Corporation and a multidisciplinary group of investigators from Indiana University.

Child↗

PubMedDate not supplied

Stress in ASL: empirical evidence and linguistic issues.

The study of signed languages provides an opportunity to identify those characteristics of language that are universal and to investigate the effect of production modality (signed vs. spoken) on the grammar. Over time, American Sign Language (ASL) has accommodated itself to the production and perception requirements of the manual/visual modality, resulting in a prosodic system that is comparable in function to spoken languages but different in means of expression. The present focus is on phrasal prominence in ASL. I review the marking of stress and phrase boundaries in ASL, and discuss prominence assignment at the phrasal level, with brief mention of lexical stress. At the kinematic level, there is a modality effect in marking of linguistic prominence but no modality effect with respect to marking phrase position. Of significance is the fact that ASL lacks phrasal prominence plasticity, that is the ability to move prominence to mark focus in a sentence location other than phrase final. I review the typological implications of how ASL handles prominence as compared to other languages.

Humans↗

PubMed2003

Lying words: predicting deception from linguistic styles.

Telling lies often requires creating a story about an experience or attitude that does not exist. As a result, false stories may be qualitatively different from true stories. The current project investigated the features of linguistic style that distinguish between true and false stories. In an analysis of five independent samples, a computer-based text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.

Adult↗

PubMed2001

Frontline talk: teachers' linguistic resources when talking about mental health and illness.

Talk about mental health and mental illness was examined using Potter and Wetherell's system of discourse analysis. Participants were 8 health coordinators (teachers) from a range of New Zealand secondary schools. They were interviewed on the topics of mental health and mental illness. Verbatim transcripts from the interviews were analyzed, and three mental health and illness linguistic resources were identified: a mental health as illness resource, a mental well-being resource, and a mental illness resource. Each resource was examined, and the practical consequences of this language use was discussed in relation to the role of teachers as frontline mental health professionals.

Communication↗

PubMed2005

Using photography to cross generational, linguistic, and cultural barriers to develop useful survey instruments.

Photographs are used as a research tool by anthropologists and as a technique to empower special populations, advocacy groups, and policy makers. This case describes how photography was used to develop a survey to study alcohol expectancies among Thai adolescents. A multi-cultural research team faced generational, linguistic, and cultural barriers in understanding Thai adolescent alcohol use well enough to write useful questions about alcohol expectancies. Asking adolescents to take and then discuss their photographs about alcohol allowed them to express themselves without the imposition of an organizational framework by the investigators. Group discussions of the photographs revealed nuances and subtleties of interpretation of behavior and expectancies involving alcohol that might otherwise have not emerged. The results of this activity were used to refine an expectancy scale used in a large-scale survey of alcohol expectancies and use.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Discovery of protein-protein interactions using a combination of linguistic, statistical and graphical information.

BACKGROUND: The rapid publication of important research in the biomedical literature makes it increasingly difficult for researchers to keep current with significant work in their area of interest. RESULTS: This paper reports a scalable method for the discovery of protein-protein interactions in Medline abstracts, using a combination of text analytics, statistical and graphical analysis, and a set of easily implemented rules. Applying these techniques to 12,300 abstracts, a precision of 0.61 and a recall of 0.97 were obtained, (f = 0.74) and when allowing for two-hop and three-hop relations discovered by graphical analysis, the precision was 0.74 (f = 0.83). CONCLUSION: This combination of linguistic and statistical approaches appears to provide the highest precision and recall thus far reported in detecting protein-protein relations using text analytic approaches.

Artificial Intelligence↗

PubMed2005

Musical and linguistic processing in song perception.

One approach to comparing the neural bases of language and music is through the use of song, which is a unique and ecological combination of these two cognitive domains. In song, language and music are merged into one acoustic signal with two salient dimensions. By manipulating either the linguistic or musical dimensions (or both) of song and studying their relationships, it is possible to gain important information about the neural networks underlying language and music cognition. We will present a brief review followed by recent behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging studies concerned with the functional and structural relationships of music and language. These results, together with the previous studies in the field, help understanding whether the different levels of music and language processing are independent or interactive.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2004

Linguistic relativism and colour cognition.

Native speakers of two languages (English and Ndonga) were compared on three colour cognition tasks (sorting, triads and visual search) in a test of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956). The colour lexicons of these two languages differ because Ndonga has no basic terms for ORANGE, PINK and PURPLE, and stimuli were chosen to exploit this difference. On the sorting task (sorting into similarity-groups) for each language, nominally similar colours were grouped together more often than nominally dissimilar colours. On the triads task (choosing the most different of three colours), when the most nominally isolated colour differed for the two language-groups, each group tended to choose their nominal isolate. On the search task (scanning for target colours among distractors), targets were either in a different English category than distractors (cross-category), or some distractors were in the same English category as distractors (within-category). The 'cost' in speed of having within-category distractors was much greater for the English than for the Ndonga. Overall, these data suggest that a core universal component is modulated by a small relativist influence. The differences in the visual search task are consistent with language affecting pre-attentive processes (an indirect language effect) as well as exerting on-line influences (a direct effect).

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Order in Spanish colour words: evidence against linguistic relativity.

The hypothesis that the Berlin and Kay (1969) colour sequence would be replicated in Spanish colour-word usage has been corroborated on 131,028 colour words from a representative corpus (N = 188,975,000). The observed sequence of white, black, red, green, blue, yellow, grey and brown is highly consistent diachronically (through current and contemporary Spanish), synchronically (through various countries) and with the expected order. Considering the divergence of Spanish vocabularies among geographical areas in the last centuries, the almost total agreement did not have a high prior probability under hypotheses of culturally arbitrary colour vocabularies. It is difficult to see how linguistic relativity could adequately account for such a robust result. The use of ordinal statistics and non-reactive measures to study cultural products constrained by epigenetic rules, such as colour vocabularies, is presented as an exercise of methodological consilience.

Color Perception↗

PubMed2002

Grammar and lexicon in facilitated communication: a linguistic authorship analysis of a Finnish case.

This case study adds a new dimension to the discourse on the authorship issue in facilitated communication. The linguistic structure produced by a young Finnish man with severe cerebral palsy was examined. Data are based on transcripts he produced from 1993 until 1996 after facilitated communication had been introduced to him. In the data analysis, as explicit criteria for his idiosyncrasies, we used patterns typical of children acquiring Finnish as their first language and those found in normal slips of the tongue, acquired aphasia, and specific language impairment. Based on the analysis (i.e. the idiosyncrasy and agrammaticality of word-forms and sentences), we strongly suggest that his output can hardly be a product of any other speaker of Finnish, including that of his facilitators.

Abnormalities, Multiple↗

PubMed2004

Patterns of ethnic, linguistic, and geographic heterogeneity of palmar interdigital ridge counts in the Indian subcontinent.

Published data on palmar interdigital ridge counts (a-b, b-c, and c-d) among 57 populations from the Indian subcontinent were analyzed with reference to ethnic, socioeconomic, linguistic, and geographic affiliations of the studied populations. The spatial autocorrelation analysis suggests significant correlation between dermatoglyphic and geographic distances. The congruence with the ethnic semblance of the groups is also apparent in the data, and, in fact, the multiresponse permutation procedure did suggest highly significant within-group homogeneity, confirming the biological validity of the social and ethnic criteria used in the analysis. The plots of populations on the first two principal components, accounting for 92% of the total variance, complement and support the results based on the other analyses, which show certain ethnic and geographic patterns. These findings can serve as baseline information for future studies on population variation in India, particularly studies based on molecular genetic markers, a trend that has already gained momentum.

Dermatoglyphics↗