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PubMed2004

Linguistic and location effects in compliance with pesticide warning labels for amateur and professional users.

Three studies explored amateur and professional users' compliance with pesticide warning labels. Professionals were classified as people working in a profession in which the use of pesticides is a necessary part of their job. Amateurs used pesticides only in their leisure time. The first study showed that the wording used affected perception of the appropriateness of hazard statements, one of the most effective variations being the use of the personal pronoun (statements beginning "You should..."). The location of warning information was also found to affect actual compliance: Compliance increased when warning information was presented in the directions for use section. A supplemental directive increased compliance only for professional users. In a final study, "best-case" and "worst-case" linguistic variations were combined with best-case and worst-case locations for safety information. Instruction statements using the personal pronoun and presented in the directions for use section resulted in the highest levels of compliance. The differences in compliance between amateur and professional users are interpreted within the framework of Rasmussen's (1986) distinction among skill-, rule-, and knowledge-based behavior. Actual or potential applications of this research include the design of warning labels and safety information.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2006

Linguistic adaptation and validation of the Spanish version of the Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia-Patient Impact Measure (BPH-PIM).

BACKGROUND: The Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia-Patient Impact Measure (BPH-PIM) is a self-reported quality-of-life questionnaire for measuring the impact of urinary/prostate symptoms on the quality of life of patients with BPH. The aim of the present study was to adapt the original instrument to Spanish (for use in Spain) and to assess the psychometric properties of the new version. METHODS: Linguistic adaptation was performed using the standard processes for establishing conceptual equivalence, and was partially conducted in parallel with original instrument development. Psychometric properties were assessed on a sample of 131 patients with BPH who were receiving treatment with doxazosin gastrointestinal therapeutic system (GITS). RESULTS: All the standardised items had response rates > 99%; there were no floor or ceiling effects. Reliability in terms of Cronbach's alpha was 0.96 and the intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.97. Construct validity was confirmed by factor analysis. Convergent validity was confirmed in terms of the relationship to the 12-Item Short-Form Health Survey (SF-12) [p < 0.001], Health Utilities Index Mark III (HUI-3) [p < 0.001] and the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) QOL item (p < 0.001). The instrument showed discriminant validity, in terms of IPSS groups (p < 0.001). The instrument was sensitive to change in terms of the correlation of the domain scores of the PIM to improvements in symptom scores (p < 0.001). Significant differences were observed for those who improved > or = 3 points in the IPSS scale (p < 0.001). CONCLUSION: A psychometrically valid and conceptually equivalent version of the BPH-PIM questionnaire has been produced in Spanish to be used in Spain in patients with BPH.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Linguistic humor comprehension in children with articulation impairments.

This study investigated the ability of children with articulation disorders to comprehend linguistic humor. It was hypothesized that children with articulation disorders would have more difficulty understanding humor based on phonological differences than humor based on lexical differences. A second hypothesis predicted that children with articulation disorders would have more difficulty understanding riddles in which the phoneme they misarticulated, either /s/ or /r/, was the source of ambiguity than riddles in which the source of ambiguity did not involve the phoneme they misarticulated. Results did not confirm the first hypothesis as there were no statistically significant differences between groups with regard to the children's ability to understand phonological vs lexical humor. The second hypothesis was supported. Children had significantly more difficulty understanding riddles in which the source of ambiguity related to the phoneme they misarticulated, either /s/ or /r/ than they did understanding phonological humor involving nonerror phonemes.

Articulation Disorders↗
PubMed2001

The linguistic and cognitive profile of Down syndrome: evidence from a comparison with fragile X syndrome.

In this paper, we report on the results of our research, which is designed to address two broad questions about the cognitive and linguistic profile of Down syndrome: (1) Which domains of functioning are especially impaired in individuals with Down syndrome? and (2) Which aspects of the language and cognitive profile of Down syndrome are syndrome specific? To address these questions, we focused on three dimensions of the Down syndrome profile--receptive language, expressive language, and theory of mind--and made comparisons to individuals with fragile X syndrome, which is an X-linked form of intellectual disability. We identified Down syndrome impairments on all three dimensions that were substantially greater than those seen in nonverbal cognition and that were not shared by individuals with fragile X syndrome. Clinical implications of these findings are considered.

Cognition Disorders↗
PubMed1987

The four alternative auditory feature test (FAAF)--linguistic and psychometric properties of the material with normative data in noise.

The linguistic properties of the FAAF test material are expounded in relation to its objectives. It is shown from reference data that there are lexical effects inherent in the use of real-word minimal pairs rather than nonsense syllables. These are word-frequency effects upon phonemes in initial position and effects of imageability upon phonemes in final position. However, those effects are not large enough to undermine the use of the FAAF as an acoustical phonetically structured material reflecting the analysis of auditory information. Normative data on a range of signal-to-noise ratios are presented. These data have helped to delimit the subsets of items that best reflect variations in performance under easy and under difficult conditions. This offers a mapping of the percentage correct from scores at one or two fixed S/N ratios required for a given level of performance and hence permits comparison with SRT(N) measures.

Humans↗
PubMed2004

Readers' sensitivity to linguistic cues in narratives: how salience influences anaphor resolution.

Despite the general assumption that anaphoric inferences are necessary inferences, Levine, Guzmán, and Klin (2000) concluded that the probability of resolving noun phrase anaphors depends both on the degree of accessibility in memory of the antecedent concepts and the extent to which resolution is necessary to create a coherent discourse representation. Four experiments are presented in which the factors that influence readers' standard of coherence are investigated. We examine the hypothesis that readers are more likely to resolve anaphors that are perceived as salient; salience was manipulated both with a syntactic focusing structure (wh- clefts) and with the addition of prenominal adjectival modifiers. The results of a probe recognition time task provide support for the hypothesis that a variety of linguistic cues serve as mental processing instructions (Givón, 1992), which instruct readers as to how much attention to devote to processing.

Cognition↗
PubMed2004

Linguistic focus and good-enough representations: an application of the change-detection paradigm.

A number of lines of study suggest that word meanings are not always fully exploited in comprehension. In two experiments, we used a text-change paradigm to study depth of semantic processing during reading. Participants were instructed to detect words that changed across two consecutive presentations of short texts. The results suggest that the full details of word meanings are not always incorporated into the interpretation and that the degree of semantic detail in the representation is a function of linguistic focus. The results provide evidence for the idea that representations are only good enough for the purpose at hand (Ferreira, Bailey, & Ferraro, 2002).

Humans↗
PubMed2002

Brain potentials elicited by prose-embedded linguistic anomalies.

Linguistic theories distinguish between syntax (sentence form) and semantics (sentence meaning). Correspondingly, recent studies have shown that syntactic and semantic anomalies elicit distinct changes in the event-related brain potential (ERP). However, these results have been obtained with highly artificial methodologies and have not yet been generalized to more natural reading conditions. Here, we recorded ERPs while subjects read a naturalistic prose passage. The subjects either read for comprehension with no other task being assigned or read for comprehension and made acceptability judgments after each sentence. Consistent with prior work and regardless of the subjects' assigned task, syntactic anomalies elicited a large positive wave (P600), whereas semantic anomalies elicited a large increase in N400 amplitude. These results demonstrate that the qualitatively distinct ERP responses elicited by syntactic and semantic anomalies are not artifacts of unnatural aspects of previously used stimuli, thereby providing additional evidence that separable syntactic and semantic processes exist.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

Galen-In-Use: using artificial intelligence terminology tools to improve the linguistic coherence of a national coding system for surgical procedures.

GALEN has developed a language independent common reference model based on a medically oriented ontology and practical tools and techniques for managing healthcare terminology including natural language processing. GALEN-IN-USE is the current phase which applied the modelling and the tools to the development or the updating of coding systems for surgical procedures in different national coding centers co-operating within the European Federation of Coding Centre (EFCC) to create a language independent knowledge repository for multicultural Europe. We used an integrated set of artificial intelligence terminology tools named CLAssification Manager workbench to process French professional medical language rubrics into intermediate dissections and to the Grail reference ontology model representation. From this language independent concept model representation we generate controlled French natural language. The French national coding centre is then able to retrieve the initial professional rubrics with different categories of concepts, to compare the professional language proposed by expert clinicians to the French generated controlled vocabulary and to finalize the linguistic labels of the coding system in relation with the meanings of the conceptual system structure.

Artificial Intelligence↗
PubMed1999

Iberia: population genetics, anthropology, and linguistics.

Basques, Portuguese, Spaniards, and Algerians have been studied for HLA and mitochondrial DNA markers, and the data analysis suggests that pre-Neolithic gene flow into Iberia came from ancient white North Africans (Hamites). The Basque language has also been used to translate the Iberian-Tartesian language and also Etruscan and Minoan Linear A. Physical anthropometry of Iberian Mesolithic and Neolithic skeletons does not support the demic replacement in Iberia of preexisting Mesolithic people by Neolithic people bearing new farming technologies from Europe and the Middle East. Also, the presence of cardial impressed pottery in western Mediterranean Europe and across the Maghreb (North Africa) coasts at the beginning of the Neolithic provides good evidence of pre-Neolithic circum-Mediterranean contacts by sea. In addition, pre-dynastic Egyptian El-Badari culture (4,500 years ago) is similar to southern Iberian Neolithic settlements with regard to pottery and animal domestication. Taking the genetic, linguistic, anthropological, and archeological evidence together with the documented Saharan area desiccation starting about 10,000 years ago, we believe that it is possible that a genetic and cultural pre-Neolithic flow coming from southern Mediterranean coasts existed toward northern Mediterranean areas, including at least Iberia and some Mediterranean islands. This model would substitute for the demic diffusion model put forward to explain Neolithic innovations in Western Europe.

Anthropology↗
PubMed2000

A corpus-linguistic investigation of dental English.

This article begins by presenting corpus linguistics and explaining how the corpus approach to language analysis can be used to investigate the language of dentistry. It then reports findings from an analysis that was carried out with readily available software and a corpus of 1,400 dental research abstracts. Included is information about word frequency in dental abstracts and also about how certain words tend to co-occur in sentences and form regular patterns. The article concludes with a discussion of ways that corpus-based findings can be applied to the teaching of English to non-native speakers of the language, many of whom will need English skills for their future careers in dentistry.

Abstracting and Indexing↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Linguistic lateralization and asymmetries in interhemispheric transmission time.

The Interhemispheric Conduction Delay (ICD) theory of cerebral lateralization claims that longer interhemispheric transfer times (IHTT's) should result in greater functional lateralization for time-critical tasks. IHTT was estimated in 40 normal participants using both a visual and an auditory version of the Poffenberger (1912) paradigm. There was a significant response-hand by side-of-presentation interaction, and the length of IHTT for auditory information being transferred from the right to left hemisphere was significantly related to linguistic lateralization as assessed with a dichotic-listening task. These results support the ICD theory of cerebral lateralization.

Brain↗
PubMed2000

A general method for sifting linguistic knowledge from structured terminologies.

Morphological knowledge is useful for medical language processing, information retrieval and terminology or ontology development. We show how a large volume of morphological associations between words can be learnt from existing medical terminologies by taking advantage of the semantic relations already encoded between terms in these terminologies: synonymy, hierarchy and transversal relations. The method proposed relies on no a priori linguistic knowledge. Since it can work with different relations between terms, it can be applied to any structured terminology. Tested on SNOMED and ICD in French and English, it proves to identify fairly reliable morphological relations (precision > 90%) with a good coverage (over 88% compared to the UMLS lexical variant generation program). For English words with a stem longer than 3 characters, recall reaches 98.8% for inflection and 94.7% for derivation.

Linguistics↗
PubMed2001

Accessibility of spoken, written, and sign language in Landau-Kleffner syndrome: a linguistic and functional MRI study.

Landau-Kleffner syndrome (LKS) is an acquired aphasia which begins in childhood and is thought to arise from an epileptic disorder within the auditory speech cortex. Although the epilepsy usually subsides at puberty, a severe communication impairment often persists. Here we report on a detailed study of a 26-year old, left-handed male, with onset of LKS at age 5 years, who is aphasic for English but who learned British Sign Language (BSL) at age 13. We have investigated his skills in different language modalities, recorded EEGs during wakefulness, sleep, and under conditions of auditory stimulation, measured brain stem auditory-evoked potentials (BAEP), and performed functional MRI (fMRI) during a range of linguistic tasks. Our investigation demonstrated severe restrictions in comprehension and production of spoken English as well as lip-reading, while reading was comparatively less impaired. BSL was by far the most efficient mode of communication. All EEG recordings were normal, while BAEP showed minor abnormalities. fMRI revealed: 1) powerful and extensive bilateral (R > L) activation of auditory cortices in response to heard speech, much stronger than when listening to music; 2) very little response to silent lip-reading; 3) strong activation in the temporo-parieto-occipital association cortex, exclusively in the right hemisphere (RH), when viewing BSL signs. Analysis of these findings provides novel insights into the disturbance of the auditory speech cortex which underlies LKS and its diagnostic evaluation by fMRI, and underpins a strategy of restoring communication abilities in LKS through a natural sign language of the deaf (with Video)

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Carl von Rokitansky and the Italian translation of the Handbuch der Pathologischen Anatomie: a linguistic and doctrinal enigma.

Carl von Rokitansky was the author of a treatise that came out between 1842 and 1846 with the title Handbuch der Pathologischen Anatomie. A historical milestone in pathological anatomy, Rokitansky's work represented the first attempt to systematically classify pathological specimens. Its publication inevitably made a great impact on Vienna, at that time the major European medical centre. The Italian translation of Rokitansky's masterpiece, Trattato Completo di Anatomia Patologica, published in Venice in 1852, was carried out by Ricchetti and Fano: the former a philologist and the latter a Triestine physician who, in 1873, had worked at Simon Pertot's side, the first prosector to be assumed in Trieste. From the start, the two translators not only made no secret of the linguistic obstacles they came up against, but also how unconvincing Rokitansky's doctrines were; a scepticism emerged from their words that inevitably contributed to the realization of a translation difficult to read. Undoubtedly, Rokitansky elaborated a theory of disease containing a certain degree of unclarity and in this respect it is interesting to emphasize that even the English translation, Manual of Pathologic Anatomy (1849-1854), demonstrated similar conceptual problems. A convinced supporter of gross pathology, Rokitansky put forth a theory of disease, the so-called Krasenlehre, resting upon humoral doctrines. This new knowledge inevitably exerted a great influence over Viennese, as well as German, medicine. Rokitansky's humoral pathology survived until the 1850s, when it was attacked by young Virchow, the future, universally recognized, father of cellular pathology, who definitively extinguished speculative humoral pathology.

Anatomy↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Narrative analysis in developmental social and linguistic pathologies: dissociation between emotional and informational language use.

This study examined the use of emotional and informational aspects of language in populations that demonstrate developmental social-emotional and linguistic pathologies. We tested high-functioning autistic (HFA) individuals because this group reveals deficiencies in social-emotional and informative aspects of language as well as abnormalities in sociability. We tested Williams syndrome (WS) individuals because of the claim that the social-emotional aspects of language use and sociability are differentially preserved in the context of mental retardation. We compared the performance of these two groups with two groups of control children (7- and 11-year-olds). All of the participants viewed a slide show depicting an event and were asked to retell the story. These narratives were coded for emotional and informational elements. The results showed that on measures of emotional elements, the WS group patterned with the control groups and only the HFA participants received lower scores, while on the informational elements, the two pathological groups did not differ, and both were lower than the controls. The results suggest that the preservation of language among WS individuals is specific for the emotional aspects of language.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Linguistic and nonlinguistic auditory processing of rapid vowel formant (F2) modulations in university students with and without developmental dyslexia.

To help resolve the issue of whether developmental dyslexia (DD) is related to central auditory processing deficits or to language-specific processing deficits, we had nine dyslectic and nine nondyslectic right-handed undergraduate students perform linguistic (Experiment 1: phoneme identification) and nonlinguistic (Experiment 2: formant rate change detection) tasks. In Experiment 1, subjects listened to synthetic vowels whose second formant (F2) was modulated sinusoidally with F1, F3, and F4 held constant. F2 modulation rate (4-18 Hz) was manipulated within and across stimuli. The groups did not differ in phoneme identification. Experiment 2 was run three times and showed that the control subjects' performance improved across runs whereas the dyslexics' deteriorated across runs (p < .0001), suggesting practice and fatigue effects, respectively. Performance on the two experiments correlated significantly and negatively for the dyslexic subjects only. These results suggest that resource depletion or frontal lobe dysfunction may be implicated in developmental dyslexia.

Dyslexia↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Barriers to creating a more culturally diverse nursing profession. Linguistic bias in multiple-choice nursing exams.

As part of a grant to recruit and retain multicultural and economically disadvantaged nursing students, funding was approved for a study analyzing multiple-choice nursing course exams for linguistic and cultural bias. Nineteen exams, for a total of 673 multiple-choice test items, were analyzed for this study. The categories of analysis used to identify flaws in the test items were: testwise flaws, irrelevant difficulty in stem, irrelevant difficulty in option, linguistic/structural bias, and cultural bias. Twenty-eight types of flaws occurred at least 10 times in the reviewed exams. Flaws from each of the categories are presented and discussed; specific examples are analyzed and revised.

Cultural Diversity↗