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PubMed1984

Linguistic processing and performance in articulation-disordered subgroups of language-impaired children.

The linguistic and dichotic listening performances of three groups of nine children were studied. The groups were divided as follows: (1) Language-disordered children whose articulatory errors were primarily omissions; (2) language-disordered children whose articulatory errors were primarily substitutions; (3) communicatively normal children. All subjects participated in articulation testing, imitative language tests, analysis of a spontaneous language sample, and a dichotic word task. The articulatory omission group differed significantly from the substitution group on the imitative language test but not on the developmental sentence analysis. All groups demonstrated a right ear advantage, suggesting left hemispheric processing of the dichotic stimuli. The results of the present study and prior research are discussed in terms of possible sources of variability.

Child↗
PubMed1990

EEG alpha asymmetries in stutterers and non-stutterers: effects of linguistic variables on hemispheric processing and fluency.

The EEG hemispheric alpha asymmetry technique was used to gather data from anterior and posterior language areas during a resting condition and in a sentence repetition task. Subjects were nine adult stuttering males and nine adult fluent male controls. Sentences were controlled for imagery, syntactic complexity, and rate. Significant within- and between-groups differences were found for both resting and testing conditions. Posteriorly, stutterers showed no differences between resting and testing conditions, while controls showed increased left hemisphere activation. Of the linguistic variables investigated, only imagery was involved in a significant interaction. Fluent males showed greater posterior left hemispheric activation for high and low visual imagery sentences, compared to greater posterior right hemispheric activation in stuttering males. Significantly greater alpha power was found for low vs high imagery sentences in the anterior and posterior left hemisphere sites for both subject groups, and in the right hemisphere sites for the stuttering group only. Fluency data is presented. Differences between groups in alpha power changes from resting to testing conditions are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

Writing induces a right hemisphere linguistic advantage in dysphonetic dyslexic children: implications for attention and capacity models of laterality.

An experiment demonstrated a complete hemispheric processing reversal in 10 male, dysphonetic dyslexic children that occurred during a dichotic listening test of their verbal working memory. Requiring a written response to dichotic digits produced a right hemisphere/left ear superiority in the dysphonetic dyslexics whereas normal subjects and other dyslexics maintained a left hemisphere/right ear advantage. This reversal was unaffected by changes in task difficulty. A second experiment assessed the influence on producing the reversal of concurrent manual interference with left hemisphere verbal processing (responding orally vs. manually) and selective right hemisphere priming (Forward Writing vs. Backward Writing). The dysphonetic children reverted to a strong left hemisphere superiority when recalling the dichotic digits orally. Backward writing produced no ear advantage in either direction. The findings suggest that dysphonetic dyslexia may be related to (1) left hemisphere processing demands that exceed capacity, (2) easily activated right hemisphere processing strategies and (3) failure to coordinate linguistic processing interhemispherically. The results supported a novel hybrid conceptualization of dyslexia consisting of a synthesis of selective activation, and dual processor-limited capacity, theories.

Attention↗
PubMed1987

Linguistic abilities in patients with prefrontal damage.

The language abilities of 21 patients with prefrontal lesions (11 right and 10 left) and 15 matched normal subjects were analyzed, using a linguistic ability test designed to evaluate performance in six areas: automatic language, language production, verbal memory, syntax, derivative words, and comprehension of logical grammatical structures. Significant differences in the obtained scores of all groups were found. In spite of formal conservation of language in patients with frontal damage, their complex and conceptual verbal abilities were severely compromised.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1987

Linguistic description in nonfluent dysphasia: utilization of pictograms.

Nonfluent dysphasic utterances for pictogram or sequential picture descriptions were compared against those elicited in a standard stative single-picture description task. Elicited utterances were also compared to identify the availability of different variables within phonologic, syntactic, and semantic levels. Descriptive data revealed that Pictograms yielded a relatively greater frequency of occurrence for the variables examined under the parameters of phonology, syntax, and semantics. Of the different variables examined for each parameter, a significantly greater incidence of phonemic paraphasias than neologistic paraphasias were obtained for the parameter of phonology. For the parameter of syntax, significantly more verb phrases were in error than noun phrases; and significantly more syntactic complexity levels 1 and 3 were produced than were levels 2, 4, or 5. Data for the parameter of semantics revealed a significantly greater occurrence of hesitations than circumlocutions, verbal paraphasias, or revisions. Discussion of the obtained findings relate to language assessment and linguistic characterization of nonfluent dysphasia.

Adult↗
PubMed1992

Relation of linguistic communication abilities of Alzheimer's patients to stage of disease.

A battery of linguistic communication (L-C) tasks was administered to 152 Alzheimer's disease patients in different stages of the disease and 60 normal elders. Subject performance data are used to construct a profile of L-C deficits by disease stage, as determined by ratings on the Global Deterioration Scale. Specification also is made of the L-C tasks on which mild Alzheimer's patients perform like normal elders, the relative difficulty of various L-C processes, the disease stage in which the greatest change occurs in L-C functions, and the degree of variation in L-C for individuals at a particular level of dementia severity.

Aged↗
PubMed1995

Investigating the validity of the Clinical Linguistic Auditory Milestone Scale.

The purpose of this investigation was to determine the validity of the Clinical Linguistic Auditory Milestone Scale (CLAMS) as a screening test to help physicians detect delays in language development. Language delays in children are often not diagnosed until about 3 years of age because (1) parents may not be aware of what constitutes normal language development, (2) diagnosis of a language problem is difficult for physicians to make because they see the child for brief periods of time, (3) there is a wide range of what constitutes normal language so professionals are reluctant to classify a child as delayed without thorough testing. The hypothesis for this investigation was that children who have language delays can be identified quickly and easily through the administration of the CLAMS. Subjects included 99 children between the ages of 1 and 3 years. The procedure had 3 parts: (1) parents completed a form consisting of questions such as parent occupation, number of children in the family, birth history, etc., (2) the CLAMS, a parent report that can be given while the child is seen by the physician, was administered, (3) the Sequenced Inventory of Communication Development (SICD), was administered to assess receptive and expressive language. The purpose for administering the SICD was to obtain a more in-depth picture of the child's ability to comprehend and use language, thereby providing data to determine the validity of the CLAMS as a screening device. Results indicated that the CLAMS is a valid instrument for identifying language delayed children.

Child Language↗
PubMed2004

Hemispheric asymmetry for linguistic prosody: a study of stress perception in Croatian.

The aim of the study was to test for possible functional cerebral asymmetry in processing one segment of linguistic prosody, namely word stress, in Croatian. The test material consisted of eight tokens of the word pas under a falling accent, varying only in vowel duration between 119 and 185 ms, attached to the end of a frame sentence. The sentence could, depending on the duration of the vowel, mean 'This is a beautiful dog' or 'This is a beautiful belt/waist.' Each sentence was presented eight times in three dichotic listening conditions (binaural, left ear only, right ear only), in random order. Fourty healthy female right-handers participated in a forced-choice lexical task. For each presented sentence they had to decide whether it referred to the animal (short vowel in the key word) or to the belt/waist (long vowel in the key word). Their oral responses were analyzed in terms of response time and categoricity. No consistent significant differences were found among listening conditions. The responses possibly reflect the nonlateralized activity of subcortical regions or a simultaneous activity of both hemispheres relying on different cues.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed2006

Neural substrates of linguistic prosody: evidence from syntactic disambiguation in the productions of brain-damaged patients.

The present investigation focussed on the neural substrates underlying linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues. A production experiment was conducted to examine the ability of left- (LHD) and right- (RHD) hemisphere-damaged patients and normal controls to use temporal and fundamental frequency cues to disambiguate sentences which include one or more Intonational Phrase level prosodic boundaries. Acoustic analyses of subjects' productions of three sentence types-parentheticals, appositives, and tags-showed that LHD speakers, compared to RHD and normal controls, exhibited impairments in the control of temporal parameters signalling phrase boundaries, including inconsistent patterns of pre-boundary lengthening and longer-than-normal pause durations in non-boundary positions. Somewhat surprisingly, a perception test presented to a group of normal native listeners showed listeners experienced greatest difficulty in identifying the presence or absence of boundaries in the productions of the RHD speakers. The findings support a cue lateralization hypothesis in which prosodic domain plays an important role.

Aged↗
PubMed2004

Early conceptual and linguistic development of a patient and partner treatment satisfaction scale (TSS) for erectile dysfunction.

OBJECTIVE: To describe the early development of a pluri-language self-report questionnaire to assess male patients and their female partners' satisfaction with drug treatment for erectile dysfunction (ED). METHODS: This first development phase proceeded in several parts. Item generation followed literature review, hypothesized characteristics of the drug and in-depth interviews with patients and their partners. Perceptions and feelings related to ED and patients' expectations of treatment were explored. Items were generated simultaneously in 5 languages (American English, Canadian French, English, French and German). Content and face validity were empirically assessed by interviews with a few patients and partners in each country. Conceptual equivalence between languages was ascertained. RESULTS: The final content domains included satisfaction with: sexual spontaneity, quality of erection, quality of ejaculation, sexual pleasure, orgasm, confidence, reliability of treatment, side effects, convenience, overall satisfaction, conformity to treatment expectations and intent to continue use of drug. Cognitive debriefing with patients and partners found few issues with comprehension, however some words were considered problematic. The simultaneous development for the different languages allowed adaptation of the content at this stage and ensured consistency of all language versions. The final questionnaire consisted of 4 modules: unmedicated patient, medicated patient, unmedicated partner, and medicated partner modules. The questionnaire was then linguistically validated into 15 additional languages for further psychometric validation. CONCLUSIONS: The Treatment Satisfaction Scale (TSS) is a multi-facetted measure of patients' and partners' satisfaction with their sexual life relating to erectile dysfunction and intended for prospective use. Its simultaneous development for a variety of countries and languages has fostered true item equivalence across language versions. However, further work is needed to validate the TSS psychometrically, including identification of domains, test responsiveness and determination of appropriate scoring prior to its clinical use.

Erectile Dysfunction↗
PubMed2005

The contribution of AERPs (MMN and LDN) to studying temporal vs. linguistic processing deficits in children with reading difficulties.

One of the factors responsible for the appearance of reading problems seems to be a difficulty in discriminating auditory stimuli presented in rapid succession, known as the 'temporal processing hypothesis'. In this study automatic discrimination processes were evaluated in 31 children with reading difficulties and 24 control children between 4 and 8 years of age, using a passive oddball paradigm, in which syllables (/ba/ and /da/) and complex tones were presented. Analysis of the MMN component revealed significant differences between the groups only in the task involving linguistic stimuli, detecting longer latency of the component in the experimental group. The LDN component showed lower amplitudes and delayed latencies in the experimental group during the processing of both types of stimuli. These differences, however, were more marked in the task involving syllables, where a higher mean amplitude was observed in the experimental group than in the control group in the right hemisphere. The task involving complex tones also revealed differences between the groups at the frontal electrodes, indicating different maturative courses of the potential. The findings demonstrate the existence of a strongly pronounced preattentional auditory deficit during phonological processing, and also reveal important differences between the various stages of automatic information processing in children with and without reading disabilities.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Dynamical systems and cognitive linguistics: toward an active morphodynamical semantics.

We propose a novel dynamical system approach to cognitive linguistics based on cellular automata and spiking neural networks. How can the same relationship 'in' apply to containers as different as 'box', 'tree' or 'bowl'? Our objective is to categorize the infinite diversity of schematic visual scenes into a small set of grammatical elements and elucidate the topology of language. Gestalt-inspired semantic studies have shown that spatial prepositions such as 'in' or 'above' are neutral toward the shape and size of objects. We suggest that this invariance can be explained by introducing morphodynamical transforms, which erase image details and create virtual structures or singularities (boundaries, skeleton), and call this paradigm 'active semantics'. Singularities arise from a large-scale lattice of coupled excitable units exhibiting spatiotemporal pattern formation, in particular traveling waves. This work addresses the crucial cognitive mechanisms of spatial schematization and categorization at the interface between vision and language and anchors them to expansion processes such as activity diffusion or wave propagation.

Algorithms↗
PubMed2006

Linguistic prominence and Broca's area: the influence of animacy as a linearization principle.

Previous neuroimaging findings suggest a sensitivity of the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (i.e. a core subregion of Broca's area) to a number of linguistic dependencies governing the linear sequencing of information in a sentence (e.g. subjects should precede objects; the participant role hierarchy should be respected). The present study used event-related fMRI to examine the hitherto untested hypothesis that the violation of a linearization principle that is purely semantic in nature (animate arguments should precede inanimate arguments) would also lead to increased pars opercularis activation. To this end, we manipulated the features animacy and argument order in German sentences and found a significant increase of activation in the pars opercularis for a violation of the animacy principle even when the other factors mentioned above were controlled for. This result therefore calls for a "supra-syntactic" account of pars opercularis function in the real-time understanding of sentences.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Bacterial linguistic communication and social intelligence.

Bacteria have developed intricate communication capabilities (e.g. quorum-sensing, chemotactic signaling and plasmid exchange) to cooperatively self-organize into highly structured colonies with elevated environmental adaptability. We propose that bacteria use their intracellular flexibility, involving signal transduction networks and genomic plasticity, to collectively maintain linguistic communication: self and shared interpretations of chemical cues, exchange of chemical messages (semantic) and dialogues (pragmatic). Meaning-based communication permits colonial identity, intentional behavior (e.g. pheromone-based courtship for mating), purposeful alteration of colony structure (e.g. formation of fruiting bodies), decision-making (e.g. to sporulate) and the recognition and identification of other colonies - features we might begin to associate with a bacterial social intelligence. Such a social intelligence, should it exist, would require going beyond communication to encompass unknown additional intracellular processes to generate inheritable colonial memory and commonly shared genomic context.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed1997

Event-related potential correlates of linguistic information processing in schizophrenics.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from adult schizophrenics and age- and education-matched normal controls during performance of an idiom recognition task involving judgments of the meaningfulness of idiomatic, literal, and nonsense phrases. Schizophrenics produced more errors and had prolonged reaction times while attempting to correctly differentiate meaningful from meaningless phrases. An ERP correlate of that deficit was a larger than normal N400 to idioms and literals, with no difference in N400 amplitude to nonsense phrases. This result was interpreted as evidence that the influence of the linguistic context provided by the first word of two-word idiomatic and literal phrases is reduced in schizophrenia. Schizophrenics also showed reduced amplitude P300.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal.

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2003

Lexical-gustatory synaesthesia: linguistic and conceptual factors.

This study documents an unusual case of developmental synaesthesia, in which speech sounds induce an involuntary sensation of taste that is subjectively located in the mouth. JIW shows a highly structured, non-random relationship between particular combinations of phonemes (rather than graphemes) and the resultant taste, and this is influenced by a number of fine-grained phonemic properties (e.g. allophony, phoneme ordering). The synaesthesia is not found for environmental sounds. The synaesthesia, in its current form, is likely to have originated during vocabulary acquisition, since it is guided by learned linguistic and conceptual knowledge. The phonemes that trigger a given taste tend to also appear in the name of the corresponding foodstuff (e.g. /I/, /n/ and /s/ can trigger a taste of mince /mIns/) and there is often a semantic association between the triggering word and taste (e.g. the word blue tastes "inky"). The results suggest that synaesthesia does not simply reflect innate connections from one perceptual system to another, but that it can be mediated and/or influenced by a symbolic/conceptual level of representation.

Adult↗