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PubMed1979

A syntax program designed to present base linguistic structures to language-disordered children.

An intervention strategy for teaching syntax to language-disordered children is described, and the results of its use in a controlled study with 11 children are reported. The therapy program attempts to move the child from single words through a series of successive approximations to use of the construct noun + "is" + verbing + noun, incorporating auditory directions and visual stimuli in the form of cards and boards upon which the cards are sequentially ordered. The results of the experimental group who participated in this therapeutic sequence were compared to those of 11 control subjects and suggested significant gains as measured by the pre- to postprogram performance (t = 2.31, p 0.05). Advantages and limitations of this type of intervention strategy are also discussed.

Audiovisual Aids↗
PubMed1984

A case of acquired aphasia and convulsive disorder: some linguistic aspects of recovery and breakdown.

Among the cases of acquired aphasia and convulsive disorder several children are reported to have experienced more than one aphasic period. We present such a case in more detail, with emphasis on some characteristics of spontaneous speech. The occurrence of paraphasias, and in particular of neologisms, appeared to be associated with language recovery and breakdown. At the beginning of the period of recovery, a rapid and total disappearance of neologisms was observed, while only literal paraphasias remained. A period of language breakdown was preceded by the return of neologisms. The process was not influenced by drug therapy.

Aphasia↗
PubMed1986

Linguistic semantic agraphia: a dissociation of the lexical spelling system from semantics.

Two spelling systems have been described. The phonological system transcodes speech sounds to letters and is thought to be useful for spelling regular words and pronounceable nonwords. Although the second system, the lexical-semantic system, is thought to use visual word images and meaning to spell irregular words, it is not known if this system is dependent on semantic knowledge. We used a homophone spelling test to examine the lexical-semantic system in five patients. The patients were asked to spell individual homophones (doe or dough) using the context of a sentence. Semantically incorrect and correct homophones were spelled equally well, whether they were regular or irregular. These results demonstrate that an irregular word may be spelled without knowledge of the word's meaning. Therefore, the lexical system can be dissociated from semantic influence.

Agraphia↗
PubMed1988

On the preservation of word order in aphasia: cross-linguistic evidence.

Studies of language production in English-speaking aphasics (both fluent and nonfluent) generally lead to the conclusion that word order is preserved to a much greater degree than grammatical morphology and/or lexical retrieval. However, because word order is rigidly preserved even in normal English speech, this pattern might reflect nothing more than "the weak link in the chain." Using a constrained production paradigm, we provide evidence showing that canonical sentence order is well preserved in both fluent and nonfluent patients, in Italian and German (languages that permit much more pragmatic word-order variation) as well as English. Patients also retain the ability to order nouns around a preposition, and among Italian patients, access to a high-frequency form of pragmatic word-order variation is also retained. Syntactic difficulties seem to revolve not around loss of ordering principles, but (1) reduction in syntactic complexity, (2) overuse of canonical word order as a "safe harbor," (3) blend errors in which a form appears in legal but semantically incorrect position, and (4) abandonment of the effort to produce a complete sentence under stressful conditions. We offer a redefinition of syntactic impairment as a problem in the access of phrase structure types, resulting in a preference for higher frequency forms. Parallels between lexical retrieval and phrase structure retrieval suggest that similar mechanisms may be at work in both cases.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1988

A linguistic deficit resulting from right-hemisphere damage.

The ability of right-brain-damaged (RBD) subjects to correctly insert a word into a well-formed stimulus sentence was tested. Subjects also performed three evaluative tasks designed to establish their degree of general cognitive impairment. The performance of RBD subjects on these tasks was compared to that of left-brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) subjects. Although RBD subjects outperformed LBD subjects on the language-related evaluative tasks, the RBD group was significantly more impaired on a subset of the insertion task. This subset included items which required reassignment of the syntactic status of elements in the stimulus sentence in order for the insertion to be carried out. The results of this study permit refinement of the common characterization of RBD individuals as rigid in their interpretation of meaning and indicate right-hemisphere involvement in aspects of the grammar previously thought to be inaccessible to it.

Brain Damage, Chronic↗
PubMed1994

Cross-linguistic approaches to speech processing.

Recent advances in the field of speech processing indicate that speakers of differing languages process speech relying on units that are appropriate to the rhythmical properties of their maternal tongue. Studies with young infants suggest that the acquisition of these processing routines takes place before the end of the first year of life. Further evidence shows that the left hemisphere initially processes any language and gradually becomes specialized for the maternal language.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by changes in phoneme length: a cross-linguistic study.

Speech sounds representing different phonetic categories are typically easier to discriminate than sounds belonging to the same category. This phenomenon is referred to as the phoneme boundary effect. We aimed to determine whether, at neural level, this effect is indeed due to crossing the phoneme boundary. The mismatch negativity (MMN) brain response was measured for across- and within-category changes in Finnish phoneme length in native speakers and second-language users of Finnish as well as non-Finnish-speaking subjects. The results showed that the MMN amplitude was enhanced in the native speakers in comparison with the two non-native groups which, in turn, did not differ from each other in MMN amplitude. The response pattern to across- and within-category changes, however, was the same in all groups regardless of whether or not they had the phoneme categories. Thus, the responses could not be determined by crossing the phoneme boundary. Rather, the enhancement of MMN amplitude in the native speakers is likely to be due to the activation of native-language phonetic prototypes. The second-language users, however, did not seem to have automatic access to Finnish prototypes.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2006

Are myelodysplastic syndromes "cancer"? Unexpected adverse consequences of linguistic ambiguity.

Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are clonal, neoplastic disorders of hematopoietic tissue that convey a guarded prognosis, but physicians vary in whether they refer to MDS as a "cancer" when discussing the diagnosis with patients. Because of past ambiguity about whether MDS is truly a malignancy, confusion about MDS terminology is widespread. Additionally, patients who carry one of the dubious cancer-specific health insurance policies are usually not eligible for financial benefits when they receive a diagnosis of MDS. Likewise, patients with MDS who have been led to believe they do not have a form of cancer by their primary physician may become upset when seeing another health care provider who does refer to MDS in this way. Here, I discuss evidence supporting broader consideration of MDS as a form of malignant neoplasia - i.e., cancer - as well as some of the relevant practical issues.

Disease Progression↗
PubMed2005

Schizophrenia and the structure of language: the linguist's view.

Patients with schizophrenia often display unusual language impairments. This is a wide ranging critical review of the literature on language in schizophrenia since the 19th century. We survey schizophrenic language level by level, from phonetics through phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. There are at least two kinds of impairment (perhaps not fully distinct): thought disorder, or failure to maintain a discourse plan, and schizophasia, comprising various dysphasia-like impairments such as clanging, neologism, and unintelligible utterances. Thought disorder appears to be primarily a disruption of executive function and pragmatics, perhaps with impairment of the syntax-semantics interface; schizophasia involves disruption at other levels. Phonetics is also often abnormal (manifesting as flat intonation or unusual voice quality), but phonological structure, morphology, and syntax are normal or nearly so (some syntactic impairments have been demonstrated). Access to the lexicon is clearly impaired, manifesting as stilted speech, word approximation, and neologism. Clanging (glossomania) is straightforwardly explainable as distraction by self-monitoring. Recent research has begun to relate schizophrenia, which is partly genetic, to the genetic endowment that makes human language possible.

History, 19th Century↗
PubMed2001

Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: when does language become a tool for categorization?

Infants' ability to form new object categories based on either visual or naming information alone was evaluated at two different ages (16 and 20 months) using an object manipulation task. Estimates of productive vocabulary size were also collected. Infants at both ages showed evidence of using visual information to categorize the objects, while only the older ones used naming information. Moreover, there was a correlation between vocabulary size and name-based categorization among the 20-month-olds. The present results establish that infants as young as 20 months can use the non-obvious cue of naming to categorize objects. The possibility of a link between this ability and lexical development is discussed.

Child Development↗
PubMed1997

Intuitive knowledge of linguistic co-reference.

The research reported here is a systematic investigation of what competent, native speakers of English, native to contemporary syntactic theory, judge to be grammatically acceptable patterns of co-reference involving names and pronouns. Its central goal is the specification of syntactic factors that influence co-reference within and between sentences. The results show that naive subjects have consistent intuitions of grammaticality that agree with some principles of contemporary binding theory. The results also show that naive subjects diverge substantially from syntactic theorists in other judgments of grammaticality. In particular, subjects have strong intuitions that reflexives and pronouns are in complementary distribution, a fact that supports contemporary syntactic theory. Beyond that domain, subjects' judgments of co-reference in name-pronoun, name-name, and pronoun-name sequences are systematically influenced by syntactic structure in ways that are not consistent with syntactic theory. Co-reference in name-pronoun sequences is generally quite acceptable but becomes more acceptable as the syntactic prominence of the name increases. Co-reference in name-name sequences is only moderately acceptable and becomes less acceptable as the syntactic prominence of the first name increases. Co-reference in pronoun-name sequences is generally unacceptable and is only weakly influenced by the kinds of syntactic prominence that affect other relations of co-reference. We account for these results through the elaboration of a model of the process by which syntactic representations are mapped onto a representation of discourse capable of expressing generalizations about co-reference both intra-sententially and inter-sententially.

Humans↗
PubMed1998

Linguistic influences in cognitive arithmetic: comment on Noel, Fias and Brsybaert (1997)

Noël et al. (Noël, M.-P., Fias, W., Brsybaert, M., 1997. About the influence of the presentation format on arithmetical-fact retrieval processes. Cognition 63, 335-374) examined the simple-multiplication errors of 24 Dutch- and 24 French-speaking adults for evidence that number reading interferes with language-specific, number-fact retrieval processes. They concluded that arithmetic memory is not influenced by reading-based interference and is based on a notation and language-independent mental representation. Alternative analyses of their error data, however, provide strong evidence that arithmetic performance is subject to reading-based interference and provide some support for the language-specificity of number-fact memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies.

This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory--the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT)--has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is hypothesized to be quantified in terms of the number of syntactic categories that are necessary to complete the current input string as a grammatical sentence. Furthermore, in accordance with results from the working memory literature both memory cost and integration cost are hypothesized to be heavily influenced by locality (1) the longer a predicted category must be kept in memory before the prediction is satisfied, the greater is the cost for maintaining that prediction; and (2) the greater the distance between an incoming word and the most local head or dependent to which it attaches, the greater the integration cost. The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including (1) the lower complexity of subject-extracted relative clauses compared to object-extracted relative clauses, (2) numerous processing overload effects across languages, including the unacceptability of multiply center-embedded structures, (3) the lower complexity of cross-serial dependencies relative to center-embedded dependencies, (4) heaviness effects, such that sentences are easier to understand when larger phrases are placed later and (5) numerous ambiguity effects, such as those which have been argued to be evidence for the Active Filler Hypothesis.

Decision Trees↗