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Results for “Verbal Behavior”

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At least 955 records · Page 53Linked to original sources
PubMed1990

Assessment of articulated thoughts in social anxiety: modification of the ATSS procedure.

In the present study an assessment strategy was developed which adapted the Articulated Thoughts during Simulated Situations (ATSS) paradigm devised by Davison, Robins & Johnson (1983). That strategy was applied to the assessment of social anxiety. Responses of 10 socially anxious and 10 non-anxious males were compared as they imagined themselves participating in videotaped simulations of heterosocial interactions. Each time the subject was aware of a reaction to the events depicted, he stopped the videotape, and then articulated his thoughts. Consistent with cognitive conceptualizations of social anxiety, the articulated thoughts of anxious males were distinguished by a greater focus upon the self in general and by a concentration upon irrational concerns in particular. In contrast, non-anxious males provided larger proportions of thoughts directed towards the environment and in particular, provided more positive thoughts both about other persons and their interactions in general. The theoretical and methodological implications of the data are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Quantitative assessment of second language learners' fluency by means of automatic speech recognition technology.

To determine whether expert fluency ratings of read speech can be predicted on the basis of automatically calculated temporal measures of speech quality, an experiment was conducted with read speech of 20 native and 60 non-native speakers of Dutch. The speech material was scored for fluency by nine experts and was then analyzed by means of an automatic speech recognizer in terms of quantitative measures such as speech rate, articulation rate, number and length of pauses, number of dysfluencies, mean length of runs, and phonation/time ratio. The results show that expert ratings of fluency in read speech are reliable (Cronbach's alpha varies between 0.90 and 0.96) and that these ratings can be predicted on the basis of quantitative measures: for six automatic measures the magnitude of the correlations with the fluency scores varies between 0.81 and 0.93. Rate of speech appears to be the best predictor: correlations vary between 0.90 and 0.93. Two other important determinants of reading fluency are the rate at which speakers articulate the sounds and the number of pauses they make. Apparently, rate of speech is such a good predictor of perceived fluency because it incorporates these two aspects.

Electronic Data Processing↗
PubMed1966

Dominant hemispherectomy: preliminary report on neuropsychological sequelae.

The first reported case of continuing survival 6 months after left hemispherectomy for glioma in a right-handed adult shows diminishing psychological impairment. Different degrees of initial impairment and in subsequent recovery of propositional speech, verbal comprehension, reading, writing, and other functions indicate quantitative rather than-qualitative differences in adult left-and right-hemispheric functions.

Brain Neoplasms↗
PubMed2006

Disruption of sitting balance after stroke: influence of spoken output.

OBJECTIVES: To identify the extent of dual task interference between cognitive and motor tasks, (cognitive motor interference (CMI)) in sitting balance during recovery from stroke; to compare CMI in sitting balance between stroke and non-stroke groups; and to record any changes to CMI during sitting that correlate with functional recovery. METHOD: 36 patients from stroke rehabilitation settings in three NHS trusts. Healthy control group: 21 older volunteers. Measures of seated postural sway were taken in unsupported sitting positions, alone, or concurrently with either a repetitive utterance task or an oral word category generation task. Outcome measures were variability of sway area, path length of sway, and the number of valid words generated. RESULTS: Stroke patients were generally less stable than controls during unsupported sitting tasks. They showed greater sway during repetitive speech compared with quiet sitting, but did not show increased instability to posture between repetitive speech and word category generation. When compared with controls, stroke patients experienced greater dual task interferences during repetitive utterance but not during word generation. Sway during repetitive speech was negatively correlated with concurrent function on the Barthel ADL index. CONCLUSIONS: The stroke patients showed postural instability and poor word generation skills. The results of this study show that the effort of verbal utterances alone was sufficient to disturb postural control early after stroke, and the extent of this instability correlated with concomitant Barthel ADL function.

Activities of Daily Living↗
PubMed2000

Phonological grouping is specifically affected in cerebellar patients: a verbal fluency study.

OBJECTIVES: Recent clinical and functional neuroimaging evidence points towards a cerebellar role in verbal production. At present it is not clear how the cerebellum participates in language production. The aim was to investigate the influence of cerebellar lesions on verbal fluency abilities with specific focus on the verbal searching strategies employed by patients with cerebellar damage. METHODS: Twenty five patients with focal or degenerative cerebellar disease and 14 control subjects were tested in a timed verbal fluency task requiring word production under forced (phonemic or semantic) conditions. To analyse the verbal searching strategy employed, semantic and phonemic cluster analyses were also performed. RESULTS: Performances of cerebellar patients were comparable with those of controls in the semantic task; conversely their performances were significantly impaired when tested in the letter task. Cluster analysis results showed that the verbal fluency impairment is linked to specific damage of phonemically related retrieval strategies. CONCLUSION: Cerebellar damage impairs verbal fluency by specifically affecting phonemic rule performances while sparing semantic rule ones. These findings underline the importance of the cerebellar computing properties in strategy development in the linguistic domain.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Rumination and executive function in depression: an experimental study.

BACKGROUND: Major depression is associated with cognitive deficits, particularly those requiring central executive functioning. Depressed patients also tend to focus on and think about their symptoms and problems ("ruminate") more than non-depressed controls. Although an association has been found between rumination and impaired performance on a central executive processing task, the causal relation between impaired executive functioning and rumination has not been determined. This study sought to directly manipulate rumination and assess the impact on executive functioning in depression as measured by random number generation. METHODS: Depressed patients (n=14) and non-depressed controls (n=14) were compared on a random number generation task, performed after both a rumination induction and after a distraction induction, with order of inductions counter balanced within each group. RESULTS: Compared with the distraction induction, the rumination induction produced a significant increase in both ruminations and the tendency towards stereotyped counting responses (thought to reflect a failure of inhibitory executive control) in depressed patients but not in controls. However, after distraction, no difference in random number generation or rumination was found between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: The aspects of executive function involved in random number generation are not fundamentally impaired in depressed patients. In depressed patients, the rumination induction seems to trigger the continued generation of ruminative stimulus independent thoughts, which interferes with concurrent executive processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

The mirror-neuron system.

A category of stimuli of great importance for primates, humans in particular, is that formed by actions done by other individuals. If we want to survive, we must understand the actions of others. Furthermore, without action understanding, social organization is impossible. In the case of humans, there is another faculty that depends on the observation of others' actions: imitation learning. Unlike most species, we are able to learn by imitation, and this faculty is at the basis of human culture. In this review we present data on a neurophysiological mechanism--the mirror-neuron mechanism--that appears to play a fundamental role in both action understanding and imitation. We describe first the functional properties of mirror neurons in monkeys. We review next the characteristics of the mirror-neuron system in humans. We stress, in particular, those properties specific to the human mirror-neuron system that might explain the human capacity to learn by imitation. We conclude by discussing the relationship between the mirror-neuron system and language.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Language processing: functional organization and neuroanatomical basis.

Earlier formulations of the relation of language and the brain provided oversimplified accounts of the nature of language disorders, classifying patients into syndromes characterized by the disruption of sensory or motor word representations or by the disruption of syntax or semantics. More recent neuropsychological findings, drawn mainly from case studies, provide evidence regarding the various levels of representations and processes involved in single-word and sentence processing. Lesion data and neuroimaging findings are converging to some extent in providing localization of these components of language processing, particularly at the single-word level. Much work remains to be done in developing precise theoretical accounts of sentence processing that can accommodate the observed patterns of breakdown. Such theoretical developments may provide a means of accommodating the seemingly contradictory findings regarding the neural organization of sentence processing.

Aphasia↗
PubMed2005

Articulatory planning is continuous and sensitive to informational redundancy.

This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the seven most frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were randomly selected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis of the selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measured by duration and number of realized segments) was affected by repetition, predictability from the previous word and predictability from the following word. Interestingly, not all of these effects were significant across morphemes and tar-get words. Repetition effects were limited to suffixes, while effects of predictability from the previous word were restricted to the stems of two of the seven target words. Predictability from the following word affected the stems of all target words equally, but not all suffixes. The implications of these findings for models of speech production are discussed.

Humans↗
PubMed1994

The nature and origins of ambient language influence on infant vocal production and early words.

Phonological structure may be seen as emerging in ontogeny from the combined effects of performance constraints rooted in the neuromotor and perceptual systems, individual lexical development and the influence of the particular ambient language. We review here the nature and origins of the earliest ambient language influences. Global effects within the first year of life include both (1) loss of early appearing phonetic gestures not supported by the ambient language and (2) positive effects, reflecting infant attention to prosody and to cues available in the visual as well as the auditory modality. In the course of early lexical development more specific effects become manifest as individual children pursue less common phonetic paths to which the ambient language provides 'sufficient exposure'.

Child Language↗
PubMed1978

Verbal characteristics of male and female transsexuals.

Slater's Selective Vocabulary Test was given to a group of 56 male and a group of 14 female transsexuals and the results were compared with those of 15-year-old boys and girls, and a group of normal male adults. It was found that whereas normal males and females have a ratio of gender appropriate words to cross gender words of approximately 2 to 1, in both male and female transsexuals that ratio is more like 1 to 1. The way in which this abnormal vocabulary acquisition may come about is briefly discussed. The factors related to this abnormal learning are not known.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

The role of prefrontal cortex in verbal episodic memory: rTMS evidence.

Long-term, episodic memory processing is supposed to involve the prefrontal cortex asymmetrically. Here we investigate the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in encoding and retrieval of semantically related or unrelated word pairs. Subjects were required to perform a task consisting of two parts: a study phase (encoding), in which word pairs were presented, and a test phase (retrieval), during which stimuli previously presented had to be recognized among other stimuli. Consistently with our previous findings using pictures, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) had a significant impact on episodic memory. The performance was significantly disrupted when rTMS was applied to the left or right DLPFC during encoding, and to the right DLPFC in retrieval, but only for unrelated word pairs. These results indicate that the nature of the material to be remembered interacts with the encoding-retrieval DLPFC asymmetry; moreover, the crucial role of DLPFC is evident only for novel stimuli.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Who's in control? Proficiency and L1 influence on L2 processing.

We report three reaction time (RT)/event-related brain potential (ERP) semantic priming lexical decision experiments that explore the following in relation to L1 activation during L2 processing: (1) the role of L2 proficiency, (2) the role of sentence context, and (3) the locus of L1 activations (orthographic vs. semantic). All experiments used German (L1) homonyms translated into English (L2) to form prime-target pairs (pine-jaw for Kiefer) to test whether the L1 caused interference in an all-L2 experiment. Both RTs and ERPs were measured on targets. Experiment 1 revealed reversed priming in the N200 component and RTs for low-proficiency learners, but only RT interference for high-proficiency participants. Experiment 2 showed that once the words were processed in sentence context, the low-proficiency participants still showed reversed N200 and RT priming, whereas the high-proficiency group showed no effects. Experiment 3 tested native English speakers with the words in sentence context and showed a null result comparable to the high-proficiency group. Based on these results, we argue that cognitive control relating to translational activation is modulated by (1) L2 proficiency, as the early interference in the N200 was observed only for low-proficiency learners, and (2) sentence context, as it helps high-proficiency learners control L1 activation. As reversed priming was observed in the N200 and not the N400 component, we argue that (3) the locus of the L1 activations was orthographic. Implications in terms of bilingual word recognition and the functional role of the N200 ERP component are discussed.

Adult↗