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PubMed2002

[The early detection of dyslexia and approach to treatment].

INTRODUCTION: The first sign of problems of dyslexia appears in phonographic decoding when the child tries to associate graphic signs with phonological sequences so as to pronounce words. During this process the child tries to recognise words visually and associate them with the names of objects. DEVELOPMENT: Spatial agnosia is a very common symptom in children with dyslexia and may be detected at preschool age. This spatial disorientation is closely linked with the notion of body, time and sometimes rhythm. Difficulty in identifying colours is an early symptom of dyslexia. Drawing up a plan of work, taking into account the systems for processing cerebral information, allows us to recreate habits of multisensorial perceptive processing; motor, oral and cognitive production, after executive levels of thought, button up and top down systems for processing. Fast For Word (FFW) training helps to achieve advances in phonemic consciousness whilst other linguistic abilities such as phonological, semantic, syntactic and grammatical consciousness, working memory and sequencing of events are integrated. Hamlet is a programme for working in phonological concepts based on classification activities. It aims to favour the analysis of segments of words, syllables or phonemes and the classification of a particular segment as belonging to a particular phonological or orthographical category or not.

Agnosia↗
PubMed1994

The effects of modality and elaboration on perceptual identification.

This paper describes two experiments on the effects of spoken and written priming on perceptual identification (visual word identification in Experiment 1 and auditory word identification in Experiment 2). Much previous work that has based the priming phase on the processing of word lists suggests that cross-modal priming (auditory-visual and visual-auditory) should be relatively weak. The present studies employed script- or story-based priming and represent a development on the earlier work by Carroll and Freebody (1987). In contrast to priming by list-processing, the reported findings show that homo-modal and cross-modal priming are indistinguishable, although only when the words are congruent with the story. Modality-shift effects are found when target words are incongruent with the stories in which they are found when target words are incongruent with the stories in which they are embedded at study. Results indicated that memory tests may be much more flexible with respect to the type of processing that can support performance than previous research suggests, and that the data-driven/conceptually driven distinction is not sufficient to account for the pattern of results obtained.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

Cortical DC-potentials in identification of the language-dominant hemisphere: linguistical and clinical aspects.

In order to find a non-invasive method for determining the hemispheric dominance for language, we studied cortical activation patterns during language processing by means of electrophysiological techniques: DC-potentials were recorded from frontal, central, temporal and parietal electrode positions in 28 right-handed normal subjects and in 16 patients with a history of transient loss of speech and known hemispheric dominance. Subjects were asked to find as many synonyms as possible within 6 seconds to either a concrete or an abstract noun. This task caused a highly significant left-hemispheric lateralization over frontal and central, but not over temporal and parietal cortical areas. Search for synonyms to abstract nouns yielded frontal left-hemispheric dominance in 93% of all normal subjects, search for synonyms to concrete nouns in 85%. Inter-electrode correlation coefficients were higher during processing of abstract word categories than during processing of concrete categories. In all patients, frontal and central lateralization corresponded to their hemispheric dominance as determined from clinical data. Advantages as well as inconveniences of this technique are discussed and compared to other invasive and noninvasive tools of assessing speech lateralization.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Length effect in word naming in reading: role of reading experience and reading deficit in italian readers.

Vocal reaction times (RTs) in naming 3- to 8-letter words were measured in proficient and dyslexic readers (Study 1). In proficient readers, RTs were independent of word length up to 5-letter words, indicating parallel processing. In the 5- to 8-letter range, RTs increased linearly, indicating sequential processing. Reading experience was associated with both faster discrimination of individual elements and parallel processing of increasingly large word parts. In dyslexics, RTs increased linearly with increasing length indicating reliance on sequential decoding. Individual analysis indicated 2 profiles of RTs (Types A and B). In Study 2, the distinction between A and B dyslexics was not associated with the use of different reading procedures. However, a more marked speed deficit characterized Type B dyslexics.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

Text generation in clinical medicine--a review.

OBJECTIVE: This article aims at an analysis of ways of producing documents (such as findings or referral letters) in clinical medicine. Special emphasis is given to the question of whether the field of "Natural Language Generation" (NLG) can provide new approaches to ameliorate the current situation. METHODS: In order to assess the currently used techniques in text production, an analysis of commercially available systems was performed in addition to an extensive review of the literature. The sketch of current NLG approaches is also based on a literature review. To estimate the applicability of several techniques to clinical documents, a typology of documents in clinical medicine was developed, based on rhetorical structure theory, speech act theory and certain recurrent linguistic phenomena exposed in the said documents. RESULTS: Current ways of producing text for documents in medicine are less than optimal in several respects. The field of NLG draws on the idea of generating text from a conceptual representation of not only certain facts, but also knowledge about how to express them via (written) language. Unfortunately, NLG does not yet offer "ready-to-run" solutions for the automatic production of most of the document types in the given typology. It seems, however, highly plausible that the demands of medical informatics for these kinds of systems will be satisfiable as NLG matures. CONCLUSIONS: NLG offers a promising way of generating text for clinical documents, a problem of enormous economical importance. The medical informatics community should therefore commit itself to the idea of NLG in medicine.

Communication↗
PubMed2002

Modulation of the lexical-semantic network by auditory semantic priming: an event-related functional MRI study.

The current event-related fMRI study specifies the neuroanatomical correlates of semantic priming and differences in semantic relation types using an auditory primed lexical decision task (LDT). Word pairs consisted of different relation types, associations (key-chain), pure categorical relations (cow-dog), and unrelated words (table-window), as well as word-pseudoword (way-tinne) and pseudoword-pseudoword (ahurn-döva) pairs. The factor lexical status, i.e., the processing of words compared to pseudowords, was associated with activation in the middle temporal gyri and the left striatum. The factor relatedness, i.e., the contrast between unrelated and related target words, was associated with increased activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus, the deep frontal operculum bilaterally, and the middle frontal gyri. A direct contrast between the two semantic relation types indicated that the processing of purely categorical compared to associative information recruits the right precuneus, the isthmus gyrus cinguli, and the cuneus, suggesting more effortful processing of the former information type. The present data show that the factors lexical status, semantic relatedness, and type of semantic relation in a primed LDT modulate the hemodynamic response in cerebral areas that subserve auditory word recognition and subsequent lexical-semantic processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Patterns of verbal long-term and working memory performance reveal deficits in strategic processing in children with frontal infarcts related to sickle cell disease.

Frontal brain regions are thought to mediate strategic processes that facilitate memory. We hypothesized that children with frontal cerebral infarcts related to sickle cell disease (SCD) would exhibit impairments in long-term and working memory as a result of disruptions in strategic processing. Word-list learning and digit span tasks were used to assess verbal memory and strategic processing in 21 children with SCD without infarcts (controls) and in 10 children with SCD with frontal infarcts. On the word-list learning task, children with frontal infarcts performed more poorly in terms of learning and free recall, although recognition and cued recall were adequate; this pattern suggested intact encoding and storage with impaired retrieval. Children with frontal infarcts performed more poorly on backward digit span, although forward digit span was adequate; this pattern suggested intact maintenance with impaired manipulation of information in working memory. Overall, these findings support the notion that disruptions in strategic processing contribute to memory impairments in children with frontal infarcts.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2000

[Effect of concreteness of target words on verbal working memory: an evaluation using Japanese version of reading span test].

Effects of concreteness and representation mode (kanji/hiragana) of target words on working memory during reading was tested using Japanese version of reading span test (RST), developed by Osaka and Osaka (1994). Concreteness and familiarity of target words and difficulty of sentences were carefully controlled. The words with high concreteness resulted in significantly higher RST scores, which suggests the high efficiency of working memory in processing these words. The results suggest that high concrete noun-words associated with visual clues consume less working memory capacity during reading. The effect of representation mode is different between subjects with high-RST and low-RST scores. Characteristic of the high concrete words that may be responsible for the effectiveness of processing are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1987

Cognitive effort and the word frequency effect in recognition and lexical decision.

Cognitive effort requirements for high and low frequency words were assessed during study for a recognition test and during the performance of a lexical decision task. Recognition for these words was tested following each task. Low frequency words received greater effort than high frequency words during study for recognition, and these words were subsequently recognized better than high frequency words. Cognitive effort requirements during performance of an incidental lexical decision task were similar to those during study for recognition. Moreover, recognition performance following the lexical decision task resembled performance following a recognition expectancy. Overall, the results indicate that low frequency words require more extensive processing than high frequency words and that this difference in processing may be a factor in recognition word frequency effects.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Comprehension of concrete and abstract words in autistic children.

This study employed the Stroop paradigm to examine comprehension of single words in autistic children. The words of interest varied along a concrete-abstract dimension. In the Stroop paradigm, subjects are asked to name the color of ink in which color words are printed. Comprehension is indexed by the degree to which the automatic processing of words interferes with the color-naming task. For both concrete and abstract words, autistic children showed the same degree of interference as reading-matched controls. The findings corroborate and extend previous work suggesting that autistic children understand, and by implication, can mentally represent, at least some word meanings.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Observing the what and when of language production for different age groups by monitoring speakers' eye movements.

Research on adult age differences in language production has traditionally focused on either the production of single words or the properties of language samples. Older adults are more prone to word retrieval failures than are younger adults (e.g., ). Older adults also tend to produce fewer ideas per utterance and fewer left-branching syntactic structures (e.g., ). The use of eye movement monitoring in the study of language production allows researchers to examine word production processes in the context of multiword utterances, bridging the gap between behavior in word production studies and spontaneous speech samples. This paper outlines one view of how speakers plan and produce utterances, summarizes the literature on age-related changes in production, presents an overview of the published research on speakers' gaze during picture description, and recaps a study using eye movement monitoring to explore age-related changes in language production.

Adult↗
PubMed2004

Word production deficits in schizophrenia.

Fronto-cerebellar circuitry is implicated in word production. Data suggest that the cerebellum is involved in word search, whereas the prefrontal cortex underlies the selection of words from among competing alternatives. We explored the role of search and selection processes in word production deficits in schizophrenia patients. In Experiment 1, patients were impaired in a verb generation task under both high and low selection conditions but were more impaired in the high selection condition. In Experiment 2, when the difficulty level of search and selection conditions was equated in a word stem completion task, patients were only impaired in the search condition. Word search deficits underlie word production problems in schizophrenia, and may involve fronto-cerebellar dysfunction.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

Pictures in sentences: understanding without words.

To understand a sentence, the meanings of the words in the sentence must be retrieved and combined. Are these meanings represented within the language system (the lexical hypothesis) or are they represented in a general conceptual system that is not restricted to language (the conceptual hypothesis)? To evaluate these hypotheses, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a word (rebus sentences). Previous research has shown that isolated pictures and words are processed equally rapidly in conceptual tasks, but that pictures are markedly slower than words in tasks requiring lexical access. The lexical hypothesis would therefore lead one to expect that rebus sentences will be relatively difficult, whereas the conceptual hypothesis would predict that rebus sentences would be rather easy. Sentences were shown using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at a rate of 10 or 12 words per second. With one set of materials (Experiments 1 and 2), readers took longer to judge the plausibility of rebus sentences than all-word sentences, although the accuracy of judgment and of recall were similar for the two formats. With two new sets of materials (Experiments 3 and 5), rebus and all-word sentences were virtually equivalent except in one circumstance: when a picture replaced the noun in a familiar phrase such as seedless grapes. In contrast, when the task required overt naming of the rebus picture in a sentence context, latency to name the picture was markedly longer than to name the corresponding word, and the appropriateness of the sentence context affected picture naming but not word naming (Experiment 4). The results fail to support theories that place word meanings in a specialized lexical entry. Instead, the results suggest that the lexical representation of a noun or familiar noun phrase provides a pointer to a nonlinguistic conceptual system, and it is in that system that the meaning of a sentence is constructed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Universality versus language-specificity in listening to running speech.

Recognizing spoken language involves automatic activation of multiple candidate words. The process of selection between candidates is made more efficient by inhibition of embedded words (like egg in beg) that leave a portion of the input stranded (here, b). Results from European languages suggest that this inhibition occurs when consonants are stranded but not when syllables are stranded. The reason why leftover syllables do not lead to inhibition could be that in principle they might themselves be words; in European languages, a syllable can be a word. In Sesotho (a Bantu language), however, a single syllable cannot be a word. We report that in Sesotho, word recognition is inhibited by stranded consonants, but stranded monosyllables produce no more difficulty than stranded bisyllables (which could be Sesotho words). Thisfinding suggests that the viability constraint which inhibits spurious embedded word candidates is not sensitive to language-specific word structure, but is universal.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2001

Examination of the neighborhood activation theory in normal and hearing-impaired listeners.

OBJECTIVE: Experiments were conducted to examine the effects of lexical information on word recognition among normal hearing listeners and individuals with sensorineural hearing loss. The lexical factors of interest were incorporated in the Neighborhood Activation Model (NAM). Central to this model is the concept that words are recognized relationally in the context of other phonemically similar words. NAM suggests that words in the mental lexicon are organized into similarity neighborhoods and the listener is required to select the target word from competing lexical items. Two structural characteristics of similarity neighborhoods that influence word recognition have been identified; "neighborhood density" or the number of phonemically similar words (neighbors) for a particular target item and "neighborhood frequency" or the average frequency of occurrence of all the items within a neighborhood. A third lexical factor, "word frequency" or the frequency of occurrence of a target word in the language, is assumed to optimize the word recognition process by biasing the system toward choosing a high frequency over a low frequency word. DESIGN: Three experiments were performed. In the initial experiments, word recognition for consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) monosyllables was assessed in young normal hearing listeners by systematically partitioning the items into the eight possible lexical conditions that could be created by two levels of the three lexical factors, word frequency (high and low), neighborhood density (high and low), and average neighborhood frequency (high and low). Neighborhood structure and word frequency were estimated computationally using a large, on-line lexicon-based Webster's Pocket Dictionary. From this program 400 highly familiar, monosyllables were selected and partitioned into eight orthogonal lexical groups (50 words/group). The 400 words were presented randomly to normal hearing listeners in speech-shaped noise (Experiment 1) and "in quiet" (Experiment 2) as well as to an elderly group of listeners with sensorineural hearing loss in the speech-shaped noise (Experiment 3). RESULTS: The results of three experiments verified predictions of NAM in both normal hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. In each experiment, words from low density neighborhoods were recognized more accurately than those from high density neighborhoods. The presence of high frequency neighbors (average neighborhood frequency) produced poorer recognition performance than comparable conditions with low frequency neighbors. Word frequency was found to have a highly significant effect on word recognition. Lexical conditions with high word frequencies produced higher performance scores than conditions with low frequency words. CONCLUSION: The results supported the basic tenets of NAM theory and identified both neighborhood structural properties and word frequency as significant lexical factors affecting word recognition when listening in noise and "in quiet." The results of the third experiment permit extension of NAM theory to individuals with sensorineural hearing loss. Future development of speech recognition tests should allow for the effects of higher level cognitive (lexical) factors on lower level phonemic processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Semantic processing of open- and closed-class words: an event-related potentials study.

Previous research on open- and closed-class words has revealed the existence of several differences in the processing of these types of vocabulary. In this paper the processing of open- and closed-class words was compared by means of an early electrical brain response, recognition potential (RP), which indexes semantic processing and originates from basal extrastriate areas. The effects of word frequency on closed-class words were also investigated. For these purposes, open- and closed-class words, among other stimuli, were presented by means of the rapid stream stimulation procedure. Results showed that there were no significant differences when comparing the RP evoked by open- and closed-class words in the left hemisphere. However, in the right hemisphere this situation changed: the RP evoked by open- and closed-class words did differ. Moreover, there were no differences between the RP evoked by closed-class words and pseudowords. These patterns of results suggest that the semantic processing of closed-class words shares some aspects with the processing of open-class words, despite the existence of some differences. Thus, whereas the semantic processing of open-class words recruits brain areas of both hemispheres, the semantic processing of closed-class words is left-lateralized. A second purpose of this work is to study word-frequency effects on closed-class words. Our results show the insensitivity of closed-class words to word-frequency effects.

Adult↗