Clinical studies on Chinese multilinguals with dysphasia.
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Adult↗
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Communication for health professionals in a multilingual society.
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Communication Barriers↗
Cross-language lexical connections in the mental lexicon: evidence from a case of trilingual aphasia.
Despite anecdotal data on lexical interference among the languages of multilingual speakers, little research evidence about the lexical connections among multilinguals' languages exists to date. In the present paper, two experiments with a multilingual speaker who had suffered aphasia are reported. The first experiment provides data about inter-language activation during natural conversations; the second experiment examines performance on a word-translation task. Asymmetric patterns of inter-language interference and translation are evident. These patterns are influenced by age of language learning, degree of language recovery and use, and prevalence of shared lexical items. We conclude that whereas age of language learning plays a role in language recovery following aphasia, the degrees of language use prior to the aphasia onset and of shared vocabulary determine the ease with which words are accessed. The findings emphasize the importance of patterns of language use and the relations between the language pair under investigation in understanding lexical connections among languages in bilinguals and multilinguals.
Aphasia↗
Language policies: instruments in cultural development and well-being.
OBJECTIVES: To measure social capital in one multilingual region of northern Sweden. Earlier studies have neglected the language aspect of social capital development. To map cultural production (song, literature, theatre) in Meänkieli, Finnish, Saami and Swedish in the Swedish Torne Valley. METHODS: Statistical comparison of regions. Cultural statistics from electronic libraries are related to language policies, density of voluntary associations, unemployment, sickness and life expectancy. Lists of voluntary associations from municipality authorities. STUDY DESIGN: The multilingual region contains five municipalities which are related to each other. Two monolingual regions are cited as references for the study: Finnish Torne Valley and parts of county Västerbotten. RESULTS: Pajala has the best institutionalisation of the former vernacular Meänkieli. Saami gains best institutional support in Kiruna. Gällivare has the weakest interest to maintain any minority language, whereas Haparanda promotes Finnish in education and administration. Overtorneå has some interest in Finnish and Meänkieli. Cultural production corresponds with the institutionalisation of Meänkieli and Saami and develops best in Pajala and Kiruna. Haparanda and especially Gällivare have weak cultural activities in Meänkieli, Finnish, Saami and Swedish. Finnish is a common, formal, administrative language in Haparanda, but is only occasionally used in cultural domains. However, the monolingual regions have higher cultural production and seem to have denser networks of voluntary associations. Since the 1980s, the cultural index is highest in the multilingual region. CONCLUSIONS: Former discriminative language policies have, most likely, hamperered development of the civil society in the multilingual region, which has seemingly had an influence on unemployment and well-being. The monolingual region has less unemployment, (earlier) better health and better life expectancy for males. There are, however, indications that the revitalisation of the minority language effects positively on socio-economic conditions.
Cross-Sectional Studies↗
Aphasia in bilinguals.
The neurophysiological and the neurolinguistic basis of multilingualism is not yet fully elucidated. A study of the occurrence of aphasia in multilingual patients and the pattern of recovery may help to clarify some unsolved problems. For e.g. is the ability to use a second language stored in a different area of the left hemisphere and what is the extent of involvement of the right hemisphere in language skills? When recovery from aphasia occurs, what factors determine the rate of recovery of different languages and the priorities of recovery? To understand some of the problems, a study of aphasia in multilinguals was conducted in Madras, South India, where multilingualism is common. 88 patients were studied with 40 healthy controls, using standard protocols. It was found that the pattern of recovery was dispersed widely in time, rate, level, degree and between the languages known. No support was obtained for the notion that the patients' mother tongue recovers first, nor was support found for the importance of language proficiency viewed globally. Evidence was found that the languages in which routine thinking, mental calculations and praying were carried out were the ones most resistant to damage in brain insults. It is interesting that these functions are all highly overlearned, acquired early in life and used frequently over the course of many years. Another observation made was that the incidence of crossed aphasia was fairly high, in both uni- and multi-linguals, with the latter showing a slightly higher incidence.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Adolescent↗
Defining and relating biomedical terms: towards a cross-language morphosemantics-based system.
This paper addresses the issue of how semantic information can be automatically assigned to compound terms, i.e. both a definition and a set of semantic relations. This is particularly crucial when elaborating multilingual databases and when developing cross-language information retrieval systems. The paper shows how morphosemantics can contribute in the constitution of multilingual lexical networks in biomedical corpora. It presents a system capable of labelling terms with morphologically related words, i.e. providing them with a definition, and grouping them according to synonymy, hyponymy and proximity relations. The approach requires the interaction of three techniques: (1) a language-specific morphosemantic parser, (2) a multilingual table defining basic relations between word roots and (3) a set of language-independent rules to draw up the list of related terms. This approach has been fully implemented for French, on an about 29,000 terms biomedical lexicon, resulting to more than 3000 lexical families. A validation of the results against a manually annotated file by experts of the domain is presented, followed by a discussion of our method.
France↗
Early detection of speech and language delays in the Netherlands. The case for integrating primary and secondary prevention.
The early detection of speech and language delays has been an important feature of the child health services in the Netherlands for some 15 years. During this period ideas about both the purpose of screening and the methods themselves have changed considerably. There are four key outstanding issues: What is the best age to identify children? What screening measures are available? How can we detect speech and language delays in multilingual children? Which groups are best able to detect speech and language difficulties: parents, teachers, playgroup leaders, doctors, nurses, or speech and language therapists? These questions are influenced by social, demographic developments and an increase in the understanding of language delay. This article examines the Dutch solutions to these problems. The conclusion reached is that early language screening can only be part of the answer to early detection both because the available measures are not yet sufficiently accurate and because the growing group of multilingual children (e.g. in Amsterdam more than 50% of the children under the age of 4 years are multilingual) makes the application of specific measures at a population level unworkable. An alternative method is suggested, namely primary prevention by giving information and support to parents, playgroup leaders, doctors, etc.
Child↗
Automatic extraction of linguistic knowledge from an international classification.
Automatic extraction of knowledge from large corpus of texts is an essential step toward linguistic knowledge acquisition in the medical domain. The current situation shows a lack of computer-readable large medical lexicons, with a partial exception for the English language. Moreover, multilingual lexicons with versatility for multiple languages applications are far from reach as long as only manual extraction is considered. Computer-assisted linguistic knowledge acquisition is a must. A multilingual lexicon differs from a monolingual one by the necessity to bridge the words in different languages. A kind of interlingua has to be built under the form of concepts to which the specific entries are attached. In the present approach, the authors have developed an intelligent rule-based tool in order to focus on a multilingual source of medical knowledge, like the International Classification of Disease (ICD) which contains a vocabulary of some 20,000 words, translated in numerous languages.
Disease↗
The GALEN project.
The GALEN project is developing language independent concept representation systems as the foundations for the next generation of multilingual coding systems. It aims to support the flexibility required to cope with the diversity amongst medical applications, while ensuring the coherence necessary for integration and re-use of terminologies. GALEN is developing a fully compositional and generative formal system for modelling concepts: the GALEN Representation and Integration Language (GRAIL) Kernel. Its goal is to overcome many of the problems with traditional coding and classification systems, in particular the combinatorial explosion of terms in enumerative systems and the generation of nonsensical terms in partially compositional systems. It will also provide a clean separation between the concept model and linguistic mechanisms which interpret that model (i.e., the words in a specific language, syntax, alternative phrasings, etc.) in order to allow the development of multilingual systems. GRAIL aims to be formally sound and produce models that are verifiable and contain no contradictions or ambiguities, with realistic human effort. A Coding Reference (CORE) Model of medical terminology covering is being developed which aims to represent the core concepts in for example pathology, anatomy and therapeutics, that have widespread applicability in medical applications. It should also provide the basis for specialist extensions according to the formal principles of GRAIL. The main results of GALEN will be delivered as a Terminology Server (TeS) which encapsulates and coordinates the functionality of the concept module, multilingual module, and code conversion module, and also provides a uniform applications programming interface and network services for use by external applications.
Databases, Bibliographic↗
Issues in the assessment of reading disabilities in L2 children--beliefs and research evidence.
In bilingual and multilingual settings one is constantly challenged by the difficulty of teasing apart phenomena associated with normal second language (L2) reading acquisition from authentic warning signs of reading failure. The bulk of this paper focuses on a critical discussion of a cluster of beliefs that pertain to the issues concerning the diagnosis of reading disability in multilingual and bilingual settings among school children. Findings from available research on reading acquisition among bilingual children and research focusing specifically on the assessment of English-as-a-second language (ESL) children who might be at risk for reading disability are used to evaluate the validity of these beliefs. While some beliefs are supported by research, others are not. In particular, the research suggests that reliable diagnosis of dyslexia among ESL children can be achieved by examining within-language differences on various indices of basic reading skills such as phonological processing, and by noting a significant gap between oral and reading comprehension.
Adolescent↗
The Babel effect: community linguistic diversity and extramarital sex in Uganda.
We examine the association of community linguistic diversity with non-spousal sexual activity in Uganda. We conducted a survey on rates of sexual contact in last 12 months among 1709 respondents age 18-60 living in Uganda in early 2001. Households were selected at random from Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) 2000 household sampling frame listings in 12 districts and 120 clusters. Household listings described the principal language spoken by every household in the cluster. Sexual contact was reported by 26 vs. 13% of unmarried women in multilingual vs. monolingual clusters respectively. Extramarital sexual contact occurred for 29 vs. 16% for married men in multilingual vs. monolingual clusters respectively. These results were robust to multivariate models which included confounders such as urbanity, and cluster distance to market places, cinemas, and transportation. Our results suggest a robust association between residence in a multilinguistic community and higher rates of non-spousal sex.
Adolescent↗
Effect of a synesthete's photisms on name recall.
A multilingual, colored-letter synesthete professor (MLS), 9 nonsynesthete multilingual professors and 4 nonsynesthete art professors learned 30 names of individuals (first and last name pairs) in three trials. They recalled the names after each trial and six months later, as well as performed cued recall trials initially and after six months. As hypothesized, MLS recalled significantly more names than control groups on all free recall tests (except after the first trial) and on cued recall tests. In addition, MLS gave qualitatively different reasons for remembering names than any individual control participant. MLS gave mostly color reasons for remembering the names, whereas nonsynesthetes gave reasons based on familiarity or language or art knowledge. Results on standardized memory tests showed that MLS had average performance on non-language visual memory tests (the Benton Visual Retention Test-Revised--BURT-R, and the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test--CFT), but had superior memory performance on a verbal test consisting of lists of nouns (Rey Auditory-Verbal Learning Test--RAVLT). MLS's synesthesia seems to aid memory for visually or auditorily presented language stimuli (names and nouns), but not for non-language visual stimuli (simple and complex figures).
Adult↗
Morpheme-based, cross-lingual indexing for medical document retrieval.
The increasing availability of machine-readable medical documents is not really matched with the sophistication of currently used retrieval facilities to deal with a variety of critical natural language phenomena. Still most popular are string-matching methods which encounter problems for the medical sublanguage, in particular, concerning the wide-spread use of complex word forms such as noun compounds. We introduce a methodology for the segmentation of complex compounds into medically motivated morphemes. Given the sublanguage patterns in our data these morphemes derive from German, Greek and Latin roots. For indexing and retrieval purposes, such a morpheme dictionary may be further structured by defining the semantic relations among morpheme sets in order to build up a multilingual morpheme thesaurus. We present a tool for thesaurus compilation and management, and outline a methodology for the proper construction and maintenance of a multilingual morpheme thesaurus.
Germany↗
Intra-operative mapping of cortical areas involved in reading in mono- and bilingual patients.
In order to identify the cortical areas involved in the reading process and to spare them during surgery, we systematically studied cortical areas by direct cortical stimulation in patients operated on for brain tumours. Seventy-six cortical stimulation mapping studies for language were performed in 35 monolingual and 19 bi- or multilingual patients over a 5-year period. We systematically searched for reading interference areas in addition to standard naming areas using an 'awake surgery' technique for brain mapping. A 'reading aloud' task (translated into different languages in multilingual patients) was used. Brain mapping was performed in left (44 patients) and right (10 patients) hemispheres. Cortical areas involved in reading were identified according to the type of interference, location and distinctness from naming areas. Stimulation of several major hemispheric regions resulted in significant interference with reading aloud: (i) the lower part of the pre- and postcentral gyri (P < 0.00001); (ii) the dominant supramarginal, angular and the posterior part of the superior temporal gyri (P < 0.00001); (iii) in the dominant inferior and middle frontal gyri (P < 0.001); and (iv) in the posterior part of the dominant middle temporal gyrus (P < 0.05). Interferences in reading were generally found in small cortical areas, with intervening areas evoking no reading interferences. Only partial overlap between reading and naming sites was found. Reading-specific sites were preferentially found when stimulating dominant inferior parietal or posterior temporal areas. Different types of reading interferences were noted. While 'articulatory' interferences were found in pre- and postcentral gyri bilaterally, and ocular-induced movements in bilateral middle frontal gyri, paraphasias were found mainly in the dominant supramarginal and posterior superior temporal gyri. Reading arrest sites were found in many regions. Reading interference sites were also occasionally found in the non-dominant hemisphere. In bilingual patients, if common cortical areas could be found, language- and reading-specific areas were sometimes detected, lending support to the concept that bilinguals can have relatively distinct cortical representation of their language skills. Finally, in this series, the location of reading interference sites and their relative specialization showed considerable individual variability.
Adolescent↗
Model-based semantic dictionaries for medical language understanding.
Semantic dictionaries are emerging as a major cornerstone towards achieving sound natural language understanding. Indeed, they constitute the main bridge between words and conceptual entities that reflect their meanings. Nowadays, more and more wide-coverage lexical dictionaries are electronically available in the public domain. However, associating a semantic content with lexical entries is not a straightforward task as it is subordinate to the existence of a fine-grained concept model of the treated domain. This paper presents the benefits and pitfalls in building and maintaining multilingual dictionaries, the semantics of which is directly established on an existing concept model. Concrete cases, handled through the GALEN-IN-USE project, illustrate the use of such semantic dictionaries for the analysis and generation of multilingual surgical procedures.
Dictionaries, Medical as Topic↗
Suggesting a new European language policy.
Conflict is the most intriguing aspect of contact linguistics. Throughout history ever since the Tower of Babel was left unfinished, contacts between speakers of different languages have unavoidably resulted in conflicts between speakers of those languages. Without any doubt, the European Union (EU)--above all after the decision to enlarge the community--has accepted the multidisciplinary symbolic function of language and culture as a basis for European political unification. Accordingly, European Union policy makers have had to analyze conflicts caused by monolingualism and multilingualism, all aspects of contact linguistics. Can these conflicts be solved, minimized or neutralized by strategies of language planning, language policies and language politics? Initial results of European language policy strategies permit at least a cautious measure of optimism and open broad perspectives for the future of a New Multilingualism which will be discussed in our contribution.
Anthropology, Cultural↗
On the representation of multiple languages in the brain: old problems and new directions.
This paper has attempted to show that when the relevant literature is critically scrutinized there is very little evidence for the idea that the right hemisphere participates in multiple languages in any way significantly different from the case of a single language. We have seen that most of the clinical data support the simple notion that the left hemisphere controls the first and subsequent languages to the same degree. The experimental data are full of contradictions, but many of the claims are invalid due to various methodological and analytical problems explained previously. It is suggested that future research concentrate on finer-grained questions than simply whether a language is left lateralized or not. These questions should make connections with other known neurological and neuropsychological facts. Of primary interest is obtaining converging evidence on the hypothesis of differential cerebral territories within the left hemisphere of bilinguals for different languages. In conclusion, we would be wise to consider the bilingual as a very rich potential source for testing various hypotheses about linguistic and neurolinguistic organization. But we should not lose the opportunity to test both more general and more specific hypotheses to which the multilingual gives us access. If treated with care the multilingual will tell us much, even though he may speak in many tongues.
Brain↗
Trends in medical information retrieval on Internet.
Information on the World Wide Web is unstructured, distributed, multimedia and multilingual. Many tools have been developed to help users search for useful information: subject hierarchies, general search engines, browsers and search assistants. Although helpful, they present serious limitations, mainly in terms of precision, multilingual indexing and distribution. In this paper, we cover some on-line solutions to medical information discovery and present our own approach, the MARVIN (multi-agent retrieval vagabond on information network) project, which tackles medical information research with specialized cooperative retrieval agents. We also draw some outlines for future extensions.
Computer Systems↗