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On the building of binary spelling interfaces for augmentative communication.

A criterion for design of optimal binary spelling interfaces (SI)--the average expectation of number of writing steps (trials) required to write one letter--is presented and discussed. This criterion is relevant for practical usage of any menu-oriented alternative communication system, mechanical device or brain-computer-interface, when a user (typically, a patient with devastating neuromuscular handicap) can not create an intended single binary response with an absolute reliability. An algorithm for building of a corresponding binary tree is developed and evaluated. This algorithm is efficient, when selection probabilities have essentially different values (the worst case).

Algorithms↗

Cerebral dominance and attentional bias in word recognition.

This study investigated the role of cerebral dominance, functional localization, and attentional bias on the recognition of neutral and emotionally charged words presented unilaterally and bilaterally by a tachistoscope to the left and right visual fields of 42 left and 42 right handers. The major findings were: (1) Over-all, right handers perceived more words than left handers; (2) Although more neutral words were perceived, there were no interactive effects for type of word; (3) Unilateral presentation: LVF = RVF for left and right handers; Bilateral presentation: left handers evidenced a left visual-field advantage, right handers evidenced a right visual-field advantage; (4) Directional cuing did not magnify the existing visual field advantage but increased efficiency of recognition for words presented to the correctly cued nondominant visual field and decreased efficiency of recognition for words presented to the incorrectly cued dominant visual field. It was concluded that, although each hemisphere was equally capable of processing single words, cerebral dominance and functional localization interact with attentional bias to produce the observed differential in word recognition of the left and right visual fields.

Adult↗

Physician data entry: providing options is essential.

Getting doctors to enter data into computer-based patient records systems is a challenge. Many physicians are resisting using any of the available options, choosing instead to stick with dictating their notes for later transcription. To build support among physicians for electronic records, many health care organizations are placing a premium on identifying the easiest and most efficient data entry methods.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

Age changes in the missing-letter effect reflect the reader's growing ability to extract the structure from text.

Readers searching for a target letter in text are more likely to miss it in frequent function words than in less frequent content words, and the magnitude of this effect increases with age. While this increase has been taken to indicate that proficient readers process familiar words in terms of larger orthographic units, we propose that it reflects the reader's growing ability to extract the structure of text, resulting in a reduced emphasis on function than on content words. Indeed, comparing 2nd graders (7 to 7 1/2 years) and college students (Experiment 1) this increase was found even when function and content words were equated for frequency. Scrambling words within a sentence (Experiment 2) improved letter detection in function compared to content words among 7th graders (12 to 13 years) and college students, but not among 3rd graders (8 to 9 years). Although letter detection was also affected by word frequency, the age differences noted above are possibly due not to the increasing familiarity of words, but rather to the growing sensitivity to their structural role in text.

Adolescent↗

Searching for meaning: a method of analysing interview transcripts with a personal computer.

Unstructured, qualitative data present a challenge to the nurse researcher. This paper offers a method of focusing on 'meaning units' as the basis of developing a category system for the analysis of interview transcripts. The use of the wordprocessing program WordPerfect is described as a method of automating some of the stages of this form of data analysis. Whilst the computer cannot replace the researcher as a critical reviewer and analyst, it can take over many of the more clerical tasks of the research process.

Humans↗

Behavioral and neurophysiological evidence for altered processing of anxiety-related words in panic disorder.

Body-related and nonsomatic words were presented tachistoscopically to 15 panic patients and 15 healthy controls at each participant's threshold for correctly identifying 50% of neutral words. Behavioral (proportion of words correctly recognized) and electrocortical (event-related brain potentials [ERPs]) measures were registered. Panic patients recognized more body-related than nonsomatic words, and body-related as compared with nonsomatic words elicited, in these patients, significantly larger P300 amplitudes and enhanced positive slow waves (600 to 800 ms after stimulus presentation). In healthy controls, the number of correct recognized words and the ERPs were not differentially affected by the 2 word types. These results are grossly consistent with cognitive models of panic disorders, assuming that certain bodily sensation are perceived and processed in an affective manner that differentiates panic patients from healthy controls.

Adult↗

Modeling lexical decision and word naming as a retrieval process.

We argue that rule-like phenomena in naming and lexical decision reflect the collapsing of information that occurs during retrieval from the lexicon, and that complex patterns in performance reflect the pattern of correlation that exists in the reader's lexicon rather than mapping rules wired into, or learned by, the processing apparatus. By using a lexicon built to scale, we show that simple retrieval operations applied to a large corpus of words correctly predict an interaction of word frequency by spelling-to-sound regularity in naming, a frequency main effect in lexical decision, sensitivity to orthographically defined syllable-like structures in lexical decision, and an interaction of number of syllables with word frequency in naming.

Decision Making↗

Automatic semantic activation is no myth: semantic context effects on the N400 in the letter-search task in the absence of response time effects.

The claim that semantic activation is an automatic process was recently called a myth, on the basis of the finding that if letter search is performed on a prime word, semantic priming effects on response time are eliminated, whereas repetition effects are preserved. The absence of semantic activation, however, cannot be validly inferred from the lack of response time effects, and converging evidence is needed. To this end, we examined the event-related potential correlate of priming, the N400 amplitude modulation, in a letter-search priming paradigm. Our experiment replicated the response time effects and demonstrated that the N400 amplitude successfully differentiates cross-case repetition priming, semantic priming, and neutral conditions. The results clearly indicate that the meaning of the prime word was processed and that semantic activation indeed was present in the letter-search task. The notion that semantic activation is an automatic process should not be abandoned prematurely.

Adult↗

Brain lateralization and severity of stuttering in children.

Cerebral lateralization in visual perception was investigated in 9 severe stuttering, 11 mild stuttering and 48 fluent speakers. The subjects were asked to identify words presented in the left or right visual field for 20 ms. Children responded by pointing to the exposed test word on a response card which contained four different words. Errors committed in the left and right visual fields were analyzed. The data showed a left hemisphere superiority in the processing of words in both the mild stutterers and the fluent speakers, but a right hemisphere advantage in the severe stutterers. The results suggest a close relationship between the severity of stuttering and functional brain organization.

Child↗

Deviant neurophysiological responses to phonological regularities in speech in dyslexic children.

Developmental dyslexia is strongly associated with a phonological deficit. Yet, implicit phonological processing (in)capacities in dyslexia remain relatively unexplored. Here we use a neurophysiological response sensitive to experience-dependent auditory memory traces, the mismatch negativity (MMN), to investigate implicit phonological processing of natural speech in dyslexic and normally reading children. In a modified passive oddball design that minimizes the contribution of acoustic processes, we presented non-words that differed by the degree of phonotactic probability, i.e. the distributional frequency of phoneme combinations in a given language. Overall morphology of ERP responses to the non-words indicated comparable processing of acoustic-phonetic stimulus differences in both children groups. Consistent with previous findings in adults, normally reading children showed a significantly stronger MMN response to the non-word with high phonotactic probability (notsel) as compared to the non-word with low phonotactic probability (notkel), suggesting auditory cortical tuning to statistical regularities of phoneme combinations. In contrast, dyslexic children did not show this sensitivity to phonotactic probability. These findings indicate that the phonological problems often reported in dyslexia relate to a subtle deficit in the implicit phonetic-phonological processing of natural speech.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

The spatial and temporal signatures of word production components.

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive meta-analysis of the relevant imaging literature on word production (82 experiments). In addition to the spatial overlap of activated regions, we also analyzed the available data on the time course of activations. The analysis specified regions and time windows of activation for the core processes of word production: lexical selection, phonological code retrieval, syllabification, and phonetic/articulatory preparation. A comparison of the word production results with studies on auditory word/non-word perception and reading showed that the time course of activations in word production is, on the whole, compatible with the temporal constraints that perception processes impose on the production processes they affect in picture/word interference paradigms.

Humans↗

On-line processing of "pop-out" words in spoken French dialogues.

Highlighting relevant information in a discourse context is a major aim of spoken language communication. Prosodic cues such as focal prominences are used to fulfill this aim through the pragmatic function of prosody. To determine whether listeners make on-line use of focal prominences to build coherent representations of the informational structure of the utterances, we used the brain event-related potential (ERP) method. Short dialogues composed of a question and an answer were presented auditorily. The design of the experiment allowed us to examine precisely the time course of the processing of prosodic patterns of sentence-medial or -final words in the answer. These patterns were either congruous or incongruous with regard to the pragmatic context introduced by the question. Furthermore, the ERP effects were compared for words with or without focal prominences. Results showed that pragmatically congruous and incongruous prosodic patterns elicit clear differences in the ERPs, which were largely modulated in latency and polarity by their position within the answer. By showing that prosodic patterns are processed on-line by listeners in order to understand the informational structure of the message, the present results demonstrate the psychobiological validity of the pragmatic concept of focus, expressed via prosodic cues. Moreover, the functional significance of the positive-going effects found sentence medially and negative-going effects found sentence finally is discussed. Whereas the former may reflect the processing of surprising and task-relevant prosodic patterns, the latter may reflect the integration problems encountered in extracting the overall informational structure of the sentence.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Effects of a concurrent memory task on hemispheric asymmetries in categorization.

Recent research on the division of processing between the two cerebral hemispheres has often employed two concurrent tasks to investigate the dynamic nature of hemispheric asymmetries. The experiment reported here explored the effects of two concurrent high-level cognitive tasks (memory retention and semantic categorization) on the direction and magnitude of hemispheric differences in the processing of words and pictures. Subjects were required to categorize words and pictures presented to either the left visual field-right hemisphere (LVF-RH) or the right visual field-left hemisphere (RVF-LH). The categorization could be performed while holding either verbal material in memory (digit span), pictorial material in memory (serial nonsense figure recognition), or with no concurrent memory task. The effects produced hemisphere-specific, material-nonspecific interference. The verbal task removed a RVF-LH advantage at word categorization and enhanced a LVF-RH advantage on picture categorization; the pictorial task interfered with picture categorization in the LVF-RH, while enhancing a RVF-LH advantage at word categorization. The results are discussed in terms of multiple resource models of hemisphere function, capacity limitations, and the functional locus of processing required to produce various dynamic hemispheric effects.

Attention↗

Phonological priming in auditory word recognition.

Cohort theory, developed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), proposes that a "cohort" of all the words beginning with a particular sound sequence will be activated during the initial stage of the word recognition process. We used a priming technique to test specific predictions regarding cohort activation in three experiments. In each experiment, subjects identified target words embedded in noise at different signal-to-noise ratios. The target words were either presented in isolation or preceded by a prime item that shared phonological information with the target. In Experiment 1, primes and targets were English words that shared zero, one, two, three, or all phonemes from the beginning of the word. In Experiment 2, nonword primes preceded word targets and shared initial phonemes. In Experiment 3, word primes and word targets shared phonemes from the end of a word. Evidence of reliable phonological priming was observed in all three experiments. The results of the first two experiments support the assumption of activation of lexical candidates based on word-initial information, as proposed in cohort theory. However, the results of the third experiment, which showed increased probability of correctly identifying targets that shared phonemes from the end of words, did not support the predictions derived from the theory. The findings are discussed in terms of current models of auditory word recognition and recent approaches to spoken-language understanding.

Cues↗

Single- versus dual-process models of lexical decision performance: insights from response time distributional analysis.

This article evaluates 2 competing models that address the decision-making processes mediating word recognition and lexical decision performance: a hybrid 2-stage model of lexical decision performance and a random-walk model. In 2 experiments, nonword type and word frequency were manipulated across 2 contrasts (pseudohomophone-legal nonword and legal-illegal nonword). When nonwords became more wordlike (i.e., BRNTA vs. BRANT vs. BRANE), response latencies to nonwords were slowed and the word frequency effect increased. More important, distributional analyses revealed that the Nonword Type = Word Frequency interaction was modulated by different components of the response time distribution, depending on the specific nonword contrast. A single-process random-walk model was able to account for this particular set of findings more successfully than the hybrid 2-stage model.

Adult↗

GOChase: correcting errors from Gene Ontology-based annotations for gene products.

SUMMARY: The Gene Ontology (GO) is a controlled biological vocabulary that provides three structured networks of terms to describe biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions. Many databases of gene products are annotated using the GO vocabularies. We found that some GO-updating operations are not easily traceable by the current biological databases and GO browsers. Consequently, numerous annotation errors arise and are propagated throughout biological databases and GO-based high-level analyses. GOChase is a set of web-based utilities to detect and correct the errors in GO-based annotations.

Database Management Systems↗

The effect of accentuation and word duration on the naturalness of speech.

In this study the effect of appropriate word duration and correct (pitch) accentuation on the naturalness of speech was investigated. In the stimulus material, the information value of the target word determined the correctness of accentuation ([new, +accent] and [old, -accent] were defined as correct). Appropriate word duration was defined as either "in agreement with accentuation" ([long, +accent] and [short, -accent]) or "in agreement with information value" ([long, new] and [short, old]). Listeners were asked to give naturalness judgments along a scale from 1 (very unnatural) to 10 (very natural) on fragments consisting of two sentences. Duration and accentuation of the target word, which always occurred in the second sentence, were manipulated separately and in combinations. Judgments show that accentuation that is not in agreement with information value causes a significant decrease of naturalness. When accentuation is in agreement with information value but duration is inappropriate for both factors, the perceived naturalness decreases significantly. However, listeners were unable to give consistent naturalness judgments on the manipulated word durations in fragments with incorrect accent distributions. Based on these results and the findings of an earlier production study [W. Eefting, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 89, 412-424 (1991)], which showed that duration is not involved in the realization of pitch accent, the following is suggested. Speakers adapt both accentuation and word duration in order to indicate that a word contains relevant information. Presence of an accent distinguishes the word from its (less relevant) environment. A longer duration provides the listener with the extra time that is needed in order to process the word's content adequately.

Humans↗