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PubMed2003

[Measurement of the legibility of written texts. Correlation between the Flesch manual method and computer methods].

OBJECTIVE: To compare, for the calculation of the Flesch legibility index, the original manual method and the computer programmes Word Perfect 7 and Microsoft Word 2000; and to correlate these with other computer measurements of legibility. DESIGN: Descriptive, observation study. SETTING: A Madrid Health Centre, within a study of the legibility of health education (HE) leaflets. MATERIAL: A sample of text from 100 HE leaflets and 11 general control texts. Main measurements. The 11 texts were analysed through Flesch' s original manual method and the computer programmes mentioned, with which the number of words and sentences, the Flesch scores, the index of sentence complexity and the LEGIN index were calculated. Pearson's correlation coefficient was calculated for all the variables. RESULTS: There was very good correlation between the manual measurement of the Flesch index, the number of words and sentences, and their determination by means of computers (r>0.75); and excellent correlation between the two programmes (r>0.9). The results support the cut-off scores in other studies for legibility measured by computer. CONCLUSIONS: Measurement of legibility through the computer programmes used can reliably replace manual measurement of the Flesch index.

Reading↗
PubMed1995

Ortho bytes.

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Computer Communication Networks↗
PubMed1996

Functional MR imaging of semantic information processing and learning-related effects using psychometrically controlled stimulation paradigms.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), in conjunction with carefully designed, psychometrically optimized stimulation procedures, was used to investigate the relation between brain activation and the processing of word associations. A semantic discrimination task of word-pair similarity was performed by normal subjects (n = 17) within a clinical 1.5-Tesla whole-body MRI system. A color similarity task of psychometrically equivalent difficulty, as indicated by behavioral data acquired online during fMRI, served as active control condition. Comparisons between tasks dramatically improved results compared to comparisons between task and resting condition. The language paradigm selectively activated left frontal and left fronto-temporal areas. Cortical activation during the semantic task decreased significantly over three runs of the same word list and was paralleled by decreased reaction times. No such changes were observed in the active control condition indicating selective learning of the language task only. When combined with psychological activation schemes and the acquisition of behavioral data, fMRI represents a powerful tool for the study of brain-behavior interaction.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Word frequency and subsequent memory effects studied using event-related fMRI.

Event-related fMRI was used to evaluate the effect of printed word frequency on the subsequent recognition of words incidentally encoded while 16 healthy right-handed volunteers performed living/nonliving judgments. Semantic judgment took longer for low-frequency words. These words were more accurately recognized than high-frequency words at later testing. Low-frequency words were also associated with relatively greater left prefrontal, left fusiform gyrus, and anterior cingulate activation. Words that were subsequently recognized were associated with greater activation in the left prefrontal region compared to those that were forgotten. These findings suggest the specific brain regions where less commonly encountered words are processed in a manner that facilitates their subsequent recognition.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Temporal dynamics of linguistic processes are reorganized in aphasics' cortex: an EEG mapping study.

Brain lesions are known to elicit reorganization of function in representational cortex. Using linguistic function as an example, we show that (a) injury-related reorganization may also be observed in language-related cortex and (b) this reorganization not only appears in cortical space but also in the dynamic flow of activity. The present study investigated cortical reorganization in a group of 10 nonfluent aphasics who demonstrated partial recovery of linguistic functions. Compared with controls, linguistic functions were organized in an atypical manner, both in terms of spatial structures involved and in the time course of the linguistic processes, from word reading to late stages of word encoding in working memory. For this purpose, event-related potentials were recorded in a two-stimulus design comprising phonological and semantic tasks. Subjects were asked to judge whether two words, separated by a 2-s interval, rhymed (phonological task) or were semantically associated. During word reading of the phonological task, controls showed negativity/activation over occipital sites, whereas patients displayed negativity at left-medial orbitofrontal locations anterior to the common sites of lesion. During the subsequent 2-s interval associated with word encoding, the two groups showed a reversed pattern: significant left-right anterior asymmetry prevailed in controls, whereas lateralization was absent in patients. Aphasics displayed maximum positivity/inhibition over the left frontal regions, at the typical site of lesion. Compared with controls, patients exhibited significant disinhibition (decreased positivity) of right frontal areas and greater activation of left temporal sites. These results suggest that the concept of language plasticity should include, in addition to spatial aspects of linguistic reorganization, the reorganized temporal dynamics associated with recovery of impaired functions.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Operations research methods applied to workflow in a medical records department.

Transcribing medical documents accurately into pre-defined formats and within certain time frames is vital for administrative and medical purposes in any hospital. This paper describes quantitative models incorporating available data to represent transcription activities of a medical records department. We forecasted the workload of the department, determined the optimal worker schedule and designed a simulation model to represent the workflow of the transcription function of a medical record department. The findings provided insight into the workflow, staffing and performance of the department.

Computer Simulation↗
PubMed1999

The effect of Arabic vowels on the reading comprehension of second- and sixth-grade native Arab children.

This study investigated the effect of Arabic vowels on the reading comprehension of native Arabic speakers. This issue has not been addressed yet. Two groups of native Arabic speakers were randomly sampled, one from two elementary schools in the Haifa area, and the other from two elementary schools in Nazareth. Both groups in both experiments read Arabic texts in two reading conditions, vowelized and unvowelized; the older group (n = 74) answered 10 multiple-choice comprehension questions about each story, and the younger group (n = 71) answered seven multiple-choice comprehension questions. The results revealed that vowels were a significant facilitator of reading comprehension in both age groups. Considering these results, reading in Arabic orthography is not an autonomous word recognition process. An alternative approach is suggested for reading Arabic.

Arabs↗
PubMed1992

Fast priming during eye fixations in reading.

Near-threshold primes were "flashed" in a target location prior to the onset of a target word while Ss read. The type and duration of the prime were manipulated. In Exp. 1, identical, related, and unrelated primes were presented for 60, 45, or 30 ms from onset of an eye fixation. The prime was then replaced with the target word, which remained in place while Ss finished reading the sentence. Fixation time on the target word was measured. Exp. 2 replicated Exp. 1, with two exceptions: A random letter string replaced the identical prime condition, and prime durations of 39, 30, or 21 ms were used. In both experiments, significant priming effects (related vs. unrelated) were obtained when the prime was presented for 30 ms. Results are discussed with regard to subliminal priming effects. Applications to the study of word recognition processes are also discussed.

Decision Making↗
PubMed1993

Bidirectional grapheme-phoneme activation in a bimodal detection task.

A divided attention paradigm was used to investigate whether graphemes and phonemes can mutually activate or inhibit each other during bimodal processing. In 3 experiments, Dutch subjects reacted to visual and auditory targets in single-channel or bimodal stimuli. In some bimodal conditions, the visual and auditory targets were nominally identical or redundant (e.g., visual A and auditory /a/); in others they were not (e.g., visual U and auditory /a/). Temporal aspects of cross-modal activation were examined by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony of visual and auditory stimuli. Cross-modal facilitation--but not inhibition--occurred rapidly and automatically between phoneme and grapheme representations. Implications for current models of bimodal processing and word recognition are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1980

Effects of the match between listener expectancies and coarticulatory cues on the perception of speech.

Several experiments have attempted to establish the order in which various linguistic units (e.g., syllables and words) are processed. This article presents an alternative interpretation (the target-stimulus mismatch interpretation) for those earlier results. This interpretation states that the closer the match between the listener's expectancies about how the stimulus will sound (the target) and the sound of the acoustic stimulus the listener actually hears (the stimulus), the faster the listener will recognize the stimulus. This interpretation was tested in an experiment in which the match between the target and the stimulus was varied by manipulating the acoustic (coarticulatory) properties of the stimulus while the size of the target (syllable) was held constant. The results suggest that earlier findings explained in terms of linguistic units or levels can be explained more readily by the target-stimulus mismatch interpretation, and these results provide evidence that coarticulatory information is utilized by the perceiver of speech.

Cues↗
PubMed1983

Investigating the boundaries of reading units: letter detection in misspelled words.

In two experiments, subjects searching for the letter t in passages that contained some misspellings made many more errors on the word the than on other correctly spelled words. Accuracy increased dramatically when the word the and the other words containing t were misspelled, even when the misspelled word was the same shape as the original. These findings define a word-inferiority effect, which stands in contrast to the superior perception of letters in words over nonwords commonly found in tachistoscopic studies. In a third experiment, subjects searched for the letter n in passages typed normally or typed with all interword spaces replaced by the symbol +. Detection errors on the word and were greatly reduced when the interword spaces were replaced by +s, but errors on other words, including those ending in the suffix morpheme -ing, were not affected by this manipulation. These results suggest that frequent function words are processed in terms of reading units that are larger than the letter and include the interword spaces.

Attention↗
PubMed1988

Dynamics of activation in semantic and episodic memory.

Spreading-activation models for the structure of semantic and episodic memory postulate a network of interconnected nodes in which activation spreads from a source node to recipient nodes. These models account for a broad range of memory-related processes, including word recognition, sentence verification, prose comprehension, and sentence production. A fundamental question regarding this account concerns the nature of activation growth at each node in the network. Two mutually exclusive possibilities are (a) that activation grows in a discrete fashion, making abrupt transitions between two or more distinct states and (b) that activation grows continuously from a resting level to an asymptotic level. In the present article, we characterize this dichotomy with examples from the literature, and we apply an adaptive priming procedure for testing discrete versus continuous activation models. Our procedure involves the presentation of prime stimuli at various moments before a test stimulus; subjects are required to make a lexical (word/nonword) decision about the test stimulus. The duration of the interval between the prime and test stimuli is varied adaptively on the basis of subjects' performance. Reaction times are recorded as a function of this duration. According to discrete activation models, there is a unique reaction-time distribution associated with each possible state of node activation. The distribution of reaction times observed when the test stimulus appears near the moment of transition between discrete states should therefore constitute a finite mixture of the underlying basis distributions associated with the individual discrete activation states. The mixture proportion will depend on the relation between the priming interval and the distribution of state-transition times. Continuous activation models assert instead that activation grows continuously over time and that there is a unique reaction-time distribution associated with any given degree of intermediate priming. Such models predict that no finite mixture distribution will emerge when the priming interval has a fixed intermediate duration. Two experiments with the adaptive priming procedure are reported to test these alternative predictions. In Experiment 1, the prime and test stimuli were semantically associated words (e.g., bread-butter). In Experiment 2, episodic associations between the prime and test stimuli were established through paired associate learning. For both cases, the mixture prediction failed, and two-state discrete activation models were rejected.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Adult↗
PubMed1999

Word-stem completion priming in healthy aging and Alzheimer's disease: the effects of age, cognitive status, and encoding.

There are many conflicting results concerning the effects of age and Alzheimer's disease (AD) on word-stem completion priming. To examine potential sources of this variability, the authors examined the influences on such priming of age, cognitive status, and encoding in a large sample of young, old, and AD individuals. At study, words were processed aloud by reading, reading and rating likeability, or generating from definition. Old participants had less priming than young participants and more priming than AD patients. For the healthy old participants, priming decreased with advancing age and with cognitive loss following generation only. For AD patients, priming decreased as dementia severity increased; patients with the mildest dementia did not differ from healthy old participants. Thus, age, cognitive status, and encoding differentially influenced the magnitude of priming in healthy aging and AD.

Adult↗