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Chen H, Xu X, Wang T. Assessing lexical ambiguity of simplified Chinese characters: Plurality and relatedness of character meanings. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 2024; 77:677-693. [PMID: 37198743 DOI: 10.1177/17470218231178787] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/19/2023]
Abstract
Lexical ambiguity is pervasive among Chinese characters as many of them are polysemantic, with one orthographic form carrying unrelated meanings, related meanings, or sometimes both unrelated and related meanings. A large-scale database with ambiguity measures for simplified Chinese characters has yet to be developed, which could greatly benefit psycholinguistic research on the Chinese language or cross-language comparisons. This article reports two sets of ratings by native speakers, the perceived number of meanings (pNoM) for 4,363 characters and the perceived relatedness of meanings (pRoM) for a subset of 1,053 characters. These rating-based ambiguity measures capture the representational nuance about a character's meanings stored in average native speakers' mental lexicon, which tends to be obscured by dictionary- and corpus-based ambiguity measures. Consequently, they each account for a reliable portion of variance in the efficiency of character processing, above and beyond the effects of character frequency, age of acquisition, and other types of ambiguity measures. Theoretical and empirical implications with regard to the plurality and the relatedness of character meanings, the two focal aspects of debate on lexical ambiguity, are discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Huilin Chen
- School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
| | - Xu Xu
- School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
| | - Tianqi Wang
- School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
- Speech Science Laboratory, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
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2
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Gimeno-Martínez M, Baus C. Characterizing language production across modalities. Cogn Neuropsychol 2024:1-17. [PMID: 38377394 DOI: 10.1080/02643294.2024.2315823] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/10/2023] [Accepted: 12/02/2023] [Indexed: 02/22/2024]
Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study investigates factors influencing lexical access in language production across modalities (signed and oral). Data from deaf and hearing signers were reanalyzed (Baus and Costa, 2015, On the temporal dynamics of sign production: An ERP study in Catalan Sign Language (LSC). Brain Research, 1609(1), 40-53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2015.03.013; Gimeno-Martínez and Baus, 2022, Iconicity in sign language production: Task matters. Neuropsychologia, 167, 108166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2022.108166) testing the influence of psycholinguistic variables and ERP mean amplitudes on signing and naming latencies. Deaf signers' signing latencies were influenced by sign iconicity in the picture signing task, and by spoken psycholinguistic variables in the word-to-sign translation task. Additionally, ERP amplitudes before response influenced signing but not translation latencies. Hearing signers' latencies, both signing and naming, were influenced by sign iconicity and word frequency, with early ERP amplitudes predicting only naming latencies. These findings highlight general and modality-specific determinants of lexical access in language production.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marc Gimeno-Martínez
- Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
| | - Cristina Baus
- Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
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3
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Basnak J, Ota M. Learnability Advantage of Segmental Repetitions in Word Learning. Lang Speech 2024:238309231223909. [PMID: 38312096 DOI: 10.1177/00238309231223909] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/06/2024]
Abstract
To date, research on wordform learning biases has mostly focused on language-dependent factors, such as the phonotactics and neighborhood density of the language(s) known by the learner. Domain-general biases, by contrast, have received little attention. In this study, we focus on one such bias-an advantage for string-internal repetitions-and examine its effects on wordform learning. Importantly, we consider whether any type of segmental repetition is equally beneficial for word recall, or whether learning is favored more or only by repeated consonants, in line with previous research indicating that consonants play a larger role than vowels in lexical processing. In Experiment 1, adult English speakers learned artificial consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel words containing either a repeated consonant (e.g., /sesu/, "c-rep"), a repeated vowel (e.g., /sepe/, "v-rep"), or dissimilar consonants and vowels (e.g., /sepu/, "no-rep"). Recall results showed no advantage for v-reps but higher accuracy for c-reps compared with no-reps. In Experiment 2, participants performed a label preference task with the same stimuli. The results showed dispreference for both c-reps and v-reps relative to no-reps, indicating that the results of Experiment 1 are independent of wordlikeness effects. These outcomes reveal that there is a form-learning bias for words with identical consonants but not for words with identical vowels, suggesting that a domain-general advantage for repetitions within strings is modulated by a language-specific processing bias for consonants.
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Affiliation(s)
- Johanna Basnak
- School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, UK
| | - Mitsuhiko Ota
- School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, UK
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Molinaro N, Nara S, Carreiras M. Early language dissociation in bilingual minds: magnetoencephalography evidence through a machine learning approach. Cereb Cortex 2024; 34:bhae053. [PMID: 38367613 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhae053] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/06/2023] [Revised: 01/26/2024] [Accepted: 01/27/2024] [Indexed: 02/19/2024] Open
Abstract
Does neural activity reveal how balanced bilinguals choose languages? Despite using diverse neuroimaging techniques, prior studies haven't provided a definitive solution to this problem. Nonetheless, studies involving direct brain stimulation in bilinguals have identified distinct brain regions associated with language production in different languages. In this magnetoencephalography study with 45 proficient Spanish-Basque bilinguals, we investigated language selection during covert picture naming and word reading tasks. Participants were prompted to name line drawings or read words if the color of the stimulus changed to green, in 10% of trials. The task was performed either in Spanish or Basque. Despite similar sensor-level evoked activity for both languages in both tasks, decoding analyses revealed language-specific classification ~100 ms post-stimulus onset. During picture naming, right occipital-temporal sensors predominantly contributed to language decoding, while left occipital-temporal sensors were crucial for decoding during word reading. Cross-task decoding analysis unveiled robust generalization effects from picture naming to word reading. Our methodology involved a fine-grained examination of neural responses using magnetoencephalography, offering insights into the dynamics of language processing in bilinguals. This study refines our understanding of the neural underpinnings of language selection and bridges the gap between non-invasive and invasive experimental evidence in bilingual language production.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nicola Molinaro
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009, Donostia/San Sebastian, Spain
- Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48009, Bilbao, Spain
| | - Sanjeev Nara
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009, Donostia/San Sebastian, Spain
- Mathematical Institute, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Physics, Geography, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (University of Giessen), 35392, Gießen, Germany
| | - Manuel Carreiras
- Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi, 69, 20009, Donostia/San Sebastian, Spain
- Ikerbasque, Basque Foundation for Science, 48009, Bilbao, Spain
- University of the Basque Country. UPV/EHU, 48940, Leioa, Spain
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Højen A, Madsen TO, Bleses D. Danish 20-month-olds' recognition of familiar words with and without consonant and vowel mispronunciations. Phonetica 2023; 80:309-328. [PMID: 37533184 DOI: 10.1515/phon-2023-2001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 08/04/2023]
Abstract
Although several studies initially supported the proposal by Nespor et al. (Nespor, Marina, Marcela Peña & Jacques Mehler. 2003. On the different roles of vowels and consonants in speech processing and language acquisition. Lingue e Linguaggio 2. 221-247) that consonants are more informative than vowels in lexical processing, a more complex picture has emerged from recent research. Current evidence suggests that infants initially show a vowel bias in lexical processing and later transition to a consonant bias, possibly depending on the characteristics of the ambient language. Danish infants have shown a vowel bias in word learning at 20 months-an age at which infants learning French or Italian no longer show a vowel bias but rather a consonant bias, and infants learning English show no bias. The present study tested whether Danish 20-month-olds also have a vowel bias when recognizing familiar words. Specifically, using the Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm, we tested whether Danish infants were more likely to ignore or accept consonant than vowel mispronunciations when matching familiar words with pictures. The infants successfully matched correctly pronounced familiar words with pictures but showed no vowel or consonant bias when matching mispronounced words with pictures. The lack of a bias for Danish vowels or consonants in familiar word recognition adds to evidence that lexical processing biases are language-specific and may additionally depend on developmental age and perhaps task difficulty.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anders Højen
- School of Communication and Culture and TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus V, Denmark
| | - Thomas O Madsen
- Department of Language, Culture, History and Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark
| | - Dorthe Bleses
- School of Communication and Culture and TrygFonden's Centre for Child Research, Aarhus University, Aarhus V, Denmark
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Roumpea G, Bon J, Marjanovič K, Pirtošek Z, Manouilidou C. Facilitated lexical processing accuracy and reaction times following repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation in dementia of the Alzheimer type: a case study. Neurocase 2023; 29:151-159. [PMID: 38700041 DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2024.2348222] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/25/2023] [Accepted: 04/16/2024] [Indexed: 05/05/2024]
Abstract
We investigated the potential effects of high-frequency (10 Hz) repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) of the bilateral Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) (30-sessions; 2-sessions/day) on improving lexical processing in one participant with mild - Alzheimer's disease (hereafter dementia of the Alzheimer type-DAT). Increased accuracy and faster reaction times (RTs) were reported in a lexical-decision task (LDT) up to 2-months post-intervention. The current findings indicate that high-frequency stimulation of the DLPFC might be a potential therapeutic tool to improve lexical processing in mild-DAT.
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Affiliation(s)
- Georgia Roumpea
- Faculty of Arts, Department of Comparative and General Linguistics, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
| | - Jurij Bon
- Department of Neurology, University Medical Centre, Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Centre for Clinical Psychiatry, University Psychiatric Clinic, Ljubljana, Slovenia
| | - Katarina Marjanovič
- Faculty of Arts, Department of Comparative and General Linguistics, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
| | - Zvezdan Pirtošek
- Department of Neurology, University Medical Centre, Ljubljana, Slovenia
| | - Christina Manouilidou
- Faculty of Arts, Department of Comparative and General Linguistics, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
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Wang R, Han J, Di Biase B, Antoniou M. The effect of study-abroad experience on lexical translation among interpreting students. Front Psychol 2023; 14:1266921. [PMID: 37809285 PMCID: PMC10559970 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1266921] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/25/2023] [Accepted: 09/06/2023] [Indexed: 10/10/2023] Open
Abstract
This study investigates the impact of study-abroad experience (SAE) on lexical translation among 50 Chinese (L1)-English (L2) interpreting students. Participants were divided into two groups based on their experience abroad. Both groups consisted of 25 unbalanced L2 learners who were matched in age, working memory, length of interpreting training, and L2 proficiency. Bidirectional word translation recognition tasks, from L1 to L2 and L2 to L1, highlighted several key findings: (1) both groups were significantly more accurate and faster from L2 to L1 than in the reverse direction; (2) the study abroad (SA) group was more inclined to respond quickly at the risk of making errors, whereas the non-study abroad (NSA) group tended to be more cautious, prioritising accuracy over speed; (3) the SA group were more balanced and consistent in their performance across lexical translations in both directions than the NSA group. These results emphasise the potent effect of SAE in resolving bilinguals' language competition, especially in streamlining language switching, a cognitive process critical for interpreting students engaging daily with dual languages.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ruiyuan Wang
- School of International Studies, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China
| | - Jing Han
- School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Bruno Di Biase
- School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
| | - Mark Antoniou
- The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia
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Howard PL, Pagán A. No evidence for high inflexible precision of prediction errors in autism during lexical processing. Autism Res 2023; 16:1775-1785. [PMID: 37497600 DOI: 10.1002/aur.2994] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/16/2022] [Accepted: 07/06/2023] [Indexed: 07/28/2023]
Abstract
Research has shown that information processing differences associated with autism could impact on language and literacy development. This study tested an approach to autistic cognition that suggests learning occurs via prediction errors, and autistic people have very precise and inflexible predictions that result in more sensitivity to meaningless signal errors than non-autistic readers. We used this theoretical background to investigate whether differences in prediction coding influence how orthographic (Experiment 1) and semantic information (Experiment 2) is processed by autistic readers. Experiment 1 used a lexical decision task to test whether letter position information was processed less flexibly by autistic than non-autistic readers. Three types of letter strings: words, transposed letter and substituted letters nonwords were presented. Experiment 2 used a semantic relatedness task to test whether autistic readers processed words with high and low semantic diversity differently to non-autistic readers. Results showed similar transposed letter and semantic diversity effects for all readers; indicating that orthographic and semantic information are processed similarly by autistic and non-autistic readers; and therefore, differences in prediction coding were not evident for these lexical processing tasks.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Ascensión Pagán
- School of Psychology and Vision Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
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Wang F, Nguyen QTH, Kaneshiro B, Hasak L, Wang AM, Toomarian EY, Norcia AM, McCandliss BD. Lexical and sublexical cortical tuning for print revealed by Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) in early readers. Dev Sci 2023; 26:e13352. [PMID: 36413170 PMCID: PMC10881121 DOI: 10.1111/desc.13352] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/30/2021] [Revised: 10/27/2022] [Accepted: 11/16/2022] [Indexed: 11/23/2022]
Abstract
There are multiple levels of processing relevant to reading that vary in their visual, sublexical, and lexical orthographic processing demands. Segregating distinct cortical sources for each of these levels has been challenging in EEG studies of early readers. To address this challenge, we applied recent advances in analyzing high-density EEG using Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEPs) via data-driven Reliable Components Analysis (RCA) in a group of early readers spanning from kindergarten to second grade. Three controlled stimulus contrasts-familiar words versus unfamiliar pseudofonts, familiar words versus pseudowords, and pseudowords versus nonwords-were used to isolate coarse print tuning, lexical processing, and sublexical orthography-related processing, respectively. First, three overlapping yet distinct neural sources-left vOT, dorsal parietal, and primary visual cortex were revealed underlying coarse print tuning. Second, we segregated distinct cortical sources for the other two levels of processing: lexical fine tuning over occipito-temporal/parietal regions; sublexical orthographic fine tuning over left occipital regions. Finally, exploratory group analyses based on children's reading fluency suggested that coarse print tuning emerges early even in children with limited reading knowledge, while sublexical and higher-level lexical processing emerge only in children with sufficient reading knowledge. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Cognitive processes underlying coarse print tuning, sublexical, and lexical fine tuning were examined in beginning readers. Three overlapping yet distinct neural sources-left ventral occipito-temporal (vOT), left temporo-parietal, and primary visual cortex-were revealed underlying coarse print tuning. Responses to sublexical orthographic fine tuning were found over left occipital regions, while responses to higher-level linguistic fine tuning were found over occipito-temporal/parietal regions. Exploratory group analyses suggested that coarse print tuning emerges in children with limited reading knowledge, while sublexical and higher-level linguistic fine tuning effects emerge in children with sufficient reading knowledge.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fang Wang
- Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
| | | | - Blair Kaneshiro
- Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
| | - Lindsey Hasak
- Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
| | - Angie M. Wang
- Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
| | - Elizabeth Y. Toomarian
- Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
- Synapse School, Menlo Park, California, USA
| | - Anthony M. Norcia
- Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
- Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford, California, USA
| | - Bruce D. McCandliss
- Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
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Slaats S, Weissbart H, Schoffelen JM, Meyer AS, Martin AE. Delta-Band Neural Responses to Individual Words Are Modulated by Sentence Processing. J Neurosci 2023; 43:4867-4883. [PMID: 37221093 PMCID: PMC10312058 DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0964-22.2023] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/06/2022] [Revised: 04/17/2023] [Accepted: 04/27/2023] [Indexed: 05/25/2023] Open
Abstract
To understand language, we need to recognize words and combine them into phrases and sentences. During this process, responses to the words themselves are changed. In a step toward understanding how the brain builds sentence structure, the present study concerns the neural readout of this adaptation. We ask whether low-frequency neural readouts associated with words change as a function of being in a sentence. To this end, we analyzed an MEG dataset by Schoffelen et al. (2019) of 102 human participants (51 women) listening to sentences and word lists, the latter lacking any syntactic structure and combinatorial meaning. Using temporal response functions and a cumulative model-fitting approach, we disentangled delta- and theta-band responses to lexical information (word frequency), from responses to sensory and distributional variables. The results suggest that delta-band responses to words are affected by sentence context in time and space, over and above entropy and surprisal. In both conditions, the word frequency response spanned left temporal and posterior frontal areas; however, the response appeared later in word lists than in sentences. In addition, sentence context determined whether inferior frontal areas were responsive to lexical information. In the theta band, the amplitude was larger in the word list condition ∼100 milliseconds in right frontal areas. We conclude that low-frequency responses to words are changed by sentential context. The results of this study show how the neural representation of words is affected by structural context and as such provide insight into how the brain instantiates compositionality in language.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Human language is unprecedented in its combinatorial capacity: we are capable of producing and understanding sentences we have never heard before. Although the mechanisms underlying this capacity have been described in formal linguistics and cognitive science, how they are implemented in the brain remains to a large extent unknown. A large body of earlier work from the cognitive neuroscientific literature implies a role for delta-band neural activity in the representation of linguistic structure and meaning. In this work, we combine these insights and techniques with findings from psycholinguistics to show that meaning is more than the sum of its parts; the delta-band MEG signal differentially reflects lexical information inside and outside sentence structures.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sophie Slaats
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
- The International Max Planck Research School for Language Sciences, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
| | - Hugo Weissbart
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands
| | - Jan-Mathijs Schoffelen
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands
| | - Antje S Meyer
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands
| | - Andrea E Martin
- Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6525 XD Nijmegen, The Netherlands
- Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, 6525 EN Nijmegen, The Netherlands
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Ståhlberg-Forsén E, Latva R, Aija A, Lehtonen L, Stolt S. Language environment and parent-infant close contact in neonatal care and emerging lexical abilities of very preterm children-a longitudinal study. Acta Paediatr 2023; 112:659-666. [PMID: 36567645 DOI: 10.1111/apa.16647] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/07/2022] [Revised: 12/19/2022] [Accepted: 12/22/2022] [Indexed: 12/27/2022]
Abstract
AIM This longitudinal study investigated associations between language environment and parent-infant close contact in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and preterm children's lexical abilities. METHODS NICU language environment of 43 very preterm infants (born<32 gestational weeks) was measured with the Language Environment Analysis System (LENA; variables: number of adult words, conversational turns, and child vocalisations). Parent-infant close contact (holding and skin-to-skin contact) in the NICU was reported using parental closeness diaries. At 15 and 18 months' corrected age, lexical development was measured with screening methods, and eye tracking-based lexical processing was assessed at 18 months. N varied between 29 and 38 in different outcome measures. RESULTS LENA measured conversational turns and child vocalisations, and parent-infant close contact associated positively with lexical development (r = 0.35-0.57). High numbers of NICU adult words associated negatively with lexical processing (r = -0.38- -0.40). In regression models, conversational turns and parent-infant close contact explained 34%-35% of receptive development. CONCLUSION Findings suggest that adult-infant turn taking and parent-infant close contact in the NICU are positively associated with lexical development. High numbers of overheard words in the NICU may not favour later lexical processing. Further research is warranted on the significance of NICU language environment on later lexical abilities.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Reija Latva
- Tampere University Hospital, Tampere, Finland.,Tampere University, Tampere, Finland
| | - Anette Aija
- University of Turku, Turku, Finland.,Tallinn Children's Hospital, Tallinn, Estonia
| | - Liisa Lehtonen
- University of Turku, Turku, Finland.,Turku University Hospital, Turku, Finland
| | - Suvi Stolt
- University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
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Gaston P, Brodbeck C, Phillips C, Lau E. Auditory Word Comprehension Is Less Incremental in Isolated Words. Neurobiol Lang (Camb) 2023; 4:29-52. [PMID: 37229141 PMCID: PMC10205071 DOI: 10.1162/nol_a_00084] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/22/2021] [Accepted: 09/26/2022] [Indexed: 05/27/2023]
Abstract
Partial speech input is often understood to trigger rapid and automatic activation of successively higher-level representations of words, from sound to meaning. Here we show evidence from magnetoencephalography that this type of incremental processing is limited when words are heard in isolation as compared to continuous speech. This suggests a less unified and automatic word recognition process than is often assumed. We present evidence from isolated words that neural effects of phoneme probability, quantified by phoneme surprisal, are significantly stronger than (statistically null) effects of phoneme-by-phoneme lexical uncertainty, quantified by cohort entropy. In contrast, we find robust effects of both cohort entropy and phoneme surprisal during perception of connected speech, with a significant interaction between the contexts. This dissociation rules out models of word recognition in which phoneme surprisal and cohort entropy are common indicators of a uniform process, even though these closely related information-theoretic measures both arise from the probability distribution of wordforms consistent with the input. We propose that phoneme surprisal effects reflect automatic access of a lower level of representation of the auditory input (e.g., wordforms) while the occurrence of cohort entropy effects is task sensitive, driven by a competition process or a higher-level representation that is engaged late (or not at all) during the processing of single words.
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Affiliation(s)
- Phoebe Gaston
- Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
- Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
| | - Christian Brodbeck
- Institute for Systems Research, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
- Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA
| | - Colin Phillips
- Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
| | - Ellen Lau
- Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
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Zhang K, Gu F, Yu H. Early lexical processing of Chinese one-character words and Mongolian words: A comparative study using event-related potentials. Front Psychol 2023; 13:1061990. [PMID: 36733864 PMCID: PMC9887120 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1061990] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/05/2022] [Accepted: 12/28/2022] [Indexed: 01/18/2023] Open
Abstract
Logographic language and alphabetic language differ significantly in orthography. Investigating the commonality and particularity of visual word recognition between the two distinct writing systems is informative for understating the neural mechanisms underlying visual word recognition. In the present study, we compared the chronometry of early lexical processing and the brain regions involved in early lexical processing between Chinese (logographic language) and Mongolian (alphabetic language) by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) using both implicit and explicit reading tasks. Familiar Chinese one-character words (lexical) and unknown Chinese one-character words (non-lexical) were pseudorandomly presented to native Chinese readers in Experiment 1. Mongolian words (lexical) and pseudowords (non-lexical) were pseudorandomly presented to native Mongolian readers in Experiment 2. In the color decision task, participants were asked to decide the color (black or blue) of each stimulus. In the lexical recognition task, participants were asked to report whether they could recognize each stimulus. The results showed that in both experiments and both tasks, ERPs to lexical items differed significantly from those to non-lexical items in the parietooccipital scalp region approximately 250 ms after stimulus onset, reflecting the early lexical processing, which likely originated from the ventral occipitotemporal cortex as revealed by source analysis. These results indicated that although Chinese and Mongolian differed markedly in orthographic features, the neural mechanisms underlying early lexical processing are similar between the two languages.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kai Zhang
- Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, China,Key Laboratory of China’s Ethnic Languages and Intelligent Processing of Gansu Province, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, China
| | - Feng Gu
- Neurocognitive Laboratory for Linguistics and Semiotics, College of Literature and Journalism, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
| | - Hongzhi Yu
- Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, China,Key Laboratory of China’s Ethnic Languages and Information Technology of Ministry of Education, Northwest Minzu University, Lanzhou, China,*Correspondence: Hongzhi Yu, ✉
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14
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Wang H, Chen R, Yan Y, McGettigan C, Rosen S, Adank P. Perceptual Learning of Noise-Vocoded Speech Under Divided Attention. Trends Hear 2023; 27:23312165231192297. [PMID: 37547940 PMCID: PMC10408355 DOI: 10.1177/23312165231192297] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/06/2023] [Revised: 07/13/2023] [Accepted: 07/19/2023] [Indexed: 08/08/2023] Open
Abstract
Speech perception performance for degraded speech can improve with practice or exposure. Such perceptual learning is thought to be reliant on attention and theoretical accounts like the predictive coding framework suggest a key role for attention in supporting learning. However, it is unclear whether speech perceptual learning requires undivided attention. We evaluated the role of divided attention in speech perceptual learning in two online experiments (N = 336). Experiment 1 tested the reliance of perceptual learning on undivided attention. Participants completed a speech recognition task where they repeated forty noise-vocoded sentences in a between-group design. Participants performed the speech task alone or concurrently with a domain-general visual task (dual task) at one of three difficulty levels. We observed perceptual learning under divided attention for all four groups, moderated by dual-task difficulty. Listeners in easy and intermediate visual conditions improved as much as the single-task group. Those who completed the most challenging visual task showed faster learning and achieved similar ending performance compared to the single-task group. Experiment 2 tested whether learning relies on domain-specific or domain-general processes. Participants completed a single speech task or performed this task together with a dual task aiming to recruit domain-specific (lexical or phonological), or domain-general (visual) processes. All secondary task conditions produced patterns and amount of learning comparable to the single speech task. Our results demonstrate that the impact of divided attention on perceptual learning is not strictly dependent on domain-general or domain-specific processes and speech perceptual learning persists under divided attention.
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Affiliation(s)
- Han Wang
- Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, UK
| | - Rongru Chen
- Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, UK
| | - Yu Yan
- Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, UK
| | - Carolyn McGettigan
- Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, UK
| | - Stuart Rosen
- Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, UK
| | - Patti Adank
- Department of Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences, University College London, London, UK
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15
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Hänel-Faulhaber B, Groen MA, Röder B, Friedrich CK. Ongoing Sign Processing Facilitates Written Word Recognition in Deaf Native Signing Children. Front Psychol 2022; 13:917700. [PMID: 35992405 PMCID: PMC9390089 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.917700] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/11/2022] [Accepted: 06/24/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Signed and written languages are intimately related in proficient signing readers. Here, we tested whether deaf native signing beginning readers are able to make rapid use of ongoing sign language to facilitate recognition of written words. Deaf native signing children (mean 10 years, 7 months) received prime target pairs with sign word onsets as primes and written words as targets. In a control group of hearing children (matched in their reading abilities to the deaf children, mean 8 years, 8 months), spoken word onsets were instead used as primes. Targets (written German words) either were completions of the German signs or of the spoken word onsets. Task of the participants was to decide whether the target word was a possible German word. Sign onsets facilitated processing of written targets in deaf children similarly to spoken word onsets facilitating processing of written targets in hearing children. In both groups, priming elicited similar effects in the simultaneously recorded event related potentials (ERPs), starting as early as 200 ms after the onset of the written target. These results suggest that beginning readers can use ongoing lexical processing in their native language - be it signed or spoken - to facilitate written word recognition. We conclude that intimate interactions between sign and written language might in turn facilitate reading acquisition in deaf beginning readers.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | - Brigitte Röder
- Biological Psychology and Neuropsychology, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
| | - Claudia K. Friedrich
- Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany
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16
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Lukic S, Licata AE, Weis E, Bogley R, Ratnasiri B, Welch AE, Hinkley LBN, Miller Z, Garcia AM, Houde JF, Nagarajan SS, Gorno-Tempini ML, Borghesani V. Auditory Verb Generation Performance Patterns Dissociate Variants of Primary Progressive Aphasia. Front Psychol 2022; 13:887591. [PMID: 35814055 PMCID: PMC9267767 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.887591] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/01/2022] [Accepted: 05/16/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a clinical syndrome in which patients progressively lose speech and language abilities. Three variants are recognized: logopenic (lvPPA), associated with phonology and/or short-term verbal memory deficits accompanied by left temporo-parietal atrophy; semantic (svPPA), associated with semantic deficits and anterior temporal lobe (ATL) atrophy; non-fluent (nfvPPA) associated with grammar and/or speech-motor deficits and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) atrophy. Here, we set out to investigate whether the three variants of PPA can be dissociated based on error patterns in a single language task. We recruited 21 lvPPA, 28 svPPA, and 24 nfvPPA patients, together with 31 healthy controls, and analyzed their performance on an auditory noun-to-verb generation task, which requires auditory analysis of the input, access to and selection of relevant lexical and semantic knowledge, as well as preparation and execution of speech. Task accuracy differed across the three variants and controls, with lvPPA and nfvPPA having the lowest and highest accuracy, respectively. Critically, machine learning analysis of the different error types yielded above-chance classification of patients into their corresponding group. An analysis of the error types revealed clear variant-specific effects: lvPPA patients produced the highest percentage of "not-a-verb" responses and the highest number of semantically related nouns (production of baseball instead of throw to noun ball); in contrast, svPPA patients produced the highest percentage of "unrelated verb" responses and the highest number of light verbs (production of take instead of throw to noun ball). Taken together, our findings indicate that error patterns in an auditory verb generation task are associated with the breakdown of different neurocognitive mechanisms across PPA variants. Specifically, they corroborate the link between temporo-parietal regions with lexical processing, as well as ATL with semantic processes. These findings illustrate how the analysis of pattern of responses can help PPA phenotyping and heighten diagnostic sensitivity, while providing insights on the neural correlates of different components of language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sladjana Lukic
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences, Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, United States
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Abigail E. Licata
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
- Department of Neurology, Dyslexia Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Elizabeth Weis
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Rian Bogley
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
- Department of Neurology, Dyslexia Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Buddhika Ratnasiri
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Ariane E. Welch
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Leighton B. N. Hinkley
- Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Z. Miller
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
- Department of Neurology, Dyslexia Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Adolfo M. Garcia
- Cognitive Neuroscience Center, Universidad de San Andrés, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Global Brain Health Institute, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
- National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Departamento de Lingüística y Literatura, Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile
| | - John F. Houde
- Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Srikantan S. Nagarajan
- Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Maria Luisa Gorno-Tempini
- Department of Neurology, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
- Department of Neurology, Dyslexia Center, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
| | - Valentina Borghesani
- Department of Psychology, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada
- Centre de Recherche de l’Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada
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17
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Abstract
Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills together (vocabulary size, structure, and lexical processing) relate to later language outcomes at age 3 (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 explored how the size and semantic structure of toddlers' vocabulary from 18 to 24 months (N = 61) predicted performance on two lexical processing tasks (semantically related and semantically unrelated trials). Denser semantic connectivity (i.e., global level connectivity between near and far neighbors) positively associated with semantic interference during semantically related lexical processing, whereas denser category structure (i.e., lower-level connectivity between near neighbors) facilitated lexical processing in semantically unrelated trials. In Experiment 2, a subset of the same children (N = 49) returned at age 36 months and completed a comprehensive assessment of their language skills using the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamental, Preschool 2 (CELF-P2). Here, earlier measures of lexico-semantic connectivity and lexical processing best predicted age 3 language skill. The findings support accounts that early vocabulary structure and lexical processing skills promote continued growth in language. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
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Affiliation(s)
- Arielle Borovsky
- Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences Purdue University
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18
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Abstract
This is a short report of an experiment conducted to investigate the effects of phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency, lexical frequency, imageability, and the number of strokes on writing-to-dictation in Chinese. Thirty-two undergraduates were tested using a writing-to-dictation task consisting of 60 Chinese characters without homophones (i.e., P-O consistent) and 60 Chinese characters with at least two homophones (i.e., P-O inconsistent), the responses of which were recorded on an Android tablet. Linear mixed-effect modelling was used to investigate the significance of the different effects on three measures-accuracy, response time (RT), and total writing time. The results indicated that imageability was significant in predicting accuracy and RT; P-O consistency was significant in predicting RT and total writing time; the number of strokes was significant in predicting accuracy and total writing time; and the lexical frequency effect was significant in predicting all three measures. In general, the results supported the dual-route account of writing-to-dictation in Chinese and confirmed that both the lexical-semantic and lexical non-semantic pathways are needed to explain writing-to-dictation in Chinese. The significance of the different effects observed in the three measures also indicated the need to include different measures when studying writing-to-dictation to better understand the time course of the writing process.
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19
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Wu J, Zheng W, Han M, Schiller NO. Cross-Dialectal Novel Word Learning and Borrowing. Front Psychol 2021; 12:734527. [PMID: 34659047 PMCID: PMC8515950 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.734527] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/01/2021] [Accepted: 08/26/2021] [Indexed: 12/05/2022] Open
Abstract
The objective of this paper was to study the cognitive processes underlying cross-dialectal novel word borrowing and loanword establishment in a Standard-Chinese-to-Shanghainese (SC-SH) auditory lexical learning and borrowing experiment. To investigate these underlying cognitive processes, SC-SH bi-dialectals were compared with SC monolectals as well as bi-dialectals of SC and other Chinese dialects (OD) to investigate the influence of short-term and long-term linguistic experience. Both comprehension and production borrowings were tested. This study found that early and proficient bi-dialectism, even if it is not directly related to the recipient dialect of lexical borrowing, has a protective effect on the ability of cross-dialectal lexical borrowing in early adulthood. Bi-dialectals tend to add separate lexical representations for incidentally encountered dialectal variants, while monolectals tend to assimilate dialectal variants to standard forms. Bi-dialectals, but not monolectals, use etymologically related morphemes between the source and recipient dialects to create nonce-borrowing compounds. Dialectal variability facilitates lexical borrowing via enriching instead of increasing the short-term lexical experience of learners. The long-term bi-dialectal experience of individuals, as well as their short-term exposure to each specific loanword, may collectively shape the route of lexical evolution of co-evolving linguistic varieties.
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Affiliation(s)
- Junru Wu
- Laboratory of Language Cognition and Evolution, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.,Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden, Netherlands
| | - Wei Zheng
- Laboratory of Language Cognition and Evolution, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
| | - Mengru Han
- Laboratory of Language Cognition and Evolution, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China
| | - Niels O Schiller
- Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, Leiden, Netherlands.,Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition, Leiden, Netherlands
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20
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Abstract
Children's linguistic knowledge and the learning mechanisms by which they acquire it grow substantially in infancy and toddlerhood, yet theories of word learning largely fail to incorporate these shifts. Moreover, researchers' often-siloed focus on either familiar word recognition or novel word learning limits the critical consideration of how these two relate. As a step toward a mechanistic theory of language acquisition, we present a framework of "learning through processing" and relate it to the prevailing methods used to assess children's early knowledge of words. Incorporating recent empirical work, we posit a specific, testable timeline of qualitative changes in the learning process in this interval. We conclude with several challenges and avenues for building a comprehensive theory of early word learning: better characterization of the input, reconciling results across approaches, and treating lexical knowledge in the nascent grammar with sufficient sophistication to ensure generalizability across languages and development.
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Affiliation(s)
- Stephan C Meylan
- Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
| | - Elika Bergelson
- Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA
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21
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Pomper R, Kaushanskaya M, Saffran J. Change is hard: Individual differences in children's lexical processing and executive functions after a shift in dimensions. Lang Learn Dev 2021; 18:229-247. [PMID: 35600505 PMCID: PMC9122267 DOI: 10.1080/15475441.2021.1947289] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/15/2023]
Abstract
Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has demonstrated that EFs support language comprehension when there is conflict between competing, incompatible interpretations of temporarily ambiguous words or phrases. By engaging EFs, children and adults are able to select or bias their attention towards the correct interpretation. However, the degree to which language processing engages EFs in the absence of ambiguity is poorly understood. In the current experiment, we tested whether EFs may be engaged when comprehending speech that does not elicit conflicting interpretations. Different components of EFs were measured using several behavioral tasks and language comprehension was measured using an eye-tracking procedure. Five-year-old children (n=56) saw pictures of familiar objects and heard sentences identifying the objects using either their names or colors. After a series of objects were identified using one dimension, children were significantly less accurate in fixating target objects that were identified using a second dimension. Further results reveal that this decrease in accuracy does not occur because children struggle to shift between dimensions, but rather because they are unable to predict which dimension will be used. These effects of predictability are related to individual differences in children's EFs. Taken together, these findings suggest that EFs may be more broadly involved when children comprehend language, even in instances that do not require conflict resolution.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ron Pomper
- Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA
- Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53705, USA
| | - Margarita Kaushanskaya
- Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53705, USA
- Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Goodnight Hall, 1975 Willow Drive, Madison, WI 53706, USA
| | - Jenny Saffran
- Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1202 West Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA
- Waisman Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53705, USA
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22
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Coch D, Mahoney MR. When two vowels go walking: An ERP study of the vowel team rule. Psychophysiology 2021; 58:e13870. [PMID: 34086295 DOI: 10.1111/psyp.13870] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/02/2020] [Revised: 03/31/2021] [Accepted: 05/12/2021] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
In an event-related potential (ERP) study of the vowel team rule in American English ("when two vowels go walking, the first does the talking"), we used a visual lexical decision task to determine whether words that do (e.g., braid) and do not (e.g., cloud) follow the rule elicit different processing, and to determine if this extends to nonwords (e.g., braip, cloup). In 32 young adults, N1 amplitude distinguished between rule-following and rule-breaking items: N1 amplitude was more negative to rule-breaking words and nonwords. In contrast, there were no significant effects of vowel team rule adherence on N400 amplitude. Behaviorally, participants responded more quickly and accurately to rule-following words, a pattern not observed for nonwords. These findings demonstrate that adherence to the vowel team rule can be indexed by both neural and behavioral measures in fluently reading young adults.
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Affiliation(s)
- Donna Coch
- Department of Education, Reading Brains Lab, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA
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23
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Brookman R, Kalashnikova M, Conti J, Xu Rattanasone N, Grant KA, Demuth K, Burnham D. Maternal Depression Affects Infants' Lexical Processing Abilities in the Second Year of Life. Brain Sci 2020; 10:E977. [PMID: 33322798 PMCID: PMC7763905 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci10120977] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/08/2020] [Revised: 11/23/2020] [Accepted: 12/09/2020] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
Maternal depression and anxiety have been proposed to increase the risk of adverse outcomes of language development in the early years of life. This study investigated the effects of maternal depression and anxiety on language development using two approaches: (i) a categorical approach that compared lexical abilities in two groups of children, a risk group (mothers with clinical-level symptomatology) and a control non-risk group, and (ii) a continuous approach that assessed the relation between individual mothers' clinical and subclinical symptomatology and their infants' lexical abilities. Infants' lexical abilities were assessed at 18 months of age using an objective lexical processing measure and a parental report of expressive vocabulary. Infants in the risk group exhibited lower lexical processing abilities compared to controls, and maternal depression scores were negatively correlated to infants' lexical processing and vocabulary measures. Furthermore, maternal depression (not anxiety) explained the variance in infants' individual lexical processing performance above the variance explained by their individual expressive vocabulary size. These results suggest that significant differences are emerging in 18-month-old infants' lexical processing abilities, and this appears to be related, in part, to their mothers' depression and anxiety symptomatology during the postnatal period.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ruth Brookman
- The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1957, Penrith, NSW 2750, Australia; (M.K.); (D.B.)
- School of Psychology, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1957, Penrith, NSW 2750, Australia;
| | - Marina Kalashnikova
- The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1957, Penrith, NSW 2750, Australia; (M.K.); (D.B.)
- Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language, Paseo Mikeletegi 69, 2º, 20009 Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain
- IKERBASQUE, Basque Foundation for Science, Plaza Euskadi 5, 48009 Bilbao, Spain
| | - Janet Conti
- School of Psychology, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1957, Penrith, NSW 2750, Australia;
| | - Nan Xu Rattanasone
- Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Balaclava Road, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia; (N.X.R.); (K.D.)
| | - Kerry-Ann Grant
- Health Education and Training Institute, Locked Bag 7118, Parramatta Bc, NSW 2124, Australia;
| | - Katherine Demuth
- Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Balaclava Road, North Ryde, NSW 2109, Australia; (N.X.R.); (K.D.)
| | - Denis Burnham
- The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, Locked Bag 1957, Penrith, NSW 2750, Australia; (M.K.); (D.B.)
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24
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Abstract
In the current study, the effects of orthographic and phonological processing in Chinese character copying were investigated using a data set extracted from a database containing handwriting data of 856 stimuli; the responses of which were collected from 100 participants. To investigate the effect of character frequency, radical frequency, and phonetic regularity, 151 phonetic compounds were selected from the database because (1) their corresponding phonetic radicals were all free-standing characters, (2) their corresponding phonetic radicals were located at either the right or the bottom positions in the characters, and (3) no more than 10% of the participants made errors when copying these target characters. The results of the linear mixed effect models revealed that after controlling for inter-stroke distance (ISD) and stroke number, the inter-stroke intervals (ISIs) at the radical and logographeme boundaries were significantly longer, indicating significant orthographic processing in the immediate copying task that radicals and logographemes were used as writing units. In addition, shorter ISIs at the logographeme boundary associated with higher radical frequency, and shorter ISIs at the radical boundary associated with higher character frequency and regular characters, were observed. These observations indicated significant orthographic and phonological effects in the immediate copying task. Finally, the significant phonetic regularity effect observed also supported the notion that phonology contributes to Chinese character writing and that the effects of central processing, including character frequency and phonetic regularity, cascade over peripheral processing during Chinese character copying.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dustin Kai-Yan Lau
- Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong
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25
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Von Holzen K, Nazzi T. Emergence of a consonant bias during the first year of life: New evidence from own-name recognition. Infancy 2020; 25:319-346. [PMID: 32749054 DOI: 10.1111/infa.12331] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/15/2019] [Revised: 02/07/2020] [Accepted: 02/23/2020] [Indexed: 11/27/2022]
Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that during the first year of life, a preference for consonant information during lexical processing (consonant bias) emerges, at least for some languages like French. Our study investigated the factors involved in this emergence as well as the developmental consequences for variation in consonant bias emergence. In a series of experiments, we measured 5-, 8-, and 11-month-old French-learning infants orientation times to a consonant or vowel mispronunciation of their own name, which is one of the few word forms familiar to infants at this young age. Both 5- and 8-month-olds oriented longer to vowel mispronunciations, but 11-month-olds showed a different pattern, initially orienting longer to consonant mispronunciations. We interpret these results as further evidence of an initial vowel bias, with consonant bias emergence by 11 months. Neither acoustic-phonetic nor lexical factors predicted preferences in 8- and 11-month-olds. Finally, counter to our predictions, a vowel bias at the time of test for 11-month-olds was related to later productive vocabulary outcomes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Katie Von Holzen
- Lehrstuhl Linguistik des Deutschen, Schwerpunkt Deutsch als Fremdsprache/Deutsch als Zweitsprache, Technische Universität Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany.,Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France.,CNRS (Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, UMR 8002), Paris, France.,Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
| | - Thierry Nazzi
- Université Paris Descartes, Sorbonne Paris Cité, Paris, France.,CNRS (Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, UMR 8002), Paris, France
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26
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Carrol G, Conklin K. Is All Formulaic Language Created Equal? Unpacking the Processing Advantage for Different Types of Formulaic Sequences. Lang Speech 2020; 63:95-122. [PMID: 30693821 DOI: 10.1177/0023830918823230] [Citation(s) in RCA: 13] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/09/2023]
Abstract
Research into recurrent, highly conventionalized "formulaic" sequences has shown a processing advantage compared to "novel" (non-formulaic) language. Studies of individual types of formulaic sequence often acknowledge the contribution of specific factors, but little work exists to compare the processing of different types of phrases with fundamentally different properties. We use eye-tracking to compare the processing of three types of formulaic phrases-idioms, binomials, and collocations-and consider whether overall frequency can explain the advantage for all three, relative to control phrases. Results show an advantage, as evidenced through shorter reading times, for all three types. While overall phrase frequency contributes much of the processing advantage, different types of phrase do show additional effects according to the specific properties that are relevant to each type: frequency, familiarity, and decomposability for idioms; predictability and semantic association for binomials; and mutual information for collocations. We discuss how the results contribute to our understanding of the representation and processing of multiword lexical units more broadly.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Kathy Conklin
- University of Nottingham, UK; Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands
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27
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Abstract
This study investigated which components of the writing production process are impaired in Spanish children with developmental dyslexia (DD) aged 8 to 12 years. Children with and without dyslexia (n = 60) were assessed in their use of the lexical and the sublexical routes of spelling as well as the orthographic working memory system by manipulating lexical frequency, phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency, and word length in a copying task and a spelling-to-dictation task. Results revealed that children with dyslexia produced longer written latencies than chronological age-matched (CA) controls, more errors than CA and reading age-matched (RA) controls, and writing durations similar to CA controls. Latencies were more affected by frequency, consistency, and length in the DD group and the RA group than in CA controls. Children in the DD and RA groups produced longer written latencies in the copying than in the spelling-to-dictation task, while controls in the CA group were not affected by the task. Results indicate that spelling impairments in Spanish children with dyslexia affect the relative involvement of lexical and sublexical information during handwriting. Meanwhile, effects on writing speed seem to be related to deficits in reading ability, and accuracy scores seem to be poorer than expected by children's reading skill.
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Abstract
In an event-related potential (ERP) study using picture stimuli, we explored whether spelling information is co-activated with sound information even when neither type of information is explicitly provided. Pairs of picture stimuli presented in a rhyming paradigm were varied by both phonology (the two images in a pair had either rhyming, e.g., boat and goat, or non-rhyming, e.g., boat and cane, labels) and orthography (rhyming image pairs had labels that were either spelled the same, e.g., boat and goat, or not spelled the same, e.g., brain and cane). Electrophysiological picture rhyming (sound) effects were evident in terms of both N400/N450 and late effect amplitude: Non-rhyming images elicited more negative waves than rhyming images. Remarkably, the magnitude of the late ERP rhyming effect was modulated by spelling - even though words were neither explicitly seen nor heard during the task. Moreover, both the N400/N450 and late rhyming effects in the spelled-the-same (orthographically matched) condition were larger in the group with higher scores (by median split) on a standardized measure of sound awareness. Overall, the findings show concomitant meaning (semantic), sound (phonological), and spelling (orthographic) activation for picture processing in a rhyming paradigm, especially in young adults with better reading skills. Not outwardly lexical but nonetheless modulated by reading skill, electrophysiological picture rhyming effects may be useful for exploring co-activation in children with dyslexia.
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Affiliation(s)
- Donna Coch
- Reading Brains Lab, Department of Education, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, United States
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29
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Simeon KM, Bicknell K, Grieco-Calub TM. Belief Shift or Only Facilitation: How Semantic Expectancy Affects Processing of Speech Degraded by Background Noise. Front Psychol 2018; 9:116. [PMID: 29472883 PMCID: PMC5809983 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00116] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/14/2017] [Accepted: 01/24/2018] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Individuals use semantic expectancy - applying conceptual and linguistic knowledge to speech input - to improve the accuracy and speed of language comprehension. This study tested how adults use semantic expectancy in quiet and in the presence of speech-shaped broadband noise at -7 and -12 dB signal-to-noise ratio. Twenty-four adults (22.1 ± 3.6 years, mean ±SD) were tested on a four-alternative-forced-choice task whereby they listened to sentences and were instructed to select an image matching the sentence-final word. The semantic expectancy of the sentences was unrelated to (neutral), congruent with, or conflicting with the acoustic target. Congruent expectancy improved accuracy and conflicting expectancy decreased accuracy relative to neutral, consistent with a theory where expectancy shifts beliefs toward likely words and away from unlikely words. Additionally, there were no significant interactions of expectancy and noise level when analyzed in log-odds, supporting the predictions of ideal observer models of speech perception.
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Affiliation(s)
- Katherine M. Simeon
- The Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
| | - Klinton Bicknell
- Department of Linguistics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
| | - Tina M. Grieco-Calub
- The Roxelyn and Richard Pepper Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
- Hugh Knowles Hearing Center, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, United States
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Von Holzen K, Nishibayashi LL, Nazzi T. Consonant and Vowel Processing in Word Form Segmentation: An Infant ERP Study. Brain Sci 2018; 8:E24. [PMID: 29385046 PMCID: PMC5836043 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci8020024] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/04/2017] [Revised: 01/19/2018] [Accepted: 01/25/2018] [Indexed: 11/16/2022] Open
Abstract
Segmentation skill and the preferential processing of consonants (C-bias) develop during the second half of the first year of life and it has been proposed that these facilitate language acquisition. We used Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neural bases of early word form segmentation, and of the early processing of onset consonants, medial vowels, and coda consonants, exploring how differences in these early skills might be related to later language outcomes. Our results with French-learning eight-month-old infants primarily support previous studies that found that the word familiarity effect in segmentation is developing from a positive to a negative polarity at this age. Although as a group infants exhibited an anterior-localized negative effect, inspection of individual results revealed that a majority of infants showed a negative-going response (Negative Responders), while a minority showed a positive-going response (Positive Responders). Furthermore, all infants demonstrated sensitivity to onset consonant mispronunciations, while Negative Responders demonstrated a lack of sensitivity to vowel mispronunciations, a developmental pattern similar to previous literature. Responses to coda consonant mispronunciations revealed neither sensitivity nor lack of sensitivity. We found that infants showing a more mature, negative response to newly segmented words compared to control words (evaluating segmentation skill) and mispronunciations (evaluating phonological processing) at test also had greater growth in word production over the second year of life than infants showing a more positive response. These results establish a relationship between early segmentation skills and phonological processing (not modulated by the type of mispronunciation) and later lexical skills.
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Affiliation(s)
- Katie Von Holzen
- Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS-Université Paris Descartes, 75006 Paris, France.
- Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20740, USA.
| | - Leo-Lyuki Nishibayashi
- Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS-Université Paris Descartes, 75006 Paris, France.
- Laboratory for Language Development, Riken Brain Science Institute, Wako-shi, Saitama-ken 351-0198, Japan.
| | - Thierry Nazzi
- Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS-Université Paris Descartes, 75006 Paris, France.
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31
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Finch KH, Tager-Flusberg H, Nelson CA. Neural responses to linguistic stimuli in children with and without autism spectrum disorder. Eur J Neurosci 2017; 47:709-719. [PMID: 28922545 DOI: 10.1111/ejn.13721] [Citation(s) in RCA: 7] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/20/2017] [Revised: 09/13/2017] [Accepted: 09/13/2017] [Indexed: 12/17/2022]
Abstract
Atypical neural responses to language have been found in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and in their unaffected siblings. However, given that language difficulties are often seen in these children, it is difficult to interpret whether these neural differences are a result of the diagnosis of ASD or impairments in their language abilities. In this study, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from four groups of 36-month-olds: low-risk control (LRC), high risk for ASD defined as having an older sibling with ASD (HRA) but who do not have ASD or milder autism-like symptoms (HRA-Typ), HRA children who do not have ASD but exhibit milder autism-like symptoms (HRA-Atyp) and HRA children diagnosed with ASD (ASD). Children listened to words expected to be acquired early (e.g. ball) and words expected to be acquired late (e.g. calf). ERPs were analysed over time windows sensitive to word processing as well as frontal and temporo-parietal sites over the left and right hemispheres. When controlling for language abilities, there were group differences within the temporo-parietal sites. Specifically, the HRA-Atyp group showed a different timed response to late words compared to the ASD and LRC groups. In addition, we found a relation between neural responses in the left frontal sites and ASD severity. Our results suggest that both language abilities and ASD diagnoses are important to consider when interpreting neural differences in lexical processing.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kayla H Finch
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, 64 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA, 02215, USA
| | - Helen Tager-Flusberg
- Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Boston University, 64 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA, 02215, USA
| | - Charles A Nelson
- Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience, Division of Developmental Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, 02215, USA.,Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, 02215, USA.,Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA
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32
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Grimm R, Cassani G, Gillis S, Daelemans W. Facilitatory Effects of Multi-Word Units in Lexical Processing and Word Learning: A Computational Investigation. Front Psychol 2017; 8:555. [PMID: 28450842 PMCID: PMC5390038 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00555] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/11/2017] [Accepted: 03/27/2017] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Previous studies have suggested that children and adults form cognitive representations of co-occurring word sequences. We propose (1) that the formation of such multi-word unit (MWU) representations precedes and facilitates the formation of single-word representations in children and thus benefits word learning, and (2) that MWU representations facilitate adult word recognition and thus benefit lexical processing. Using a modified version of an existing computational model (McCauley and Christiansen, 2014), we extract MWUs from a corpus of child-directed speech (CDS) and a corpus of conversations among adults. We then correlate the number of MWUs within which each word appears with (1) age of first production and (2) adult reaction times on a word recognition task. In doing so, we take care to control for the effect of word frequency, as frequent words will naturally tend to occur in many MWUs. We also compare results to a baseline model which randomly groups words into sequences-and find that MWUs have a unique facilitatory effect on both response variables, suggesting that they benefit word learning in children and word recognition in adults. The effect is strongest on age of first production, implying that MWUs are comparatively more important for word learning than for adult lexical processing. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms and formulate testable predictions.
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Affiliation(s)
- Robert Grimm
- Department of Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Psycholinguistics Research Center, University of AntwerpAntwerp, Belgium
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33
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Borovsky A, Ellis EM, Evans JL, Elman JL. Lexical leverage: category knowledge boosts real-time novel word recognition in 2-year-olds. Dev Sci 2016; 19:918-932. [PMID: 26452444 PMCID: PMC4826629 DOI: 10.1111/desc.12343] [Citation(s) in RCA: 50] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/14/2014] [Accepted: 06/17/2015] [Indexed: 11/30/2022]
Abstract
Recent research suggests that infants tend to add words to their vocabulary that are semantically related to other known words, though it is not clear why this pattern emerges. In this paper, we explore whether infants leverage their existing vocabulary and semantic knowledge when interpreting novel label-object mappings in real time. We initially identified categorical domains for which individual 24-month-old infants have relatively higher and lower levels of knowledge, irrespective of overall vocabulary size. Next, we taught infants novel words in these higher and lower knowledge domains and then asked if their subsequent real-time recognition of these items varied as a function of their category knowledge. While our participants successfully acquired the novel label-object mappings in our task, there were important differences in the way infants recognized these words in real time. Namely, infants showed more robust recognition of high (vs. low) domain knowledge words. These findings suggest that dense semantic structure facilitates early word learning and real-time novel word recognition.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Erica M Ellis
- Department of Communication Disorders, California State University, USA
- School of Behavioral & Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
| | - Julia L Evans
- School of Behavioral & Brain Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, USA
- Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, USA
| | - Jeffrey L Elman
- Center for Research in Language, University of California, San Diego, USA
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34
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Schuster S, Hawelka S, Hutzler F, Kronbichler M, Richlan F. Words in Context: The Effects of Length, Frequency, and Predictability on Brain Responses During Natural Reading. Cereb Cortex 2016; 26:3889-3904. [PMID: 27365297 PMCID: PMC5028003 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhw184] [Citation(s) in RCA: 47] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.9] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/26/2022] Open
Abstract
Word length, frequency, and predictability count among the most influential variables during reading. Their effects are well-documented in eye movement studies, but pertinent evidence from neuroimaging primarily stem from single-word presentations. We investigated the effects of these variables during reading of whole sentences with simultaneous eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fixation-related fMRI). Increasing word length was associated with increasing activation in occipital areas linked to visual analysis. Additionally, length elicited a U-shaped modulation (i.e., least activation for medium-length words) within a brain stem region presumably linked to eye movement control. These effects, however, were diminished when accounting for multiple fixation cases. Increasing frequency was associated with decreasing activation within left inferior frontal, superior parietal, and occipito-temporal regions. The function of the latter region—hosting the putative visual word form area—was originally considered as limited to sublexical processing. An exploratory analysis revealed that increasing predictability was associated with decreasing activation within middle temporal and inferior frontal regions previously implicated in memory access and unification. The findings are discussed with regard to their correspondence with findings from single-word presentations and with regard to neurocognitive models of visual word recognition, semantic processing, and eye movement control during reading.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sarah Schuster
- Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.,Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
| | - Stefan Hawelka
- Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.,Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
| | - Florian Hutzler
- Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.,Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
| | - Martin Kronbichler
- Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.,Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.,Neuroscience Institute, Christian-Doppler Klinik, Paracelsus Medical University, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
| | - Fabio Richlan
- Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria.,Department of Psychology, University of Salzburg, 5020 Salzburg, Austria
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35
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Abstract
Understanding speech is effortless in ideal situations, and although adverse conditions, such as caused by hearing impairment, often render it an effortful task, they do not necessarily suspend speech comprehension. A prime example of this is speech perception by cochlear implant users, whose hearing prostheses transmit speech as a significantly degraded signal. It is yet unknown how mechanisms of speech processing deal with such degraded signals, and whether they are affected by effortful processing of speech. This paper compares the automatic process of lexical competition between natural and degraded speech, and combines gaze fixations, which capture the course of lexical disambiguation, with pupillometry, which quantifies the mental effort involved in processing speech. Listeners' ocular responses were recorded during disambiguation of lexical embeddings with matching and mismatching durational cues. Durational cues were selected due to their substantial role in listeners' quick limitation of the number of lexical candidates for lexical access in natural speech. Results showed that lexical competition increased mental effort in processing natural stimuli in particular in presence of mismatching cues. Signal degradation reduced listeners' ability to quickly integrate durational cues in lexical selection, and delayed and prolonged lexical competition. The effort of processing degraded speech was increased overall, and because it had its sources at the pre-lexical level this effect can be attributed to listening to degraded speech rather than to lexical disambiguation. In sum, the course of lexical competition was largely comparable for natural and degraded speech, but showed crucial shifts in timing, and different sources of increased mental effort. We argue that well-timed progress of information from sensory to pre-lexical and lexical stages of processing, which is the result of perceptual adaptation during speech development, is the reason why in ideal situations speech is perceived as an undemanding task. Degradation of the signal or the receiver channel can quickly bring this well-adjusted timing out of balance and lead to increase in mental effort. Incomplete and effortful processing at the early pre-lexical stages has its consequences on lexical processing as it adds uncertainty to the forming and revising of lexical hypotheses.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anita E. Wagner
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University Medical Center Groningen, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands
- Graduate School of Medical Sciences, School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands
| | - Paolo Toffanin
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University Medical Center Groningen, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands
| | - Deniz Başkent
- Department of Otorhinolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery, University Medical Center Groningen, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands
- Graduate School of Medical Sciences, School of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, University of GroningenGroningen, Netherlands
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36
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Imbir KK, Spustek T, Żygierewicz J. Polish pseudo-words list: dataset of 3023 stimuli with competent judges' ratings. Front Psychol 2015; 6:1395. [PMID: 26441770 PMCID: PMC4569746 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01395] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/08/2015] [Accepted: 09/01/2015] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Pseudo-words are stimuli, which are useful in research concerning lexical processing. As in the case of existing words, they are language dependent; thus, they should be generated for each language separately. The Polish Pseudo-words List (PPwL) is a dataset presenting a set of 3023 stimuli (words of 4-13 letters long). They were generated using an algorithm substituting random letters in existing words with respect to the frequency of letters in certain positions. We put out the raw set for a competent judges' assessment and included the responses in the dataset. PPwL allows the choice of suitable control stimuli for experiments concerning lexical processing.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kamil K Imbir
- Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw Warsaw, Poland ; The Maria Grzegorzewska University Warsaw, Poland
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37
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Abstract
Previously reported simulations using the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control suggest that the patterns of eye movements observed with children versus adult readers reflect differences in lexical processing proficiency (Reichle et al., 2013). However, these simulations fail to specify precisely what aspect(s) of lexical processing (e.g., orthographic processing) account for the concurrent changes in eye movements and reading skill. To examine this issue, the E-Z Reader model was first used to simulate the aggregate eye-movement data from 15 adults and 75 children to replicate the finding that gross differences in reading skill can be accounted for by differences in lexical processing proficiency. The model was then used to simulate the eye-movement data of individual children so that the best-fitting lexical-processing parameters could be correlated to measures of orthographic knowledge, phonological-processing skill, sentence comprehension, and general intelligence. These analyses suggest that orthographic knowledge accounts for variance in the eye-movement measures that is observed with between-individual differences in reading skill. The theoretical implications of this conclusion will be discussed in relation to computational models of reading and our understanding of reading skill development.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lyuba Mancheva
- GIPSA-lab, University of Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France; University of Grenoble Alpes, LPNC, F-38000 Grenoble, France; CNRS, LPNC UMR5105, F-38000 Grenoble, France
| | - Erik D Reichle
- Centre for Vision and Cognition, University of Southampton, UK
| | - Benoît Lemaire
- University of Grenoble Alpes, LPNC, F-38000 Grenoble, France; CNRS, LPNC UMR5105, F-38000 Grenoble, France
| | - Sylviane Valdois
- University of Grenoble Alpes, LPNC, F-38000 Grenoble, France; CNRS, LPNC UMR5105, F-38000 Grenoble, France
| | - Jean Ecalle
- Laboratoire d'Etude des Mécanismes Cognitifs, Université de Lyon 2, LabEx Cortex ANR-11-LABX-0042, France
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38
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Bavin EL, Kidd E, Prendergast L, Baker E, Dissanayake C, Prior M. Severity of autism is related to children's language processing. Autism Res 2014; 7:687-94. [PMID: 25262588 DOI: 10.1002/aur.1410] [Citation(s) in RCA: 35] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/11/2014] [Accepted: 08/04/2014] [Indexed: 11/06/2022]
Abstract
Problems in language processing have been associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), with some research attributing the problems to overall language skills rather than a diagnosis of ASD. Lexical access was assessed in a looking-while-listening task in three groups of 5- to 7-year-old children; two had high-functioning ASD (HFA), an ASD severe (ASD-S) group (n = 16) and an ASD moderate (ASD-M) group (n = 21). The third group were typically developing (TD) (n = 48). Participants heard sentences of the form "Where's the x?" and their eye movements to targets (e.g., train), phonological competitors (e.g., tree), and distractors were recorded. Proportions of looking time at target were analyzed within 200 ms intervals. Significant group differences were found between the ASD-S and TD groups only, at time intervals 1000-1200 and 1200-1400 ms postonset. The TD group was more likely to be fixated on target. These differences were maintained after adjusting for language, verbal and nonverbal IQ, and attention scores. An analysis using parent report of autistic-like behaviors showed higher scores to be associated with lower proportions of looking time at target, regardless of group. Further analysis showed fixation for the TD group to be significantly faster than for the ASD-S. In addition, incremental processing was found for all groups. The study findings suggest that severity of autistic behaviors will impact significantly on children's language processing in real life situations when exposed to syntactically complex material. They also show the value of using online methods for understanding how young children with ASD process language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Edith L Bavin
- School of Psychological Science, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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39
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Abstract
A word-spotting experiment is reported whereby participants determined whether a polysyllabic pseudoword began with a real word or not. All target words ended in a single consonant (e.g., slam) which either did or did not form a complex coda with the consonant that followed it. When it did (e.g., the mp of slampora), target detection was harder than when the target was followed by a vowel (e.g., slamorpa). When it did not (e.g., the mc of slamcora), target detection was easier. These results demonstrate a bias toward maximization of the coda when segmenting a polysyllabic letter-string which is argued to reflect the way in which polysyllabic words are represented in the mental lexicon.
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Affiliation(s)
- Marcus Taft
- University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
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40
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Libben G, Curtiss K, Weber S. Psychocentricity and participant profiles: implications for lexical processing among multilinguals. Front Psychol 2014; 5:557. [PMID: 25071614 PMCID: PMC4074704 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00557] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/17/2014] [Accepted: 05/20/2014] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Lexical processing among bilinguals is often affected by complex patterns of individual experience. In this paper we discuss the psychocentric perspective on language representation and processing, which highlights the centrality of individual experience in psycholinguistic experimentation. We discuss applications to the investigation of lexical processing among multilinguals and explore the advantages of using high-density experiments with multilinguals. High density experiments are designed to co-index measures of lexical perception and production, as well as participant profiles. We discuss the challenges associated with the characterization of participant profiles and present a new data visualization technique, that we term Facial Profiles. This technique is based on Chernoff faces developed over 40 years ago. The Facial Profile technique seeks to overcome some of the challenges associated with the use of Chernoff faces, while maintaining the core insight that recoding multivariate data as facial features can engage the human face recognition system and thus enhance our ability to detect and interpret patterns within multivariate datasets. We demonstrate that Facial Profiles can code participant characteristics in lexical processing studies by recoding variables such as reading ability, speaking ability, and listening ability into iconically-related relative sizes of eye, mouth, and ear, respectively. The balance of ability in bilinguals can be captured by creating composite facial profiles or Janus Facial Profiles. We demonstrate the use of Facial Profiles and Janus Facial Profiles in the characterization of participant effects in the study of lexical perception and production.
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Affiliation(s)
- Gary Libben
- Department of Applied Linguistics and Department of Psychology, Brock University, University of Calgary St. Catharines, ON, Canada ; Language Research Centre, University of Calgary Calgary, AB, Canada
| | - Kaitlin Curtiss
- Department of Applied Linguistics, Brock University St. Catharines, ON, Canada
| | - Silke Weber
- Department of Linguistics, University of Calgary Calgary, AB, Canada
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41
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Abstract
We investigated the role of the visual similarity of masked primes to targets in a lexical decision experiment. In the primes, some letters in the target (e.g., A in ABANDON) had either visually similar letters (e.g., H), dissimilar letters (D), visually similar digits (4), or dissimilar digits (6) substituted for them. The similarities of the digits and letters to the base letter were equated and verified in a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) perceptual identification task. Using targets presented in lowercase (e.g., abandon) and primes presented in uppercase, visually similar digit primes (e.g., 484NDON) produced more priming than did visually dissimilar digit primes (676NDON), but little difference was found between the visually similar and dissimilar letter primes (HRHNDON vs. DWDNDON). These results were explained in terms of task-driven competition between the target letter and the visually similar letter.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sachiko Kinoshita
- ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia,
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Zhan J, Yu H, Zhou X. fMRI evidence for the interaction between orthography and phonology in reading Chinese compound words. Front Hum Neurosci 2013; 7:753. [PMID: 24319418 PMCID: PMC3836272 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00753] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/04/2013] [Accepted: 10/20/2013] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Compound words make up a major part of modern Chinese vocabulary. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that access to lexical semantics of compound words is driven by the interaction between orthographic and phonological information. However, little is known about the neural underpinnings of compound word processing. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging study, we asked participants to perform lexical decisions to pseudohomophones, which were constructed by replacing one or both constituents of two-character compound words with orthographically dissimilar homophonic characters. Mixed pseudohomophones, which shared the first constituent with the base words, were more difficult to reject than non-pseudohomophone non-words. This effect was accompanied by the increased activation of bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), left inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and left angular gyrus. The pure pseudohomophones, which shared no constituent with their base words, were rejected as quickly as non-word controls and did not elicit any significant neural activation. The effective connectivity of a phonological pathway from left IPL to left IFG was enhanced for the mixed pseudohomophones but not for pure pseudohomophones. These findings demonstrated that phonological activation alone, as in the case of the pure pseudohomophones, is not sufficient to drive access to lexical representations of compound words, and that orthographic information interacts with phonology, playing a gating role in the recognition of Chinese compound words.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jiayu Zhan
- Department of Psychology, Peking University Beijing, China ; Center for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University Beijing, China
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Pexman PM, Siakaluk PD, Yap MJ. Introduction to the research topic meaning in mind: semantic richness effects in language processing. Front Hum Neurosci 2013; 7:723. [PMID: 24204336 PMCID: PMC3817369 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00723] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.6] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/18/2013] [Accepted: 10/11/2013] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Affiliation(s)
- Penny M Pexman
- Department of Psychology, University of Calgary Calgary, AB, Canada
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Abstract
Community structure, which refers to the presence of densely connected groups within a larger network, is a common feature of several real-world networks from a variety of domains such as the human brain, social networks of hunter-gatherers and business organizations, and the World Wide Web (Porter et al., 2009). Using a community detection technique known as the Louvain optimization method, 17 communities were extracted from the giant component of the phonological network described in Vitevitch (2008). Additional analyses comparing the lexical and phonological characteristics of words in these communities against words in randomly generated communities revealed several novel discoveries. Larger communities tend to consist of short, frequent words of high degree and low age of acquisition ratings, and smaller communities tend to consist of longer, less frequent words of low degree and high age of acquisition ratings. Real communities also contained fewer different phonological segments compared to random communities, although the number of occurrences of phonological segments found in real communities was much higher than that of the same phonological segments in random communities. Interestingly, the observation that relatively few biphones occur very frequently and a large number of biphones occur rarely within communities mirrors the pattern of the overall frequency of words in a language (Zipf, 1935). The present findings have important implications for understanding the dynamics of activation spread among words in the phonological network that are relevant to lexical processing, as well as understanding the mechanisms that underlie language acquisition and the evolution of language.
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Affiliation(s)
- Cynthia S. Q. Siew
- Spoken Language Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of KansasLawrence, KS, USA
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Abstract
The neural mechanisms of language abnormalities, the core symptoms in schizophrenia, remain unclear. In this study, a new experimental paradigm, combining magnetoencephalography (MEG) techniques and machine intelligence methodologies, was designed to gain knowledge about the frequency, brain location, and time of occurrence of the neural oscillations that are associated with lexical processing in schizophrenia. The 248-channel MEG recordings were obtained from 12 patients with schizophrenia and 10 healthy controls, during a lexical processing task, where the patients discriminated correct from incorrect lexical stimuli that were visually presented. Event-related desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/ERS) was computed along the frequency, time, and space dimensions combined, that resulted in a large spectral-spatial-temporal ERD/ERS feature set. Machine intelligence techniques were then applied to select a small subset of oscillation patterns that are abnormal in patients with schizophrenia, according to their discriminating power in patient and control classification. Patients with schizophrenia showed abnormal ERD/ERS patterns during both lexical encoding and post-encoding periods. The top-ranked features were located at the occipital and left frontal-temporal areas, and covered a wide frequency range, including δ (1-4 Hz), α (8-12 Hz), β (12-32 Hz), and γ (32-48 Hz) bands. These top features could discriminate the patient group from the control group with 90.91% high accuracy, which demonstrates significant brain oscillation abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia at the specific frequency, time, and brain location indicated by these top features. As neural oscillation abnormality may be due to the mechanisms of the disease, the spectral, spatial, and temporal content of the discriminating features can offer useful information for helping understand the physiological basis of the language disorder in schizophrenia, as well as the pathology of the disease itself.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tingting Xu
- Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
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Gould L, Cummine J, Borowsky R. The cognitive chronometric architecture of reading aloud: semantic and lexical effects on naming onset and duration. Front Hum Neurosci 2012; 6:287. [PMID: 23125825 PMCID: PMC3486687 DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2012.00287] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.8] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/23/2012] [Accepted: 09/28/2012] [Indexed: 11/27/2022] Open
Abstract
We examined onset reaction time (RT) in a word naming task using an additive factors method (AFM). The pattern of additive and over-additive joint effects on RT among Instructions (INST: name all, name words), Word Frequency (WF: log10 HAL), Semantic Neighborhood Density (SND: Inverse Ncount), and Word Type (WT: regular, exception) supported a cognitive chronometric architecture consisting of at least two cascaded stages of processing, with the orthographic lexical system as the locus of the INST × WF and the INST × SND interactions, and the phonological output system as the locus of the WF × WT and the SND × WT interactions. Additivity between INST and WT supports the notion that these variables affect separable systems, and a WF × SND interaction supports a common locus of their effects. These results support stage-like/cascaded processing models over parallel processing models of basic reading. We also examined response duration (RD) in these data by recording and hand-marking vocal responses, which provides evidence that basic reading processes are ongoing even after the initiation of a vocal response, and supports the notion that the more lexically a word is read, the shorter the RD. As such, the effects of WT and INST on RD were opposite to their effects on RT however the effects of WF and SND on RD were in the same direction as their effects on RT. Given the combination of consistent and dissociating effects between RT and RD, these results provide new challenges to all models of basic reading processes.
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Affiliation(s)
- Layla Gould
- Department of Psychology, University of Saskatoon Saskatoon, SK, Canada
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47
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Reingold EM, Reichle ED, Glaholt MG, Sheridan H. Direct lexical control of eye movements in reading: evidence from a survival analysis of fixation durations. Cogn Psychol 2012; 65:177-206. [PMID: 22542804 PMCID: PMC3565237 DOI: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.03.001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 86] [Impact Index Per Article: 7.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/30/2011] [Revised: 02/18/2012] [Accepted: 03/04/2012] [Indexed: 10/28/2022]
Abstract
Participants' eye movements were monitored in an experiment that manipulated the frequency of target words (high vs. low) as well as their availability for parafoveal processing during fixations on the pre-target word (valid vs. invalid preview). The influence of the word-frequency by preview validity manipulation on the distributions of first fixation duration was examined by using ex-Gaussian fitting as well as a novel survival analysis technique which provided precise estimates of the timing of the first discernible influence of word frequency on first fixation duration. Using this technique, we found a significant influence of word frequency on fixation duration in normal reading (valid preview) as early as 145ms from the start of fixation. We also demonstrated an equally rapid non-lexical influence on first fixation duration as a function of initial landing position (location) on target words. The time-course of frequency effects, but not location effects was strongly influenced by preview validity, demonstrating the crucial role of parafoveal processing in enabling direct lexical control of reading fixation times. Implications for models of eye-movement control are discussed.
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Affiliation(s)
- Eyal M Reingold
- Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L 1C6.
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Chen Q, Mirman D. Competition and cooperation among similar representations: toward a unified account of facilitative and inhibitory effects of lexical neighbors. Psychol Rev 2012; 119:417-30. [PMID: 22352357 PMCID: PMC3328653 DOI: 10.1037/a0027175] [Citation(s) in RCA: 113] [Impact Index Per Article: 9.4] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/08/2022]
Abstract
One of the core principles of how the mind works is the graded, parallel activation of multiple related or similar representations. Parallel activation of multiple representations has been particularly important in the development of theories and models of language processing, where coactivated representations (neighbors) have been shown to exhibit both facilitative and inhibitory effects on word recognition and production. Researchers generally ascribe these effects to interactive activation and competition, but there is no unified explanation for why the effects are facilitative in some cases and inhibitory in others. We present a series of simulations of a simple domain-general interactive activation and competition model that is broadly consistent with more specialized domain-specific models of lexical processing. The results showed that interactive activation and competition can indeed account for the complex pattern of reversals. Critically, the simulations revealed a core computational principle that determines whether neighbor effects are facilitative or inhibitory: strongly active neighbors exert a net inhibitory effect, and weakly active neighbors exert a net facilitative effect.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qi Chen
- Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Elkins Park, PA 19027, USA.
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Mainela-Arnold E, Evans JL, Coady J. Beyond capacity limitations II: effects of lexical processes on word recall in verbal working memory tasks in children with and without specific language impairment. J Speech Lang Hear Res 2010; 53:1656-72. [PMID: 20705747 PMCID: PMC2982928 DOI: 10.1044/1092-4388(2010/08-0240)] [Citation(s) in RCA: 10] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/19/2023]
Abstract
PURPOSE This study investigated the impact of lexical processes on target word recall in sentence span tasks in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD Participants were 42 children (ages 8;2-12;3 [years;months]): 21 with SLI and 21 typically developing peers matched on age and nonverbal IQ. Children completed a sentence span task in which target words to be recalled varied in word frequency and neighborhood density. Two measures of lexical processes were examined: the number of nontarget competitor words activated during a gating task (lexical cohort competition) and word definitions. RESULTS Neighborhood density had no effect on word recall for either group. However, both groups recalled significantly more high- than low-frequency words. Lexical cohort competition and specificity of semantic representations accounted for unique variance in the number of target word recalled in the SLI and chronological age-matched (CA) groups combined. CONCLUSIONS Performance on verbal working memory span tasks for both SLI and CA children is influenced by word frequency, lexical cohorts, and semantic representations. Future studies need to examine the extent to which verbal working memory capacity is a cognitive construct independent of extant language knowledge representations.
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Abstract
The forms of words as they appear in text and speech are central to theories and models of lexical processing. Nonetheless, current methods for simulating their learning and representation fail to approach the scale and heterogeneity of real wordform lexicons. A connectionist architecture termed the sequence encoder is used to learn nearly 75,000 wordform representations through exposure to strings of stress-marked phonemes or letters. First, the mechanisms and efficacy of the sequence encoder are demonstrated and shown to overcome problems with traditional slot-based codes. Then, two large-scale simulations are reported that learned to represent lexicons of either phonological or orthographic word-forms. In doing so, the models learned the statistics of their lexicons as shown by better processing of well-formed pseudowords as opposed to ill-formed (scrambled) pseudowords, and by accounting for variance in well-formedness ratings. It is discussed how the sequence encoder may be integrated into broader models of lexical processing.
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Affiliation(s)
| | | | - David C. Plaut
- Department of Psychology, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University
| | - Jeffrey L. Elman
- Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego
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