Effects of grammatical categories on letter detection in continuous text

Prepositions and pronouns in connected discourse of individuals with aphasia

The lexical-grammatical divide has been a widely addressed topic in aphasia. Speech parts are generally classified as either belonging to a lexical or a grammatical category based on the frequency of acquisition of new members in their paradigms (open vs. closed classes), thus neglecting heterogeneity within categories. Such an approach has led to contradictory findings. First, prepositions form closed classes, but are classically taken as lexical items. Pronouns, also belonging to a closed class, are analyzed as grammatical elements. Second, both within the group of prepositions and pronouns, forms with different syntactic and semantic properties co-exist. Following the theoretical notions granted by a usage-based theory of grammar, the ProGram theory, and taking focalizability as the classification criteria, we hypothesize that individuals with non-fluent aphasias will experience more severe problems with grammatical prepositions and pronouns, given that these elements are secondary and dependent, whereas informants in the fluent group will experience more severe trouble with lexical forms, potentially primary and independent. We focused on the performance of nine Spanish-speaking individuals with aphasia from the Rosell (2005) corpus. Samples of 300 words were transcribed and analyzed. As predicted, grammatical prepositions were found to be more severely compromised in the speech output of individuals with deficits of motor predominance, whereas lexical prepositions are more severely affected in individuals with deficits of sensory predominance. Although less conclusively, the same tendency holds in the case of pronouns. Our results, consistent with previous findings, confirm the heterogeneity of prepositions and pronouns, which should no longer be analyzed en bloc.

Planning and production of grammatical and lexical verbs in multi-word messages

Grammatical words represent the part of grammar that can be most directly contrasted with the lexicon. Aphasiological studies, linguistic theories and psycholinguistic studies suggest that their processing is operated at different stages in speech production. Models of sentence production propose that at the formulation stage, lexical words are processed at the functional level while grammatical words are processed at a later positional level. In this study we consider proposals made by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models to derive two predictions for the processing of grammatical words compared to lexical words. First, based on the assumption that grammatical words are less crucial for communication and therefore paid less attention to, it is predicted that they show shorter articulation times and/or higher error rates than lexical words. Second, based on the assumption that grammatical words differ from lexical words in being dependent on a lexical host, it is hypothesized that the retrieval of a grammatical word has to be put on hold until its lexical host is available, and it is predicted that this is reflected in longer reaction times (RTs) for grammatical compared to lexical words. We investigated these predictions by comparing fully homonymous sentences with only a difference in verb status (grammatical vs. lexical) elicited by a specific context. We measured RTs, duration and accuracy rate. No difference in duration was observed. Longer RTs and a lower accuracy rate for grammatical words were reported, successfully reflecting grammatical word properties as defined by linguistic theories and psycholinguistic models. Importantly, this study provides insight into the span of encoding and grammatical encoding processes in speech production.

ReadingMate: the effect of the content stabilizing technique, font size, and interline spacing on the letter-counting task performance of treadmill runners

OBJECTIVE

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of font size, interline spacing, and a technology called ReadingMate on the letter-counting task performance of users running on a treadmill.

BACKGROUND

Few researchers have investigated how runners read text while running on a treadmill. Our previous studies showed that ReadingMate had positive effects on the reading-while-running experience; however, the effect of other text conditions (i.e., font size and interline spacing) and the interplay between ReadingMate and such text conditions on the letter-counting task performance are not clearly understood.

METHOD

Fifteen participants were recruited for the experiment. There were three main factors: display types (normal and ReadingMate), font sizes (8, 12, 16, and 20 point), and interline spacing (1.0x, 1.5x, 2.0x, and 2.5x). The researchers employed a letter-counting task. The performance was measured regarding task performance time, success rate of counting the target letter f and number of give-ups.

RESULTS

Overall, the letter-counting task performance while running on a treadmill improved as font size and interline spacing increased, as expected. ReadingMate was more effective than normal display particularly when text was displayed in a small font size and with dense interline spacing.

CONCLUSION

When text must be displayed in a small font size and with dense interline spacing, ReadingMate can be used to improve the users' task performance.

APPLICATION

Practical applications of ReadingMate include improving the text-reading experience in shaky environments, such as in aviation, construction, and transportation.