The real-time status of strong and weak islands

In two eye-tracking reading experiments, we used a variant of the filled gap technique to investigate how strong and weak islands are processed on a moment-to-moment basis during comprehension. Experiment 1 provided a conceptual replication of previous studies showing that real time processing is sensitive to strong islands. In the absence of an island, readers experienced processing difficulty when a pronoun appeared in a position of a predicted gap, but this difficulty was absent when the pronoun appeared inside a strong island. Experiment 2 showed an analogous effect for weak islands: a processing cost was seen for a pronoun in the position of a predicted gap in a that-complement clause, but this cost was absent in a matched whether clause, which constitutes a weak island configuration. Overall, our results are compatible with the claim that active dependency formation is suspended, or reduced, in both weak and strong island structures.

Pre- and post-head processing for single- and double-scrambled sentences of a head-final language as measured by the eye tracking method

Using the eye-tracking method, the present study depicted pre- and post-head processing for simple scrambled sentences of head-final languages. Three versions of simple Japanese active sentences with ditransitive verbs were used: namely, (1) SO₁O₂V canonical, (2) SO₂O₁V single-scrambled, and (3) O₁O₂SV double-scrambled order. First pass reading times indicated that the third noun phrase just before the verb in both single- and double-scrambled sentences required longer reading times compared to canonical sentences. Re-reading times (the sum of all fixations minus the first pass reading) showed that all noun phrases including the crucial phrase before the verb in double-scrambled sentences required longer re-reading times than those required for single-scrambled sentences; single-scrambled sentences had no difference from canonical ones. Therefore, a single filler-gap dependency can be resolved in pre-head anticipatory processing whereas two filler-gap dependencies require much greater cognitive loading than a single case. These two dependencies can be resolved in post-head processing using verb agreement information.

Understanding mechanisms in transitive inferences: an eye-tracking study in Korean reading

The current experiment examined the mechanism of relational information processing by assessing transitive inferences in different syntactic structures. More specifically, the current experiment focused on whether the demands of conscious inference processing interact with the difficulty of syntactic processing. This research used the eye-tracking method to investigate online processing mechanisms in complex sentences with transitive inference. Overall sentence reading times, accuracy rates of comprehension questions, and the two eye-movement measures of gaze duration and re-reading times were examined in 32 participants. The results showed that inference processing demands affected overall reading times and accuracy rates, while syntactic processing demands did not have an effect on overall reading times or accuracy rates. The results of the eye-tracking measures showed that syntactic processing demands affected gaze duration, while the inference processing demand affected re-reading times. Apparently, the difficulty of inference processing was not affected by the surface form of a sentence. The results of this study suggested that basic processes of sentence interpretation share resources with other cognitive processes such as inference.

Asymmetric partner pronoun use and demand-withdraw interaction in couples coping with health problems

Recent research links first-person plural pronoun use (we-talk) by individual romantic partners to adaptive relationship functioning and individual health outcomes. To examine a possible boundary condition of adaptive we-talk in couples coping with health problems, we correlated asymmetric couple-level we/I-ratios (more we-talk relative to I-talk by the spouse than the patient) with a concurrent pattern of directional demand-withdraw (D-W) interaction in which the spouse demands change while the patient withdraws. Couples in which a partner who abused alcohol (n = 65), smoked cigarettes despite having heart or lung disease (n = 24), or had congestive heart failure (n = 58) discussed a health-related disagreement during a video-recorded interaction task. Transcripts of these conversations provided measures of pronoun use for each partner, and trained observers coded D-W patterns from the recordings. As expected, partner asymmetry in we/I-ratio scores predicted directional demand-withdraw, such that spouses who used more we-talk (relative to I-talk) than patients tended to assume the demand role in concurrent D-W interaction. Asymmetric I-talk rather than we-talk accounted for this association, and asymmetric you-talk contributed independently as well. In contrast to previous studies of we-talk by individual partners, the present results identify dyad-level pronoun patterns that clearly do not mark beneficent processes: asymmetric partner we/I-ratios and you-talk reflect problematic demand-withdraw interaction.

Reconsidering the role of temporal order in spoken word recognition

Models of spoken word recognition assume that words are represented as sequences of phonemes. We evaluated this assumption by examining phonemic anadromes, words that share the same phonemes but differ in their order (e.g., sub and bus). Using the visual-world paradigm, we found that listeners show more fixations to anadromes (e.g., sub when bus is the target) than to unrelated words (well) and to words that share the same vowel but not the same set of phonemes (sun). This contrasts with the predictions of existing models and suggests that words are not defined as strict sequences of phonemes.

The flexibility of letter-position flexibility: evidence from eye movements in reading Hebrew

Hebrew provides an intriguing contrast to European languages. On the one hand, like any European language, it has an alphabetic script. On the other hand, being a Semitic language, it differs in the structure of base words. By monitoring eye movements, we examined the time-course of processing letter transpositions in Hebrew and assessed their impact on reading different types of Hebrew words that differ in their internal structure. We found that letter transposition resulted in dramatic reading costs for words with Semitic word structure, and much smaller costs for non-Semitic words. Moreover, the strongest impact of transposition occurred where root-letter transposition resulted in a pseudo-root, where significant interference emerged already in first fixation duration. Our findings thus suggest that Hebrew readers differentiate between Semitic and non-Semitic forms already at first fixation, at the early phase of word recognition. Moreover, letters are differentially processed across the visual array, given their morphological structure and their contribution to recovering semantic meaning. We conclude that flexibility or rigidity in encoding letter position is determined by cues regarding the internal structure of printed words.

Bilingual control: sequential memory in language switching

To investigate bilingual language control, prior language switching studies presented visual objects, which had to be named in different languages, typically indicated by a visual cue. The present study examined language switching of predictable responses by introducing a novel sequence-based language switching paradigm. In 4 experiments, sequential responses (i.e., weekdays, numbers or new sequences) and an alternating language sequence (e.g., L1-L1-L2-L2) were implemented, both of which were memory based. Our data revealed switch costs, showing that a language switch is associated with worse performance compared with a language repetition, and mixing costs, which constitutes the performance difference between pure and mixed language blocks, even while producing entirely predictable responses (i.e., language and concept). Additionally, we found these switch costs with overlearned and new sequences and found that switch costs were reduced with longer preparation time. The obtained data are consistent with a proactive interference account, such as the inhibitory control model.

Speechreading development in deaf and hearing children: introducing the test of child speechreading

PURPOSE

In this article, the authors describe the development of a new instrument, the Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS), which was specifically designed for use with deaf and hearing children. Speechreading is a skill that is required for deaf children to access the language of the hearing community. ToCS is a deaf-friendly, computer-based test that measures child speechreading (silent lipreading) at 3 psycholinguistic levels: (a) Words, (b) Sentences, and (c) Short Stories. The aims of the study were to standardize the ToCS with deaf and hearing children and to investigate the effects of hearing status, age, and linguistic complexity on speechreading ability.

METHOD

Eighty-six severely and profoundly deaf children and 91 hearing children participated. All children were between the ages of 5 and 14 years. The deaf children were from a range of language and communication backgrounds, and their preferred mode of communication varied.

RESULTS

Speechreading skills significantly improved with age for both groups of children. There was no effect of hearing status on speechreading ability, and children from both groups showed similar performance across all subtests of the ToCS.

CONCLUSION

The ToCS is a valid and reliable assessment of speechreading ability in school-age children that can be used to measure individual differences in performance in speechreading ability.

Individuals with intellectual disability can self-teach in reading

Previous research has suggested that individuals with intellectual disability (ID) underperform in several areas of reading compared to mental age-matched peers. However, it is unclear how they compare on orthographic aspects of reading, which have to do with learning and matching the specific letter patterns in words. The leading approach to understanding orthographic learning is the self-teaching hypothesis, which suggests that orthographic learning is acquired through the experience of phonologically recoding words. The present study was a first test of the self-teaching hypothesis for individuals with ID in comparison to a group of typically developing children matched on verbal mental age. Results indicated that both groups were able to self-teach.

Factors affecting occupational advice for speakers who do and do not stutter

Factors affecting perceptions of occupational suitability were examined for speakers who stutter and speakers who do not stutter. In Experiment 1, 58 adults who do not stutter heard one of two audio recordings (less severe stuttering, more severe stuttering) of a speaker who stuttered. Participants rated the speaker's communicative functioning, personal attributes, and suitability for 32 occupations, along with perceptions of the occupations' speaking demands and educational requirements. Perceived speaking demand strongly affected occupational suitability ratings at both levels of stuttering severity. In Experiment 2, 58 additional adults who do not stutter heard a recording of another adult in one of two conditions (fluent speech, pseudo-stuttering), and provided the same ratings as in Experiment 1. In the pseudo-stuttering condition, participants' perceptions of occupational speaking demand again had a strong effect on occupational suitability ratings. In the fluent condition, suitability ratings were affected primarily by perceived educational demand; perceived speaking demand was of secondary importance. Across all participants in Experiment 2, occupational suitability ratings were associated with ratings of the speaker's personal attributes and communicative functioning. In both experiments, speakers who stuttered received lower suitability ratings for high speaking demand occupations than for low speaking demand occupations. Ratings for many high speaking occupations, however, fell just below the midpoint of the occupational suitability scale, suggesting that participants viewed these occupations as less appropriate, but not necessarily inappropriate, for people who stutter. Overall, the findings support the hypothesis that people who stutter may face occupational stereotyping and/or role entrapment in work settings.

EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES

At the end of this activity the reader will be able to (a) summarize main findings on research related to the work-related experiences of people who stutter, (b) describe factors that affect perceptions of which occupations are best suited for speakers who stutter and speakers who do not stutter, and (c) discuss how findings from the present study relate to previous findings on occupational advice for people who stutter.

TMS-induced modulation of action sentence priming in the ventral premotor cortex

Despite accumulating evidence that cortical motor areas, particularly the lateral premotor cortex, are activated during language comprehension, the question of whether motor processes help mediate the semantic encoding of language remains controversial. To address this issue, we examined whether low frequency (1 Hz) repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of the left ventral premotor cortex (PMv) can interfere with the comprehension of sentences describing manual actions, visual properties of manipulable and non-manipulable objects, and actions of the lips and mouth. Using a primed semantic decision task, sixteen participants were asked to determine for a given sentence whether or not an auditorily presented target word was congruent with the sentence. We hypothesized that if the left PMv is contributing semantic information that is used to comprehend action and object related sentences, then TMS applied over PMv should result in a disruption of semantic priming. Our results show that TMS reduces semantic priming, induces a shift in response bias, and increases response sensitivity, but does so only during the processing of manual action sentences. This suggests a preferential contribution of PMv to the processing of sentences describing manual actions compared to other types of sentences.

Computerized analysis of speech and language to identify psycholinguistic correlates of frontotemporal lobar degeneration

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the use of a semiautomated computerized system for measuring speech and language characteristics in patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration (FTLD).

BACKGROUND

FTLD is a heterogeneous disorder comprising at least 3 variants. Computerized assessment of spontaneous verbal descriptions by patients with FTLD offers a detailed and reproducible view of the underlying cognitive deficits.

METHODS

Audiorecorded speech samples of 38 patients from 3 participating medical centers were elicited using the Cookie Theft stimulus. Each patient underwent a battery of neuropsychologic tests. The audio was analyzed by the computerized system to measure 15 speech and language variables. Analysis of variance was used to identify characteristics with significant differences in means between FTLD variants. Factor analysis was used to examine the implicit relations between subsets of the variables.

RESULTS

Semiautomated measurements of pause-to-word ratio and pronoun-to-noun ratio were able to discriminate between some of the FTLD variants. Principal component analysis of all 14 variables suggested 4 subjectively defined components (length, hesitancy, empty content, grammaticality) corresponding to the phenomenology of FTLD variants.

CONCLUSION

Semiautomated language and speech analysis is a promising novel approach to neuropsychologic assessment that offers a valuable contribution to the toolbox of researchers in dementia and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Improving accuracy in detecting acoustic onsets

In current cognitive psychology, naming latencies are commonly measured by electronic voice keys that detect when sound exceeds a certain amplitude threshold. However, recent research (e.g., K. Rastle & M. H. Davis, 2002) has shown that these devices are particularly inaccurate in precisely detecting acoustic onsets. In this article, the authors discuss the various problems and solutions that have been put forward with respect to this issue and show that classical voice keys may trigger several tens of milliseconds later than acoustic onset. The authors argue that a solution to this problem may come from voice keys that use a combination of analogue and digital noise (nonspeech sound) detection. It is shown that the acoustic onsets detected by such a device are only a few milliseconds delayed and correlate highly (up to .99) with reaction time values obtained by visual waveform inspection.

Electrophysiological evidence of different interpretative strategies in irony comprehension

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they could be ironical, literal or nonsensical endings. Participants were asked to evaluate whether each sentence was coherent or incoherent. Half of them were initially instructed to consider whether the sentences made sense (holistic condition); the other half were instructed to consider whether the sentences were congruent or incongruent (analytic condition). Behavioral responses and Event Related Potentials were registered during the experiment. Both behavioral and electrophysiological results allow clearly distinguishing between the holistic and the analytic strategies. The fact that the same set of stimuli elicits different ERP waveforms, depending on the strategy with which they are analyzed, suggests that different cognitive processes and different areas of the brain are operating in each case.

Embodiment awareness, mathematics discourse, and the blind

Blindness might be described as a biological condition, and thus remedies could be in the realm of biotechnology. However, the convergence of information technology and cognitive science offers great opportunities for understanding and helping blind children as they learn mathematics, the crosscutting discipline most important for all branches of science and engineering. This article outlines our logic and approach for providing blind students with awareness of the embodiment of their teachers to maintain situated communication. First, we shall show that math discourse is inherently spatiotemporal, and that this information is carried by gesticulation in conjunction with speech. Second, we shall explore the capacity of those who are blind for the imagism necessary for mathematics reasoning. Third, we shall advance a set of augmentative devices suggested by our analysis. Finally, we shall outline our ongoing experiments to validate our rationale.

Anagram software for cognitive research that enables specification of psycholinguistic variables

Anagram tasks are frequently used in cognitive research, and the generation of new scrambled letter combinations is a task well suited to a software solution. Most available programs, however, do not allow experimenters to generate new anagrams flexibly or to characterize existing anagrams using psycholinguistic criteria. They also do not provide detailed information on their source dictionaries. We present anagram software that interfaces with CELEX2, an internationallyrecognized psycholinguistic database. This software allows users to capitalize on lexical variables and thus enables direct control of psycholinguistic features that may influence the cognitive processes involved in anagram solution.

Bilingual and multilingual language processing

This chapter addresses the interesting question on the neurolinguistics of bilingualism and the representation of language in the brain in bilingual and multilingual subjects. A fundamental issue is whether the cerebral representation of language in bi- and multilinguals differs from that of monolinguals, and if so, in which specific way. This is an interdisciplinary question which needs to identify and differentiate different levels involved in the neural representation of languages, such as neuroanatomical, neurofunctional, biochemical, psychological and linguistic levels. Furthermore, specific factors such as age, manner of acquisition and environmental factors seem to affect the neural representation. We examined the question whether verbal memory processing in two unrelated languages is mediated by a common neural system or by distinct cortical areas. Subjects were Finnish-English adult multilinguals who had acquired the second language after the age of ten. They were PET-scanned whilst either encoding or retrieving word pairs in their mother tongue (Finnish) or in a foreign language (English). Within each language, subjects had to encode and retrieve four sets of 12 visually presented paired word associates which were not semantically related. Two sets consisted of highly imaginable words and the other two sets of abstract words. Presentation of pseudo-words served as a reference condition. An emission scan was recorded after each intravenous administration of O-15 water. Encoding was associated with prefrontal and hippocampal activation. During memory retrieval, precuneus showed a consistent activation in both languages and for both highly imaginable and abstract words. Differential activations were found in Broca's area and in the cerebellum as well as in the angular/supramarginal gyri according to the language used. The findings advance our understanding of the neural representation that underlies multiple language functions. Further studies are needed to elucidate the neuronal mechanisms of bi/multilingual language processing. A promising perspective for future bi/multilingual research is an integrative approach using brain imaging studies with a high spatial resolution such as fMRI, combined with techniques with a high temporal resolution, such as magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Lexique 2: a new French lexical database

In this article, we present a new lexical database for French: Lexique. In addition to classical word information such as gender, number, and grammatical category, Lexique includes a series of interesting new characteristics. First, word frequencies are based on two cues: a contemporary corpus of texts and the number of Web pages containing the word. Second, the database is split into a graphemic table with all the relevant frequencies, a table structured around lemmas (particularly interesting for the study of the inflectional family), and a table about surface frequency cues. Third, Lexique is distributed under a GNU-like license, allowing people to contribute to it. Finally, a metasearch engine, Open Lexique, has been developed so that new databases can be added very easily to the existing ones. Lexique can either be downloaded or interrogated freely from http://www.lexique.org.

The delayed trigger voice key: An improved analogue voice key for psycholinguistic research

Many researchers rely on analogue voice keys for psycholinguistic research. However, the triggering of traditional simple threshold voice keys (STVKs) is delayed after response onset, and the delay duration may vary depending on initial phoneme type. The delayed trigger voice key (DTVK), a stand-alone electronic device that incorporates an additional minimum signal duration parameter, is described and validated in two experiments. In Experiment 1, recorded responses from a nonword naming task were presented to the DTVK and an STVK. As compared with hand-coded reaction times from visual inspection of the waveform, the DTVK was more accurate than the STVK, overall and across initial phoneme type. Rastle and Davis (2002) showed that an STVK more accurately detected an initial [s] when it was followed by a vowel than when followed by a consonant. Participants' responses from that study were presented to the DTVK in Experiment 2, and accuracy was equivalent for initial [s] in vowel and consonant contexts. Details for the construction of the DTVK are provided.

Automatic classification of dysfunctional thoughts: a feasibility test

The identification of dysfunctional thoughts is a central effort in cognitive therapy. This paper describes the first version of a computer module that classifies dysfunctional thoughts automatically. It is part of COGNO, a system we are developing to give automatic feedback on dysfunctional thoughts. The system uses rules that were developed from language markers identified in a sample of 149 dysfunctional thoughts. The system was tested with an independent set of 112 example thoughts. The system detects the majority of dysfunctional thoughts, but works reliably only for some thought categories. Automatic thought classification may be a first step toward developing natural dialogue systems in cognitive therapy.

WordGen: A tool for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French

WordGen is an easy-to-use program that uses the CELEX and Lexique lexical databases for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French. Items can be generated in these four languages, specifying any combination of seven linguistic constraints: number of letters, neighborhood size, frequency, summated position-nonspecific bigram frequency, minimum position-nonspecific bigram f requency, position-specific frequency of the initial and final bigram, and orthographic relatedness. The program also has a module to calculate the respective values of these variables for items that have already been constructed, either with the program or taken from earlier studies. Stimulus queries can be entered through WordGen's graphical user interface or by means of batch files. WordGen is especially useful for (1) Dutch and German item generation, because no such stimulus-selection tool exists for these languages, (2) the generation of nonwords for all four languages, because our program has some important advantages over previous nonword generation approaches, and (3) psycholinguistic experiments on bilingualism, because the possibility of using the same tool for different languages increases the cross-linguistic comparability of the generated item lists. WordGen is free and available at http://expsy.ugent.be/wordgen.htm.

A database for semantic, grammatical, and frequency properties of the first words acquired by Italian children

The CFVlexvar.xls database includes imageability, frequency, and grammatical properties of the first words acquired by Italian children. For each of 519 words that are known by children 18-30 months of age (taken from Caselli & Casadio's, 1995, Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory), new values of imageability are provided and values for age of acquisition, child written frequency, and adult written and spoken frequency are included. In this article, correlations among the variables are discussed and the words are grouped into grammatical categories. The results show that words acquired early have imageable referents, are frequently used in the texts read and written by elementary school children, and are frequent in adult written and spoken language. Nouns are acquired earlier and are more imageable than both verbs and adjectives. The composition in grammatical categories of the child's first vocabulary reflects the composition of adult vocabulary. The full set of these norms can be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive/.

Measuring icon complexity: an automated analysis

Measures of icon designs rely heavily on surveys of the perceptions of population samples. Thus, measuring the extent to which changes in the structure of an icon will alter its perceived complexity can be costly and slow. An automated system capable of producing reliable estimates of perceived complexity could reduce development costs and time. Measures of icon complexity developed by Garcia, Badre, and Stasko (1994) and McDougall, Curry, and de Bruijn (1999) were correlated with six icon properties measured using Matlab (MathWorks, 2001) software, which uses image-processing techniques to measure icon properties. The six icon properties measured were icon foreground, the number of objects in an icon, the number of holes in those objects, and two calculations of icon edges and homogeneity in icon structure. The strongest correlates with human judgments of perceived icon complexity (McDougall et al., 1999) were structural variability (r(s) = .65) and edge information (r(s) = .64).