Processing compounds: A cross-linguistic study

This study explores the role of semantic transparency and morphological headedness in the on-line visual recognition of French and Bulgarian compounds using a constituent repetition priming paradigm. The results reported show significant constituent priming effects for both languages. Moreover, distinct priming patterns emerged, demonstrating that the semantic transparency of individual constituents, their position in the string, and morphological headedness interact in the processing of compounds.

The role of morphological structure in the processing of compounds: the interface between linguistics and psycholinguistics

This study presents a cross-linguistic investigation of lexical access and subjects' sensitivity to the internal morphological structure of compounds in two highly inflected languages, Greek and Polish. The following questions were addressed: Are individual constituents activated during on-line word recognition? To what extent does internal morphological structure play a role during lexical access? Is there an interaction between headedness and constituent-priming given that the inflection that the second constituent carries determines the gender, number, and case of the compound? Our results show activation of individual constituents of compounds during priming, a strong word effect, and a positional advantage for first constituents in spite of the presence of second constituent heads.

Processing of mass/count information in Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment

This study examines the processing of a specific linguistic distinction, the mass/count distinction, in patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Fourteen AD and 10 MCI subjects were tested using a sentence grammaticality judgement task where grammaticality violations were caused by determiner-noun mismatches, as well as a sentence-picture matching task to assess their ability to access mass and count readings of dual nouns. Considerable heterogeneity was observed within each subject group, and performance across groups was almost identical. It is concluded that a combination of linguistic and attentional and/or learning factors are responsible for the range of impairments; specifically, a subset of subjects exhibit no linguistic nor attentional/learning impairment, another subset exhibit only an attentional and/or learning impairment but no linguistic impairment, and a third subset (comprising more than half of the subjects included in this study) exhibit a linguistic impairment. It is postulated that the latter group have difficulty processing sense extensions in metonymous nouns. It is further claimed that, at least within the limits of the study, language impairments can be of the same severity and nature across AD and MCI subjects.

Lexical access in younger and older adults: The case of the mass/count distinction

Although lexicosemantic deficits are not typically seen in older adults, some studies indicate that age-related changes in semantic processing may occur. We had groups of older and younger adults perform speeded lexical decision on mass (e.g., honey), count (e.g., car), and dual nouns, which may be either mass or count (e.g., lamb). Singular dual nouns engendered significantly faster response times in older adults than mass and count nouns, whereas younger adults manifested similar response times to count and dual nouns. These results point toward a three-way distinction in the lexicon between mass, count, and dual nouns. Older adults appear to treat a larger set of nouns as dual than do younger adults. This may be due to awareness of the mass/count ambiguity present in a greater number of lexical items, as a result of their greater linguistic experience. Alternatively, in order to conserve processing resources, older adults may not activate mass/count information when recognizing a dual noun unless a mass or count reading is forced by context.

Two different dysgraphic syndromes in a regular orthography, spanish

In opaque orthographies, such as English and French, three central dysgraphic syndromes have been described: surface dysgraphia, phonological dysgraphia, and deep dysgraphia. Writing breakdown patterns reveal that spelling can proceed by phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, or by a more direct or lexical approach. Ardila et al. (1989, 1991) claim that for Spanish speakers a lexical strategy for reading and writing is not an option due to the regularity of the orthography of this language. In this study we report two clear cases of dysgraphia in Spanish, one of surface dysgraphia and another of phonological dysgraphia, where a dissociation between lexical and sublexical writing can be observed, thus contradicting Ardila's position.

Cognitive reserve in a cross-cultural population: the case of Italian emigrants in Montreal

BACKGROUND

Cognitive reserve could be defined as the accumulation of experiences, abilities, knowledge and changes that occur throughout the lifespan. One of the most difficult changes in life is the experience of emigrating to a foreign country.

AIMS

The present investigation aimed to compare the cognitive reserve of two paired groups of elderly: Italians living in Italy and Italians who in adult age (around 20 years) emigrated to Montreal. Both groups attended the same years of school, in Italy.

METHODS

Cognitive reserve was measured in the two groups by a structured and standardised questionnaire, the cognitive reserve questionnaire.

RESULTS

Cognitive reserve showed to be significantly higher in the Italian-Canadian individuals (i.e. Italians who emigrated).

CONCLUSIONS

Emigration might act as an environmental factor that enriches people's lifestyle and reflects itself in the amount of their cognitive reserve.

Mental lexicon research in the new millennium

This article presents an overview of current research on the mental lexicon, as it is represented by articles in the spring 2002 Special Issue of Brain and Language. We examine current findings in terms of language, task, and population effects associated with how words are presented and processed in the mind. We discuss how such mental representations may be linked to neurological instantiations and address the issue of ecological validity in the field. These discussions are organized in order to both provide an overview of the issues and to enable the reader to locate specific articles that bear on these issues. Finally, we present an organizational framework for the characterization of mental lexicon research within which challenges for advancement are isolated.

Lexical attrition in younger and older bilingual adults

Healthy monolingual older adults experience changes in their lexical abilities. Bilingual individuals immersed in an environment in which their second language is dominant experience lexical changes, or attrition, in their first language. Changes in lexical skills in the first language of older individuals who are bilinguals, therefore, can be attributed to the typical processes accompanying older age, the typical processes accompanying first-language attrition in bilingual contexts, or both. The challenge, then, in understanding how lexical skills change in bilingual older individuals, lies in dissociating these processes. This paper addresses the difficulty of teasing apart the effects of ageing and attrition in older bilinguals and proposes some solutions. It presents preliminary results from a study of lexical processing in bilingual younger and older individuals. Processing differences were found for the older bilingual participants in their first language (L1), but not in their second language (L2). It is concluded that the lexical behaviour found for older bilinguals in this study can be attributed to L1 attrition and not to processes of ageing. These findings are discussed in the context of previous reports concerning changes in lexical skills associated with typical ageing and those associated with bilingual L1 attrition.

Why is "Red Cross" different from "Yellow Cross"?: a neuropsychological study of noun-adjective agreement within Italian compounds

This study investigates the performance of two Italian nonfluent aphasic patients on noun-adjective agreement in compounds and in noun phrases. A completion, a reading, and a repetition task were administered. Results show that both patients were able to correctly inflect adjectives within compounds, but not in noun phrases. Moreover, they were sensitive to constituent order (noun-adjective vs adjective-noun) within noun phrases, but less so within compounds. These results suggest differential processing for compounds as compared to noun phrases: While the latter require standard morphosyntactic operations that are often impaired in aphasic patients, the former can be accessed as whole words at the lexical level.

Processing articles and pronouns in agrammatic aphasia: evidence from French

The hypothesis that closed-class items which participate in theta-role assignment are less problematic in agrammatism than items which do not (Rizzi, 1985) is put to an empirical test. Five French-speaking agrammatic patients were tested in a sentence-picture matching paradigm to probe their comprehension of sentences containing articles, which are not involved in theta-role assignment, and of sentences containing pronouns, which in the direct object position are homophonous with articles and are theta-role assignees. Gender was used as a variable to differentiate between target and distractor. The data indicate that pronouns are significantly more difficult to process than articles. This result disconfirms the claim that the availability of grammatical information encoded in closed-class items is a function of their involvement in theta-role assignment. The present study demonstrates that the ability to process gender marked articles is generally well preserved in French-speaking agrammatic patients.

The Neuronal Correlates of Indeterminate Sentence Comprehension: An fMRI Study

Sentences such as The author started the book are indeterminate because they do not make explicit what the subject (the author) started doing with the object (the book). In principle, indeterminate sentences allow for an infinite number of interpretations. One theory, however, assumes that these sentences are resolved by semanticcoercion, a linguistic process that forces the noun book to be interpreted as an activity (e.g., writing the book) or by a process that interpolates this activity information in the resulting enriched semantic composition. An alternative theory, pragmatic, assumes classical semantic composition, whereby meaning arises from the denotation of words and how they are combined syntactically, with enrichment obtained via pragmatic inferences beyond linguistic-semantic processes. Cognitive neuroscience studies investigating the neuroanatomical and functional correlates of indeterminate sentences have shown activations either at the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vmPFC) or at the left inferior frontal gyrus (L-IFG). These studies have supported the semantic coercion theory assuming that one of these regions is where enriched semantic composition takes place. Employing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that indeterminate sentences activate bilaterally the superior temporal gyrus (STG), the right inferior frontal gyrus (R-IFG), and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), more so than control sentences (The author wrote the book). Activation of indeterminate sentences exceeded that of anomalous sentences (…drank the book) and engaged more left- and right-hemisphere areas than other sentence types. We suggest that the widespread activations for indeterminate sentences represent the deployment of pragmatic-inferential processes, which seek to enrich sentence content without necessarily resorting to semantic coercion.

Semantic and syntactic aspects of the mass/count distinction: a case study of semantic dementia

Semantic and syntactic contributions to processing of mass and count nouns were assessed by examining the performance of a patient suffering from a pure semantic deficit. Semantic and syntactic processing was evaluated on grammaticality judgement and sentence-picture matching tasks, respectively, where each task involved mass and count readings of metonymic nouns. While the patient did not show impaired performance on the grammaticality judgment task, he manifested difficulties in making mass/count distinctions in the sentence-picture matching task. It is thus argued that while distributionally the mass/count distinction may be established on a purely syntactic basis, cognitive processing of mass/count information requires both intact syntactic and semantic knowledge.

Regularity revisited: evidence from lexical access of verbs and nouns in Greek

The present study investigates the relationship between morphological regularity and form during lexical processing using a visual priming paradigm varying the prime duration. We addressed the effect of regularity on morphological facilitation in nouns and verbs by exploiting particular characteristics of a highly inflected language, Greek, in which it is possible to manipulate morphological regularity while controlling the degree of orthographic overlap between morphological relatives. The effects of morphological regularity were found to crucially depend on the time course of lexical access. Moreover, morphological regularity was found to affect nouns and verbs differentially. We interpret these findings with respect to the distinction between affix processing and allomorph retrieval and discuss the issues of form overlap and orthographic boundaries in morphological processing.

The mental representation of singular and plural nouns in Algerian Arabic as revealed through auditory priming in agrammatic aphasic patients

Working within the theoretical framework of prosodic nonconcatenative morphology developed by McCarthy (1975) for Semitic languages, we addressed, in the present paper, the issues of lexical representation, morphological relatedness, and modes of access in Algerian Arabic--a dialect of Standard Arabic--in an auditory morphological priming experiment. More specifically, we investigated the process of word recognition of singular and plural nouns in the performance of 24 non-brain-damaged subjects and 2 Algerian-speaking agrammatic aphasics. Plurals in Arabic involve either suffixation as in the sound plural (e.g., lbas "dress"/lbasat "dresses"), or stem-internal changes as in the broken plurals (e.g., kursi "chair"/krasa "chairs"). Our findings reveal a differential processing of the two forms, indicating whole word access for broken plurals and decomposition into word and suffix for suffixed plurals. Further, the evidence suggests for Algerian Arabic an architecture of the lexicon reflecting a family-like organization which takes into account language-specific features.

Probability in the grammar of German and Dutch: interfixation in triconstituent compounds

This study addresses the possibility that interfixes in multiconstituent nominal compounds in German and Dutch are functional as markers of immediate constituent structure. We report a lexical statistical survey of interfixation in the lexicons of German and Dutch which shows that all interfixes of German and one interfix of Dutch are significantly more likely to appear at the major constituent boundary than expected under chance conditions. A series of experiments provides evidence that speakers of German and Dutch are sensitive to the probabilistic cues to constituent structure provided by the interfixes. Thus, our data provide evidence that probability is part and parcel of grammatical competence.

Interaction of morphological structure and prefix transparency in the processing of Bulgarian aspectual verb forms

This study investigates the processing of polymorphemic words in a highly inflected language, Bulgarian. The roles of semantic transparency, aspect, and bound or free root status in the recognition of aspectual verb forms were probed in the visual modality in a simple lexical decision and a masked priming experiment at a short SOA. Results from the two experiments yielded effects of semantic transparency and morphological complexity, demonstrating that both factors influence the recognition of prefixed aspectual forms in Bulgarian and pointing toward different access procedures. In contrast, the status of the root did not influence recognition patterns, suggesting that free-standing and bound roots are equivalent lexical units of access and representation in Bulgarian.

In sensu non in situ: the prodromic cognitivism of Kussmaul

Kussmaul's model of language functions is presented, together with antecedent models that have influenced his conception of linguistic processes. The particular interest in this model lies in the fact that it anticipates the modern approach to diagram-making. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, Kussmaul understood that a functional model can, indeed ought to, be developed without being constrained by considerations of localization, as long as the neurological foundations of language remain underspecified. He thus deserves recognition as a pioneer of cognitive neuropsychology.

Semantic and syntactic processing of mass and count nouns: data from dementia

In the present research, we investigated the processing of Italian mass and count nouns and of their semantic and morphosyntactic attributes in people with neurodegenerative disease. The performance of a group of 26 Italian participants with Alzheimer's disease was studied in a semantic judgment task and a syntactic judgment task. Results were analyzed by means of mixed-effect models, revealing an interaction between task and stimulus category: The probability for correct responses to mass stimuli was significantly lower than that for count stimuli, but only in the semantic task. These findings confirm the major semantic impairment in dementia and suggest that mass nouns have particular features that make them more prone to impairment than count nouns for a progressively degenerating brain.

The recognition of gender-marked nouns and verbs in Polish-speaking aphasic patients

In the present study, we investigated the on-line recognition of gender-marked lexical items by three aphasic patients and eighteen matched control participants, all native speakers of Polish. Polish is unique in that it allows investigating grammatical gender across the major categories of nouns and verbs. Patients and their controls were tested using a simple visual lexical decision paradigm in which gender, number and grammatical category were manipulated. Results show that, while response latencies were markedly slower for aphasic patients, gender did not yield differential results in either grammatical category, for both patients and control participants. Plural forms, on the other hand, showed significantly slower response latencies than singular forms in both brain-damaged and unimpaired participants, but only for nouns. We interpret these findings in terms of the inherent vs. contextual, i.e. underspecified, nature of gender and number in the two grammatical categories. This study suggests that while gender can be impaired in off-line performance in aphasia, on-line recognition patterns parallel the performance of non-brain-damaged individuals, confirming the preservation of access procedures in automatic word recognition.

Verb reading in developmental language impairment

This research addresses the issues of frequency and regularity in verb reading and their importance for the organization of the mental lexicon in DLI francophones. A reading task probes response latencies and response accuracy for DLI and control participants on frequent and infrequent inflected forms of verbs. DLI participants are slower at reading verbs even if their mean accuracy rates are higher than controls'. Results also indicate that the type of suffix on the verb affects controls and DLI participants differently in their accuracy rates: DLI participants exhibit higher error rates on less frequent inflections, while controls do not. Finally, unusual patterns are found for DLI participants on regular versus irregular verbs: regular verbs are slower to be read by DLI participants. These results are compared to findings from a previous simple lexical decision study. They are interpreted as indicating that DLI word reading patterns are qualitatively different from those evidenced by controls.

Conceptions and questions concerning morphological processing

The understanding of the nature and extent of morphological processing is critical to the overall investigation of how words are organized in the mind. In this overview article, we discuss the nature of morphological processing and the domain of morphological processing research. We claim that investigations crucially involve the understanding of relations among morphologically simple and morphologically complex words, and sketch how specific questions of morphological processing within the 2004 special issue on the mental lexicon fall under these categories. Finally, we discuss issues of construct, content and ecological validity within the field and what morphological processing can reveal about the association of form and meaning in the mind.

The role of typological variation in the processing of interfixed compounds

This study investigates the processing of interfixed compounds within a primed lexical decision paradigm. Results from an experiment on German are compared with those from a previous study on Greek and Polish, demonstrating that patterns of morphological priming in German differ from those obtained in the other two languages. In all experiments compounds were primed by initial morphemes with and without the interfix. In Greek and Polish priming was significantly facilitated in cases where the mophological prime was homophonous with a real word. In German, however, the effect of wordness was found for un-interfixed but not for interfixed primes. Our data suggest that patterns of morphological priming for a given structure may not be generalizable to analogous structures in other languages without a consideration of language-specific morphological properties.

Regularity re-revisited: modality matters

The issue of regular-irregular past tense formation was examined in a cross-modal lexical decision task in Modern Greek, a language where the orthographic and phonological overlap between present and past tense stems is the same for both regular and irregular verbs. The experiment described here is a follow-up study of previous visual lexical decision experiments (Tsapkini, Kehayia, & Harema, 2002) that also addressed the regular-irregular distinction in Greek. In the present experiment, we investigated the effect of input modality in lexical processing and compared different types of regular and irregular verbs. In contrast to our previous intra-modal (visual-visual) priming experiments, in this cross-modal (auditory-visual) priming study, we found that regular verbs with an orthographically salient morphemic aspectual marker elicited the same facilitation as those without an orthographically salient marker. However, irregular verbs did not exhibit a different priming pattern with respect to modality. We interpret these results in the framework of a two-level lexical processing approach with modality-specific access representations at a surface level and modality-independent morphemic representations at a deeper level.

The split between Gall and Spurzheim (1813-1818)

An acerbic footnote in Volume 3 (1818) of the five-volume great work of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, Anatomy and Physiology of the Nervous System in General and of the Brain in Particular with Observations on the Possibility of Understanding the Many Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Man and Animals by the Configuration of Their Heads, marked the end of the collaboration between Gall, the founder of organologie, and Spurzheim, promoter of phrenology. We discuss the background of this note and the nature of the rift that marked the end of Gall and Spurzheim's collaboration.

Does phonological change play a role in the recognition of derived forms across modalities?

This study investigates the way in which phonological change during derivation influences the access of complex words in the on-line performance of English-speaking subjects during word recognition. Three visual lexical decision experiments were administered (cross-modal priming, visual priming and simple). Overall, the results showed that the forms which were subject to phonological change during derivation were always recognized significantly slower than those without phonological alterations. The results confirm the role of phonological change in accessing derived words. They also have important implications for a theory of lexical representation.