Syntactic and semantic processes in aphasic deficits: The availability of prepositions

The availability of a specific category of closed class items (prepositions) was examined in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia. The role of prepositions was varied (syntactic/semantic) in two tasks: one requiring production of prepositions and the other acceptability judgments. Overall, it was easier to perform the acceptability task than to produce the target item. In the judgment task, Wernicke's aphasics more accurately determined the acceptability of prepositions in their syntactic role than in their semantic role, but Broca's aphasics showed no such difference. In the production task, Wernicke's aphasics again were more likely to produce prepositions which were in a primarily syntactic role. Broca's aphasics, however, failed to produce such syntactically based prepositions. The results suggest that the availability of a given closed class vocabulary form is not merely a function of its class membership but also of its functional role, and this fact serves to distinguish aspects of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics' deficit.     

Monitoring and self-repair in speech

Making a self-repair in speech typically proceeds in three phases. The first phase involves the monitoring of one's own speech and the interruption of the flow of speech when trouble is detected. From an analysis of 959 spontaneous self-repairs it appears that interrupting follows detection promptly, with the exception that correct words tend to be completed. Another finding is that detection of trouble improves towards the end of constituents. The second phase is characterized by hesitation, pausing, but especially the use of so-called editing terms. Which editing term is used depends on the nature of the speech trouble in a rather regular fashion: Speech errors induce other editing terms than words that are merely inappropriate, and trouble which is detected quickly by the speaker is preferably signalled by the use of ‘uh’. The third phase consists of making the repair proper. The linguistic well-formedness of a repair is not dependent on the speaker's respecting the integrity of constituents, but on the structural relation between original utterance and repair. A bi-conditional well-formedness rule links this relation to a corresponding relation between the conjuncts of a coordination. It is suggested that a similar relation holds also between question and answer. In all three cases the speaker respects certain structural commitments derived from an original utterance. It was finally shown that the editing term plus the first word of the repair proper almost always contain sufficient information for the listener to decide how the repair should be related to the original utterance. Speakers almost never produce misleading information in this respect.It is argued that speakers have little or no access to their speech production process; self-monitoring is probably based on parsing one's own inner or overt speech.     

The development of discourse mapping processes: the on-line interpretation of anaphoric expressions

The present research focuses on how children integrate the antecedent of different kinds of anaphor into their on-going interpretation of an utterance, and on the kinds of cues they use to help them to do this. These issues were studied by examining the on-line processing of three types of anaphoric devices—repeated noun phrases, general terms and pronoun anaphors. The data showed that by the age of five, anaphoric mapping processes in general are well-mastered, although all age-groups (5, 7, 10 year olds and adults) found general term anaphors more difficult to interpret. The major developmental differences concerned the processing of anaphoric pronouns. For five year olds, pronouns were primarily interpreted as devices which maintained the thematic subject of the discourse, but when there was no thematic subject they relied primarily on pragmatic plausibility in their assignment of pronominal co-reference. As children get older, they are able to take advantage of the lexical properties of pronouns and all three sources of information—lexical, pragmatic inference and the thematic structure of the discourse—play contributory roles in the assignment of reference to a pronoun.     

Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech

The interactions, during word-recognition in continuous speech, between the bottom-up analyses of the input and different forms of internally generated top-down constraint, were investigated using a shadowing task and a mispronunciation detection task (in the detection task the subject saw a text of the original passage as he listened to it). The listener's dependence on bottom-up analyses in the shadowing task, as measured by the number of fluent restorations of mispronounced words, was found to vary as a function of the syllable position of the mispronunciation within the word and of the contextual constraints on the word as a whole. In the detection task only syllable position effects were obtained. The results, discussed in conjunction with earlier research, were found to be inconsistent with either the logogen model of word-recognition or an autonomous search model. Instead, an active direct access model is proposed, in which top-down processing constraints interact directly with bottom-up information to produce the primary lexical interpretation of the acoustic-phonetic input.     

Word recognition under spatial transformation in retarded and normal readers

The recognition of words in normal, reversed, and inverted orientation was compared in a group of 9- to 11-year-old retarded readers and a matched group of normal readers. Using the ratio of reading times as an index of reading difficulty under spatial transformation, the results confirmed those of earlier studies which have shown that retarded readers' performance is less affected by spatial transformation than is normal readers'. However, an analysis in terms of the ratio of numbers of words read correctly pointed to just the opposite conclusion. The two sets of findings were reconciled by showing that they follow from the form of the function relating reading time to number correct, and by demonstrating that when word lists are equated for orthographic familiarity the performances of retarded and normal readers are equally affected by spatial transformation, whether the time or number ratio is used as an index.     

lhr,dir, or mir? On the acquisition of pronouns in German children

The present study tested the hypothesis that the linguistic complexity of pronouns corresponds to the order in which children acquire them. Linguistic complexity was defined by three principles of linguistic contrast, namely the proximal-nonproximal, singular-nonsingular, and speaker-nonspeaker contrasts.In an experimental naming task, 55 German children aged 3;5 to 6;5 were asked to express the possessive relationship between different participants in a communication situation and particular objects by means of personal pronouns in the dative case, used from the speaker's point of view. The results showed a strong correspondence between the predicted and actual order of correct use of pronouns, and provide evidence for the precedence of the proximal-nonproximal over the singular-nonsingular contrast.     

On the role of the anterior cingulate cortex in phonation: A case report

A 41-year-old male patient is presented with a lesion in the anterior cingulate cortex, medial orbital cortex, and rostral striatum bilaterally and supplementary motor area on the left side. The patient first exhibited a state of akinetic mutism which lasted about 6 weeks. During this state, no volitional vocal utterances were made; there were, however, occasional groans of pain. During recovery, the mute phase was replaced by a state in which the patient could whisper but not phonate verbal utterances. About 10 weeks after the accident, phonation was restored. The speech was characterized, however, by monotonous intonation and a very low frequency of spontaneous utterances. While the frequency of spontaneous speech improved noticeably during the following months, emotional intonation remained permanently defective. A comparison of the present case with other cases from the literature as well as experimental monkey data suggest that the anterior cingulate cortex is involved in the volitional control of emotional vocal utterances.     

Sensitivity in spectral structures

Invariance of matching is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the existence of sensitivity functions that are unique up to multiplication by arbitrary positive real numbers. Examples from auditory and visual psychophysics are discussed.     

Effects of question type and experimenter position on bilateral differences in electrodermal activity and conjugate lateral eye movements

28 dextral males participated in a within-subjects experiment which tasted for the effects of question type (verbal versus spatial) and experimenter-position (in front of or behind the subject) on direction of conjugate lateral eye movements (LEMs) and bilateral differences in skin conductance responses (SCRs). Question dependent asymmetries were observed for LEM direction but not for SCR magnitude. Experimenter-position had no significant effect. The results for LEM direction are consistent with the hypothesis linking eye movements to the left or right with activation of the cerebral hemisphere contralateral to the direction of gaze. The results for SCR magnitude, given certain assumptions, can be reconciled with a hemispheric model of contralateral excitatory control of that system.     

Altering information to gain action control: Functional aspects of human information processing in decision making

In recent approaches to social judgment, information distortion has been discussed primarily as a violation of individual rationality, due to unintentionally occurring biases. In contrast to this view, it is argued that frequently individuals make purposive use of selective changes in information processing in order to avoid indecisiveness. In this sense, selective changes in information processing may be considered a functional requirement of a volitional process which protects the current intention (or tentative decision) from being replaced by competing behavioral tendencies. On the basis of J. Kuhl's theory of action control (1981, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 40, 155–170; 1982, in W. Hacker, W. Volpert, & M. von Cranach, Eds., Cognitive and Motivational Aspects of Action, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1984, in B. A. Maher, Progress in Experimental Personality Research, Vol. 13, New York: Academic Press) it was predicted that subjects having a high score on the action-control scale (i.e., action-oriented subjects) should show a stronger tendency to increase the attractiveness rating of a tentatively preferred decision during the process of decision making than subjects scoring low on that scale (i.e., state-oriented subjects). To test this assumption, students searching for an apartment were offered 16 apartments along with a list containing information about the alternatives. The subjects had to rate the attractiveness of each apartment twice before they were asked to indicate which apartments they would like to rent. The results confirmed the predictions. It was found that action-oriented subjects increased the divergence of their attractiveness ratings from the first to the second point of evaluation, whereas state-oriented subjects did not.     

Spatial memory in rats under restricted viewing conditions

In a procedure devised by J. A. Walker and D. S. Olton (Learning and Motivation, 1979, 10, 73–84), rats were placed on two arms of a four-arm radial maze and then were placed in the center of the maze to test how accurately they could choose the alleys on which they had not been placed. In three experiments, the conditions under which animals viewed the environment from the arms were varied. In Experiment 1, both the extent of spatial view and the exposure time were varied factorially in a within-subjects design; animals viewed the environment down a tunnel or had a 180° or 360° view, and subjects were allowed to view the environment for either 2 or 20 sec. In Experiment 2, a between-subjects design was used, in which different groups of subjects were tested repeatedly under either the tunnel, 180°, or 360° conditions. Both experiments showed that animals could avoid the arms previously visited at no better than a chance level of accuracy in the tunnel viewing condition but could perform with progressively better accuracy at the 180 and 360° viewing conditions. Animals also were more accurate in Experiment 1 after viewing for 20 sec than after viewing for 2 sec. Experiment 3 involved a procedure in which restricted viewing conditions were used both during arm placements and testing. Animals tested under tunnel viewing eventually achieved above-chance performance with this procedure, but did not exceed chance as rapidly as groups tested with 45 and 90° views of the environment. These results suggest that animals can learn about their position in a spatial environment through observation and that an animal's ability to locate its position is directly related to the extent of the surrounding environment it can see and the length of time it is allowed to look. The implications of these findings for list and map hypotheses of spatial memory representation are discussed.     

A developmental study of learning disabilities and memory

Seven-, ten-, and thirteen-year-old learning-disabled (LD) and non-learning-disabled (NORM) children were presented specially structured lists of 38 words each and tested for free recall. Each list contained only four semantically related words. Two of the four related words were presented contiguously (serial positions 9 and 10) and the other two words were spaced (serial positions 20 and 30). All children recalled disproportionately more adjacent words (item 9 or 10) than any other words. Spaced words (items 20 and 30) were less likely to be recalled by the younger children than by the older children and by the LDs than by the NORMS. These findings provided support for the distinction between automatic and purposive semantic processing. NORMs' recall was governed by purposive semantic processing to a greater extent than was LDs' recall. However, no group or age differences were observed in automatic semantic processing.     

The mean fundamental frequency in stutterers and nonstutterers during reading and spontaneous speech

Corresponding to the higher tension of muscles involved in speech production, a higher mean fundamental frequency should be expected in stutterers as compared to nonstutterers. It could be shown by the change scores of the mean fundamental frequency from reading to free conversation that stutterers tend to have a higher fundamental frequency during spontaneous speech.     

Stuttering and anxiety: The difference between stutterers and nonstutterers in verbal apprehension and physiologic arousal during the anticipation of speech and non-speech tasks

To test if stressful anticipation of speech situations is a factor in eliciting stuttering behavior, the difference between 24 stutterers and 24 nonstutterers in verbal apprehension and physiologic activity was studied before and during speech tasks (reading and conversation), and nonspeech tasks (motor and intelligence task).Results indicate that the difference between stutterers and nonstutterers mainly were restricted to anxiety ratings assessed after each task. Heart rate, vasomotor responses, and electrodermal activity recorded before and during speech tasks were higher compared with the physiologic activity before and during nonspeech tasks but, unexpectedly, this was also the case for nonstutterers. It is concluded that stuttering is not elicited by anxiety.     

Remembrance of places lasts: Proactive inhibition and patterns of choice in rat spatial memory

A series of experiments was carried out to evaluate the notion that rats given a sequence of massed daily trials on the radial maze reset working memory at the end of each trial by deleting its contents. Although curves presented by D. S. Olton [Scientific American, 1977, 236, 82–98; In S. H. Hulse, H. Fowler, & W. K. Honig (Eds.), Cognitive processes in animal behavior, Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1978] show that rats return to errorless performance at the beginning of each trial after the first, the fact that accuracy falls less rapidly over choices on Trial 1 than on subsequent trials suggests a proactive inhibition (PI) effect. In Experiment 1, Olton's findings were replicated, and a PI effect was observed on Days 1–2 of testing. On Days 3–5, overall accuracy improved significantly and was associated with the development of a strong tendency for rats to enter adjacent alleys, which became particularly marked on the final trials of a day's testing. In order to prevent rats from achieving accurate performance by using an adjacent alleys pattern, a procedure was used in Experiment 2 which involved initial forced random choices followed by a retention test consisting of free choices. Repeated daily trials with this procedure yielded a significant PI effect, which was more marked at a 60-sec delay than at a 0-sec delay. Experiments 3 and 4 showed this PI effect to be robust and resistant to manipulations designed to produce release from PI. Both the PI effect and a strong tendency found in Experiment 1 for animals to avoid on the initial choices of Trial n those alleys most recently entered on Trial n?1 argue that rats do not reset working memory between trials.