Hemispheric contributions to pragmatics

Twenty-seven patients with right-hemisphere damage (RBD) and thirty-one patients with left-hemisphere damage (LBD) received a new pragmatics battery in Hebrew consisting of two parts: (1) comprehension and production of basic speech acts (BSAs), including tests of assertions, questions, requests, and commands, and (2) comprehension of implicatures, including implicatures of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner. Each test had a verbal and a nonverbal version. Patients also received Hebrew versions of the Western Aphasia Battery and of the Right Hemisphere Communication Battery. Both LBD and RBD patients were impaired relative to controls but did not differ from each other in their overall scores on BSAs and on Implicatures when scores were corrected by aphasia and neglect indices. There was a systematic localization of BSAs in the left hemisphere (LH) but not in the right hemisphere (RH). There was poor localization of Implicatures in either hemisphere. In LBD patients, BSAs were associated with language functions measured with the WAB, suggesting the radical possibility that the classic localization of language functions in aphasia is influenced by the localization of the BSAs required by aphasia language tests. Both BSAs and implicatures show greater functional independence from other pragmatic, language and cognitive functions in the RBD than in the LBD patients. Thus, the LH is more likely to contain an unmodular domain-nonspecific set of central cognitive mechanisms for applying means-ends rationality principles to intentional activity.     

A linguistic deficit resulting from right-hemisphere damage

The ability of right-brain-damaged (RBD) subjects to correctly insert a word into a well-formed stimulus sentence was tested. Subjects also performed three evaluative tasks designed to establish their degree of general cognitive impairment. The performance of RBD subjects on these tasks was compared to that of left-brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) subjects. Although RBD subjects outperformed LBD subjects on the language-related evaluative tasks, the RBD group was significantly more impaired on a subset of the insertion task. This subset included items which required reassignment of the syntactic status of elements in the stimulus sentence in order for the insertion to be carried out. The results of this study permit refinement of the common characterization of RBD individuals as rigid in their interpretation of meaning and indicate right-hemisphere involvement in aspects of the grammar previously thought to be inaccessible to it.     

Characteristics of recovery of drawing ability in left and right brain-damaged patients

Drawings of a "person" were obtained from 21 patients with left brain damage (LBD) and 13 patients with right brain damage (RBD) at hospital discharge and 1 month postdischarge, corresponding to 2-4 and 6-8 weeks postonset, respectively. Early LBD drawings were simplistic and often incoherent. Most were placed in the upper left quadrant of the page. RBD drawings were scattered, fragmented, and elaborately detailed. Many showed evidence of left-sided neglect. The resolution of drawing disability also differed between the two groups: LBD subjects recovered drawing abilities more rapidly and more completely than RBD subjects. These differences in drawing characteristics and in the resolution of drawing disability were discernable for experienced neuropsychologists.     

Comprehension of Idioms in Turkish Aphasic Participants

Brain damaged participants offer an opportunity to evaluate the cognitive and linguistic processes and make assumptions about how the brain works. Cognitive linguists have been investigating the underlying mechanisms of idiom comprehension to unravel the ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension. The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the comprehension of idiomatic expressions in left brain damaged (LBD) aphasic, right brain damaged (RBD) and healthy control participants. Idiom comprehension in eleven LBD aphasic participants, ten RBD participants and eleven healthy control participants were assessed with three tasks: String to Picture Matching Task, Literal Sentence Comprehension Task and Oral Idiom Definition Task. The results of the tasks showed that in overall idiom comprehension category, the left brain-damaged aphasic participants interpret idioms more literally compared to right brain-damaged participants. What is more, there is a significant difference in opaque idiom comprehension implying that left brain-damaged aphasic participants perform worse compared to right brain-damaged participants. On the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference in scores of transparent idiom comprehension between the left brain-damaged aphasic and right brain-damaged participants. This result also contribute to the idea that while figurative processing system is damaged in LBD aphasics, the literal comprehension mechanism is spared to some extent. The results of this study support the view that idiom comprehension sites are mainly left lateralized. Furthermore, the results of this study are in consistence with the Giora’s Graded Salience Hypothesis.     

Reception training effects on the production of modeled language constructions

Several previous studies have reported that first-grade-age children increase their usage of prepositional phrases when exposed to novel (inverted) prepositional constructions. The hypothesis was tested that such anomalous increases could be eliminated by discrimination training on the two prepositional forms. One group of first-grade subjects (age 72 months) was trained to respond differentially to sentences containing either familiar or novel prepositional constructions, while a control group received only exposure to the same sentences. As predicted, when later exposed to the modeling of novel constructions, children in the pretrained group did not increase their frequency of familiar prepositional phrases, while those in the control group did.     

Lateralization of egocentric and allocentric spatial processing after parietal brain lesions

The purpose of this paper was to verify whether left and right parietal brain lesions may selectively impair egocentric and allocentric processing of spatial information in near/far spaces. Two Right-Brain-Damaged (RBD), 2 Left-Brain-Damaged (LBD) patients (not affected by neglect or language disturbances) and eight normal controls were submitted to the Ego-Allo Task requiring distance judgments computed according to egocentric or allocentric frames of reference in near/far spaces. Subjects also completed a general neuropsychological assessment and the following visuospatial tasks: reproduction of the Rey-Osterreith figure, line length judgement, point position identification, mental rotation, mental construction, line length memory, line length inference, Corsi block-tapping task. LBD patients presented difficulties in both egocentric and allocentric processing, whereas RBD patients dropped in egocentric but not in allocentric judgements, and in near but not far space. Further, RBD patients dropped in perceptually comparing linear distances, whereas LBD patients failed in memory for distances. The overall pattern of results suggests that the right hemisphere is specialized in processing metric information according to egocentric frames of reference. The data are interpreted according to a theoretical model that highlights the close link between egocentric processing and perceptual control of action.     

汉语习语理解研究

研究宗旨是探讨中国成人对汉语中三字习语的加工处理问题。研究材料包括：（１）动宾结构的惯用语,既有比喻意义又有字面意义;（２）动宾结构的一般三字词组;（３）偏正结构的三字惯用语,既有比喻意义又有字面意义;（４）偏正结构的一般三字词组;（５）动宾结构的惯用语。只有比喻意义而无字面意义;（６）三字词。它们都是被试所熟悉的。向３５名成人呈现这些词语和（７）无意义三字组合,要求他们作意义判别。结果表明,所有惯用语的判断反应均无显著性差异,各组惯用语的判断反应时均慢于单词,而快于一般词组。实验结果基本支持两种意义同时加工,但比喻意义优先完成的假设。此外,文章还讨论了习语的词汇化等问题。     

The perception of positive and negative facial expressions by unilateral stroke patients

There remains conflict in the literature about the lateralisation of affective face perception. Some studies have reported a right hemisphere advantage irrespective of valence, whereas others have found a left hemisphere advantage for positive, and a right hemisphere advantage for negative, emotion. Differences in injury aetiology and chronicity, proportion of male participants, participant age, and the number of emotions used within a perception task may contribute to these contradictory findings. The present study therefore controlled and/or directly examined the influence of these possible moderators. Right brain-damaged (RBD; n = 17), left brain-damaged (LBD; n = 17), and healthy control (HC; n = 34) participants completed two face perception tasks (identification and discrimination). No group differences in facial expression perception according to valence were found. Across emotions, the RBD group was less accurate than the HC group, however RBD and LBD group performance did not differ. The lack of difference between RBD and LBD groups indicates that both hemispheres are involved in positive and negative expression perception. The inclusion of older adults and the well-defined chronicity range of the brain-damaged participants may have moderated these findings. Participant sex and general face perception ability did not influence performance. Furthermore, while the RBD group was less accurate than the LBD group when the identification task tested two emotions, performance of the two groups was indistinguishable when the number of emotions increased (four or six). This suggests that task demand moderates a study’s ability to find hemispheric differences in the perception of facial emotion.     

The Use of Contextual Information by Right Brain-Damaged Individuals in the Resolution of Ambiguous Pronouns

Two experiments were conducted with the primary purpose of investigating the ability of right brain-damaged (RBD) individuals to use contextual information—at the level of the single sentence, in terms of the integration of information between clauses, and at the level of a minimal discourse (i.e., two sentences)—in the resolution of ambiguous pronouns. The investigation was extended to a group of left brain-damaged (LBD) and non-brain-damaged (NBD) individuals. Contrary to the prevailing view that RBD patients have difficulty in the use of contextual information to process language, both experiments were consistent in demonstrating that the RBD group was influenced by contextual information in a manner similar to that demonstrated by both the LBD and NBD groups.     

Anterior-posterior interhemispheric differences in the loci of lesions producing visual hemineglect

Five neuropsychological tests designed to measure the presence and severity of visual hemineglect were given to 101 patients with clearly defined unilateral lesions. Of these, visual hemineglect was present in 28 out of a total of 56 left brain damaged (LBD) patients and in 20 out of 45 right brain damaged (RBD) patients. The incidence of hemineglect in these groups did not differ significantly, but the severity of hemineglect was greater in the RBD group than in the LBD group. However, the two groups were found to differ significantly with respect to the loci of the lesions most likely to result in hemineglect. In the RBD group most patients with hemineglect had posterior lesions, and in the LBD group most patients with hemineglect had anterior lesions. Possible reasons for this were discussed first from the point of view of an inattention hypothesis and second in terms of the effects the lateralization of language representation might have on the representation of spatial functions.     

Emotion recognition in stroke patients with left and right hemispheric lesion: results with a new instrument-the FEEL Test

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of a stroke event on people's ability to recognize basic emotions. In particular, the hypothesis that right brain-damaged (RBD) patients would show less of emotion recognition ability compared with left brain-damaged (LBD) patients and healthy controls, was tested. To investigate this the FEEL Test (Facially Expressed Emotion Labeling) was used, a computer based psychometric test that assesses one's ability to recognize facially displayed basic emotions via a forced-choice paradigm. We examined 24 patients after a stroke event (13 RBD, 11 LBD) and compared them with a matched group of healthy controls (HC, n=29). Results showed that the stroke patients performed significantly worse in the FEEL Test than did HC (p<.001). This deficit was especially evident for negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness, and disgust). In contrast to other studies we did not find any significant differences between RBD and LBD patients in their ability to recognize emotions. These results indicate that a stroke event has a negative effect on the recognition of facially displayed emotions but suggest that this effect is apparently not dependent on the side of the brain damage.     

Effects of right and left hemisphere damage on performance of the "Right Hemisphere Communication Battery"

A Hebrew adaptation of Gardner and Brownell's (1986) "Right Hemisphere Communication Battery" (HRHCB) was administered to 27 right brain-damaged (RBD) patients, 31 left brain-damaged (LBD) patients, and 21 age-matched normal controls. Both patient groups showed deficits relative to controls and overall there was no difference between the two patient groups. A factor analysis of patients' scores on the HRHCB yielded two interpretable factors, a verbal and a nonverbal one. These factors were not lateralized. Performance of patients on the HRHCB correlated significantly and positively with performance on most tests of basic language functions, measured with a Hebrew adaptation of the "Western Aphasia Battery" (HWAB) and with other cognitive functions measured with standardized neuropsychological tests. There were stronger correlations of HRHCB with subtests of the HWAB in LBD patients and with nonlanguage cognitive tests in RBD patients. In the LBD group, HRHCB subtests' scores correlated negatively with lesion extent in frontal and temporal perisylvian regions. Such localization was not observed in RBD patients. The results argue against selective right hemisphere (RH) involvement in the RHCB, alleged to measure pragmatic aspects of language use, and show, instead, bilateral involvement. The results also argue against a modular organization of these functions of language use, especially in the RH.     

Novel figurative phrases and idioms: phrase characteristics over multiple presentations

In a series of three studies, characteristics of novel figurative phrases were compared with those of established idioms. Studies 1 and 2 found that certain correlations were found to be strong and in one direction for familiar idioms and comparably strong but in the opposite direction for novel figurative phrases, with the correlations for less familiar idioms usually falling partway between these extremes. Study 2 also noted that written or auditory presentation had minimal effects on characteristic ratings. In Study 3 the correlations among characteristics stayed relatively constant for familiar idioms after one, three, or six presentations, but for the novel figurative phrases, after multiple presentations the correlations changed in the direction of the established idioms.     

Effects of Right- and Left-Hemisphere Damage on Understanding Conversational Implicatures

Processing of implicatures was examined in 27 right-brain-damaged (RBD) and 31 left-brain-damaged (LBD) stroke patients with focal lesions using a new implicatures battery (IB) as part of an exploration of the neural basis and modularity of natural language pragmatics. Following Grice, we sampled implicatures of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. Verbal implicatures consisted of two-sentence conversational vignettes which are literally problematic. Nonverbal implicatures consisted mostly of famous paintings that are literally problematic (e.g., Magritte's "Le Domain d'Arnheim"). The patient has to identify and solve the problem. To compare with performance on the IB, patients also received a Hebrew adaptation of Gardner and Brownell's Right Hemisphere Communication Battery, a new test of basic speech acts (verbal and nonverbal assertions, questions, requests, and commands), a Hebrew version of the Western Aphasia Battery, and standardized neuropsychological tests. Both LBD and RBD patients were significantly impaired in implicature processing relative to age-matched normal controls. In general, both patient groups showed weak correlations of implicatures with extents of lesions in left perisylvian language area or its right-hemisphere (RH) homolog. However, performance of LBD and RBD patients on the IB revealed different patterns of correlations with other pragmatic, language, and nonlanguage tests. In LBD patients, there was a greater association between performance on verbal and nonverbal implicatures and between performance on implicatures and basic speech acts than in RBD patients. Given the different modes in which right-and left-hemisphere (LH) damage affect the processing of conversational implicatures, it remains to be discovered how the two hemispheres interact to process natural language pragmatics in the normal brain in real time.     

Can language do the driving? The effect of linguistic input on infants' categorization of support spatial relations

Two experiments explored the effect of linguistic input on 18-month-olds' ability to form an abstract categorical representation of support. Infants were habituated to 4 support events (i.e., one object placed on another) and were tested with a novel support and a novel containment event. Infants formed an abstract category of support (i.e., looked significantly longer at the novel than familiar relation) when hearing the word "on" during habituation but not when viewing the events in silence (Experiment 1) or when hearing general phrases or a novel word (Experiment 2). Results indicate that a familiar word can facilitate infants' formation of an abstract spatial category, leading them to form a category that they do not form in the absence of the word.     

Comprehension of contrastive stress by Broca's aphasics.

Comprehension of stress as a determiner of reference for pronouns was compared in eight patients with Broca's aphasia (BA) and five age-matched control subjects. The subjects were asked to listen to sentences in which the stressed or unstressed condition of the pronoun was a critical criterion for the establishment of reference. For each sentence, subjects were shown three pictures and asked to point to the correct referent of the pronoun. While the controls were nearly perfect in both the stressed and unstressed conditions, BA patients were significantly worse than normals, showing chance performance in both cases. However, a significant disparity was found in the BA patients' selection of the object NP as the referent under stressed and unstressed conditions, indicating that BA subjects are, indeed, sensitive to the stress patterns of pronouns. It was thus hypothesized that the BA patients' chance performance was the result of an inability to implement their knowledge of stress during the processing of sentences involving discourse-related linguistic operations, such as the establishment of pronoun reference (Grodzinsky, Wexler, Chien, Marakovitz, & Solomon, 1993). To test this hypothesis, a second experiment was conducted in which discourse-related operations were eliminated. In this second experiment, comprehension of stress by the same two groups was compared in tasks involving purely morphosyntactic processes. The contrastive stress patterns of otherwise homophonous compound nouns and adjectival phrases (e.g., BLACKboard, black BOARD), rather than those of pronouns, were examined. In this grammatically "simpler" experiment (i.e., without discourse-related operations), BA subjects scored significantly above chance in their comprehension of sentences involving compound nouns; unexpectedly, however, these same subjects did not show significantly above-chance performance in their comprehension of sentences containing adjectival phrases. Nevertheless, the results obtained in these two experiments seem to support the view that aphasic patients may have a lack of processing capacity, resulting in more errors during the processing of discourse-related linguistic constructions.     

The Decoding of Emotional Concepts in Patients with Focal Cerebral Lesions

The effects of focal brain lesions on the decoding of emotional concepts in facial expressions were investigated. Facial emotions are hierarchically organized patterns comprising (1) structural surface features, (2) discrete (primary) emotional categories and (3) secondary dimensions, such as valence and arousal.Categoricaldecoding was measured using (1) selection of category labels and selection of the named emotion category; (2) matching one facial expression with two choice expressions.Dimensionaldecoding was assessed by matching one face with two different expressions with regard to valence or arousal. 70 patients with well documented cerebral lesions and 15 matched hospital controls participated in the study. 27 had left brain damage (LBD; 10 frontal, 10 temporal, 7 parietal); 37 had right brain damage (RBD; 15 frontal, 11 temporal, 11 parietal). Six additional patients had lesions involving both frontal lobes. Right temporal and parietal lesioned patients were markedly impaired in the decoding of primary emotions. The same patients also showed a reduced arousal decoding. In contrast to several patients with frontal and left hemisphere lesions, emotional conceptualization and face discrimination was not independent in these groups. No group differences were observed in valence decoding. However, right frontal lesions appeared to interfere with the discrimination of negative valence. Moreover, a distraction by structural features was noted in RBD when facial identities were varied across stimulus and response pictures in matching tasks with differing conceptual load. Our results suggest that focal brain lesions differentially affect the comprehension of emotional meaning in faces depending on the level of conceptual load and interference of structural surface features.     

Young children's comprehension of English SVO word order revisited: Testing the same children in act-out and intermodal preferential looking tasks

Act-out and intermodal preferential looking (IPL) tasks were administered to 67 English children aged 2–0, 2–9 and 3–5 to assess their comprehension of canonical SVO transitive word order with both familiar and novel verbs. Children at 3–5 and at 2–9 showed evidence of comprehending word order in both verb conditions and both tasks, although children at 2–9 performed better with familiar than with novel verbs in the act-out task. Children at 2–0 showed no evidence of comprehending word order in either task with novel verbs; with familiar verbs they showed competence in the IPL task but not in the act-out task. The difference in performance for familiar and novel verbs from the same children at 2–0, on the IPL task, and at 2–9, on the act-out task, is consistent with the hypothesis that early linguistic/cognitive representations are graded in strength, with early representations still weak and very task dependent. However, these representations also become more abstract with development, as indicated by the familiarity effect even in the more sensitive IPL task.     

The multidetermined nature of idiom processing

Models of idiom comprehension differ in their predictions concerning compositionality: Some claim that idiomatic meaning is the result of compositional analysis initiated at the earliest stages of comprehension, whereas others claim that compositional analysis occurs only at late stages, subsequent to direct retrieval--especially for idioms that are highly familiar. We evaluated these alternatives in four experiments by using a variety of online and offline comprehension measures. In Experiment 1, we analyzed the normative characteristics of 219 idioms with respect to these predictions. Dimensions of interest included several measures of decomposability, familiarity, and word frequency of the idioms' verbs and nouns. In Experiments 2 through 4, we determined how these dimensions relate to several online measures of idiom comprehension. High familiarity was associated with good comprehension across all experiments; however, facilitative effects of decomposability were found only for tasks that required an overt semantic judgment. Word frequency, but not semantic decomposability of the idiom-initial verb, was associated with comprehension for some measures. These data support a model of idiom comprehension, according to which figurative meaning arises from the time-dependent availability of multiple linguistic constraints, and in which decomposability plays a limited role in the earliest stages of idiom comprehension. Normative data for 210 of the idiomatic phrases may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society Web archive at www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

Resolving Conflicts in Natural and Grammatical Gender Agreement: Evidence from Eye Movements

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, J Mem Lang, 60:112–143, 2009). The experiments made use of the contrast between grammatical and natural gender in Hebrew, using complex subject noun phrases containing head nouns and prepositional phrases with local nouns. Noun phrases were manipulated to produce (a) matches and mismatches in grammatical gender between heads and local nouns; and (b) inanimate nouns and animate nouns with natural gender that served either as head or as local nouns. These noun phrases were the subjects of sentences that ended with predicates agreeing in gender with the head noun, with the local noun, or both. The ungrammatical sentences were those in which the gender of the predicate and the head noun did not match. To assess the impact of conflicts in grammatical and natural gender on the time course of reading, participants’ eye movements were monitored. The results revealed clear disruptions in reading the predicate due to grammatical-gender mismatches with head and local nouns, in analogy to attraction in production. When the head nouns conveyed natural gender these effects were amplified, but variations in the natural gender of local nouns had negligible consequences. The results imply that comprehension and production are similarly sensitive to the control of grammatical agreement by grammatical and natural gender in subject noun phrases.