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.     

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.     

Surface form and memory in question answering

Speakers tend to repeat materials from previous talk. This tendency is experimentally established and manipulated in various question-answering situations. It is shown that a question's surface form can affect the format of the answer given, even if this form has little semantic or conversational consequence, as in the pair Q: (At) what time do you close. A: “(At)five o'clock.” Answerers tend to match the utterance to the prepositional (nonprepositional) form of the question. This “correspondence effect” may diminish or disappear when, following the question, additional verbal material is presented to the answerer. The experiments show that neither the articulatory buffer nor long-term memory is normally involved in this retention of recent speech. Retaining recent speech in working memory may fulfill a variety of functions for speaker and listener, among them the correct production and interpretation of surface anaphora. Reusing recent materials may, moreover, be more economical than regenerating speech anew from a semantic base, and thus contribute to fluency. But the realization of this strategy requires a production system in which linguistic formulation can take place relatively independent of, and parallel to, conceptual planning.     

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.     

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.     

Helping contacts between nonprofessional child aides and young children experiencing school adjustment problems

The present studies examine several within-session measures of helping interactions involving nonprofessional child aides and young maladapting school children referred to a preventively oriented school mental health program. The studies' three main criterion measures were: (1) estimates of children's predominant mood state at the beginning, during, and end of a session; (2) judgments about a child's predominant within-session moded of expression; and (3) aides' ratings of session satisfaction. Both predominant mood and mode of expression differed for children with different initial referral problems. Both also related to differential aide judgements about session satisfaction. Aide satisfaction related to structural aspects of the session, including its length and whether it was thought to deal with significant problems.     

Children's self-concept and attitude toward school in open and traditional classrooms

Children from a traditional school and two open schools were compared, using the Pictorial Self-Concept scale and the Attitude Toward School scale. To control for the self-selection of open school students, the traditional school subjects were divided into those whose parents favored and those whose parents did not favor open education. Three of the 12 analyses were significant, but not in the predicted, or in any orderly, direction. These results were attributed to chance. Attitude toward school was higher for females than males and decreased for kindergarden to grade 2. Self-concept increased form kindergarten to grade 2, with no significant sex differences.     

Voice-onset time as a clue to the nature of Broca speech errors

Blumstein, Cooper, Goodglass, Statlender, and Gottleib (Brain and Language, 9, 153–170 (1980)) attempt to determine by an examination of the VOTs of aphasic speakers whether Broca's aphasics make phonemic substitutions in addition to their well-known phonetic errors. There are a number of problems with this study, mostly due to an apparent failure to fully appreciate the fact that VOT is a cover term for several acoustic features. It is suggested that VOT measurement in any given position in a word cannot solve this problem and that future studies should include glottographic observations as well as VOT measurements made in all positions in the word.     

Visuospatial competency, handedness, and cerebral dominance

The present study addressed the question of Levy's (1974, Psychobiological implications of bilateral assymetry. In S. Dimond &; J. G. Beaumont, Hemispheric function in the human brain, NY: Halstead. Pp. 121–183.) proposal that left handers would have lowered spatial skills relative to verbal skills. In the first part of the study, performance on the PMA (visuospatial subtest) and WAIS Block Design subtest were compared between right and left handed high school and college samples. No support could be found for deficient visuo-spatial performance in the left handers. In the second part of the experiment, no relative impairment of visuospatial skills was found when subjects were classified into predicted speech dominance groups on the basis of a dichotic listening task and/or a visual half-field task. An extreme groups comparison of the most left dominant and most right dominant groups again yielded no significant differences in visuo-spatial performance. Finally, the relationship between degree of speech lateralization and visuo-spatial skills was examined. Only partial support for differences in cerebral organization for speech in left handers was found in the college sample.     

Inspection time and its relation to intelligence

Inspection time, defined as the minimum duration for which two different stimuli must be presented if they are to be perceived as different, was measured for both auditory and visual stimuli. The minimum durations were determined by means of a two- alternative forced-choice task for 50 children whose average age was 12 years 2 months. The times were correlated with the children's verbal (Mill-Hill vocabulary) and nonverbal (Raven matrices) intelligence. The Kendall correlation coefficients were ?.3188 and ?.0929 for the auditory and visual inspection times with verbal intelligence, and ?.2322 and ?.2676 for those times with nonverbal intelligence. Auditory and visual inspection times were correlated .1721 with each other. These results do not support earlier claims that inspection time is closely related to conventional measures of intelligence.     

Transfer of compounds and components in the discriminative learning of retardates

The discriminative learning and transfer of compound and component problems were assessed in retarded subjects at two levels of intelligence. It was found that brighter subjects (MA = 10 years) found the component problems relatively easier than the compound problems to a greater extent than did the less developed subjects (MA = 5 years). The learning of compound solutions was shown to transfer positively to other compound problems and negatively to component problems. Component solutions were found to transfer positively to other component solutions and negatively to compound solutions. These dimensional transfer effects were interpreted to mean that both compound and component solutions were mediated and conceptual in nature. The developmental differences in relative usages of compound and component aspects of stimuli were viewed as the result of differences in direction of attention rather than of differences in complexity of processing.     

A review, analysis, and some new data on hand-posture distributions in left-handers

Different methods have been employed to assess handwriting posture in left-handers, and different dimensions of hand posture have been used for categorization. Within North American samples, there is a remarkable consistency between studies in the distributions when the same assessment method is used, but there are very large and highly significant differences for different methods of assessment. The various methods and dimensions of categorization evidently index different variables, and these are likely to have different relations with neuropsychological factors. It is possible, however, to gather questionnaire data on handwriting posture that closely resemble direct experimenter observation, as a brief report on left-handed males shows.     

A neuronal model for syllable representation

A speculative neuronal template, equivalent to canonical syllable forms and independent of segmental representations, is offered to help account for (1) the inviolate nature of phonotactic constraints in aphasic speech output, and (2) left hemisphere specialization for speech sound access and output. The model, which attempts to relate plausible neuronal systems to linguistic function, is based on cell assemblies that are thought to develop by way of genetic predisposition and ontogenetic language experience, into configurations that can represent canonical slot positions for the consonants and vowel comprising a syllable. The syllable is assumed to be the basic organizational rhythmic unit for serial concatenation of sublexical segments. A scheme for neurological differentiation of vowels and consonants is offered. Phonotactic constraints can become "hard-wired" to help create the automaticity underlying phonological sound organization. Testable predictions are offered to substantiate the claims of the model.     

Cardiac orienting responses of 6- and 16-week-old infants

Since previous data suggested that the magnitude of orienting evidenced by cardiac deceleration increased over the first 16 weeks of life, 6- and 16-week-old infants were compared on various characteristics of orienting: habituation, dishabituation, and magnitude of deceleration to stimulus offset as well as to stimulus onset. Neither the change in stimulus following habituation trials nor the stimulus offset produced a large enough response to confidently evaluate age differences suggested by the data. Stimulus onset elicited a pronounced deceleration which for the two age groups was of equivalent magnitude on initial trials and declined similarly with stimulus repetition. It was suggested that similarity of the two age groups on these parameters was due to control of state within a narrow alert range, and that, in general, younger infants are less likely than older infants to show orienting when conditions for orienting are marginal.