Age,sex, and verbal abilities affect location of linguistic connectivity in ventral visual pathway

Previous studies have shown that the strength of connectivity between regions can vary depending upon the cognitive demands of a task. In this study, the location of task-dependent connectivity from the primary visual cortex (V1) was examined in 43 children (ages 9–15) performing visual tasks; connectivity maxima were identified for a visual task requiring a linguistic (orthographic) judgment. Age, sex, and verbal IQ interacted to affect maxima location. Increases in age and verbal IQ produced similar shifts in maxima location; in girls, connectivity maxima shifted primarily laterally within the left temporal lobe, whereas the shift was primarily posterior within occipital cortex among boys. A composite map across all subjects shows an expansion in the area of connectivity with age. Results show that the location of visual/linguistic connectivity varies systematically during development, suggesting that both sex differences and developmental changes in V1 connectivity are related to linguistic function.     

Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory

A total of 1,242 subjects, in five experiments plus a pilot study, saw a series of slides depicting a single auto-pedestrian accident. The purpose of these experiments was to investigate how information supplied after an event influences a witness's memory for that event. Subjects were exposed to either consistent, misleading, or irrelevant information after the accident event. Misleading information produced less accurate responding on both a yes-no and a two-alternative forced-choice recognition test. Further, misleading information had a larger impact if introduced just prior to a final test rather than immediately after the initial event. The effects of misleading information cannot be accounted for by a simple demand-characteristics explanation. Overall, the results suggest that information to which a witness is exposed after an event, whether that information is consistent or misleading, is integrated into the witness's memory of the event.     

The role of linguistic and visual information in spelling: a developmental study

This study investigated the processes that elementary school children use for spelling. Good and poor spellers in grades 3 through 6 spelled words and nonwords that differed in the types of information (phonological, orthographic, morphological, or visual) that could be used to produce their correct spelling. A multiple choice spelling recognition task was also administered. Error rates on words and nonwords were related to the type of information that could be used to determine the correct spelling. Words that could be spelled on the basis of linguistic information were easier than words that could be spelled only on the basis of visual information. While children were sensitive to the linguistic properties of the stimuli, their use and knowledge of various sources of linguistic information was not uniformly developed. Children had the most difficulty with spellings based on morphological information and the least difficulty with those based on invariant sound-spelling relationships. On the dictation and the nonword tasks, younger children and poorer spellers differed from older children and better spellers in the overall level of their knowledge, but all children showed a similar pattern of results suggesting that they did not use different processes to spell words. However, the data from the recognition task suggested that poor spellers may rely more on visual information than good spellers.     

Simultaneous motor and verbal processing of visual information in a modified Stroop test

Color patches could simultaneously be manually counted and conflicting color words named in the time required for one of the tasks alone. The independence of verbal and nonverbal information processing resembles “split-brain” behavior. Naming color patches while counting color words took more time than would have been required for doing the individual tasks successively, indicating response competition in the standard Stroop test. Form or location stimuli substituted for color words reduced interference when naming color patches.     

Integration of verbal and visual information as evidenced by distortions in picture memory.

Subjects were presented with a series of pictures, some of which were general (girl walking down the path) and others specific (girl hiking down the path). These pictures were matched with sentences which were either general or specific ("The girl is walking [hiking] down the path.") Subsequently, a forced-choice picture recognition test was administered in which subjects saw pairs of pictures and indicated which member of each pair they had seen before. It was found that labelling the picture with a sentence containing a specific verb substantially increased the likelihood that the specific picture corresponding to that verb would subsequently be falsely recognized. The results are discussed in terms of current theories of memorial representation.     

Individual differences in the linguistic competence of referential and expressive subjects

The aim of this work was to examine individual differences in referential and expressive style through a longitudinal study. The composition of the first 50 words, communicative gestures, the conversational style of dyads and the percentage of vocabulary produced from 12 to 24 month-olds were analyzed. The vocabulary was collected through interviews to parents and sessions of mother-infant interaction in the laboratory. Significant differences in the proportion of common nouns and frozen phrases between referential and expressive children in the frequency of communicative gestures and style conversation were found. Thus, referential children and their mothers used more pointing gestures than the expressive children and their mothers. Additionally, mothers of referential children used completing more frequently.     

Brain network interactions in auditory, visual and linguistic processing

In the paper, we discuss the importance of network interactions between brain regions in mediating performance of sensorimotor and cognitive tasks, including those associated with language processing. Functional neuroimaging, especially PET and fMRI, provide data that are obtained essentially simultaneously from much of the brain, and thus are ideal for enabling one to assess interregional functional interactions. Two ways to use these types of data to assess network interactions are presented. First, using PET, we demonstrate that anterior and posterior perisylvian language areas have stronger functional connectivity during spontaneous narrative production than during other less linguistically demanding production tasks. Second, we show how one can use large-scale neural network modeling to relate neural activity to the hemodynamically-based data generated by fMRI and PET. We review two versions of a model of object processing - one for visual and one for auditory objects. The regions comprising the models include primary and secondary sensory cortex, association cortex in the temporal lobe, and prefrontal cortex. Each model incorporates specific assumptions about how neurons in each of these areas function, and how neurons in the different areas are interconnected with each other. Each model is able to perform a delayed match-to-sample task for simple objects (simple shapes for the visual model; tonal contours for the auditory model). We find that the simulated electrical activities in each region are similar to those observed in nonhuman primates performing analogous tasks, and the absolute values of the simulated integrated synaptic activity in each brain region match human fMRI/PET data. Thus, this type of modeling provides a way to understand the neural bases for the sensorimotor and cognitive tasks of interest.     

Dissociation of the neural systems for working memory maintenance of verbal and nonspatial visual information

Working memory for names and faces was investigated to ascertain whether verbal and nonspatial visual information is maintained in working memory by separate neural systems. The subjects performed a delayed match-to-sample task for famous or unfamous faces and names and a sensorimotor control task. Several occipital, temporal, parietal, and prefrontal areas were activated during all memory delays, in comparison with the control delays. Greater delay activity for unfamous faces than for names was obtained in the right fusiform gyrus, right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), right IFG/ precentral gyrus, and right medial superior frontal gyrus, whereas greater delay activity for unfamous names than for faces was observed in the precuneus, left insula/postcentral gyrus, and left IFG/ precentral gyrus. There was no significant difference in the prefrontal activity in the comparison between famous faces and names. Greater delay activity for famous names than for faces was obtained in visual association and parietal areas. The results indicate that there is a functional dissociation based on information type within the neural system that is responsible for working memory maintenance of verbal and nonspatial visual information.     

The effect of verbal size information upon visual judgments of absolute distance

When an 0 views a blank triangle of light under completely reduced conditions, he is able to make use of verbally conveyed information about the size of this stimulus when he is attempting to judge the absolute distance of the stimulus. Although between-Os variance is rather large in this situation, group mean distance estimates are highly veridical. This is further evidence for the view that, when the 0 is given a retinal subtense, any kind of information about size enables him to make a judgment of absolute distance, just as information about distance enables him to make a judgment of absolute size.     

Attending to visual or auditory verbal information while performing other concurrent tasks

Investigation of the effect that a word recognition task has on concurrent nonverbal tasks showed (a) auditory verbal messages affected visual tracking performance but not the detection of brief light flashes in the visual periphery, (b) greater impairment, both of tracking and light detections, when verbal messages were visual rather than auditory. With a kinaesthetic tracking task, errors increased significantly during auditory messages but were even greater during visual messages. There was no interaction between the modality of tracking error feedback (auditory or visual) and the modality of the verbal message. Nor was the decrement from visual messages reduced by changing the presentation format. It is suggested that different temporal characteristics of visual and auditory information affect the attentional demands of verbal messages.     

Emergent verbal behavior and analogy: skinnerian and linguistic approaches

The production of verbal operants not previously taught is an important aspect of language productivity. For Skinner, new mands, tacts, and autoclitics result from the recombination of verbal operants. The relation between these mands, tacts, and autoclitics is what linguists call analogy, a grammatical pattern that serves as a foundation on which a speaker might emit new linguistic forms. Analogy appears in linguistics as a regularity principle that characterizes language and has been related to how languages change and also to creativity. The approaches of neogrammarians like Hermann Paul, as well as those of Jespersen and Bloomfield, appear to have influenced Skinner's understanding of verbal creativity. Generalization and stimulus equivalence are behavioral processes related to the generative grammatical behavior described in the analogy model. Linguistic forms and grammatical patterns described in analogy are part of the contingencies of reinforcement that produce generalization and stimulus equivalence. The analysis of verbal behavior needs linguistic analyses of the constituents of linguistic forms and their combination patterns.     

The role of verbal ability in the processing of complex verbal information

Summary This study investigated the relation between psychometric mental-ability test scores and several reaction-time measures; a simple-reaction task, a choice-reaction task, the Posner and Mitchell (1967) letter-identification task, and a variation of the sentence-verification task. Scores on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Verbal Subtest of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SATV) were obtained. The less complex information-processing tasks replicate earlier studies in which general intelligence was only marginally related to reaction-time measures. The sentence-verification task systematically varied task complexity. Several direct and derived measures from the task were significantly correlated with psychometric mentalability measures. However, even though a number of precautions were taken to ensure that the sentence-verification task assessed purely verbal-processing efficiency, there was little evidence for an important task-specific relation between verification measures and verbal ability. Moreover, despite its relative verbal complexity, sentence verification did not reflect a greater relationship to verbal ability than other tasks did. Overall, the information-processing efficiency measures used in this study suggested a fairly general, rather than a task-specific, relationship to intellectual ability.The research presented in this paper was conducted while the first author was affiliated with the University of Georgia, U. S. A.