Linguistic difficulties in language and reading development constrain skilled adult reading

This study investigated whether the quality and specification of phonological representations in early language development would predict later skilled reading. Two perceptual identification experiments were performed with skilled readers. In Experiment 1, spelling difficulties in Grade 1 were used as a proxy measure for poorly specified representations in early language development. In Experiment 2, difficulties in perceiving and representing liquid and nasalized phonemes in final consonant clusters were used for the same purpose. Both experiments showed that words that were more likely to develop underspecified lexical representations in early language development remained more difficult in skilled reading. This finding suggests that early linguistic difficulties in speech perception and structuring of lexical representations may constrain the long-term organization and dynamics of the skilled adult reading system. The present data thus challenge the assumption that skilled reading can be fully understood without taking into account linguistic constraints acting upon the beginning reader.     

Processing Coordinate Structures

Coordination often involves syntactically like categories. Based on the results of four reading time studies, it is argued here that the syntactic like-category restriction is not grammatical. Coordination of unlike categories can be just as acceptable as coordination of like categories. However, syntactically like category coordination is processed faster than coordination of unlike categories even when the two sentence types are judged to be fully acceptable. Further, parallelism of conjuncts facilitates processing regardless of whether it is parallelism in the category of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar might regulate) or parallelism in the internal structure of the conjuncts (a property which the grammar does not regulate, on anyone's view). Parallelism did not facilitate processing when the structure of a subject and object were manipulated, implying that parallelism effects are largely limited to the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and not due simply to the repetition of a phrase with a particular shape.     

Where's the ball? Two- and three-year-olds reason about unseen events

Children 2, 2 1/2, and 3 years of age engaged in a search task in which they opened 1 of 4 doors in an occluder to retrieve a ball that had been rolled behind the occluder. The correct door was determined by a partially visible wall placed behind the occluder that stopped the motion of the unseen ball. Only the oldest group of children was able to reliably choose the correct door. All children were able to retrieve a toy that had been hidden in the same apparatus if the toy was hidden from the front by opening a door. Analysis of the younger children's errors indicated that they did not search randomly but instead used a variety of strategies. The results are consistent with the Piagetian view that the ability to use representations to guide action develops slowly over the first years of life.     

Prosody and lemma selection

In three picture-naming experiments, we examined the effect of prosodic context on the synonyms people use to name pictures in Mandarin Chinese. This was done without time pressure. The results showed that when monosyllabic and bisyllabic synonyms (e.g., hen/chicken) were embedded in a context of pictures with either bisyllabic or trisyllabic names, participants gave bisyllabic responses to the synonyms more often than they did in a condition without such a context. The difference was very similar in magnitude in both the bisyllabic and trisyllabic contextual conditions. These results suggest that people are biased toward using synonyms that have numbers of syllables equal or similar to those of the prosodic context. If it is assumed that prosodic effects originate at a stage of processing beyond the lemma level, then this suggests either that multiple phonological forms of synonyms can be activated or that there is feedback from prosodic processing that influences lemma selection.     

Temporal variation in Irish suicide rates

Using Irish suicide data for the period 1990-1998, the independent effects of month and day adjusting for age, gender, and calendar year effects and distinguishing between holiday and working Mondays were assessed. The male suicide rate was significantly higher on working Mondays (+31%) and Saturdays (+14%), and during April, June, and August (+17%), after adjustment for the other variables. In contrast, female suicide rates were higher only in August (+35%) and exhibited no day effect. Teenage men had a greater elevation of risk on Saturdays, Sundays, and both working and holiday Mondays than any other group. The study findings should be taken into account in the planning of specialized health care services and helplines for suicidal people. Furthermore, the findings provide support for Gabennesch's (1988) broken promise theory and the relationship between dysfunctions of the serotonergic system and suicidal behavior.     

Children who question their heterosexuality

Many gay, lesbian, and bisexual adults report a period of childhood sexual questioning--an uneasy questioning of their heterosexuality brought on by same-sex attractions and motivating same-sex sexual exploration. This article evaluates hypotheses about the correlates, causes, and consequences of childhood sexual questioning. Participants were 182 children in the 4th through 8th grades. Compared with children more confident in their heterosexuality, sexual-questioning children reported more impaired self-concepts, fewer same-sex-typed attributes (but not more cross-sex-typed attributes), a greater sense of feeling different from same-sex others, and lesser satisfaction with their gender assignment. Short-term longitudinal analyses indicated that sexual questioning is more likely a determinant than a consequence of these correlated variables. However, influences of sexual questioning on these outcomes were small.     

Test-retest reliability of fMRI during nonverbal semantic decisions in moderate-severe nonfluent aphasia patients

Cortical reorganization in poststroke aphasia is not well understood. Few studies have investigated neural mechanisms underlying language recovery in severe aphasia patients, who are typically viewed as having a poor prognosis for language recovery. Although test-retest reliability is routinely demonstrated during collection of language data in single-subject aphasia research, this is rarely examined in fMRI studies investigating the underlying neural mechanisms in aphasia recovery. The purpose of this study was to acquire fMRI test-retest data examining semantic decisions both within and between two aphasia patients. Functional MRI was utilized to image individuals with chronic, moderate-severe nonfluent aphasia during nonverbal, yes/no button-box semantic judgments of iconic sentences presented in the Computer-assisted Visual Communication (C-ViC) program. We investigated the critical issue of intra-subject reliability by exploring similarities and differences in regions of activation during participants' performance of identical tasks twice on the same day. Each participant demonstrated high intra-subject reliability, with response decrements typical of task familiarity. Differences between participants included greater left hemisphere perilesional activation in the individual with better response to C-ViC training. This study provides fMRI reliability in chronic nonfluent aphasia, and adds to evidence supporting differences in individual cortical reorganization in aphasia recovery.     

Developmental dyslexia in different languages: language-specific or universal?

Most of the research on developmental dyslexia comes from English-speaking countries. However, there is accumulating evidence that learning to read English is harder than learning to read other European orthographies (Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003). These findings therefore suggest the need to determine whether the main English findings concerning dyslexia can be generalized to other European orthographies, all of which have less irregular spelling-to-sound correspondences than English. To do this, we conducted a study with German- and English-speaking children (n=149) in which we investigated a number of theoretically important marker effects of the reading process. The results clearly show that the similarities between dyslexic readers using different orthographies are far bigger than their differences. That is, dyslexics in both countries exhibit a reading speed deficit, a nonword reading deficit that is greater than their word reading deficit, and an extremely slow and serial phonological decoding mechanism. These problems were of similar size across orthographies and persisted even with respect to younger readers that were at the same reading level. Both groups showed that they could process larger orthographic units. However, the use of this information to supplement grapheme-phoneme decoding was not fully efficient for the English dyslexics.     

Refinements in the Rorschach Ego Impairment Index incorporating the human representational variable

The Ego Impairment Index (EII; Perry & Viglione, 1991) is a composite measure of psychological impairment and thought disturbance developed from the empirical and theoretical literature on the Rorschach. In this article, we summarize reliability and validity data regarding the EII. Our major goal was to present the rationale and empirical basis for recent refinements in the EII. Among the subcomponents of the original EII was the Human Experience variable (HEV), which has recently been revised and replaced with the Human Representational variable (HRV; Viglione, Perry, Jansak, Meyer, & Exner, 2003). In this study, we replaced the HEV with the HRV to create the EII-2. This was accomplished by recalculating the factor coefficients with a sample of 363 Rorschach protocols. We present additional validity data for the new EII-2. Research recommendations and interpretive guidelines are also presented.     

The category test perseveration, loss of set, and memory scales: three new scales and their relationship to executive functioning measures

The Category Test (CT) is a neuropsychological measure that taps into multiple domains of complex reasoning but yields a single error score, limiting the use of the test. In this study, three new CT scales were developed to assess specific aspects of executive dysfunction: Perseveration, Failure to Maintain Cognitive Set, and Inability to Recall and Re-Initiate Past Behavior. The relationship of these scales to well-established neuropsychological measures was examined in head-injured individuals and schizophrenia patients. The CT Perseveration score was correlated with the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) Perseverative Responses score, but also with measures from the Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised and the California Verbal Learning Test. The CT Memory score correlated with other memory measures, but also with the WCST Perseveration measure. Although future studies designed to test discriminant and convergent validity are warranted, these scales may be useful in determining specific aspects of impaired CT performance.