The readability of the non-binary gender star in German: Evidence from a lexical decision task

Objectives: Children born preterm have a high prevalence of neurocognitive deficits early in life. We examined whether the neural correlates of lexical access are atypical in 9-year-old children born preterm, and whether the findings of acoustic mapping correlate with language- and attention-related skills. Patients and Methods: The subjects were fourteen 9-year-old children born preterm and 14 full-term, typically developing controls. Two auditory event-related potential (ERP) components, the N200 and the N400, were used to assess discrimination response and word recognition. A set of behavioral tests (naming ability, auditory attention, phonological processing, pseudoword repetition, and comprehension of instructions) was performed, and the results were compared with the amplitudes, latencies, and scalp distribution of the ERP results. Results: In prematurely born children, neurophysiological deficits were associated with difficulties in auditory discrimination. The N200 amplitude correlated significantly with auditory attention and pseudoword repetition. The scalp distribution of both the N200 and the N400 was broader in children born preterm than in the controls. Low scores in the neuropsychological tasks referred to difficulties in auditory processing and memory. Conclusions: Children born preterm have difficulties in lexical access together with memory- and attention-related processes, which may have a longstanding impact on their school outcomes and academic skills.

It has been hypothesized that the deterioration in the ability to name famous people in normal aging and cognitive impairment is a continuum in which meaning-based representations and form-based representations are differentially impaired, with early impairments in lexical access but not in semantic access. This hypothesis is tested in a follow-up study comparing the performance of fifty-six participants with amnestic mild cognitive impairment and forty-one control participants were assessed. A lexical task was conducted involving recognition and naming of famous people from photographs. Proportional semantic and phonological access measures were calculated. Comparisons revealed significant differences between baseline and follow-up, with improvements in semantic access in the control group and decrements in phonological access in the group with amnestic mild cognitive impairment. Phonological access and reaction time measures were significantly and positively correlated, and semantic access and reaction time were significantly and negatively correlated. These results add evidence to the hypothesis that the decrease of processing resources is related to the increase of difficulties in lexical access throughout aging. Patterns of change must be replicated over longer periods of time.

children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show lexical deficits as the first noticeable sign of such disorder, characterized as difficulties in lexical access during naming and speech tests. Studies that compare picture naming and drawings seem perfect to clarify lexical deficits. to compare the performance of children with normal language development (NLD) to that of children with SLI in naming, drawing and definition tasks, aiming to explore the the quality of semantic representation of the lexicon. Two groups were involved in this study: the Control Group (CG), with no language disorders, composed by 40 subjects, and the Research Group (RG), with 20 subjects, all diagnosed with SLI, aging from five to seven years. Tasks of naming, picture drawing and definition were performed, using 20 different pictures. In the naming task, the types of errors were analyzed and sorted as follows: semantic, phonological, none specified and others. The analysis of the drawing and definition tasks was based only on the correct answers, semantic and none specified errors. children of the RG presented a greater number of semantic errors in the picture naming task when compared to the CG. Besides that, definitions presented by the RG seemed more simple and incomplete even when the child was capable of naming the picture correctly. Drawings of correctly named objects were better than those that were named incorrectly. it was possible to discriminate within SLI children those that present greater lexical deficits. It was also possible to explore the possible reasons for failures in naming tasks.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative condition that involves several cognitive functions, with language being one of the most affected. This article aims to examine the state of the art on linguistic impairments in AD, with a specific focus on six domains: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Linguistic manifestations vary according to the stage of the disease and address both language production and comprehension. In initial projects, we observed difficulties in lexical access, anomia, and a decline in semantic verbal fluency. As the disease progresses, phonetic-phonological, morphosyntactic and pragmatic alterations worsen, impairing the cohesion, coherence, and effectiveness of communication. Cross-cultural studies indicate that the linguistic structure of each language can influence these patterns of decline, while factors such as working memory and semantic complexity are also important for the observed diversity. It is concluded that the detailed study of linguistic domains in AD is essential for early diagnosis, monitoring of progression and the development of personalized intervention strategies. Considering advances in artificial intelligence, neuroscience and interdisciplinary approaches, there are promising prospects for the creation of more effective methods for preserving communication and autonomy of individuals affected by the disease.

Aims and objectives: Differences in directionality, motivations and locus of codeswitching have been reported for children’s codeswitching, but these constructs have not been subjected to experimental study in order to examine how they may interact. This study investigated these variables in bilingual preschool children’s codeswitching. Methodology: Thirty-two Russian-Hebrew bilingual children (mean age 6;3) performed two tasks: Retelling of narratives manipulated for setting/topic and listener and Conversation with a bilingual adult. Retelling conditions included a Russian story retold to a Hebrew-speaking puppet, a Hebrew story retold to a Russian speaking puppet and a Mixed language story retold to a bilingual puppet. The Conversation task involved responses to questions in Russian, Hebrew and codeswitched speech about holidays and activities at home and in preschool. Data and Analysis: All children’s speech was audio recorded and transcribed using CHILDES conventions for data transcription. Codeswitched utterances were coded for the following: Directionality (Hebrew-to-Russian/Russian-to-Hebrew); Motivation (psycholinguistic/sociopragmatic); and Locus (intra-utterance/cross-speaker). Results: Overall children produced more codeswitching from Russian to Hebrew and did so more for psycholinguistic motivations (to maintain fluency or to overcome difficulties in lexical access). Originality: High rates of codeswitching occurred in this study, ranging from 15% to 22% for Conversation and Retelling, respectively (calculated as codeswitched instances per utterance). This high rate may be attributed to the experimental nature of the tasks, which intended to elicit codeswitching in children’s speech. Significance: Drawing from Green and Wei’s processing model, findings regarding directionality and motivation are discussed in terms of connectivity and activation.

Recent findings regarding the understanding of number concepts and counting principles, and the simple arithmetic competencies of normal and mathematically disabled (MD) children are reviewed. Differences across these groups are evident in the understanding of counting concepts and for several features of arithmetic skill development. In comparison to normal children, many children with MD show a developmental delay in the understanding of counting concepts, and use immature counting-based procedures and commit more procedural errors during the solving of arithmetic problems. Unlike normal children, children with MD do not transition as easily from use of counting-based procedures to memory-based processes, such as arithmetic fact retrieval. Use of immature counting procedures to solve arithmetic problems may be due to their poor understanding of counting concepts or poor skill at detecting and correcting counting-based errors. Deficits in arithmetic fact retrieval may be due to difficulties in lexical access (and storage) and/or inability to inhibit irrelevant associations from entering working memory during problem solving.

This study explores several speech parameters related to mild cognitive impairment, as well as those that might be flagging the presence of an underlying neurodegenerative process. Speech is an excellent biomarker because it is not invasive and, what is more, its analysis is rapid and economical. Our aim has been to ascertain whether the typical speech patterns of people with Alzheimer's disease are also present during the disorder's preclinical stages. To do so, we shall be using a task that involves reading out aloud. This is followed by an analysis of the recordings, looking for the possible parameters differentiating between those older people with MCI and a high probability of developing dementia and those with MCI that will not do so. We found that the disease's most differentiating parameters prior to its onset involve changes in speech duration and an alteration in rhythm rate and intensity. These parameters seem to be related to the first difficulties in lexical access among older people with AD.

There is a growing awareness that children may experience hyperacusis, a condition that is often associated with behavioral and developmental disorders. This preliminary study was aimed to investigate the effects of hyperacusis alone on various components of speech and language in children without developmental disorders. This study was conducted on 109 children aged between 4 and 7 years attending kindergarten and primary school. Hyperacusis was assessed through behavioral observation of children and questionnaires for parents. Different components of speech and language were assessed through specific tests. Hyperacusis was diagnosed in fifteen children (13.8%); ten (66.7%) were attending primary school and five (33.3%) kindergarten. A significant difference between children with and without hyperacusis was found for tests evaluating the average number of words in a sentence and phonemic fluency; older children appeared to have more difficulties. Several differences in education profiles were found: parents of children with hyperacusis spent less time with their children compared to parents of children without hyperacusis. Our preliminary results suggest some difficulties in lexical access and the use of shorter sentences by children with hypersensitivity to sound; however, the small size of our sample and the largely unknown interactions between hyperacusis and developmental disorders suggest caution when interpreting these results. Further studies on larger samples are necessary to gain additional knowledge on the effects of hyperacusis on speech and language in children without developmental disorders.

A picture naming experiment in Dutch tested whether disfluencies in speech can arise from difficulties in lexical access. Speakers described networks consisting of line drawings and paths connecting these drawings, and we manipulated picture name agreement. Consistent with our hypothesis, there were more pauses and more self-corrections in the low name agreement condition than the high name agreement condition, but there was no effect on repetitions. We also considered determiner frequency. There were more self-corrections and more repetitions when the picture name required the less frequent (neuter-gender) determiner "het" than the more frequent (common-gender) determiner "de". These data suggest that difficulties in distinct stages of language production result in distinct patterns of disfluencies.

This study explored possible impairments in the comprehension of nominal metaphors in five aphasic patients with semantic deficits and two with difficulties in lexical access. To this end, a set of four novel tasks was designed: two oral paraphrasing and two forced-choice tasks. The results support the claims of the Class-Inclusion Model and the Graded Salience Hypothesis, and showed that difficulties in the comprehension of these types of expressions are sensitive to certain features of metaphor vehicles, especially their ambiguity, level of conventionality and degree of semantic opacity. Similarly, they confirmed that metaphors understood as categorization statements require the undamaged processing of low-imageability words, as opposed to analogical metaphors, which comply with the assumptions of the Structural Mapping Model. Generally, patients with lexical impairments do not show difficulties in the processing of metaphorical expressions, while the performance of patients with semantic deficit is affected in accordance with their inability to understand abstract and low-frequency words.

ABSTRACTBackground: Transient aphasias are common in the first few days after resective surgery to the language-dominant hemisphere. The specific speech and language deficits that occur are related to the location of the surgical site, and may include impairments in fluency, lexical access, repetition, and comprehension. The impact of these transient aphasias on connected speech production has not previously been investigated.Aims: The goals of this study were to characterise the nature of connected speech deficits in the immediate post-surgical period, and to determine which deficits resolve completely within 1 month.Methods & Procedures: Forty-three patients undergoing resective surgery in the left (language-dominant) hemisphere participated in the study. Brief connected speech samples were obtained before surgery, and at 2–3 days post-surgery. In a subset of 24 patients (all of whom presented with aphasia in the immediate post-surgical period), follow-up samples were also obtained at 1 month post-surgery. The samples were transcribed and coded in CHAT format. Ten connected speech measures were derived from each speech sample, and were then compared by time point.Outcomes & Results: At 2–3 days post-surgery, deficits were observed in all 10 connected speech measures in comparison to pre-surgical samples: there were decreases in words per minute, words per utterance, and the use of embedded clauses, and increases in phonological errors, lexical access difficulties, morphosyntactic errors, filled pauses, false starts, and retraced sequences. The proportion of closed-class words could be perturbed in either direction. At 1 month post-surgery, 8 of the 10 connected speech measures had significantly improved, and all measures reflecting structural features (words per utterance, number of embeddings, morphosyntactic errors, proportion of words that were closed class) were equivalent to the pre-surgical time point. Subtle deficits persisted in some other measures; in particular, there were more phonological errors and lexical access difficulties than at the pre-surgical time point.Conclusions: Transient aphasias after left hemisphere surgery impacted all aspects of connected speech in the immediate post-surgical period. Most of these deficits were largely or completely resolved by 1 month post-surgery, but some subtle impairments persisted.

The effects of polysemy (number of meanings) and word frequency were examined in lexical decision and naming tasks. Polysemy effects were observed in both tasks. In the lexical decision task, high- and low-frequency words produced identical polysemy effects. In the naming task, however, polysemy interacted with frequency, with polysemy effects being limited to low-frequency words. When degraded stimuli were used in both tasks, the interaction appeared not only in naming but also in lexical decision. Because stimulus degradation also produced an effect of spelling-sound regularity in the lexical decision task, the different relationships between polysemy and frequency appear to be due to whether responding was based primarily on orthographic or phonological codes. As such, the effects of polysemy seem to be due to the nature of task-specific processes. An explanation in terms of M. S. Seidenberg and J. L. McClelland's (1989) and D. C. Plaut and J. L. McClelland's (1993) parallel distributed processing models is proposed. One of the most fundamental issues in reading research is how a word's meaning is derived from the processing of a visual input. Chumbley and Balota (1984) suggested that essentially all major models of word recognition, such as Morton's (1969) logogen model, Becker's (1980) verification model, and Forster's (1976) lexical search model, assume at least two processes are involved. The first is the process of accessing the lexicon and the second is the process of meaning determination. The verification model and the lexical search model assume that lexical access involves a sequential matching process between information extracted from the visual stimulus and lexical representations, with representations for higher frequency words checked first. The logogen model assumes differential threshold values for the lexical representations depending

Research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is non-selective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. One piece of evidence is that bilinguals recognise cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two languages) faster than non-cognates. The present study used cognates to investigate whether the non-selective access hypothesis holds also for trilinguals and three languages. Dutch-English-German trilinguals carried out a lexical decision task in their third language (German). The word materials included purely German control words, “double” cognates that overlapped in Dutch and German, but not in English, and “triple” cognates with the same form and meaning in Dutch, German, and English. Faster RTs were found for Dutch-German cognates than for control words, but additionally, “triple” cognates were processed even faster than “double” cognates. The “triple” cognate effect was not influenced by whether the participants had previously read an English text. A control experiment with German monolinguals confirmed that the effect was not an artifact of uncontrolled stimulus characteristics. Thus, independent of context, both the native language and another foreign non-target language influenced target language comprehension in trilinguals. This supports a view of language non-selective access implying all languages known to an individual may affect word activation and recognition.

This study investigates the costs and benefits of inference processing in university students with reading comprehension difficulties. Inferences, which combine implicit and explicit information, are seen as an indicator of better reading comprehension. The study focuses on three loci during narration: the last words of the first and second phrases, and a target word in a lexical decision task. Brain activity was recorded using event-related potentials (ERP) from 63 students as they read familiar, less-familiar, and neutral stories. The results revealed a slow negativity component at the first locus, with greater negativity for words from familiar contexts compared to less-familiar and neutral contexts. At the second locus, N400 and Post-N400 components reflected greater negativity for familiar contexts. At the third locus, FN400 and N400 components were observed for pseudowords. These findings suggest a bottom-up processing strategy, characterized by lexical access difficulties in less-skilled readers.

Semantic Context Effects on Visual Word Processing: A Hybrid Prospective-Retrospective Processing Theory