Deviant Word Research Articles

Linguistic and attentional factors – Not statistical regularities – Contribute to word-selective neural responses with FPVS-oddball paradigms

Studies using frequency-tagging in electroencephalography (EEG) have dramatically increased in the past 10 years, in a variety of domains and populations. Here we used Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation (FPVS) combined with an oddball design to explore visual word recognition. Given the paradigm's high sensitivity, it is crucial for future basic research and clinical application to prove its robustness across variations of designs, stimulus types and tasks. This paradigm uses periodicity of brain responses to measure discrimination between two experimentally defined categories of stimuli presented periodically. EEG was recorded in 22 adults who viewed words inserted every 5 stimuli (at 2 Hz) within base stimuli presented at 10 Hz. Using two discrimination levels (deviant words among nonwords or pseudowords), we assessed the impact of relative frequency of item repetition (set size or item repetition controlled for deviant versus base stimuli), and of the orthogonal task (focused or deployed spatial attention). Word-selective occipito-temporal responses were robust at the individual level (significant in 95% of participants), left-lateralized, larger for the prelexical (nonwords) than lexical (pseudowords) contrast, and stronger with a deployed spatial attention task as compared to the typically used focused task. Importantly, amplitudes were not affected by item repetition. These results help understanding the factors influencing word-selective EEG responses and support the validity of FPVS-EEG oddball paradigms, as they confirm that word-selective responses are linguistic. Second, they show its robustness against design-related factors that could induce statistical (ir)regularities in item rate. They also confirm its high individual sensitivity and demonstrate how it can be optimized, using a deployed rather than focused attention task, to measure implicit word recognition processes in typical and atypical populations.

Visual mismatch negativity elicited by semantic violations in visual words

The remarkable rapidity and effortlessness of speech perception and word reading by skilled listeners or readers suggest implicit or automatic mechanisms underlying language processing. In speech perception, the implicit mechanisms are reflected by the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) response, suggesting that phonemic, lexical, semantic, and syntactic information are automatically and rapidly processed in the absence of focused attention. In visual word reading, implicit orthographic and lexical processing are reflected by visual mismatch negativity (vMMN), the visual counterpart of auditory MMN. The semantic processing of spoken words is reflected by MMN. This study investigated whether semantic processing is also reflected by vMMN. For this purpose, visual Chinese words belonging to different semantic categories (color, taste, and action) were presented to participants in oddball paradigms. A set of words belonging to the same semantic category was frequently presented as standards; a word belonging to a different semantic category was presented sporadically as deviant. Participants were instructed to perform a visual cross-change detection task and ignore the words. Significant vMMN was elicited in Experiments 1 to 3, in which the deviant word carried a semantic radical that overtly indicated the word’s semantic category information. The vMMNs were most prominent around 260 ms after word onset, were parieto-occipital distributed, and were significantly left-hemisphere lateralized, suggesting rapid semantic processing of the visual words’ category-related information. No significant vMMN was elicited in Experiment 4, in which the deviant word did not carry any semantic radicals. Thus, the semantic radical, which has a high frequency of occurrence because it is carried by many words, may be critical for the elicitation of vMMN.

New varieties of English: Issues of incomprehensibility and unintelligibility

The present article discusses new varieties of English with reference to intelligibility and comprehensibility. It has been observed that new varieties of English display deviant phonological features. Speakers of these varieties insert a sound, delete a sound, substitute a sound, and rearrange sounds when they pronounce certain words. Moreover, they use deviant word stress patterns. These things affect the intelligibility of their speech. The new varieties differ at the level of discourse as well; the content and language used to perform certain speech acts such as coaxing, responding to questions, etc., may result in miscommunication. Thus, unintelligibility is a result of mother tongue interference and incomprehensibility is a result of mother culture interference. The article illustrates unintelligibility and incomprehensibility using examples from non-native varieties of English.

Effect of negatively valenced words on deviant P3 during the three-stimulus oddball paradigm

Attentional bias (sensitization) for negative information was estimated using event-related brain potentials (ERP). We used a three-stimulus visual oddball paradigm that comprised a small diamond standard stimulus (66.7%), a large diamond target stimulus (16.7%), and deviant word stimuli (16.7%) written in Kanji. Furthermore, half the deviant words were negative emotional words (e.g., destruction or scream) and the others half were neutral words (e.g., structure or range). Healthy participants (N = 26) were instructed to press a button after the target appeared while ignoring the other stimuli. EEG was recorded from Fz, Cz, and Pz sites and the average of EEG that time-locked to the onset of stimuli was calculated. Results indicated that the P3 amplitude for the target at Pz was the largest among the three sites, whereas the P3 amplitude for deviant words at Cz and Pz was larger than those at Fz. Furthermore, the P3 amplitudes for negative words increased in comparison to those for neutral words. These results suggest that increased amplitudes to word stimuli are regarded as deviant P3, and changes reflect passive attentional capture elicited by negative emotional information. Implications for using ERPs for estimating attentional bias to threat information are discussed.

A linguistic stylistic study of Wole Soyinka’s Night and Death in the Dawn

Linguistic stylistics explores the linguistic features of a text; it is primarily concerned with the use of language and its effect in a text. This study is aimed at analyzing the language structure/system of Wole Soyinka’s ‘Night’ and ‘Death in the Dawn’ to render a linguistic description, that is, identifying the linguistic deviant features of Soyinka’s poems and describing how they deviated from the known rules to create effect. Some aspects of Niazi & Gautam’s (2010) framework, as well as Onwukwe’s (2012) concept of foregrounded irregularities at the lexical, syntactic and semantic levels were adopted in the analysis of the data collected from a selection of deviant words and structures in the poems. Findings reveal that the syntactic level has the most deviant structures while the lexical level has the least deviant lexemes and that the language system of Wole Soyinka’s poems deviated in ways that make words: violate the class to which they originally belong, inflect words which do not require inflections, create compounds not seen in the lexicon of the language, make structures violate the selectional restriction and category rule and give rise to figurative language. In conclusion, the choice of words in a literary work is very important as it creates certain effects on the readers of that work which is what Soyinka accomplished by deviating from the known linguistic norms. This research hopes to contribute to the understanding of Soyinka’s poems and serve as a reference point for scholars who wish to carry out a similar research.

Variant Word Stress Patterns in the Spoken English of Selected Nigerian Teachers

Earlier studies on word stress patterns in Nigerian English (NE) have focused mainly on how it differs from British English (BE) and have presented a picture of homogeneous and deviant word stress patterns in NE. Currently, little is known about the variant word stress patterns in NE. In line with the above statements, this study examines empirically the variations in the stress patterns in spoken English, but does so in relation to selected Nigerian teachers. The data were sourced through a text-based research instrument designed to test the stress placement of some English words by purposively selected teachers drawn from Kano, Oyo and Imo states,representing the three major ethnolinguistic groups in Nigeria. From each of the three states, 108 teachers who wereindigenes were selected from primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education making 324 in all. They were made to read prepared passages made up of 50 items in context and in isolation. A close perceptual analysis was carried out to ascertain the differences in the performance of the respondents on word stress. The paper employed Metrical Theory for the data analysis. The study revealed that thesubjects manifested sophisticated (VIII), standard (VII) and non-standard (VI) variant word stress patterns in their articulations. It concluded that variant stress patterns of the NE are direct consequences of some sociolinguistic variables.

Intonation and talker variability in the discrimination of Spanish lexical stress contrasts by Spanish, German and French listeners.

The perception of stress is highly influenced by listeners' native language. In this research, the authors examined the effect of intonation and talker variability (here: phonetic variability) in the discrimination of Spanish lexical stress contrasts by native Spanish (N = 17), German (N = 21), and French (N = 27) listeners. Participants listened to 216 trials containing three Spanish disyllabic words, where one word carried a different lexical stress to the others. The listeners' task was to identify the deviant word in each trial (Odd-One-Out task). The words in the trials were produced by either the same talker or by two different talkers, and carried the same or varying intonation patterns. The German listeners' performance was lower compared to the Spanish listeners but higher than that of the French listeners. French listeners performed above chance level with and without talker variability, and performed at chance level when intonation variability was introduced. Results are discussed in the context of the stress "deafness" hypothesis.

Some Alternatives? Event-Related Potential Investigation of Literal and Pragmatic Interpretations of Some Presented in Isolation.

In sentence verification tasks involving under-informative statements such as Some elephants are mammals, some adults appear more tolerant to pragmatic violations than others. The underlying causes of such inter-individual variability remain however essentially unknown. Here, we investigated inter-individual variation in adults deriving the scalar inference “not all” triggered by the quantifier some. We first assessed the individual intolerance to pragmatic violations in adult participants presented with under-informative some-statements (e.g., Some infants are young). We then recorded event-related brain potentials in the same participants using an oddball paradigm where an ambiguous deviant word some presented in isolation had to be taken either as a match (in its literal interpretation “at least some”) or as a mismatch (in its pragmatic interpretation “some but not all”) and where an unambiguous deviant target word all was featured as control. Mean amplitude modulation of the classic P3b provided a measure of the ease with which participants considered some and all as deviants within each experimental block. We found that intolerance to pragmatic violations was associated with a reduction in the magnitude of the P3b effect elicited by the target some when it was to be considered a literal match. Furthermore, we failed to replicate a straightforward literal interpretation facilitation effect in our experiment which offers a control for task demands. We propose that the derivation of scalar inferences also relies on general, but flexible, mismatch resolution processes.

A cognitive-based indicator of deviant sexual interest: Concurrent validation of the Stroop task

ABSTRACTOne of the strongest predictors of sexual recidivism is sexual deviance [Hanson, R. K., & Bussière, M. T. (1998). Predicting relapse: A meta-analysis of sexual offender recidivism studies. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 348–362. doi:10.1037/0022-006X.66.2.348]. Phallometric testing, the most commonly used method of assessing sexual deviance, has elicited methodological and ethical criticisms, while self-report is vulnerable to social desirability and poor insight. To overcome these limitations, researchers have utilised cognitive measures, including a modified Stroop task, to measure deviant sexual interests among sex offenders using victim selection as a comparison measure. However, the results have been inconclusive. The current study explored the validity of the modified Stroop task as a measure of deviant sexual interest among a non-offending sample of 570 females and 223 male participants, using self-report as the comparison measure. The results indicated a significant gender difference in concurrent validity; there was a significant relationship between self-reported deviance and deviant word Stroop performance for male but not for female respondents, suggesting the Stroop is a viable option for assessing sexual deviance among males. Implications of these findings are discussed relative to sexual recidivism risk assessment.

Unattentive speech processing is influenced by orthographic knowledge: Evidence from mismatch negativity

How far can acquired knowledge such as orthographic knowledge affect pre-existing abilities such as speech perception? This controversial issue was addressed by investigating the automaticity of the influence of orthographic knowledge on speech processing. Many studies demonstrated this influence in active, lexico-semantic speech processing tasks. However, it has never been observed when speech is unattended. Here, the Mismatch Negativity (MMN), an automatic index of experience-dependent auditory traces, was recorded in an unattended oddball paradigm manipulating the orthographic congruency between frequent and deviant spoken riming words. Both orthographically congruent and incongruent deviant words elicited a typical MMN over the fronto-central regions, with a stronger response in the incongruent condition. The finding showed that the orthographic dimension of spoken words influences a physiological marker of speech processing although participants were required not to attend to the auditory input. This provides evidence for an impact of acquiring a written code on speech processing.

Variability in Dutch Tweets. An estimate of the proportion of deviant word tokens

In this paper, we attempt to estimate which proportion of the word tokens in Dutch tweets are not covered by standard resources and can therefore be expected to cause problems for standard NLP applications. We fully annotated and analysed a small pilot corpus. We also used the corpus to calibrate automatic estimation procedures for proportions of non-word tokens and of out-of-vocabulary words, after which we applied these procedures to about 2 billion Dutch tweets. We find that the proportion of possibly problematic tokens is so high (e.g. an estimate of 15% of the words being problematic in the full tweet collection, and the annotated sample with death-threat-related tweets showing problematic words in three out of four tweets) that any NLP application designed/created for standard Dutch can be expected to be seriously hampered in its processing. We suggest a few approaches to alleviate the problem, but none of them will solve the problem completely.

Deviant word order in Swedish poetry

It is generally assumed that recurrent deviations from ordinary language in poetry have a non-complex relationship to ordinary grammar. This assumption has been formulated by Fabb (2010) as the Development Hypothesis (DH). In this paper, DH is elaborated within a generative framework and tested upon deviant word order in a sample of 19th century Swedish poetry. The result is that the hypothesis is fairly well corroborated, although not totally. In closing, an alternative hypothesis by Thoms (2010), the Non-Uniformity Hypothesis, is tested. It claims that poetry has more of its own syntax. This hypothesis is shown to yield, on the whole, predictions just as good as DH. Neither of the hypotheses, however, lasts the entire course.

A Stylistic Analysis of Adichie's Half of A Yellow Sun

Language analysis has continued to benefit from a functional approach to its study and stylistics as a linguistic discipline is an approach to the functional interpretation of text. The purpose of this paper is to analyze peculiar linguistic features in relation to their functional values in Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun. The study employed such tools as graphology, morphology, and syntactic and lexico-semantics to examine the stylistic features in the text.The major findings of this study were: there is the use ofa non-structural linguistic element to indicate plot movement. Graphological elements such as spacing and asterisks were used to effect change in spatio-temporal contextjlanguage-character mapping is achieved via the use of such linguistic features as deviant word forms and expressions, compounding, etc. to reveal characters' social, economic and educational levels. Also, loan words reveal the physical setting of the text. The syntactic and the lexico-sernantic features of the text foreground the themes entailed in the text. The subject matter of a writer informs his choice of words and expressions. The deployment oflanguage for experiential, interpersonal and textual functions depends largely on a language user's effective competence in the language of communication and his sound control of the contextual variables ofher/his physical and linguistic contexts.

Spectrotemporal processing drives fast access to memory traces for spoken words

The Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potentials is generated when a detectable spectrotemporal feature of the incoming sound does not match the sensory model set up by preceding repeated stimuli. MMN is enhanced at frontocentral scalp sites for deviant words when compared to acoustically similar deviant pseudowords, suggesting that automatic access to long-term memory traces for spoken words contributes to MMN generation. Does spectrotemporal feature matching also drive automatic lexical access? To test this, we recorded human auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) to disyllabic spoken words and pseudowords within a passive oddball paradigm. We first aimed at replicating the word-related MMN enhancement effect for Spanish, thereby adding to the available cross-linguistic evidence (e.g., Finnish, English). We then probed its resilience to spectrotemporal perturbation by inserting short (20ms) and long (120ms) silent gaps between first and second syllables of deviant and standard stimuli. A significantly enhanced, frontocentrally distributed MMN to deviant words was found for stimuli with no gap. The long gap yielded no deviant word MMN, showing that prior expectations of word form limits in a given language influence deviance detection processes. Crucially, the insertion of a short gap suppressed deviant word MMN enhancement at frontocentral sites. We propose that spectrotemporal point-wise matching constitutes a core mechanism for fast serial computations in audition and language, bridging sensory and long-term memory systems.

The N400 and the P300 are not all that independent

This study assessed whether two ERP components that are elicited by unexpected events interact. The conditions that are known to elicit the N400 and the P300 ERP components were applied separately and in combination to terminal-words in sentences. Each sentence ended with a terminal-word that was highly expected, semantically unexpected, physically deviant, or both semantically unexpected and physically deviant. In addition, we varied the level of semantic relatedness between the unexpected terminal-words and the expected exemplars. Physically deviant words elicited a P300, whereas semantically unexpected words elicited an N400, whose amplitude was sensitive to the level of semantic relatedness. Words that were both semantically unexpected and physically deviant elicited both an N400 with enhanced amplitude, and a P300 with reduced amplitude. These results suggest an interaction between the processes manifested by the two components.

Grammatical constructions in Cri du chat syndrome—Findings from a case study

The literature on grammatical skills in persons with Cri du chat syndrome (CCS) is very limited, and the need for more knowledge in this area is thus evident, in particular for speech and language therapists working with individuals with this syndrome. This case study report describes the syntactic skills of a 14-year-old Norwegian girl with CCS. The theoretical framework is construction grammar. Data for the study were collected in a diary by the author over a period of 4 months and make up a corpus of 552 utterances. These utterances are described in terms of MLU, diversity of argument structure constructions, proportion and types of complex utterances, use of auxiliaries, as well as deviant word order patterns, types of omissions, and use of prefabricated units. The primary aim of the study is to identify strengths and weaknesses in syntactic skills, which provide the basis for future research on grammatical skills in persons with CCS.

Emotional content does not interfere with verbal memory in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy

In healthy humans, memory for words with emotional valence is better than memory for neutral words. At the same time, the word preceding the emotional word in a word list learning task is remembered less often than other neutral words. Both effects, enhanced memory for emotional words and retrograde amnesia for preceding words, are dependent on intactness of the amygdala. In this study we asked whether patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), a disease that often involves the amygdala as well, show altered memory for emotional words and the words presented in close temporal proximity. Whereas we found enhanced memory performance for emotional and decreased recognition performance for the preceding and successive word in our 19 control subjects, both effects were strongly reduced in our 21 patients. No group differences occurred in memory for perceptually deviant words. The lack of emotion effects on memory in the patients cannot simply be attributed to altered perception of emotions as the patients rated the emotionality of the words no different than control subjects. Hence, we conclude that patients with TLE have a specific deficit in the emotion-driven encoding enhancement mediated by the amygdala–hippocampus loop.

Attention orienting effects of hesitations in speech: Evidence from ERPs.

Filled-pause disfluencies such as um and er affect listeners' comprehension, possibly mediated by attentional mechanisms (J. E. Fox Tree, 2001). However, there is little direct evidence that hesitations affect attention. The current study used an acoustic manipulation of continuous speech to induce event-related potential components associated with attention (mismatch negativity [MMN] and P300) during the comprehension of fluent and disfluent utterances. In fluent cases, infrequently occurring acoustically manipulated target words gave rise to typical MMN and P300 components when compared to nonmanipulated controls. In disfluent cases, where targets were preceded by natural sounding hesitations culminating in the filled pause er, an MMN (reflecting a detection of deviance) was still apparent for manipulated words, but there was little evidence of a subsequent P300. This suggests that attention was not reoriented to deviant words in disfluent cases. A subsequent recognition test showed that nonmanipulated words were more likely to be remembered if they had been preceded by a hesitation. Taken together, these results strongly implicate attention in an account of disfluency processing: Hesitations orient listeners' attention, with consequences for the immediate processing and later representation of an utterance.

Differences in AERP responses and atypical hemispheric specialization in 17-month-old children at risk of dyslexia

To determine the auditory event-related potential (AERP) correlates of phoneme perception in 17-month-old children at risk of dyslexia and controls, AERPs were elicited by standard (/bAk/) and deviant (/dAk/) word stimuli presented in an oddball paradigm. The at-risk children tended to show delayed P1 and P2 peaks for standard stimuli. Hemispheric group differences were observed for N2 amplitude and P1 latency, suggesting atypical processing of spoken words in at-risk children. Larger P2 and to a lesser extent P1 amplitudes following deviant words occurred in the control but not in the at-risk group, this may signal poorer phoneme discrimination in at-risk children. The present AERP results offer clues to where to look for a marker to identify children at high risk of reading and writing problems at an early age to facilitate early intervention.

Language context and phonetic change detection

Event-related brain potentials (ERP) were recorded to two spoken words, /pæti/ and /peti/. The vowel difference between the two words results in a semantical difference in Finnish, but not in Hungarian, in which /æ/ and /e/ are perceived as allophones of the same vowel /ε/. As a consequence, native Hungarian speakers, who had not studied Finnish before being tested, could not categorize the two word stimuli. In the main experiment, native Hungarian speakers, who fluently spoke Finnish, were presented with two oddball sequences in which /pæti/ was the frequent standard stimulus, /peti/ the infrequent deviant. In addition, very rare target words were also included. In one condition, the targets were Hungarian words, whereas in the other, they were Finnish words. The participants’ sense of being in two different language environments was further encouraged by having separate experimenters conducting the two conditions, one speaking with the subjects only in Hungarian, the other only in Finnish. Language context had no effect on the mismatch negativity ERP component elicited by the deviant word stimuli. This result suggests that language context does not affect the pre-attentive detection of auditory deviance.