Nonlinguistic Systems Research Articles

A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation of Verbal Working Memory in Adolescents With Specific Language Impairment

This study used neuroimaging and behavioral techniques to examine the claim that processing capacity limitations underlie specific language impairment (SLI). Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate verbal working memory in adolescents with SLI and normal language (NL) controls. The experimental task involved a modified listening span measure that included sentence encoding and recognition of final words in prior sets of sentences. The SLI group performed significantly poorer than the NL group for both encoding and recognition and displayed slower reaction times for correct responses on high complexity encoding items. fMRI results revealed that the SLI group exhibited significant hypoactivation during encoding in regions that have been implicated in attentional and memory processes, as well as hypoactivation during recognition in regions associated with language processing. Correlational analyses indicated that adolescents with SLI exhibited different patterns of coordinating activation among brain regions relative to controls for both encoding and recognition, suggesting reliance on a less functional network. These findings are interpreted as supporting the notion that constraints in nonlinguistic systems play a role in SLI.

Linguistic and Nonlinguistic Priming in Aphasia

Studies of real-time processing in aphasia suggest that linguistic symptoms may be due to deficits in activation dynamics rather than loss of linguistic knowledge. To investigate the domain specificity of such processing deficits, we compared performance by Italian-speaking fluent aphasics, nonfluent aphasics, and normal controls in a linguistic priming task (grammatical gender) with their performance in a color-priming task that requires no verbal mediation. Normal or larger than normal color-priming effects were demonstrated in both aphasic groups. Gender priming did not reach significance in either group, even though the patients displayed above-chance sensitivity to gender class and gender agreement in their accuracy scores. The demonstration of spared gender knowledge despite impaired gender priming underscores the utility of on-line techniques in the study of aphasia. The demonstration of spared color priming suggests that priming deficits in aphasia are either (1) specific to speech and language or (2) specific only to those sensorimotor and attentional processes that language shares with other nonlinguistic systems.

Concerning the use of language and ancillary codes in ritualized communication

This essay employs some ethnographic exemplars of the communicative use of spitting to illustrate a semiotic investigation of the formal relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic sign systems in face‐to‐face communication. It argues that elements from various sign strata not only interact in certain ways in the communicative constitution of reality, but that they may also signify one another. This potential is especially important in situations of uncertain outcome, for through their experiential immediacy nonlinguistic signs contribute to the ritualization of the communication situation. Such signs, iconic in character, emphasize the performativity or eventness of the communication process in which they function as metapropositional elements.

Sign Language Research and Linguistic Theory

Linguistic theory has traditionally defined language in terms of speech and has, as a result, labelled sign languages as non-linguistic systems. Recent advances in sign language linguistic research, however, indicate that modern linguistic theory must include sign language research and theory. This paper examines the historical bias linguistic theory has maintained towards sign languages and refutes the classification of sign languages as contrived artificial systems by surveying current linguistic research into American Sign Language. The growing body of American Sign Language research demonstrates that a signed language can have all the structural levels of spoken language despite its visual-spatial mode. This research also indicates that signed languages are an important source of linguistic data that can help further develop a cognitive linguistic theory.

Profiles of symbol-reading skills in organic patients

One (unitary) school of thought views all symbolic competences as closely related, while a rival (pluralistic) approach underscores the relative differences among modes of symbolic processing. To secure information on the plausibility of these competing hypotheses, matched groups of left- and right-hemisphere patients were given a visual symbol-recognition test. Subjects were required to choose the correctly depicted symbol among a set of four. The results challenge a strong version of the “unitary” hypothesis. What emerges instead is a view of symbol systems as a continuum: relatively linguistic symbol systems prove challenging for left-hemisphere patients, relatively nonlinguistic systems pose comparable difficulties for right-hemisphere patients. Contrary to hypothesis, the processing of numerical symbols poses special difficulty for right-hemisphere patients. Performance on trademarks—items which can be processed by linguistic or nonlinguistic strategies—suggests that organic patients with contrasting pathologies may adopt different processing strategies when confronting identical physical stimuli.

Generative prosody and English verse

The primary task of generative prosody is to discover the principles which underlie the poet's selection and rejection of linguistic material for use in an essentially non-linguistic system (meter) and to formalize these principles as rules of prosody capable of generating metrical lines of verse without predicting unmetrical lines. This essay is an attempt to explore certain aspects of these rules in the lyric iambic pentameters of Shakespeare and Pope, with some comparative references to the German verse tradition. Introductory remarks on generative prosody and the concept of metricality (section 1.) are followed by an evaluation of a recently proposed theory of English meter (section 2.) and a discussion of levels of abstraction in prosodic and linguistic feature analysis (section 3.). The final section includes remarks on stress and lexicality as prosodic features (section 3.2.), the concept of metrical ambiguity (section 3.3.) and suggested modifications of the Magnuson-Ryder theory of prosody (sections 3.4.–3.6.). The essay concludes with a discussion of positional rules (section 3.7.) and a prosody for English iambic pentameter verse (section 3.8.).

On Musical Quotation

Criteria of quotationality vary in nonlinguistic symbol systems, and there is the question whether quotation is even possible in some contexts. For instance, can one painting or dance movement quote another? If a painting is autographic,2 how can it be duplicated in a pictorial quotation? And if scored dance gestures can be duplicated like words and sentences, what then corresponds to the reference giving quotation marks in language-stage-winks fore and aft? This is enough to show that different arts have different problems with quotation centering around the separate issues of establishing criteria of duplication and of reference. Perhaps the best way to begin a discussion of musical quotation is with some examples plus underscoring of critical terms. Consider these comments on Ives's Second String Quartet-?

Critical remarks on generative metrics

The primary task of generative prosody is to discover the principles which underlie the poet's selection and rejection of linguistic material for use in an essentially non-linguistic system (meter) and to formalize these principles as rules of prosody capable of generating metrical lines of verse without predicting unmetrical lines. This essay is an attempt to explore certain aspects of these rules in the lyric iambic pentameters of Shakespeare and Pope, with some comparative references to the German verse tradition. Introductory remarks on generative prosody and the concept of metricality (section 1.) are followed by an evaluation of a recently proposed theory of English meter (section 2.) and a discussion of levels of abstraction in prosodic and linguistic feature analysis (section 3.). The final section includes remarks on stress and lexicality as prosodic features (section 3.2.), the concept of metrical ambiguity (section 3.3.) and suggested modifications of the Magnuson-Ryder theory of prosody (sections 3.4.–3.6.). The essay concludes with a discussion of positional rules (section 3.7.) and a prosody for English iambic pentameter verse (section 3.8.).