Phonemic Tasks Research Articles

Phonological awareness in German-speaking preschool children with cochlear implants – 3 case examples

ObjectiveThe aim was to explore PA skills German-speaking preschool children with cochlea implants (CIs) and how these skills may be related to their speech and language skills. MethodsThree monolingual German-speaking pre-school children aged 5;04–6;01 with bilateral CIs were tested. Their cognitive, speech and language skills were assessed. Six subtests of a standardized PA test battery were administered (i.e. rhyme identification, rhyme production; phoneme identification- input and -output; phoneme blending-input and -output). ResultsAll three children showed distinctive PA profiles. One boy, who had no spoken language deficits, struggled to complete the rhyme tasks but performed well on three phoneme tasks. However, he showed a discrepancy between expressive and receptive phoneme blending skills, scoring poorly on the expressive subtest. The second boy, who displayed grammar comprehension and expressive vocabulary difficulties, showed a mixed profile, with a below average performance on rhyme production. The girl who had significant speech and language deficits scored below average on all six PA subtests. ConclusionsPA profiles in children with CI vary considerably and PA testing should include a range of different PA tasks. The assumed link between spoken language deficits and PA difficulties shown in children with normal hearing could be confirmed.

Treatment of Phonological Anomia in Aphasia: Some Suggestions for Users of Signed Language

Aphasiologists agree that with damage to the left hemisphere of the brain, both those who use vocal and those who use signed forms of communication are in jeopardy of developing aphasia, an impaired ability to produce and/or perceive language. Of the many symptoms that are associated with aphasia, anomia (a word retrieval impairment of language) is the most common, but while treatments for phonological anomia (a type of anomia caused by defective phonological processes) are available for users of spoken language, the same cannot be said for users of signed language. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature by making some suggestions for the treatment of phonological anomia in signed language users. In spoken languages, phonological word finding deficits can be remediated by phonemic cueing tasks in which the initial phonemes of target words are provided as cues to phonologically prime targets and facilitate their retrieval. In this paper I argue that by simply substituting phonemes as cues for cheremes (the signed language equivalent of phonemes), we could adapt the phonemic cueing approach to treatment of phonological anomia in spoken languages to make it suitable for use with signed language users.

Valence of Affective Verbal Fluency: fMRI Studies on Neural Organization of Emotional Concepts Joy and Fear.

The present study was designed to examine the underlying brain mechanisms of positive and negative emotional verbal fluency. Three verbal fluency tasks (one non-emotional phonemic task, two emotional tasks: Joy and Fear) were used in this study. The results were analyzed for 35 healthy, Polish-speaking, right-handed adults aged 20-35. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (3T) was used to show brain activity during active participation in emotional verbal fluency tasks. The results reported for emotional fluency confirmed activation of different brain regions for the negative and positive emotional verbal fluency: in positive emotional verbal fluency Joy elicits greater activation in the frontal regions and the cingulate cortex, while in negative verbal fluency Fear is reflected in activation of parietal and temporal areas. The study provides an evidence for differentiation in neural mechanisms between positive and negative emotional verbal fluency and/or positive and negative retrieving processes, and differentiation in brain-related determinants of the emotional concepts organization.

Phonological awareness development in children with and without spoken language difficulties: A 12-month longitudinal study of German-speaking pre-school children

Purpose: There is strong empirical evidence that English-speaking children with spoken language difficulties (SLD) often have phonological awareness (PA) deficits. The aim of this study was to explore longitudinally if this is also true of pre-school children speaking German, a language that makes extensive use of derivational morphemes which may impact on the acquisition of different PA levels.Method: Thirty 4-year-old children with SLD were assessed on 11 PA subtests at three points over a 12-month period and compared with 97 four-year-old typically developing (TD) children.Result: The TD-group had a mean percentage correct of over 50% for the majority of tasks (including phoneme tasks) and their PA skills developed significantly over time. In contrast, the SLD-group improved their PA performance over time on syllable and rhyme, but not on phoneme level tasks. Group comparisons revealed that children with SLD had weaker PA skills, particularly on phoneme level tasks.Conclusion: The study contributes a longitudinal perspective on PA development before school entry. In line with their English-speaking peers, German-speaking children with SLD showed poorer PA skills than TD peers, indicating that the relationship between SLD and PA is similar across these two related but different languages.

Performance of Children in Phonemic and Semantic Verbal Fluency Tasks

Abstract This study investigated the performance of children from the Brazilian Northeast region, from 7 to 10 years in phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks. The participants were 102 subjects (62 girls and 40 boys) who performed three phonemic and three semantic fluency tasks. The results were submitted to correlational and variance analysis to investigate the influence of the variables age and gender on the subjects performance. There was no effect of gender on the results. Significant contrasts between age groups were found, and better performance was observed on phonemic tasks. Also, the performance in this task changed along development, in contrast to what happened with the semantic fluency. The findings seem to be in accordance to neurodevelopmental aspects, taken into account that explicit memory systems show more precocious maturational course, with earlier consolidation, in comparison to the executive functions and frontal lobes, which go on developing until adult ages.

Is semantic verbal fluency impairment explained by executive function deficits in schizophrenia?

Objective:To investigate if verbal fluency impairment in schizophrenia reflects executive function deficits or results from degraded semantic store or inefficient search and retrieval strategies.Method:Two groups were compared: 141 individuals with schizophrenia and 119 healthy age and education-matched controls. Both groups performed semantic and phonetic verbal fluency tasks. Performance was evaluated using three scores, based on 1) number of words generated; 2) number of clustered/related words; and 3) switching score. A fourth performance score based on the number of clusters was also measured.Results:Individuals with schizophrenia produced fewer words than controls. After controlling for the total number of words produced, a difference was observed between the groups in the number of cluster-related words generated in the semantic task. In both groups, the number of words generated in the semantic task was higher than that generated in the phonemic task, although a significant group vs. fluency type interaction showed that subjects with schizophrenia had disproportionate semantic fluency impairment. Working memory was positively associated with increased production of words within clusters and inversely correlated with switching.Conclusion:Semantic fluency impairment may be attributed to an inability (resulting from reduced cognitive control) to distinguish target signal from competing noise and to maintain cues for production of memory probes.

Lexical processing depends on sublexical processing: Evidence from the visual world paradigm with aphasia

Lexical processing depends on sublexical processing: Evidence from the visual world paradigm with aphasia

Memória de curto prazo fonológica e consciência fonológica em escolares do Ensino Fundamental

To characterize and compare the performance of students at the beginning and at the end of the elementary school in Short-Term Phonological Memory (STPM) and Phonological Awareness (PA). We assessed 80 students of both the genders who showed adequate linguistic and academic performance. The sample comprised 40 students in 1st grade and 40 in 5th grade from a public state school with mean age of 6.2 and 9.8 years, respectively. The STPM was assessed using a standardized test of Pseudoword Repetition. PA was assessed through a Sequential Assessment Test (CONFIAS). No difference was found between the students of 1st and 5th years in STPM both in total score and concerning the similarity of the pseudowords. Regarding PA, there was a significant difference among the percentage distribution of correct answers in syllabic and phonemic tasks, and the students from 5th grade presented better performance. At the beginning and at the end of the elementary school, there is no difference in STPM performance. On the other hand, there is difference in PA, which highlights the influence of schooling on PA development. The correlation between STPM and PA only in 5th-year students suggests that, at the beginning of literacy, STPM cannot be considered as a predictor to children's performance in PA. Nevertheless, as the schooling advances, there is influence of PA on STPM.

Abnormal Brain Dynamics Underlie Speech Production in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

A large proportion of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have speech and/or language difficulties. While a number of structural and functional neuroimaging methods have been used to explore the brain differences in ASD with regards to speech and language comprehension and production, the neurobiology of basic speech function in ASD has not been examined. Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a neuroimaging modality with high spatial and temporal resolution that can be applied to the examination of brain dynamics underlying speech as it can capture the fast responses fundamental to this function. We acquired MEG from 21 children with high‐functioning autism (mean age: 11.43 years) and 21 age‐ and sex‐matched controls as they performed a simple oromotor task, a phoneme production task and a phonemic sequencing task. Results showed significant differences in activation magnitude and peak latencies in primary motor cortex (Brodmann Area 4), motor planning areas (BA 6), temporal sequencing and sensorimotor integration areas (BA 22/13) and executive control areas (BA 9). Our findings of significant functional brain differences between these two groups on these simple oromotor and phonemic tasks suggest that these deficits may be foundational and could underlie the language deficits seen in ASD. Autism Res 2016, 9: 249–261. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Advanced acoustic modelling techniques in MP3 speech recognition

The automatic recognition of MP3 compressed speech presents a challenge to the current systems due to the lossy nature of compression which causes irreversible degradation of the speech wave. This article evaluates the performance of a recognition system optimized for MP3 compressed speech with current state-of-the-art acoustic modelling techniques and one specific front-end compensation method. The article concentrates on acoustic model adaptation, discriminative training, and additional dithering as prominent means of compensating for the described distortion in the task of phoneme and large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR). The experiments presented on the phoneme task show a dramatic increase of the recognition error for unvoiced speech units as a direct result of compression. The application of acoustic model adaptation has proved to yield the highest relative contribution while the gain of discriminative training diminished with decreasing bit-rate. The application of additional dithering yielded a consistent improvement only for the MFCC features, but the overall results were still worse than those for the PLP features.

The Effects of Phonological Awareness Training on the Reading Performance by Child EFL Learners in China

AbstractThe present study explores the effects of phonological awareness training of child EFL learners in China on their reading performances. Eighty grade one Chinese children from two intact primary school classes participated in the study. The treatment class received a 10-week English phonological awareness training, while the contrast class did not receive any training. Both pre-test and post-test were administered to all participants, including English assessment, phonological awareness measures and English reading measures. The results show that the treatment class outperformed the contrast class in the post-test in reading measures and phonological awareness measures; phonological awareness positively correlated with children’s early reading performance; phoneme tasks were strong predictors of Child EFL learners’ early reading performance.

The Absoluteness of Semantic Processing: Lessons from the Analysis of Temporal Clusters in Phonemic Verbal Fluency

BackgroundFor word production, we may consciously pursue semantic or phonological search strategies, but it is uncertain whether we can retrieve the different aspects of lexical information independently from each other. We therefore studied the spread of semantic information into words produced under exclusively phonemic task demands.Methods42 subjects participated in a letter verbal fluency task, demanding the production of as many s-words as possible in two minutes. Based on curve fittings for the time courses of word production, output spurts (temporal clusters) considered to reflect rapid lexical retrieval based on automatic activation spread, were identified. Semantic and phonemic word relatedness within versus between these clusters was assessed by respective scores (0 meaning no relation, 4 maximum relation).ResultsSubjects produced 27.5 (±9.4) words belonging to 6.7 (±2.4) clusters. Both phonemically and semantically words were more related within clusters than between clusters (phon: 0.33±0.22 vs. 0.19±0.17, p<.01; sem: 0.65±0.29 vs. 0.37±0.29, p<.01). Whereas the extent of phonemic relatedness correlated with high task performance, the contrary was the case for the extent of semantic relatedness.ConclusionThe results indicate that semantic information spread occurs, even if the consciously pursued word search strategy is purely phonological. This, together with the negative correlation between semantic relatedness and verbal output suits the idea of a semantic default mode of lexical search, acting against rapid task performance in the given scenario of phonemic verbal fluency. The simultaneity of enhanced semantic and phonemic word relatedness within the same temporal cluster boundaries suggests an interaction between content and sound-related information whenever a new semantic field has been opened.

P593: fNIRS evaluation during a phonemic verbal task reveals prefrontal hypometabolism in patients affected by myotonic dystrophy type 1

P593: fNIRS evaluation during a phonemic verbal task reveals prefrontal hypometabolism in patients affected by myotonic dystrophy type 1

Component analysis of verbal fluency performance in younger participants with moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury

Primary objective: To investigate phonemic and semantic verbal fluency performance in a group of young adult participants with and without traumatic brain injury.Research design: Group comparison.Methods and procedures: Twenty-five participants with moderate-to-severe TBI and 25 participants with no brain damage (NBD) were given phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks. Responses were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively.Main outcomes and results: Young participants with moderate-to-severe TBI generated significantly fewer total correct words and sub-categories for both fluency conditions when compared to controls. The total number of correct words generated on the phonemic condition and for the semantic category of animals was positively correlated with the number of category switches produced during the task.Conclusions: While young participants with moderate-to-severe TBI produced fewer total correct words on both verbal fluency conditions in comparison to controls, these differences were greater on the phonemic condition. Participants with moderate-to-severe TBI switched less frequently on both fluency tasks and produced smaller cluster sizes only on the phonemic task in comparison to controls. These results are in contrast with previous investigations that have observed greater age-related declines on semantic tasks when compared to phonemic tasks.

Unconstrained, phonemic and semantic verbal fluency: age and education effects, norms and discrepancies

OBJECTIVE: To present performance norms and discrepancy score of three one-minute verbal fluency tasks (VFTs); to investigate age and education effects; to analyze the differences between time intervals; and to investigate whether these differences varied according to age and education. METHOD: Three hundred adults divided into three age groups (19-39; 40-59; 60-75) and two groups of educational level (2 to 7 years; 8 years or more) performed unconstrained, semantic, and phonemic VFTs. We compared the performance of the groups using two-way ANOVA with post-hoc Bonferroni test. The depression scale score was covariate. The time interval of verbal fluency was the variable used for subjects' comparison (repeated measures ANOVA). RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that there are age and education effects on phonemic and unconstrained VFTs. We also found an interaction between those variables in the semantic VFT (time intervals and total time) and in the differences between semantic and phonemic tasks. The repeated measures analysis revealed age effects on semantic VFTs and education effects on the phonemic and semantic VFTs. Such findings are relevant for clinical neuropsychology, contributing to avoid false-positive or false-negative interpretation.

Behavioral evidence of a dissociation between voice gender categorization and phoneme categorization using auditory morphed stimuli.

Both voice gender perception and speech perception rely on neuronal populations located in the peri-sylvian areas. However, whilst functional imaging studies suggest a left vs. right hemisphere and anterior vs. posterior dissociation between voice and speech categorization, psycholinguistic studies on talker variability suggest that these two processes share common mechanisms. In this study, we investigated the categorical perception of voice gender (male vs. female) and phonemes (/pa/ vs. /ta/) using the same stimulus continua generated by morphing. This allowed the investigation of behavioral differences while controlling acoustic characteristics, since the same stimuli were used in both tasks. Despite a higher acoustic dissimilarity between items during the phoneme categorization task (a male and female voice producing the same phonemes) than the gender task (the same person producing 2 phonemes), results showed that speech information is being processed much faster than voice information. In addition, f0 or timbre equalization did not affect RT, which disagrees with the classical psycholinguistic models in which voice information is stripped away or normalized to access phonetic content. Also, despite similar average response (percentages) and perceptual (d') curves, a reverse correlation analysis on acoustic features revealed that only the vowel formant frequencies distinguish stimuli in the gender task, whilst, as expected, the formant frequencies of the consonant distinguished stimuli in the phoneme task. The 2nd set of results thus also disagrees with models postulating that the same acoustic information is used for voice and speech. Altogether these results suggest that voice gender categorization and phoneme categorization are dissociated at an early stage on the basis of different enhanced acoustic features that are diagnostic to the task at hand.

Association between top-down skills and auditory processing tests

Today, we are questioning how top-down skills may interfere with performance on auditory processing tests. ObjectiveTo investigate the existence of a possible association between memory, attention and language skills in auditory processing tests in “normal” development children. MethodTwenty children (ages 7 to 9 years), without complaints related to verbal and/or written language skills; without overt neurological or psychological involvement or delayed psychomotor development. We employed Hearing and auditory Processing Assessment tests in addition to psychophysical tests (visual and auditory attention tests; memory tests for digits and syllables and phonological awareness tests). Resultsthere was a “very strong” correlation between Frequency Pattern and Memory for Digits Tests; a “strong” correlations between SSW (LE) test and Memory for Syllables, and SSW (LE) test and phonemic tasks. Conclusionthe Frequency Pattern Test showed a strong correlation with the phonological working memory skill; just as the SSW had with language and memory skills for syllables. It is noteworthy the difficult to clinically interpret the results of each auditory processing test alone, since these may be dependent on skills not necessarily related to the auditory modality, such as memory and language.

Phonemic Awareness Contributes to Text Reading Fluency: Evidence From Eye Movements

.Although phonemic awareness is a known predictor of early decoding and word recognition, less is known about relationships between phonemic awareness and text reading fluency. This longitudinal study is the first to investigate this relationship by measuring eye movements during picture matching tasks and during silent sentence reading. Time spent looking at the correct target during phonemic awareness and receptive spelling tasks gauged the efficiency of phonological and orthographic processes. Children's eye movements during sentence reading provided a direct measure of silent reading fluency for comprehended text. Results indicate that children who processed the phonemic awareness targets more slowly in Grade 2 tended to be slower readers in Grade 3. Processing difficulty during a receptive spelling task was related to reading fluency within Grade 2. Findings suggest that inefficient phonemic processing contributes to poor silent reading fluency after second grade.

Effect of aging, education, reading and writing, semantic processing and depression symptoms on verbal fluency

Verbal fluency tasks are widely used in (clinical) neuropsychology to evaluate components of executive functioning and lexical-semantic processing (linguistic and semantic memory). Performance in those tasks may be affected by several variables, such as age, education and diseases. This study investigated whether aging, education, reading and writing frequency, performance in semantic judgment tasks and depression symptoms predict the performance in unconstrained, phonemic and semantic fluency tasks. This study sample comprised 260 healthy adults aged 19 to 75 years old. The Pearson correlation coefficient and multiple regression models were used for data analysis. The variables under analysis were associated in different ways and had different levels of contribution according to the type of verbal fluency task. Education had the greatest effect on verbal fluency tasks. There was a greater effect of age on semantic fluency than on phonemic tasks. The semantic judgment tasks predicted the verbal fluency performance alone or in combination with other variables. These findings corroborate the importance of education in cognition supporting the hypothesis of a cognitive reserve and confirming the contribution of lexical-semantic processing to verbal fluency.

The relationship between motor symptom lateralization and cognitive performance in newly diagnosed drug-naïve patients with Parkinson's disease

The side of motor symptom predominance may influence cognitive performance in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD): PD patients with right-side motor symptom predominance typically present difficulties in tasks of language and verbal memory, whereas PD patients with left-side motor symptom predominance typically present difficulties in visuospatial tasks. The current study aimed at investigating the relationship between motor symptom lateralization and cognitive performance in PD patients without the possible confounding effect of dopaminergic drugs, which may enhance or impair cognition on the basis of assessed function and disease stage. From the initial sample of 137 consecutive newly diagnosed drug-naïve (de novo) PD patients, clinical follow-ups and neurological examinations identified 108 right-handed patients with a unilateral motor presentation or a clear motor asymmetry (59 right-PD: 54.6%; 49 left-PD: 45.4%). Any cognitive difference emerged between right-PD patients and left-PD patients at this disease stage. Scores of lateralized motor impairment severity correlated with some cognitive performances: Right motor impairment correlated with a measure of set shifting (Trail Making Test B–A), and left motor impairment correlated with phonemic fluency and tasks with visuospatial material (Colored Progressive Matrices of Raven, Rey–Osterrieth Complex Figure Copy and Immediate Recall). Findings of the current study supported the conclusion that the side of clinical motor predominance scarcely influences cognition in the early untreated stages of PD, suggesting that cognitive differences between subgroups of lateralized PD patients probably may appear in more advanced disease stages.