Single-word Tasks Research Articles

Cross-Language Transfer and Attentional Control in Early Bilingual Speech.

This study investigated the roles of cross-language transfer of first language (L1) and attentional control in second-language (L2) speech perception and production of sequential bilinguals, taking phonological overlap into account. Twenty-five monolingual Dutch-speaking and 25 sequential bilingual Turkish-Dutch-speaking 3- and 4-year-olds were tested using picture identification tasks for speech perception in L1 Turkish and L2 Dutch, single-word tasks for speech production in L1 and L2, and a visual search task for attentional control. Phonological overlap was manipulated by dividing the speech tasks into subsets of phonemes that were either shared or unshared between languages. In Dutch speech perception and production, monolingual children obtained higher accuracies than bilingual peers. Bilinguals showed equal performance in L1 and L2 perception but scored higher on L1 than on L2 production. For speech perception of shared phonemes, linear regression analyses revealed no direct effects of attention and L1 on L2. For speech production of shared phonemes, attention and L1 directly affected L2. When exploring unshared phonemes, direct effects of attentional control on L2 were demonstrated not only for speech production but also for speech perception. The roles of attentional control and cross-language transfer on L2 speech are different for shared and unshared phonemes. Whereas L2 speech production of shared phonemes is also supported by cross-language transfer of L1, L2 speech perception and production of unshared phonemes benefit from attentional control only. This underscores the clinical importance of considering phonological overlap and supporting attentional control when assisting young sequential bilinguals' L2 development.

Language changes in Alzheimer’s disease: A systematic review of verb processing

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) results in language impairments and higher-level communication problems. Research into the language of people with AD (pwAD) has mainly focused on nouns; however, improved understanding of verb processing by pwAD could improve diagnostic assessments and communicative interventions. This systematic review synthesizes findings of AD’s effects on verbs from single-word, sentence, and discourse tasks. Review of 57 studies revealed that pwAD were less accurate than controls on single-word tasks and less accurate with verbs than nouns on these tasks. They had difficulty comprehending sentences featuring multiple verbs or verbs with reversible thematic roles. Discourse production by pwAD was marked by vagueness, including declines in total output and propositional content and a preference for generic verbs and simple syntax. Few studies examining sentence production or discourse comprehension were found. Future research should address relationships between long-term memory and language preservation as well as verb use in discourse.

Behind the therapy door: what is “usual care” aphasia therapy in acute stroke management?

ABSTRACT Background: Usual care is the term used to describe everyday practice in the management of a client within a profession. The knowledge of the tasks used in therapy and key therapeutic processes used within these treatments, provides critical information about if and how the therapy works. The Very Early Rehabilitation in SpEech Randomised Controlled Trial (VERSE RCT) had three arms with therapists within the intensive Usual Care-Plus arm (UC-Plus) providing daily direct aphasia therapy at their discretion for 20 sessions. Aims: To describe usual care aphasia treatment provided in the Usual Care-Plus arm of VERSE RCT. Methods and Procedures: One in four intensive Usual Care-Plus treatment sessions were video-recorded (N = 187) within the main trial. Twenty-five of these (13%) were transcribed, coded, and analysed for therapeutic inputs to describe usual care aphasia therapy using the Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) checklist as an overriding framework. Outcomes and Results: Therapy predominantly took place in an inpatient setting (52%) with an average session duration of 51 minutes (SD 7.8). Across the sessions, 96 different tasks were used and 57% of these focused on verbal expression at the single word level. Visual materials were most frequently used compared to the use of technology during sessions. Therapists (n = 16) did the majority of the talking during sessions and most frequently provided models as cues or problem-solving accuracy feedback. Models (55%), sentence completion (51%), and orthographic cues (44%) were the most successful at eliciting the target response. Conclusions: Considerable variability in task selection was seen in the sample which may be a hallmark of usual care. Therapists may have a preference for single word tasks and appear to produce the majority of verbal utterances during sessions, potentially creating an unequal communication environment. This study provided a comprehensive description from the Usual Care-Plus data of the VERSE RCT and may establish a baseline of therapy type for future research.

Verb argument structure effects in aphasia are different at single-word versus sentence level

ABSTRACTBackground: Many aphasia assessments and therapies select and/or sequence verbs based on linguistic complexity of their verb argument structure (VAS). However, further empirical testing is needed to fully understand whether and how VAS parameters affect the cognitive difficulty of verb processing in different tasks and contexts.Aims: The study investigated whether more linguistically complex VAS universally implies more cognitively difficult verb processing, as predicted by the Argument Structure Complexity Hypothesis. We hypothesized that this would only be the case at sentence level, whereas in single-word tasks more linguistically complex VAS would facilitate lexical access via lexico-semantic associations with potential arguments, contrary to the Argument Structure Complexity Hypothesis.Methods and Procedures: The effects of three VAS parameters (number of arguments, number of valency frames, canonicity of thematic role marking) were tested in two tasks (single-word naming and cued sentence production) in two aphasia types (fluent and non-fluent, 20 participants per group). We analyzed how VAS parameters affected accuracy and latency in naming and canonicity and well-formedness in sentence production.Outcomes and Results: As hypothesized, VAS effects were different at the sentence versus single-word level. In sentence production, one VAS parameter (the number of arguments) showed the expected negative effect of greater linguistic complexity on sentence canonicity. No other comparisons were significant, likely due to ceiling effects. In contrast, in single-word naming, VAS effects were mixed. The number of valency frames showed the predicted facilitatory effect of linguistic complexity. The number of arguments showed a non-significant statistical trend in the same direction. For canonicity of thematic role marking, greater complexity had a negative effect on naming, possibly because it does not affect the number of lexico-semantic associates of the verb. All findings pertained to both non-fluent and fluent aphasia.Conclusions: When accounting for VAS parameters in selection or sequencing of verbs for assessment or therapy, the cognitive difficulty of verb processing should be estimated for a particular task. In sentence-level grammatical processing, most cognitively difficult verbs are those with more linguistically complex VAS. In contrast, in single verb retrieval, verbs with more linguistically complex VAS may be cognitively simpler if their richer lexico-semantic associations with potential arguments provide extra routes of lexical access.

Modifying the severity of Jargon aphasia using inter-stimulus manipulations

Modifying the severity of Jargon aphasia using inter-stimulus manipulations

Dissociating word frequency and predictability effects in reading: Evidence from coregistration of eye movements and EEG.

Two very reliable influences on eye fixation durations in reading are word frequency, as measured by corpus counts, and word predictability, as measured by cloze norming. Several studies have reported strictly additive effects of these 2 variables. Predictability also reliably influences the amplitude of the N400 component in event-related potential studies. However, previous research suggests that while frequency affects the N400 in single-word tasks, it may have little or no effect on the N400 when a word is presented with a preceding sentence context. The present study assessed this apparent dissociation between the results from the 2 methods using a coregistration paradigm in which the frequency and predictability of a target word were manipulated while readers' eye movements and electroencephalograms were simultaneously recorded. We replicated the pattern of significant, and additive, effects of the 2 manipulations on eye fixation durations. We also replicated the predictability effect on the N400, time-locked to the onset of the reader's first fixation on the target word. However, there was no indication of a frequency effect in the electroencephalogram record. We suggest that this pattern has implications both for the interpretation of the N400 and for the interpretation of frequency and predictability effects in language comprehension.

‘All the better for not seeing you’: Effects of communicative context on the speech of an individual with acquired communication difficulties

Evidence shows that speakers adjust their speech depending on the demands of the listener. However, it is unclear whether people with acquired communication disorders can and do make similar adaptations. This study investigated the impact of different conversational settings on the intelligibility of a speaker with acquired communication difficulties. Twenty-eight assessors listened to recordings of the speaker reading aloud 40 words and 32 sentences to a listener who was either face-to-face or unseen. The speaker's ability to convey information was measured by the accuracy of assessors’ orthographic transcriptions of the words and sentences. Assessors’ scores were significantly higher in the unseen condition for the single word task particularly if they had heard the face-to-face condition first. Scores for the sentence task were significantly higher in the second presentation regardless of the condition. The results from this study suggest that therapy conducted in situations where the client is not able to see their conversation partner may encourage them to perform at a higher level and increase the clarity of their speech.Learning outcomes: Readers will be able to describe: (1) the range of conversational adjustments made by speakers without communication difficulties; (2) differences between these tasks in offering contextual information to the listener; and (3) the potential for using challenging communicative situations to improve the performance of adults with communication disorders.

Speech characteristics of 8-year-old children: Findings from a prospective population study

Speech disorder that continues into middle childhood is rarely studied compared with speech disorder in the early years. Speech production in single words, connected speech and nonword repetition was assessed for 7390 eight-year-old children within the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). The majority (n=6399) had typical speech and 50 of these children served as controls. The remainder were categorised as using common clinical distortions only (CCD, n=582) or speech difficulties (SDiff, n=409). The samples from the CCD children were not analysed further. Speech samples from the SDiff and the control children were transcribed and analysed in terms of percentage consonants correct, error type and syllable structure. Findings were compared with those from children in the Shriberg et al. (1997) lifespan database (n=25). The 8-year-old children from ALSPAC in the SDiff and control groups achieved similar speech accuracy scores to the 8-year-old children in the lifespan database. The SDiff group had consistently lower scores than the ALSPAC control group, with the following measures most clearly differentiating the groups: single word task (percentage of substitutions and distortions), connected speech task (percentage of vowels correct (PVC), percentage of omission of singletons and entire clusters, and stress pattern matches), nonword repetition task (PVC, percentage of entire clusters omitted, percentage of distortions, and percentage of stress pattern matches). Connected speech and nonword samples provide useful supplementary data for identifying older children with atypical speech.Learning outcomes: The reader will recognize the methods used to identify speech characteristics in a large scale population study. They will describe how measures of speech accuracy in connected speech compare with the Shriberg et al. (1997) lifespan database. The reader will also recall information on how typically and atypically developing children differ on a range of measures across different types of speech sample.

The distribution of fixation durations during reading: Effects of stimulus quality.

Participants' eye movements were recorded as they read single sentences presented normally, presented entirely in faint text, or presented normally except for a single faint word. Fixations were longer when the entire sentence was faint than when the sentence was presented normally. In addition, fixations were much longer on a single faint word embedded in normal text, compared to when the entire sentence was faint. The primary aim of the study was to examine the influence of stimulus quality on the distribution of fixation durations. Ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that stimulus quality affected the mean of the Normal component, but in contrast to results from single-word tasks (Plourde & Besner, 1997), stimulus quality did not affect the exponential component, regardless of whether one or all words were faint. The results also contrast with the finding (Staub, White, Drieghe, Hollway, & Rayner, 2010) that the word frequency effect on fixation durations is an effect on both of the critical distributional parameters. These findings are argued to have implications for the interpretation of the role of stimulus quality in word recognition, and for models of eye movement control in reading.

Early strategies of elementary school children’s single word reading

According to the Overlapping Waves Model, children’s strategy use in performing academic skills is variable and adaptive and changes gradually with age and experience. In the context of children’s numerical and arithmetical development, several findings confirm the assumptions of the model. In this study, elementary school children in 2 nd ( n = 30) and 4 th ( n = 28) grade, with comparable IQ and reading achievement scores were confronted with different single word tasks (common and uncommon words, word-similar and -dissimilar pseudowords) to trigger different reading strategies. Strategy behavior was identified by video analysis and children’s self-report. The analyses of the data confirm the validity of the Overlapping Waves Model in the context of single word reading. Children in both grades showed variable and multiple usage of strategies and reacted adaptively when reading words of the different categories. Moreover, older children used more elaborated strategies and were more efficient in their strategy choice.

Requests for clarification and children's speech responses: Changing `pasghetti' to `spaghetti'

One way children improve their pronunciation of monosyllabic words is via clarification requests, specifically, the adult saying an incorrect production that differs from the child's incorrect production (Weiner and Ostrowski, 1979). The aim of this study was to investigate children's responses to clarification requests when producing polysyllabic words (three or more syllables). Six typically developing children, aged 4;1 to 4;9 years, produced polysyllabic words during both a single word task and in conversational speech. When participants produced polysyllabic words incorrectly, a predetermined clarification request was used. Following this request, participants improved in their production of polysyllabic words, suggesting that clarification requests may have therapeutic applications.

Ear selection and pediatric cochlear implants: A preliminary examination of speech production outcomes

The goal of the current study was to examine whether ear selection (left versus right) for cochlear implantation results in significant differences in speech production outcomes. Ten children with right-ear implants were compared to five children with left-ear implants on intelligibility of speech produced in single words, sentences, and conversation as well as on accuracy of speech sounds produced during administration of a single word articulation test and in conversational speech. The children with right-ear implants performed significantly better than those with left-ear implants but only on the single word tasks. No significant differences were observed at the sentence or conversational speech levels. Findings are discussed relative to the possibility that the obtained ear of implantation differences (if real) may disappear over time. Such a conclusion is quite tentative however given the small sample size in the current study. Such a limitation may also explain why no differences were obtained for the connected speech measures. Further study of ear selection outcomes is clearly indicated.

Revisiting speech rate and utterance length manipulations in stuttering speakers

The goal of this study was to evaluate stuttering frequency across a multidimensional (2 × 2) hierarchy of speech performance tasks. Specifically, this study examined the interaction between changes in length of utterance and levels of speech rate stability. Forty-four adult male speakers participated in the study (22 stuttering speakers and 22 non-stuttering speakers). Participants were audio and video recorded while producing a spontaneous speech task and four different experimental speaking tasks. The four experimental speaking tasks involved reading a list of 45 words and a list 45 phrases two times each. One reading of each list involved speaking at a steady habitual rate (habitual rate tasks) and another reading involved producing each list at a variable speaking rate (variable rate tasks). For the variable rate tasks, participants were directed to produce words or phrases at randomly ordered slow, habitual, and fast rates. The stuttering speakers exhibited significantly more stuttering on the variable rate tasks than on the habitual rate tasks. In addition, the stuttering speakers exhibited significantly more stuttering on the first word of the phrase length tasks compared to the single word tasks. Overall, the results indicated that varying levels of both utterance length and temporal complexity function to modulate stuttering frequency in adult stuttering speakers. Discussion focuses on issues of speech performance according to stuttering severity and possible clinical implications. Learning outcomes: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) describe the mediating effects of length of utterance and speech rate on the frequency of stuttering in stuttering speakers; (2) understand the rationale behind multidimensional skill performance matrices; and (3) describe possible applications of motor skill performance matrices to stuttering therapy.

Interpretable vs. uninterpretable features: Evidence from six Greek-speaking agrammatic patients

The aim of the present study is to examine the validity of the tree-pruning hypothesis (TPH) put forward by [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: Pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397–425]. The TPH accounts for the deficits agrammatic Broca's aphasic have in relation to verb inflections in syntactic terms and postulates that such patients cannot construct syntactic trees higher than an impaired node, the pruning site, while nodes located lower remain intact. This paper reports the performance of six Greek-speaking agrammatic patients. The experiments investigated the patients' ability to produce tense, agreement and aspect in single word and sentential tasks and their ability to judge the grammaticality of the same inflectional markers within sentences. In single word tasks the patients were impaired in all inflectional markers to a similar degree, while in sentential tasks, both in production and in grammaticality judgment, aspect and tense were more impaired than agreement. The results are similar to those in [Friedmann, N., & Grodzinsky, Y. (1997). Tense and agreement in agrammatic production: pruning the syntactic tree. Brain and Language, 56, 397–425]. However, in the syntactic clause in Greek, agreement is thought to be located higher than tense and aspect, and aspect is located lower than tense. These results, therefore, do not support predictions of the TPH insofar as tense and aspect that are lower in the syntactic tree were found to be more impaired than agreement. Instead, the results are interpreted within recent formulations of minimalism that distinguish between interpretable (tense and aspect) and uninterpretable (agreement) features and the morphophonological evaluation operations associated with them.

A Comparison of Single Words and Conversational Speech in Phonological Evaluation

The purpose of the current study was to compare conversational speech samples with single-word samples that were partially tailored to the participants' individual phonological profiles, using aspects of nonlinear phonological frameworks as a basis for evaluation. There were 20 participants in the study, ranging in age from 3;0 to 10;5 (years;months). The Computerized Articulation and Phonology Evaluation System (J. J. Masterson & B. Bernhardt, 2001) was used to elicit single-word productions. Both group and individual comparisons indicated very few differences in accuracy or treatment ramifications. The time required to elicit and transcribe the conversational samples was typically 3 times greater than the time required for the single-word task. The single-word task elicited more of the English-language targets. The results of this study suggest that a single-word task tailored to some extent to the client's phonological system gives sufficient and representative information for phonological evaluation. A brief conversational sample remains useful for examining prosody, intelligibility, and other aspects of language, and as a check on the representativeness of the single-word sample.

When is Gender Accessed? a Study of Paraphasias in Hebrew Anomia

This study explored access to grammatical gender during naming in Hebrew. Studies of anomia and tip-of-the-tongue states (TOT) found that speakers of various languages (Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch) have information about the grammatical gender of words they fail to retrieve. In Hebrew, on the other hand, a TOT study found that Hebrew speakers could not provide gender information. To test access to gender in single words in Hebrew we used an implicit measure — the analysis of paraphasias of anomic patients with respect to whether or not they preserved the grammatical gender of the target word. The rationale behind this measure was that when a paraphasia is created, it generally conforms to the partial knowledge the speaker has on the target word. If speakers have gender knowledge when they fail to name, they should produce paraphasias that match their partial information, and thus match the gender of the target. Such gender preservation in paraphasias was found in German for individuals with anomia, and in Arabic, French and German for slips of the tongue. Participants were 22 Hebrew-speaking aphasic patients with phonological, semantic or conceptual anomia, who produced 532 paraphasias. None of the participants showed gender preservation in their paraphasias. Even phonological anomics, who have access to semantic information, did not preserve grammatical gender in a single-word naming task. We suggest that this difference between Hebrew and previously studied languages relates to the fact that in Hebrew bare nouns are allowed, and therefore gender is not accessed in single-word naming, whereas in languages in which a noun should be produced as a full NP (with a determiner or case-marking for example) gender has to be accessed even in single-word tasks. We propose a hypothesis according to which gender is accessed if and only if the noun is incorporated into a syntactic tree (or a chunk of a tree) that includes an agreement phrase.

Learning to divide the labor: an account of deficits in light and heavy verb production

Theories of sentence production that involve a convergence of activation from conceptual-semantic and syntactic-sequential units inspired a connectionist model that was trained to produce simple sentences. The model used a learning algorithm that resulted in a sharing of responsibility (or “division of labor”) between syntactic and semantic inputs for lexical activation according to their predictive power. Semantically rich, or “heavy”, verbs in the model came to rely on semantic cues more than on syntactic cues, whereas semantically impoverished, or “light”, verbs relied more on syntactic cues. When the syntactic and semantic inputs were lesioned, the model exhibited patterns of production characteristic of agrammatic and anomic aphasic patients, respectively. Anomic models tended to lose the ability to retrieve heavy verbs, whereas agrammatic models were more impaired in retrieving light verbs. These results obtained in both sentence production and single-word naming simulations. Moreover, simulated agrammatic lexical retrieval was more impaired overall in sentences than in single-word tasks, in agreement with the literature. The results provide a demonstration of the division-of-labor principle, as well as general support for the claim that connectionist learning principles can contribute to the understanding of non-transparent neuropsychological dissociations.

Verbs and nouns: the importance of being imageable

There are many differences between verbs and nouns—semantic, syntactic and phonological. We focus on the semantic distinctions and examine differences in performance in both normal control subjects and individuals with aphasia. In tasks requiring production of particular semantic categories and categorisation of given verbs and nouns, control subjects produced fewer verbs than nouns and were slower and less accurate in verb categorisation. Patients who had shown a verb deficit in naming also had particular difficulties producing both verbs and nouns of relatively low imageability. In reading and writing, some patients exhibited poorer performance with verbs than nouns, even when verb/noun homonyms were used. When imageability was controlled, however, no dissociation was shown. We conclude that in simple single word tasks imageability must be controlled to eliminate this as a factor in apparent verb deficits. Other semantic factors, however, could affect performance, particularly when tasks involve the relationships between category exemplars.

Receptive and expressive language activations for sentences: a PET study.

Most language mapping studies have focussed on activations for single-word tasks. We examined activations for verbal auditory and generation tasks using sentence stimuli. [15O]-water PET was performed in 4 female and 5 male normal adults. Listening to sentences (minus rest) activated the superior and middle temporal gyri bilaterally, but mean activation was significantly stronger on the left. The strongest activation for sentence generation (minus repetition) was seen in the left middle and inferior frontal gyri (area 46). This focus appears to be anterior to activations reported for single-word generation, possibly due to greater verbal working memory demands of the sentential task. Additional activation of the left inferior temporal lobe can be attributed to lexicosemantic processing.

The development of word‐coding skills in the born deaf: An experimental study of deaf school‐leavers

Single word spelling for picture names and lexical decision were examined systematically in a group of born‐deaf English school‐leavers with a reading age of between 9 and 10 years. The deaf were better at these word‐coding skills than their reading‐age matched peers. Like them they showed systematic effects of word regularity (phonological and orthographic) in their single word spellings. In lexical decision the deaf were as fast and as accurate as chronological controls and showed similar patterns of sensitivity to spelling regularity.While both the younger and older hearing control groups showed a consistent pattern of performance across the spelling and reading tasks, with regularity effects marked in the younger and less marked in the older group, the deaf by comparison showed somewhat disjoint patterns of reading and spelling processes. This is discussed in the context of variable patterns of word reading and spelling development in hearing children.Word reading and writing is better in these deaf students than is predicted by their standardized text comprehension scores. It is suggested that in the born‐deaf, word‐coding skills are isolated with respect to other language skills; they have not become contextualized. Moreover, the pattern of performance on these single word tasks suggests that the development of such lower level literacy skills is still incomplete.