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Bencie Woll

Publications and source records attributed to Bencie Woll.

18 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Lexical and sentential processing in British Sign Language.

Studies of spoken and written language suggest that the perception of sentences engages the left anterior and posterior temporal cortex and the left inferior frontal gyrus to a greater extent than non-sententially structured material, such as word lists. This study sought to determine whether the same is true when the language is gestural and perceived visually. Regional neural activity was measured using functional MRI while Deaf and hearing native signers of British Sign Language (BSL) detected semantic anomalies in well-formed BSL sentences and when they detected nonsense signs in lists of unconnected BSL signs. Processing BSL sentences, when contrasted with signed lists, was reliably associated with greater activation in the posterior portions of the left middle and superior temporal gyri and in the left inferior frontal cortex, but not in the anterior temporal cortex, which was activated to a similar extent whether lists or sentences were processed. Further support for the specificity of these areas for processing the linguistic-rather than visuospatial-features of signed sentences came from a contrast of hearing native signers and hearing sign-naïve participants. Hearing signers recruited the left posterior temporal and inferior frontal regions during BSL sentence processing to a greater extent than hearing non-signers. These data suggest that these left perisylvian regions are differentially associated with sentence processing, whatever the modality of the linguistic input.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Moving ahead in language: observations on a report of precocious language development in 3-4 year old children with spinal muscular atrophy type II.

Benony and Benony in a recent issue of this Journal have presented new data on the precocity of language acquisition in children with type II spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), at age 36-47 months. They refer to our interim report of advanced early language development in these motor-impaired children, which covers the age period 18-35 months. Here, we provide more details of our findings and discuss them in relation to their report and our theory of the role of the procedural system in language learning.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2005

Language and imagery: effects of language modality.

Across spoken languages, properties of wordforms (e.g. the sounds in the word hammer) do not generally evoke mental images associated to meanings. However, across signed languages, many signforms readily evoke mental images (e.g. the sign HAMMER resembles the motion involved in hammering). Here we assess the relationship between language and imagery, comparing the performance of English speakers and British sign language (BSL) signers in meaning similarity judgement tasks. In experiment 1, we found that BSL signers used these imagistic properties in making meaning similarity judgements, in contrast with English speakers. In experiment 2, we found that English speakers behaved more like BSL signers when asked to develop mental images for the words before performing the same task. These findings show that language differences can bias users to attend more to those aspects of the world encoded in their language than to those that are not; and that language modality (spoken versus signed) can affect the degree to which imagery is involved in language.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Testing comprehension abilities in users of British Sign Language following CVA.

Recent imaging (e.g., MacSweeney et al., 2002) and lesion (Hickok, Love-Geffen, & Klima, 2002) studies suggest that sign language comprehension depends primarily on left hemisphere structures. However, this may not be true of all aspects of comprehension. For example, there is evidence that the processing of topographic space in sign may be vulnerable to right hemisphere damage (e.g., Hickok, Say, Bellugi, & Klima, 1996), and the influence of iconicity on comprehension has yet to be explored. In this study, comprehension testing was conducted with 15 signers with unilateral brain damage, and with elderly Deaf controls. Four tests were administered: a test of iconic and non-iconic noun comprehension, a test of verb and sentence comprehension, a test of locative sentence comprehension, and a test of classifier comprehension. All tests were administered in British Sign Language (BSL), a language that has only recently been explored with lesioned signers (see Atkinson, Marshall, Thacker, & Woll, 2004; Marshall, Atkinson, Thacker, Woll, & Smulevitch, 2004; Marshall, Atkinson, Woll, & Thacker, in press). People with left hemisphere damage were impaired relative to controls on all tests. Those with right hemisphere damage performed well in the first two tests, but were impaired on locative sentences and classifiers. Neither group showed any effect of iconicity. The results shed further light on the laterality of sign language comprehension.

Aged↗
PubMed2004

Dissociating linguistic and nonlinguistic gestural communication in the brain.

Gestures of the face, arms, and hands are components of signed languages used by Deaf people. Signaling codes, such as the racecourse betting code known as Tic Tac, are also made up of such gestures. Tic Tac lacks the phonological structure of British Sign Language (BSL) but is similar in terms of its visual and articulatory components. Using fMRI, we compared the neural correlates of viewing a gestural language (BSL) and a manual-brachial code (Tic Tac) relative to a low-level baseline task. We compared three groups: Deaf native signers, hearing native signers, and hearing nonsigners. None of the participants had any knowledge of Tic Tac. All three groups activated an extensive frontal-posterior network in response to both types of stimuli. Superior temporal cortex, including the planum temporale, was activated bilaterally in response to both types of gesture in all groups, irrespective of hearing status. The engagement of these traditionally auditory processing regions was greater in Deaf than hearing participants. These data suggest that the planum temporale may be responsive to visual movement in both deaf and hearing people, yet when hearing is absent early in development, the visual processing role of this region is enhanced. Greater activation for BSL than Tic Tac was observed in signers, but not in nonsigners, in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus and gyrus, extending into the supramarginal gyrus. This suggests that the left posterior perisylvian cortex is of fundamental importance to language processing, regardless of the modality in which it is conveyed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2004

Understanding 'not': neuropsychological dissociations between hand and head markers of negation in BSL.

Simple negation in natural languages represents a complex interrelationship of syntax, prosody, semantics and pragmatics, and may be realised in various ways: lexically, morphologically and prosodically. In almost all spoken languages, the first two of these are the primary realisations of syntactic negation. In contrast, in many signed languages negation can occur without lexical or morphological marking. Thus, in British Sign Language (BSL), negation is obligatorily expressed using face-head actions alone (facial negation) with the option of articulating a manual form alongside the required face-head actions (lexical negation). What are the processes underlying facial negation? Here, we explore this question neuropsychologically. If facial negation reflects lexico-syntactic processing in BSL, it may be relatively spared in people with unilateral right hemisphere (RH) lesions, as has been suggested for other 'grammatical facial actions' [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 307; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence)]. Three BSL users with RH lesions were specifically impaired in perceiving facial compared with manual (lexical and morphological) negation. This dissociation was absent in three users of BSL with left hemisphere lesions and different degrees of language disorder, who also showed relative sparing of negation comprehension. We conclude that, in contrast to some analyses [Applied Psycholinguistics 18 (1997) 411; Emmorey, K. (2002). Language, cognition and the brain: Insights from sign language research. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum (Lawrence); Archives of Neurology 36 (1979) 837], non-manual negation in sign may not be a direct surface realisation of syntax [Language and Speech 42 (1999) 143; Language and Speech 42 (1999) 127]. Difficulties with facial negation in the RH-lesion group were associated with specific impairments in processing facial images, including facial expressions. However, they did not reflect generalised 'face-blindness', since the reading of (English) speech patterns from faces was spared in this group. We propose that some aspects of the linguistic analysis of sign language are achieved by prosodic analysis systems (analysis of face and head gestures), which are lateralised to the minor hemisphere.

Aged↗
PubMed2004

The impact of maternal deafness on cradling laterality with deaf and hearing infants.

A recent article in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education (Leigh, Brice, & Meadow-Orlans, 2004) explored attachment between deaf mothers and their 18-month-old children and reported relationship patterns similar to those for hearing dyads. The study reported here explores a marker of early mother-child relationships: cradling laterality. Results indicated that, overall, the cradling bias of deaf mothers is similar to that of hearing mothers, but that there are significant differences among deaf mothers related to the hearing status of their own parents and, in a complex way, to the hearing status of their children. Deaf mothers of deaf parents showed a strong leftward cradling bias with both hearing and deaf children, whereas deaf mothers of hearing parents showed a leftward cradling bias with hearing children and a rightward cradling bias with deaf children. Possible explanations for these patterns of behavior are discussed.

Anxiety↗
PubMed2003

Space is special in Sign.

Following groundbreaking work by linguists and cognitive scientists over the past thirty years, it is now generally accepted that sign languages of the deaf, such as ASL (American Sign Language) or BSL (British Sign Language), are structured and processed in a similar manner to spoken languages. The one striking difference is that they operate in a wholly non-auditory, visuospatial medium. How does the medium impact on language processing itself?

Journal Article↗
PubMed2002

Neural correlates of British sign language comprehension: spatial processing demands of topographic language.

In all signed languages used by deaf people, signs are executed in "sign space" in front of the body. Some signed sentences use this space to map detailed "real-world" spatial relationships directly. Such sentences can be considered to exploit sign space "topographically." Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we explored the extent to which increasing the topographic processing demands of signed sentences was reflected in the differential recruitment of brain regions in deaf and hearing native signers of the British Sign Language. When BSL signers performed a sentence anomaly judgement task, the occipito-temporal junction was activated bilaterally to a greater extent for topographic than nontopographic processing. The differential role of movement in the processing of the two sentence types may account for this finding. In addition, enhanced activation was observed in the left inferior and superior parietal lobules during processing of topographic BSL sentences. We argue that the left parietal lobe is specifically involved in processing the precise configuration and location of hands in space to represent objects, agents, and actions. Importantly, no differences in these regions were observed when hearing people heard and saw English translations of these sentences. Despite the high degree of similarity in the neural systems underlying signed and spoken languages, exploring the linguistic features which are unique to each of these broadens our understanding of the systems involved in language comprehension.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2002

Effects of parental style of interaction on language development in very young severe and profound deaf children.

AIMS: (1) To study the influence of different styles of parent-child interaction in the language development of very young deaf children. (2) To find out if there are differences in parent-child interaction between two groups of very young deaf children following an Aural/Oral or a Bilingual approach to education. METHODS: Subjects were selected from all deaf children in the County of Avon who were under 3 years of age at the time of first assessment, had severe or profound, bilateral, sensorineural hearing loss and no associated medical problems. There were 16 children and families at the start of the project but only 13 completed all the assessments. The Bristol Language Developmental Scales (BLADES) was used to assess both sign and spoken language development. Interaction was studied through analysis of contingency and book-reading applied to selected periods of 3 min from four videorecorded sessions, taken at 3 months intervals for a period of 1 year. RESULTS: From the 13 children studied, only seven presented with some degree of expressive language measurable by the BLADES. Analysis of contingency showed that parents present with higher percentage of both Direct Related Acts and ON then their children Acts (On Acts: where both individuals are involved in the same task). Regarding bookreading, it was observed that parents often attend to child initiatives and acknowledge most of them but they make little effort to expand or use the child's message as topic for further conversation. In the reduced sample of seven children with expressive language, those with better language development had parents with: (a) higher percentage of DR acts; (b) higher percentage of ON acts; (c) higher percentage of appropriate responses to child communicative initiatives. CONCLUSIONS: In this small group language development seems to be facilitated by encouraging child participation and using a more contingent and child centred interaction. No significant differences were found between oral and bilingual families in terms of quality of interaction.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed2002

Speechreading circuits in people born deaf.

In hearing people, silent speechreading generates bilateral activation in superior temporal regions specialised for the perception of auditory speech [Science 276 (1997) 593; Neuroreport 11 (2000) 1729; Proceedings of the Royal Society London B 268 (2001) 451]. In the present study, FMRI data were collected from deaf and hearing volunteers while they speechread numbers and during a control task in which they counted nonsense mouth movements (gurns). Brain activation for silent speechreading in oral deaf participants was found primarily in posterior cingulate cortex and hippocampal/lingual gyri. In contrast to the pattern observed in the hearing group, deaf participants showed no speechreading-specific activation in left lateral temporal regions. These data suggest that acoustic experience shapes the functional circuits for analysing speech. We speculate on the functional role, the posterior cingulate gyrus may play in speechreading by profoundly congenitally deaf people.

Acoustics↗
PubMed2002

The development of complex verb constructions in British Sign Language.

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2-12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of concepts onto language, children acquiring BSL overgeneralize the use of argument structure related to perspective shifting; secondly, these overgeneralizations are predicted by the typological characteristics of the language and modality. Children under age 6;0, in attempting to produce sentences encoded through a perspective shift, begin by breaking down double-verb constructions (AB verbs) into components, producing only the part of the verb phrase which describes the perspective of the patient. There is also a prolonged period of development of non-manual features, with the full structure not seen in its adult form until after 9;0. The errors in the use of AB verbs and the subsequent protracted development of correct usage are explained in terms of the conceptual-linguistic interface.

Child↗
PubMed2002

Left cradling and left ear advantage for emotional speech: listen to the other side too.

In a recent issue of this journal, Turnbull and Bryson (2001) examined a possible relation between left ear (right hemisphere) advantage for perception of emotional speech and the universal preference of mothers to cradle infants on the left side, referring to a hypothesis that we had previously suggested (Sieratzki & Woll, 1996). Although they concluded that their data do not support our theory, reanalysis does suggest a connection between the hemispheric asymmetry for speech prosody and the leftward cradling bias.

Comment↗
PubMed2002

Neural systems underlying British Sign Language and audio-visual English processing in native users.

In order to understand the evolution of human language, it is necessary to explore the neural systems that support language processing in its many forms. In particular, it is informative to separate those mechanisms that may have evolved for sensory processing (hearing) from those that have evolved to represent events and actions symbolically (language). To what extent are the brain systems that support language processing shaped by auditory experience and to what extent by exposure to language, which may not necessarily be acoustically structured? In this first neuroimaging study of the perception of British Sign Language (BSL), we explored these questions by measuring brain activation using functional MRI in nine hearing and nine congenitally deaf native users of BSL while they performed a BSL sentence-acceptability task. Eight hearing, non-signing subjects performed an analogous task that involved audio-visual English sentences. The data support the argument that there are both modality-independent and modality-dependent language localization patterns in native users. In relation to modality-independent patterns, regions activated by both BSL in deaf signers and by spoken English in hearing non-signers included inferior prefrontal regions bilaterally (including Broca's area) and superior temporal regions bilaterally (including Wernicke's area). Lateralization patterns were similar for the two languages. There was no evidence of enhanced right-hemisphere recruitment for BSL processing in comparison with audio-visual English. In relation to modality-specific patterns, audio-visual speech in hearing subjects generated greater activation in the primary and secondary auditory cortices than BSL in deaf signers, whereas BSL generated enhanced activation in the posterior occipito-temporal regions (V5), reflecting the greater movement component of BSL. The influence of hearing status on the recruitment of sign language processing systems was explored by comparing deaf and hearing adults who had BSL as their first language (native signers). Deaf native signers demonstrated greater activation in the left superior temporal gyrus in response to BSL than hearing native signers. This important finding suggests that left- temporal auditory regions may be privileged for processing heard speech even in hearing native signers. However, in the absence of auditory input this region can be recruited for visual processing.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric perspectives on maternal cradling preferences.

OBJECTIVE: To assess competing explanations for the universal preference of mothers to cradle infants on their left side and to propose a relation to hemispheric asymmetry for social attachment and communication behaviour. METHODS: A review of observational, experimental, physiological, psychological, neuro-physiological, and neuro-psychological studies, including new findings on the cradling behaviour of mothers with auditory or visual impairments. RESULTS: A significant left-cradling bias is observed in both right- and left-handed mothers which cannot adequately be explained by arguments based on handedness or closer contact to the soothing sound of the maternal heartbeat. Observations of primate behaviour have led to the suggestion that the left-cradling bias may be related to a left visual field (right hemisphere) advantage for monitoring an infant's facial expressions of distress. However, more than just monitoring, cradling subserves the mother's connection with the infant. For that reason, we have suggested that left cradling might be related to a right hemisphere specialisation for emotional communication, i.e. the speech melody, smiles, signals, and stroking which mothers use to interact with their infants. Studies of mother-infant interaction show that the sound of the mother's voice is more soothing when cradling on the left, more stimulating when cradling on the right. Cradling laterality may thus be related to emotional state and behavioural intent. There is also evidence to suggest that left cradling is linked to a special role of the right hemisphere in social attachment behaviour. This function may be disturbed in mothers with post-natal depression who show abnormal right hemisphere activity. CONCLUSION: Cradling embodies the symbiotic relationship between mother and infant; various lines of evidence support the suggestion that the universal preference of mothers to cradle infants on their left side is related to a right hemisphere dominance for social attachment and communication behaviour.

Brain↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Is speech and language therapy meeting the needs of language minorities? The case of deaf people with neurological impairments.

The cultural diversity of the UK poses a challenge for speech and language therapists. Work with children from language minorities has been documented, but less so with adults. This raises the question of whether adults from minority communities are gaining access to services. Deaf people who use British Sign Language (BSL) are one language minority. It is known that sign language is vulnerable to neurological damage. Of interest is whether Deaf people with such damage are referred to speech and language therapy (SLT). The aim was to find out how many deaf people were referred to SLT services in the UK over the last 5 years, and reasons for the referrals. We also explored the service offered to Deaf referrals, and whether SLT teams had access to BSL skills, either internally or via interpreters. A brief questionnaire was sent to the managers of all SLT services in the UK (n=264). There was as 60% response rate. Only 34 services received referrals of Deaf patients, with a total of 39 Deaf people seen. This is substantially below the predicted rates. Most referrals were for dysphagia, or dysphagia with communication impairments. In line with this, dysphagia management was the dominant service, although most referrals also received language assessment. Most teams did not have signing staff members and access to interpreters was variable. The results suggest that many Deaf people are not gaining access to SLT after neurological impairment. Those who are referred are unlikely to receive language therapy. The instigation of a national team specializing in BSL impairments is recommended.

Adult↗