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Biomedical subjects

J Alegria

Publications and source records attributed to J Alegria.

9 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2005

Phonological processing in deaf children: when lipreading and cues are incongruent.

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with synchronized but different lipreading and auditory information (the McGurk paradigm). In the present experiment, lips and cues were sometimes congruent and sometimes incongruent. It was expected that incongruent cues would force the perceptual system to adopt solutions according to the weight attributed to different sources of phonological information. With congruent cues, performance improved, with improvements greater in the early than the late group. With incongruent cues, performance decreased relative to lipreading only, indicating that cues were not ignored, and it was observed that the effect of incongruent cues increased when the visibility of the target phoneme decreased. The results are compatible with the notion that the perceptual system integrates cues and lipreading according to principles similar to those evoked to explain audiovisual integration.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

The development of spelling procedures in French-speaking, normal and reading-disabled children: effects of frequency and lexicality.

The spelling procedures of normal and reading-disabled French-speaking children matched for reading level were examined. Subjects had to spell frequent and infrequent words containing either inconsistent nondominant graphonemes (e.g., /s/ spelled "c" as in "cigarette," the dominant spelling for /s/ being "s") or consistent context-dependent graphonemes (e.g., /g/ followed by "i"-->"gu") as well as pseudo-words including inconsistent graphonemes presented in different phonological contexts (e.g., /s/ can be spelled "s" or "c" if the following vowel is /i/, but "c" is incorrect if the following vowel is /y/). At the lowest reading level, frequency effects were totally absent in both groups of children. Also, signs of taking the context into account in applying rules were observed only in the normal group. As reading ability progresses, the effects of both word frequency and contextual constraints to rule application increase. Those phenomena were weaker in reading-disabled than in normal readers. It is suggested that disabled readers could use partial cues that allow reading but do not supply complete representations of words to the orthographic lexicon.

Achievement↗
PubMed1986

Speech-mediated retention in dyslexics.

Dyslexics (6 to 9 yr. old) and a control group of 12 normal readers (second-graders) were tested on a memory task with rhyming and non-rhyming items. The most important finding is that both groups were penalized by rhyme, indicating speech coding. It was observed that the dyslexics were not less penalized by rhyme than were controls. The present results are compared with those of other recent studies.

Child↗
PubMed1984

Consequences of auditory deprivation in animals and humans.

An electron microscopic study of the cerebral cortex of mutant deaf mice (Deol's dn gene) has shown differences in synaptic organisation between these mice and normally hearing ones. In the auditory cortex of the deaf mice, there are fewer synapses and these are larger than in the normally hearing, whereas there is no difference between these two categories in the visual cortex. These results are the reverse of those observed by other authors in the occipital cortex of rats raised in an enriched or impoverished environment. In humans, the functional consequences of early hearing loss have been investigated on moderately to severely deaf (60-80 db mean loss) youngsters, who have been tested for their capacity of categorical perception, auditory discrimination, and production of significant contrasts between stop consonants. Categorical perception was absent in all but one subject. Auditory discrimination was poor for both the voiced-voiceless contrast and the place of articulation contrast. In the production experiments, the subjects had greater difficulty in producing the voiced-voiceless than the place of articulation contrasts. The possible relevance of these animal and human studies to cochlear implantation is discussed.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1979

Genetic aspects of verbal mediation in memory.

When do children begin to store visually presented information using a speech code? Conrad has shown that at age 6, but not before, children have more difficulty in recalling items whose names rhyme than items whose names do not and concluded that at 6 years of age children begin to store information in memory using verbal labels. Experiment 1, using a technique similar to the one introduced by Conrad, showed that 4-year-old children memorized nonrhyming items better than rhyming ones. Experiment 2 used a different technique. Instead of comparing the performance obtained with 2 series of different items, one with rhyming and the other with nonrhyming names, we have, by using bilingual children, made comparisons within the same series of items. In one language the items had rhyming names and in the other, nonrhyming names. This technique controlled for the intrinsic difficulty of the items. The results of experiment 2 confirmed those obtained in experiment 1. Our conclusion is that 4-year-old children already use a speech code in order to store and organize information in memory.

Age Factors↗