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Biomedical subjects

J L Locke

Publications and source records attributed to J L Locke.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1990

Structure and stimulation in the ontogeny of spoken language.

Linguistic innateness is a fundamentally physical notion, which ultimately requires independent physical evidence. For spoken language, it is relevant to consider babbling, components of which are unaffected by ambient stimulation and are predicted by models of vocal tract function. Links between babbling and speech point to innate factors in the ontogeny of spoken language and invite attention to central control mechanisms. These neural capabilities enable oral language learning by providing children with control over an initial stock of speech-like movements and by directing their attention to salient linguistic patterns. Dispositions to attend to some cues are so strong that little stimulation is required. In other cases, predispositions are weak, and acquisition requires correspondingly more experience. To understand the ontogeny of language, we need to learn which cases are which and to know how these interactions occur and change over the course of acquisition.

Animals↗
PubMed1990

Linguistic significance of babbling: evidence from a tracheostomized infant.

The role of babbling in language development is not well understood. One source of evidence is the utterances of infants who were tracheostomized during the period in which they would normally have produced syllabic vocalization. We describe here the phonetic patterns and linguistic development of a girl called Jenny. She was tracheostomized and generally aphonic from 0.5-1.8 but cognitively and socially normal, with near-normal comprehension of language. Acoustic analyses of Jenny's utterances following decannulation revealed a tenth of the canonical syllables which might be expected in normally developing infants, an extremely small inventory of consonant-like segments, and a marked preference for labial obstruents. In these ways, she resembled a group of infants of the same age who also cannot hear their oral-motor movements, the congenitally deaf, suggesting that the audibility of babbling contributes to its onset. Two months following decannulation, when Jenny was 1.10, she produced only a handful of different words. We think this is because aphonia prevented her from discovering the referential value of vocal expression and discouraged the formation of a phonetic repertoire that could be appropriated for lexical service. This unusual case suggests that babbling normally facilitates the development of language and speech.

Aphonia↗
PubMed1989

Angiosarcoma of the axillary vein.

Angiosarcoma is a malignant tumor of vascular origin. Malignant primary vein tumors are rare. The case of a 64-year-old patient who underwent a left forequarter amputation for angiosarcoma arising from the left axillary vein, a site not previously described, is presented. Also, the literature is reviewed.

Amputation, Surgical↗
PubMed1989

Segmental infarct of the testis due to hypersensitivity angiitis.

We present a case of hypersensitivity angiitis causing a segmental infarction of the testis. The lesion presented as a discrete, palpable mass that led to orchiectomy. Hypersensitivity angiitis has not been reported previously to affect the testes or to produce a segmental infarct in any solid organ. A discussion is given of the vasculitides, especially periarteritis nodosa, that may involve the testes.

Humans↗
PubMed1989

Genetic factors in the ontogeny of spoken language: evidence from monozygotic and dizygotic twins.

Recent controversy about the innateness of language has awakened interest in the genetic basis of linguistic development. In this study, we analysed more extensively data from Mather & Black (1984) in order to test the hypothesis that the speech articulation of monozygotic (MZ) twins would be qualitatively more similar than that of age- and sex-matched dizygotic (DZ) twins. Analyses revealed that 4-year-old MZ twin pairs were significantly more likely to misproduce the same sounds on an articulation test than were DZ twin pairs, and that DZ twins were no more likely to share errors than were children who were both genetically and environmentally unrelated. There was no evidence that MZ twins made more similar errors than DZ twins, and indeed it was difficult to make this determination since only broad categories of error (substitution, distortion, omission) were available for analysis. The greater amount of genetic material shared by MZ twins, and the presumably more similar morphology of their speech mechanisms, may have caused certain sound patterns to be of more nearly equal difficulty for both members of a MZ pair. However, these findings need to be confirmed with phonetically more detailed analyses.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1989

Stress-related rib and vertebral changes.

In the course of routine chest examination, 80 asymptomatic patients were observed to have localized hyperostosis of the posterior ribs and articulating transverse processes. The authors studied the distributions of lesions in these 80 patients, and records were reviewed in the 50 cases in which they were available. The occupational histories, male-to-female ratio (5:1), and ratio of right-to-left rib involvement (9:1)--in addition to results of electromyographic and histologic studies and the principles of bone remodeling--suggest that this hyperostosis occurs at sites most stressed with bending and rotation of the thorax. The authors hypothesize that this stress-related change occurs due to the pull of the iliocostalis thoracis muscle and is of no clinical significance.

Adult↗
PubMed1979

Phonetically mediated recall in the phonetically disordered child.

Children with phonology disorders frequently show reduced performance in short-term recall, inviting the assumption that impairment of memory may cause or help to cause the speech disorder. Ten children with marked phonology disorders were compared to 10 correctly speaking children on a test of short-term memory for sets of pictures whose names rhymed or did not rhyme. The phonologically disordered children performed significantly worse than those with correct speech and provided less evidence of phonetic mediation, a process commonly associated with enhanced levels of recall. Attention is drawn to the possibility that the disorder of phonology operated indirectly to reduce the efficiency of memory, though the question is complicated.

Age Factors↗
PubMed1978

Large auditory and small visual effects in the recall of consonant letters.

Eighty-six adults serially recalled lists of visually presented consonant letters similar in auditory or visual features or dissimilar in both feature sets. There were significantly more errors at every auditory list position than at the corresponding visual and neutral list positions, which did not themselves differ. There was a positive correlation between the tendency toward phonetic coding and overall performance, with 75 subjects making more errors on the auditory list than either of the other lists. The eight subjects who made more errors on the visual list showed poor performance in the recall of all lists. Factors governing the perceivability of stimuli apparently do not continue to operate significantly in controlling their recallability, at least in the case of veridical visual input.

Achievement↗
PubMed1975

Memory for speech and speech for memory.

Thirty kindergarteners, 15 who substituted /w/ for /r/ and 15 with correct articulation, received two perception tests and a memory test that included /w/ and /r/ in minimally contrastive syllables. Although both groups had nearly perfect perception of the experimenter's productions of /w/ and /r/, misarticulating subjects perceived their own tape-recorded w/r productions as /w/. In the memory task these same misarticulating subjects committed significantly more /w/-/r/ confusions in unspoken recall. The discussion considers why people subvocally rehearse; a developmental period in which children do not rehearse; ways subvocalization may aid recall, including motor and acoustic encoding; an echoic store that provides additional recall support if subjects rehearse vocally, and perception of self- and other- produced phonemes by misarticulating children-including its relevance to a motor theory of perception. Evidence is presented that speech for memory can be sufficiently impaired to cause memory disorder. Conceptions that restrict speech disorder to an impairment of communication are challenged.

Analysis of Variance↗