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PubMed1997

Cerebral processing of words and the development of chronic pain.

The processing of pain-related, body-related, and neutral words was assessed in individuals with prechronic pain and matched healthy controls. Integrated surface electromyogram, heart rate, skin conductance level, and visual event-related potentials from 11 electrode sites were recorded during the presentation of three word types at perception threshold. Startle responses were recorded from words presented above perception threshold. The patient and control groups did not differ in recognition performance. Pain-related words evoked an enhanced early component (N100) of the visual event-related potential only in the prechronic pain group. In both groups the late slow wave and the startle response were enhanced for body- and pain-related words compared with those for neutral words. All word types elicited larger late positivities in the prechronic pain group and in the right compared with the left hemisphere. These data suggest differential cortical processing of pain-related material in persons at a prechronic pain stage.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Developmental change in neutral processing of words by children with autism.

This study examined the development of neural processing of auditorally presented words in high functioning children with autism. The purpose was to test the hypothesis that electrophysiological abnormalities associated with impairments in early cortical processing and in semantic processing persist into early adolescence in autistic individuals. Eighteen children with autism and 18 normally developing children participated in the study. Ten of the children in each group were 8-9 years old, and 8 in each group were 11-12 years old (n = 36). Lists of words were presented auditorally; half were words belonging to a specified semantic category and half were words outside the category. Results revealed that while early cortical processing abnormalities appeared to resolve with development, children with autism in both age groups failed to exhibit differential semantic processing of in-versus out-of-category words. Further, while 8 year-olds with autism generated a large N4 (a late cognitive ERP component, which is sensitive to semantic deviance from a context) to words in both stimulus classes the 11 year-olds showed attenuated N4 relative to normal controls in response to both stimulus types. An attempt is made to integrate findings with current cognitive theories toward a parsimonious explanation of semantic classification deficits in autism.

Affect↗

PubMed1995

Personal computers and process writing: a written language intervention for deaf children.

This study was concerned with the effectiveness of word processing as a written language intervention for primary-age deaf children. Subjects were 14 children in two primary school deaf-unit classes matched in terms of age, gender, and degree of hearing loss. A quasi-experimental design incorporating multiple-group baselines with pre- and post-tests enable all subjects to receive the intervention while maintaining experimental control. Samples of children's written language were collected at the end of each phase in the study. Experienced teachers of deaf children rated five dimensions of the quality of the written language samples, while a speech and language therapist judged other linguistic qualities of the writing. Significant improvements in quality ratings over the course of the study indicated that the word processing intervention had led to improvements in the children's written language skills. These results confirm the effectiveness of word processing as an adjunct to the process writing approach to written language instruction for deaf children.

Child↗

PubMed2000

Meaning resolution processes for words: a parallel independent model.

Lexical ambiguity research over the last two decades is reviewed, with a focus on how that literature applies to understanding the resolution of meaning for words. Early models of ambiguity processing dealt almost exclusively with the time course of the effects of context on lexical access, in order to address the issue of modularity of lexical access. Newer models of ambiguity processing accommodate recent findings of early context effects that are contingent on both strength of context and meaning frequency. The most important contribution of these newer models of ambiguity processing is not to the modularity debate, but to investigation of the range of parameters affecting the entire meaning resolution process, including meaning access as well as the integration of meanings into context. As an example of this approach, we describe a simple quantitative model of meaning resolution that subsumes many other models as parametric variations.

Humans↗

PubMed2004

Processing of written words by individuals with prelingual deafness.

The aim of this study was to elucidate how prelingual deafness affects the ability to process written words. An experiment designed to reveal possible differences in the word-processing strategies and efficiency of a sample of prelingually deafened students (n = 18; mean grade = 5.1) and a task-matched hearing control group (n = 28; mean grade = 4.9) was conducted. The experiment was based on a research paradigm demanding the same/different categorization of physically (perceptually) or conventionally identical word pairs. To elucidate the nature of the word-processing strategy adopted by each group, word pairs varying within their phonological information (monosyllabic, bisyllabic) were used for stimulation. Unexpectedly, findings revealed that the abilities of the 2 participant groups to process written words were remarkably similar. This was true whether or not the processing of the word pairs required the referencing of linguistic knowledge for the mediation of their identicalness. Furthermore, there was no evidence that either of the 2 participant groups relied on phonological information for processing the stimuli. In general, the findings support a conclusion that the difficulties of prelingually deafened individuals with reading are not rooted in a deficient ability to process written words per se but reflect the absence of crucial (probably general as well as linguistic) knowledge as the basis for their final interpretation. The results further suggest that the phonological decoding of written words may not be a prerequisite for their efficient processing in working memory.

Articulation Disorders↗

PubMed1991

Visual speech processing: word-decoding and word-discrimination related to sentence-based speechreading and hearing-impairment.

Two aspects of visual speech processing in speechreading (word decoding and word discrimination) were tested in a group of 24 normal hearing and a group of 20 hearing-impaired subjects. Word decoding and word discrimination performance were independent of factors related to the impairment, both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense. Decoding skill, but not discrimination skill, was associated with sentence-based speechreading. The results were interpreted such that, in order to represent a critical component process in sentence-based speechreading, the visual speech perception task must entail lexically induced processing as a task-demand. The theoretical status of the word decoding task as one operationalization of a speech decoding module was discussed (Fodor, 1983). An error analysis of performance in the word decoding/discrimination tasks suggested that the perception of heard stimuli, as well as the perception of lipped stimuli, were critically dependent on the same features; that is, the temporally initial phonetic segment of the word (cf. Marslen-Wilson, 1987). Implications for a theory of visual speech perception were discussed.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

Visual word form familiarity and attention in lateral difference during processing Japanese Kana words.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between familiarity and laterality in reading Japanese Kana words. In two divided-visual-field experiments, three- or four-character Hiragana or Katakana words were presented in both familiar and unfamiliar scripts, to which subjects performed lexical decisions. Experiment 1, using three stimulus durations (40, 100, 160 ms), suggested that only in the unfamiliar script condition was increased stimulus presentation time differently affected in each visual field. To examine this lateral difference during the processing of unfamiliar scripts as related to attentional laterality, a concurrent auditory shadowing task was added in Experiment 2. The results suggested that processing words in an unfamiliar script requires attention, which could be left-hemisphere lateralized, while orthographically familiar kana words can be processed automatically on the basis of their word-level orthographic representations or visual word form.

Attention↗

PubMedDate not supplied

The effect of five proofreading conditions on the spelling performance of college students with learning disabilities.

This study investigated the effect of five proofreading conditions on the spelling performance of 12 college students with learning disabilities on a composition activity. The proofreading conditions investigated were handwriting with no additional assistance, handwriting with a conventional print dictionary, handwriting with a handheld spelling checker, word processing with no additional assistance, and word processing with an integrated spelling checker. A repeated measures ANOVA was used to analyze the results, with proofreading condition used as a within-participants factor. Except for handwriting alone, all of the techniques resulted in significant reductions in the number of spelling errors in the students' written work; however, none of the techniques enabled the students to produce compositions with a mean level of spelling accuracy comparable to that of their nondisabled peers.

Achievement↗

PubMed2004

From orthography to phonetics: ERP measures of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion mechanisms in reading.

Neuroimaging has provided evidence that the first stages of visual word recognition activate a visual word-form center localized in the left extrastriate cortex (fusiform gyrus). Accordingly, neurological cases of patients suffering from pure alexia reported the left posterior occipital lobe as the possible locus of orthographic analysis. There is less agreement in the literature about which brain structures are involved in the subsequent stages of word processing and, in particular, their time course of activation. Functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic source imaging studies recently reported data that could indicate a dual route model of reading. These findings are particularly relevant to studies on the functional deficits associated with phonological and surface dyslexia. There is evidence for the existence of two different brain mechanisms supporting phonological processing in visual word recognition: one mechanism subserving "assembled phonology" for reading letter strings and another one subserving "addressed phonology" for reading meaningful words. However, available knowledge on the time course and neural locus of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion mechanisms in reading is still inadequate. In this study, we compared processing of meaningful and meaningless Italian words in a task requiring a phonemic/phonetic decision task. Stimuli were 1152 different orthographic stimuli presented in the central visual field. Half the stimuli were Italian words (with a high or low frequency of occurrence), the other half were meaningless strings of letters (legal pseudowords and letter strings). Event-related potentials were recorded from 28 scalp sites in 10 Italian university students. The task consisted of deciding about the presence/absence of a given "phone" in the hypothetical enunciation of word read: for example, "Is there a /k/ in cheese?". Results showed that lexical frequency and orthographical regularity affected linguistic processing within 150 msec poststimulus. Indeed, the amplitude of a centroparietal P150 varied as a function of stimulus type, being larger in response to high-frequency words than to low-frequency ones and to words and pseudowords than to letter strings. This component might index visual categorization processes and recognition of familiar objects, being highly sensitive to orthographic regularity and "ill-formedness" of words. The amplitude of the P150 was the same in response to well-formed meaningless and to meaningful words, when these latter had a low lexical frequency. This might indicate that highly familiar words are recognized as meaningful unitary visual objects at very early stages of processing, through a visual route to an orthographic input lexicon. Moreover, the amplitude of the negativity recorded between 250 and 350 msec showed an anteroposterior topographic dissociation for access to the phonemic representation of well- or ill-formed strings of characters. Brain responses were larger over the left occipito-temporal regions during reading of words and pseudowords and over the left frontal regions during reading of letter strings.

Adult↗

PubMed2000

The anatomy of language: contributions from functional neuroimaging.

This article illustrates how functional neuroimaging can be used to test the validity of neurological and cognitive models of language. Three models of language are described: the 19th Century neurological model which describes both the anatomy and cognitive components of auditory and visual word processing, and 2 20th Century cognitive models that are not constrained by anatomy but emphasise 2 different routes to reading that are not present in the neurological model. A series of functional imaging studies are then presented which show that, as predicted by the 19th Century neurologists, auditory and visual word repetition engage the left posterior superior temporal and posterior inferior frontal cortices. More specifically, the roles Wernicke and Broca assigned to these regions lie respectively in the posterior superior temporal sulcus and the anterior insula. In addition, a region in the left posterior inferior temporal cortex is activated for word retrieval, thereby providing a second route to reading, as predicted by the 20th Century cognitive models. This region and its function may have been missed by the 19th Century neurologists because selective damage is rare. The angular gyrus, previously linked to the visual word form system, is shown to be part of a distributed semantic system that can be accessed by objects and faces as well as speech. Other components of the semantic system include several regions in the inferior and middle temporal lobes. From these functional imaging results, a new anatomically constrained model of word processing is proposed which reconciles the anatomical ambitions of the 19th Century neurologists and the cognitive finesse of the 20th Century cognitive models. The review focuses on single word processing and does not attempt to discuss how words are combined to generate sentences or how several languages are learned and interchanged. Progress in unravelling these and other related issues will depend on the integration of behavioural, computational and neurophysiological approaches, including neuroimaging.

Brain↗

PubMed2005

The effects of articulatory suppression on word recognition in Serbian.

The relatedness of phonological coding to the articulatory mechanisms in visual word recognition vary in different writing systems. While articulatory suppression (i.e., continuous verbalising during a visual word processing task) has a detrimental effect on the processing of Japanese words printed in regular syllabic Khana script, it has no such effect on the processing of irregular alphabetic English words. Besner (1990) proposed an experiment in the Serbian language, written in Cyrillic and Roman regular but alphabetic scripts, to disentangle the importance of script regularity vs. the syllabic-alphabetic dimension for the effects observed. Articulatory suppression had an equally detrimental effect in a lexical decision task for both alphabetically regular and distorted (by a mixture of the two alphabets) Serbian words, but comparisons of articulatory suppression effect size obtained in Serbian to those obtained in English and Japanese suggest "alphabeticity-syllabicity" to be the more critical dimension in determining the relatedness of phonological coding and articulatory activity.

Humans↗

PubMed2000

[Semantic processing of words in selective listening: an examination using recognition tests and event-related brain potentials].

Two experiments were conducted to investigate the degree of semantic processing for unattended words. In a dichotic listening task, each participant was required to attend selectively to either a word sequence in one ear or a speech passage in the opposite ear. The selective listening was confirmed by attenuated P1-N1 and N400 waves of the event-related brain potential to unattended words. The N400 attenuation with semantic priming was observed only for attended words. In a following recognition test with a booklet and auditory presentation, the percentage of false alarms for "new" words (or lures) semantically related to "old" words was higher when the "old" words were attended in selective listening than when unattended. These findings suggest that selective attention can act before and/or at a level of semantic processing.

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Inattentional amnesia to words in a high attentional load task.

We investigated the dependence of visual word processes on attention by examining event-related potential (ERP) responses as subjects viewed words while their attention was engaged by a concurrent highly demanding task. We used a paradigm from a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment [Rees, G., Russel, C., Frith, C. D., & Driver, J. Inattentional blindness vs. inattentional amnesia for fixated but ignored words. Science, 286, 2504-2506, 1999] in which participants attended either to drawings or to overlapping letters (words or nonwords) presented at a fast rate. Although previous fMRI results supported the notion that word processing was obliterated by attention withdrawal, the current electrophysiological results demonstrated that visual words are processed even under conditions in which attentional resources are engaged in a different task that does not involve reading. In two experiments, ERPs for attended words versus nonwords differed in the left frontal, left posterior, and medial scalp locations. However, in contrast to the previous fMRI results, ERPs responded differentially to ignored words and consonant strings in several regions. These results suggest that fMRI and ERPs may have differential sensitivity to some forms of neural activation. Moreover, they provide evidence to restore the notion that the brain analyzes words even when attention is tied to another dimension.

Adult↗

PubMed1996

Using technology to enhance the writing processes of students with learning disabilities.

This article reviews the ways that computers can support writing by students with learning disabilities, with an emphasis applications that go beyond word processing. Following an overview of research on word processing is a discussion of software assists with the basic processes of transcription and sentence generation, including spelling checkers, speech synthesis, prediction, and grammar and style checkers. Next, applications that support the cognitive processes of planning are review including prompting programs, outlining and semantic mapping software, and multimedia applications. Finally, the use of computer networks to support collaboration and communication with diverse audiences is addressed.

Child↗

PubMed2003

Semantic and phonological influences on the processing of words and pseudohomophones.

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship between semantics and phonology in the lexical decision task. In the first experiment, lexical decisions to words with large semantic neighborhoods were faster than those to words with sparse semantic neighborhoods. Conversely, this effect of semantic neighborhood was reversed for pseudohomophones (e.g., nale). That is, pseudohomophones based on words with large semantic neighborhoods took longer to reject than did those based on words with sparse semantic neighborhoods. In the second experiment, we found the magnitude of the semantic neighborhood effect for words to be a function of nonword foil type. Taken together, these results indicate that semantic neighborhood size affects processing of both words and pseudohomophones, and that the effect of semantic neighborhood size for words is more pronounced when pseudohomophone foils are employed. These effects are discussed in terms of a model in which the orthographic, phonological, and semantic systems are fully interactive.

Humans↗

PubMed2000

Stroop interference and negative priming: problems with inferences from null results.

The Stroop color-naming effect has often been taken as evidence for the automaticity of word processing (MacLeod, 1991). Recently, Besner, Stolz, and Boutilier (1997) reported that coloring a single letter instead of the whole word eliminated the Stroop effect. From this finding, they concluded that word processing could not be purely automatic, since it can be prevented. We asked whether the elimination of the Stroop effect is sufficient evidence for concluding that the word is not processed. Combining Besner et al.'s manipulation with a negative-priming procedure, we found intact negative priming from the prime color word in the absence of a Stroop effect. This result clearly indicates that the meaning of the prime word was processed. The findings highlight the importance of using converging methods to evaluate lack of processing.

Adult↗

PubMed1997

How the brain processes complex words: an event-related potential study of German verb inflections.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as German-speaking subjects read verbs in correct and incorrect participle forms. The critical words were presented in three different versions to three different groups of subjects, as part of a simple sentence, in a word list, and embedded in a story; for each version separate ERPs were recorded. Three types of verbs were investigated, regulars, irregulars and nonce verbs. We compared correct regular and irregular participles with incorrect ones; the latter had -(e)n on verbs that actually take -t participles (* getanz-en), or -(e)t on verbs that require -(e)n (* gelad-et). For the nonce verbs, we compared participles with the unexpected -(e)n ending with the expected -t participle forms. The ERP responses were very consistent across the three versions of the experiment: (i) incorrect irregular participles (* gelad-et) elicited a left frontotemporal negativity; (ii) incorrect regulars (* getanz-en) produced no differences to the correct ones; (iii) nonce verbs were associated with an N400 component but did not show a difference between expected and unexpected endings. We will interpret these findings with respect to psycholinguistic models of morphological processing and argue that the brain processes regularly inflected words differently from irregularly inflected ones, the latter by accessing full-form entries stored in memory and the former by a computational process that decomposes complex words into stems and affixes.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Repetition priming within and between the two cerebral hemispheres.

Two experiments explored repetition priming benefits in the left and right cerebral hemispheres. In both experiments, a lateralized lexical decision task was employed using repeated target stimuli. In the first experiment, all targets were repeated in the same visual field, and in the second experiment the visual field of presentation was switched following repetition. Both experiments demonstrated hemispheric specialization for the task (a RVF advantage for word identification) and hemispheric interaction for word processing (lexicality priming from contralateral distracters). In the first experiment, words were identified more quickly and accurately following repetition, with repetition facilitating faster but fewer correct responses for non-words. Complex interactions between visual field of first and second presentation in the second experiment indicate asymmetric interhemispheric repetition priming effects. These results provide a broad picture of hemispheric asymmetries in word processing and of complex interaction between the hemispheres during word recognition.

Cerebral Cortex↗