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Writing program with word prediction for a young man with multiple disabilities: a preliminary assessment.

This study assessed a writing program with word prediction, which completed the writing of a word and spoke it out only when there was certainty that such a word was the correct one. The assessment was carried out with a young man with multiple disabilities, who typically used a word-processing program without word prediction. The two programs were compared on the time required by the participant for writing general sentences, through a social validation assessment, and eventually a check on the participant's preference. Analysis showed the program with word prediction was significantly more effective in terms of the writing time, which was halved, and was deemed preferable by 40 raters (psychology students) involved in the social validation assessment and by the participant himself. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Adult↗

Orthographic depth and the interaction of visual and auditory processing in word recognition.

We studied the influence of word frequency and orthographic depth on the interaction of orthographic and phonetic information in word perception. Native speakers of English and Serbo-Croatian were presented with simultaneous printed and spoken verbal stimuli and had to decide whether they were equivalent. Decision reaction time was measured in three experimental conditions: Clear print and clear speech, degraded print and clear speech, and clear print and degraded speech. Within each language, the effects of visual and auditory degradation were measured, relative to the undegraded presentation. Both effects of degradation were much stronger in English than in Serbo-Croatian. Moreover, they were the same for high- and low-frequency words in both languages. These results can be accounted for by a parallel interactive processing model that assumes lateral connections between the orthographic and phonological systems at all of their levels. The structure of these lateral connections is independent of word frequency and is determined by the relationship between spelling and phonology in the language: simple isomorphic connections between graphemes and phonemes in Serbo-Croatian, but more complex, many-to-one, connections in English.

Form Perception↗

The effects of methylphenidate on levels of processing and laterality in children with attention deficit disorder.

Effects of stimulant medication (methylphenidate) on levels (feature, name, semantic) of word processing by the left and right hemisphere were assessed in 31 attention-deficit-disordered children. In a double-blind procedure, same-different decisions were made to tachistoscopically presented word pairs under medication and placebo. Analysis of manual response times failed to show any negative effects of medication. Feature decisions were faster than name decisions, which were faster than semantic decisions. Methylphenidate induced a right visual field advantage (left hemisphere) for the name decision, which was interpreted as a normalization effect. The results suggest that (1) methylphenidate may selectively improve the phonological level of word processing and (2) methylphenidate's favorable therapeutic effect is produced through inhibition of excessive right hemisphere activity in response to task demands that engage the left hemisphere.

Adolescent↗

[Report management system using Web server and search engine].

PURPOSE: To develop a management system of written reports using a Web server and search engine. METHODS: All the reports written through word processing software in the local area network in the radiology department were automatically transferred to one of the PC servers, in which a Web server and search engine were in operation. Previous reports, approximately eighty thousand, were also registered. Using Web browsers and the program developed by hypertext mark-up language and JavaScript, all the reports were readily accessible by keywords, or by any words within reports. RESULTS: Over 100, 000 reports were easily accessible using Web browsers, based on our one-year experience. Maintaining the Web server and search engine, and upgrading the program were easily managed in our daily practice. CONCLUSION: The report management system we developed is flexible, scalable, and easy to maintain. It is an effective way to manage a large volume of radiology reports written through word processing software.

Computer Communication Networks↗

Desktop publishing and medical imaging: paper as hardcopy medium for digital images.

Desktop-publishing software and hardware has progressed to the point that many widely used word-processing programs are capable of printing high-quality digital images with many shades of gray from black to white. Accordingly, it should be relatively easy to print digital medical images on paper for reports, instructional materials, and in research notes. Components were assembled that were necessary for extracting image data from medical imaging devices and converting the data to a form usable by word-processing software. A system incorporating these components was implemented in a medical setting and has been operating for 18 months. The use of this system by medical staff has been monitored.

Computer Graphics↗

A surgical pathology reporting and encoding system using industry-standard hardware and software.

I describe an efficient, inexpensive, industry-standard computer system that is designed for word processing of surgical pathology reports as well as encoding in Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) and data storage. This system is capable of maintaining a large database of patient information with coded diagnoses. It is designed to be utilized with readily available stock computer hardware and software without significant customization or any additional programming. The hardware is easily purchased from and can be maintained by a retail, business-oriented computer store. The system described incorporates WordPerfect for word processing and the CAP/SNOMED system for diagnosis encoding and data storage and retrieval.

Humans↗

[An investigation of the unit of activation in on-line inferences during text processing: word-unit or proposition-unit?].

This study investigated the unit of activation in on-line inferences. To explore whether the activation of inferences is a word-unit or a proposition-unit, a meaningfulness-decision task was devised as a priming measure. The task required participants to decide whether a series of short sentences was meaningful or not. The result of Experiment 1 suggested that only proposition-units were activated. A priming effect was observed in targets which described inferences both at word-level and proposition-level, but not in targets which described inferences at word-level only. In Experiment 2, a meaningfulness-decision task was administered to investigate word-based priming and to make sure that the result of Experiment 1 was not caused by characteristics of the task. In Experiment 3, a priming effect was found in targets which described inferences using alternative perspectives and words. These results suggest that the unit of activation in on-line inferences is proposition-units and that these activations relate to the proposition-semantic level, not the word or single-concept level.

Mental Processes↗

Word segmentation processing: a way to exponentially extend medical dictionaries.

One of the most critical problems of automatic natural language processing (NLP) is the size of the medical lexicons. The set of compound medical words and the continual creation of new terms renders medical lexicons exhaustive beyond question. The structure of such dictionaries usually consists of two parts: 1) the morphological and sometimes syntactical information necessary to identify, on a grapheme level, a given word in a sentence, and 2) the part often devoted to conceptual knowledge associated with the recognized word. It is only when these two prerequisites are fulfilled that an attempt to understand the meaning of a whole expression is possible. The approach developed in this paper is a pragmatic way to rapidly increase the lexico-semantic part of medical dictionaries. We developed a semi-automatic tool, as a prototype to demonstrate the feasibility of this approach. This tool is able to translate almost any diagnosis expressed in French into its equivalent in the ICD-9CM coding scheme.

Dictionaries, Medical as Topic↗

Electrical neuroimaging reveals early generator modulation to emotional words.

Functional electrical neuroimaging investigated incidental emotional word processing. Previous research suggests that the brain may differentially respond to the emotional content of linguistic stimuli pre-lexically (i.e., before distinguishing that these stimuli are words). We investigated the spatiotemporal brain mechanisms of this apparent paradox and in particular whether the initial differentiation of emotional stimuli is marked by different brain generator configurations using high-density, event-related potentials. Such would support the existence of specific cerebral resources dedicated to emotional word processing. A related issue concerns the possibility of right-hemispheric specialization in the processing of emotional stimuli. Thirteen healthy men performed a go/no-go lexical decision task with bilateral word/non-word or non-word/non-word stimulus pairs. Words included equal numbers of neutral and emotional stimuli, but subjects made no explicit discrimination along this dimension. Emotional words appearing in the right visual field (ERVF) yielded the best overall performance, although the difference between emotional and neutral words was larger for left than for right visual field presentations. Electrophysiologically, ERVF presentations were distinguished from all other conditions over the 100-140 ms period by a distinct scalp topography, indicative of different intracranial generator configurations. A distributed linear source estimation (LAURA) of this distinct scalp potential field revealed bilateral lateral-occipital sources with a right hemisphere current density maximum. These data support the existence of a specialized brain network triggered by the emotional connotation of words at a very early processing stage.

Adult↗

Lexical and conceptual components of stem completion priming in patients with Alzheimer's disease.

This study evaluated the hypothesis of dissociation between normal lexical but deficient conceptual repetition priming in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). For this purpose, we administered to patients with AD and age-matched normal controls the Stem Completion task. In Experiment 1, the level of word processing during study was manipulated by requiring subjects to count vowels (graphemic condition) or generate meanings (semantic condition) of target words. In Experiment 2, the presentation modality was varied during the study to obtain an intramodal and crossmodal repetition priming. Probably due to a floor effect of performance in the graphemic condition, in Experiment 1, AD patients exhibited lower priming than normal controls for the semantically processed words but comparable priming for the graphemically processed ones. In contrast, in Experiment 2, AD patients were poorly primed both in the intra- and crossmodal conditions. Results question the hypothesis of a lexical/conceptual dissociation in the repetition priming exhibited by AD patients and call for other explicative hypotheses of the dissociation between normal and deficient forms of repetition priming in degenerative dementia.

Aged↗

IT usage, perceptions and literacy of medical students.

A cross-sectional study of medical students using a self-administered questionnaire was carried out in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Malaysia from December 2000 to January 2001 to determine IT usage, perceptions and literacy of medical students. 366 of 653 (56.0%) students reported owning some type of personal computer. Students mainly used the computer to get onto the Internet, do word-processing and make presentations. Junior (Year One and Two) students and those who had used computers before entering university were more likely to use the Internet. Those who own computers were more likely to feel comfortable with software (OR 1.61, 95% CI: 1.09, 2.38). Students who use the Internet were more likely to perceive that IT facilitated their studies (OR 4.61, 95% CI: 2.35, 9.05). The highest self-reported IT skill was e-mailing followed by surfing the World Wide Web and word-processing. Male students and junior students had significantly higher self-reported IT literacy scores compared to female students and senior students. Significant predictors for an IT identifier score after adjusting for other variables were self-reported rating of computer knowledge, number of siblings, parents' income and gender.

Cross-Sectional Studies↗

Effect of word and syllable frequency on activation during lexical decision and reading aloud.

This functional MRI (fMRI) study investigated the effect of lexical and syllable frequency on visual word processing during lexical decision and reading aloud. Previous research has shown a dissociation of syllable and word frequency effects in Spanish using behavioral and electrophysiological measures, suggesting that sublexical (syllabic) representations are computed and mediate the firing of lexical candidates. Here, we characterize the neuroanatomical basis of these lexical and sublexical manipulations and their dependence on task. During lexical decision, words with low vs. high lexical frequency increased activation in left frontal, anterior cingulate, supplemental motor area (SMA), and pre-SMA regions; while words with high vs. low syllable frequency increased activation in a left anterior inferior temporal region. In contrast, when the words were read aloud those with low vs. high syllable frequency increased activation in the left anterior insula, with no other significant effects. On the basis of the neuroanatomy, we propose that the contrasting effects of syllable frequency during lexical decision and reading aloud reflect two different cognitive processes in visual word processing. Specifically, words with high-frequency syllables may increase lexical competition in the inferior temporal lobe while facilitating articulatory planning in the left anterior insula.

Adult↗

Effect of imagery ability on letter-level and word-level processing.

In a letter-identification task, subjects matched a probe letter to the initial letter of a subsequently presented probe word. We varied word frequency and predicted that the performance of vivid imagers would resemble that of typical young adults, whereas the performance of poor imagers would fall in between that of typical young adults and of older adults, or would simply resemble the performance of typical older adults (a linear decrease in reaction time [RT] with word frequency; see Allen & Madden, 1989). The in-between function for young and older adults combined predicts a dip in RT for very-high-frequency words compared to medium-high-, low-, and very-low-frequency words. As predicted, vivid imagers exhibited increased latencies for medium-high-frequency words relative to the other three word-frequency categories, whereas poor imagers exhibited a dip.

Adult↗

Human hippocampal long-term sustained response during word memory processing.

Temporal behavior of activation associated with the neural substrate of human memory function was investigated during and after an auditorily instructed word memory task using multislice functional magnetic resonance imaging. The hippocampal formation, which is involved in human memory function, displayed a long-term sustained response that persisted significantly (approximately 90 s) beyond the duration of the memory task. This sustained period was approximately two-fold longer than the duration of the post-task activation observed in auditory areas and Broca's area, which are involved in the phonological loop of the verbal working memory. These observations suggest that the hippocampal memory processing involves sustained activation in the transitional function for the long-term memory over the working memory period.

Adult↗

Phonological processing of words in right- and left-handers.

It is commonly accepted that phonology is the exclusive domain of the left hemisphere. However, this pattern of lateralization, which posits a right visual field advantage, has been questioned by several studies. In fact, certain factors such as characteristics of the stimuli and subjects' handedness can modulate the right visual field advantage. Thus, the goal of this study was to compare the hemispheric dynamics of right-handers and left-handers during a divided visual field presentation of words that varied in terms of their phonological transparency. For non-transparent words, the left hemisphere seems more competent in both handedness groups. With regard to transparent words, the right hemisphere of both groups also appears competent. Surprisingly, left-handers achieved optimal processing with a functionally isolated left hemisphere, whereas right-handers needed the participation of both hemispheres. The pattern of performance cannot be fully explained by either the callosal or the direct access model.

Adult↗

An investigation of phonology and orthography in spoken-word recognition.

The possible influence of initial phonological and/or orthographic information on spoken-word processing was examined in six experiments modelled after and extending the work Jakimik, Cole, and Rudnicky (1985). Following Jakimik et al., Experiment 1 used polysyllabic primes with monosyllabic targets (e.g., BUCKLE-BUCK/[symbol: see text]; MYSTERY-MISS,/[symbol: see text]). Experiments 2, 3, and 4 used polysyllabic primes and polysyllabic targets whose initial syllables shared phonological information (e.g., NUISANCE-NOODLE,/[symbol: see text]), orthographic information (e.g., RATIO-RATIFY,/[symbol: see text]), both (e.g., FUNNEL-FUNNY,/[symbol: see text]), or were unrelated (e.g., SERMON-NOODLE,/[symbol: see text]). Participants engaged in a lexical decision (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or a shadowing (Experiment 2) task with a single-trial (Experiments 2 and 3) or subsequent-trial (Experiments 1 and 4) priming procedure. Experiment 5 tested primes and targets that varied in the number of shared graphemes while holding shared phonemes constant at one. Experiment 6 used the procedures of Experiment 2 but a low proportion of related trials. Results revealed that response times were facilitated for prime-target pairs that shared initial phonological and orthographic information. These results were confirmed under conditions when strategic processing was greatly reduced suggesting that phonological and orthographic information is automatically activated during spoken-word processing.

Automatism↗

Language experience and the organization of brain activity to phonetically similar words: ERP evidence from 14- and 20-month-olds.

The ability to discriminate phonetically similar speech sounds is evident quite early in development. However, inexperienced word learners do not always use this information in processing word meanings [Stager & Werker (1997). Nature, 388, 381-382]. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine developmental changes from 14 to 20 months in brain activity important in processing phonetic detail in the context of meaningful words. ERPs were compared to three types of words: words whose meanings were known by the child (e.g., ''bear''), nonsense words that differed by an initial phoneme (e.g., ''gare''), and nonsense words that differed from the known words by more than one phoneme (e.g., ''kobe''). These results supported the behavioral findings suggesting that inexperienced word learners do not use information about phonetic detail when processing word meanings. For the 14-month-olds, ERPs to known words (e.g., ''bear'') differed from ERPs to phonetically dissimilar nonsense words (e.g., ''kobe''), but did not differ from ERPs to phonetically similar nonsense words (e.g., ''gare''), suggesting that known words and similar mispronunciations were processed as the same word. In contrast, for experienced word learners (i. e., 20-month-olds), ERPs to known words (e.g., ''bear'') differed from those to both types of nonsense words (''gare'' and ''kobe''). Changes in the lateral distribution of ERP differences to known and unknown (nonce) words between 14 and 20 months replicated previous findings. The findings suggested that vocabulary development is an important factor in the organization of neural systems linked to processing phonetic detail within the context of word comprehension.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

Kanji word reading process analysed by positron emission tomography.

Positron emission tomography, involving the H2(15)O injection technique, was used to study changes in regional cerebral blood flow during Japanese kanji word reading. Three-times intrasubject averaging analysis revealed that the main cortical responses occurred in the bilateral (left-side dominant) posterior inferior temporal area for visual input. We believe the left posterior inferior temporal area processes highly complex morphological features of kanji. For language output, left-side dominant activation of the posterior inferior frontal gyrus and the basal ganglia was found.

Adult↗