PubMed Health⌕ Search

SEARCH · PubMed Health

Results for “LINGUISTICS”

Explore indexed PubMed citations for clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health research. Read source abstracts and follow each citation to its original PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
PubMed1986

Source density analysis of scalp potentials during linguistic and non-linguistic processing of visual stimuli.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 40 locations, covering most of the scalp, during repeated tasks in which the observer (O) had to judge either the tense of a printed verb (V) or the symmetry of a spatial pattern (S). Stimuli were drawn at random from large ensembles. A simplified method of Laplacean analysis (MacKay 1983, 1984) allowed the corresponding source densities to be mapped at up to 28 locations, relatively free of artefacts due to eye movements or tongue movements. O signalled his judgement in each case by pressing one of two buttons on a given cue. The decision time allowed was kept short (about 1 s) but long enough for the task to be handled successfully. When stimuli 'V' and 'S' were drawn from geometrically different ensembles, the source-density distributions for the two tasks differed significantly at a number of locations. When 'V' and 'S' were drawn from a common ensemble, however, and O was instructed on each trial (in random order) to assess each stimulus as a word or as a geometrical pattern, the similarities in the source-density maps were more striking than the differences. It would seem that during sufficiently rapid verbal and spatial judgments, little sign of hemispheric specialization or task-specific differences may appear in the spatiotemporal profile of ERP source densities. More salient differences, some lateralized, appeared during the preparation interval prior to verbal and spatial tasks; but their pattern varied widely from subject to subject.

Cerebral Cortex↗
PubMed1986

Visual and auditory event-related potentials elicited by linguistic and non-linguistic incongruities.

To test the hypothesis that violation of overlearned relations between stimuli in a sequence is critical for eliciting the event-related potential (ERP) N400, we recorded scalp ERPs in sequences where interstimulus relations were either overlearned (sentences or famous songs) or not (geometric figures or scale notes): 25% of the sequences ended with an incongruous stimulus. N400 occurred after incongruous words in sentences only. It seems to index the further processing necessary to specify the nature of the mismatch detected between attended and expected stimuli, when complex information is involved. Earlier components also varied as a function of experimental factors.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1982

Hemispheric specialization for the processing of linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli in congenitally deaf and hearing adults: a review and contribution.

Congenitally deaf individuals, interpreters for the deaf and hearing controls viewed words, dots, American sign language signs and drawings of objects presented tachistoscopically. The stimuli were presented both bilaterally and unilaterally to the subjects. The deaf subjects showed a significant left visual field (LVF) superiority for the processing of the drawings while the nondeaf groups showed significant right visual field (RVF) advantages. Laterality differences between groups on the other tasks were nonsignificant. The deaf group also showed a significant LVF advantage in the bilateral condition across all tasks as opposed to a RVF advantage yielded by nondeaf groups. A significant LVF advantage for words and dots was found compared to the RVF advantage for signs across all subjects. The differences between deaf and nondeaf groups are discussed in terms of processing strategies and the critical period for language acquisition theory.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Developing linguistic literacy: a comprehensive model.

This is a position paper modelling the domain of linguistic literacy and its development through the life span. It aims to provide a framework for the analysis of language development in the school years, integrating sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic notions of variation, language awareness, and literacy in a comprehensive model. The paper focuses on those aspects of literacy competence that are expressed in language as well as aspects of linguistic knowledge that are affected by literacy competence, tracing the route that children take in appropriating linguistic literacy as part of their cognitive abilities and examining the effect of literacy on language across development. Our view of linguistic literacy consists of one defining feature: control over linguistic variation from both a user-dependent ('lectal') and a context-dependent (modality, genre, and register) perspective; of one concomitant process: metalanguage and its role in language development; and of one condition: familiarity with writing and written language from two aspects: written language as discourse style--the recognition that the kind of language used for writing is essentially different from the one used for speech; and written language as a notational system--the perception and growing command of the representational system that is used in the written modality. Linguistic literacy is viewed as a constituent of language knowledge characterized by the availability of multiple linguistic resources and by the ability to consciously access one's own linguistic knowledge and to view language from various perspectives.

Awareness↗
PubMed2000

Sensitivity to linguistic anomalies in spoken sentences: a case study approach to understanding thought disorder in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: As a group, positively thought-disordered (TD) schizophrenic patients are relatively impaired in their ability to use linguistic context to process sentences online (Kuperberg et al. 1998). This study investigates the heterogeneity in the use of linguistic context both between individual TD patients and within the individual patients as severity of thought disorder changes over time. METHODS: Seventeen TD schizophrenics performed an online word-monitoring task on four separate occasions. In each patient, baseline reaction time (RTs) to target words in normal sentences were subtracted from RTs to target words in pragmatically-, semantically- and syntactically-violated sentences to obtain a measure of online sensitivity to each type of linguistic violation, and these were compared with normative data of a healthy volunteer and a non-TD schizophrenic control group. In addition, the co-variation of severity of thought disorder and sensitivity to linguistic context within all individual TD patients over the four testing sessions, was examined. RESULTS: There was marked heterogeneity between individual TD patients in their sensitivity to different types of linguistic violations: some were selectively insensitive to pragmatic violations, while others were insensitive to semantic and syntactic (subcategorization) violations. There was also an inverse relationship between severity of thought disorder and sensitivity to linguistic violations within individual patients over the four sessions. CONCLUSIONS: It is likely that a single cognitive deficit does not account for all types of schizophrenic thought disorder, but rather that there are multiple deficits affecting specific levels of linguistic processing. In these schizophrenic patients, impairment in the use of linguistic context was related to the state, rather than the trait, of thought disorder.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Linguistic influences on the auditory processing of speech by children with normal hearing or hearing impairment.

OBJECTIVE: The accurate perception of speech requires the processing of multidimensional information. The aim of this research was to examine linguistic influences on the auditory processing of speech in the presence of childhood hearing impairment. DESIGN: The processing interactions characterizing the linguistic and auditory dimensions were assessed with a pediatric auditory analog of the Pomerantz task (Pomerantz, Pristach, & Carson, 1989). The task yields measures of Stroop interference, the effect of irrelevant semantic content, and of Garner interference, the effect of irrelevant linguistic variability (Stroop, 1935; Garner, 1974a). Subjects were 100 normal-hearing children and 60 hearing-impaired children. Subjects were required to attend selectively to the auditory (voice-gender) dimension and to ignore the linguistic dimension. The logic of the task is that performance for the voice-gender dimension will be unaffected by what is happening on the irrelevant dimension if the dimensions are processed independently. On the other hand, if the dimensions are not processed independently, subjects will not be able to attend selectively and performance for the relevant dimension will be affected by what is happening on the to-be-ignored dimension. RESULTS: Both the normal-hearing and hearing-impaired children showed auditory Stroop and Garner interference effects, indicating that the auditory and linguistic dimensions were not processed independently by either group. However, the linguistic dimension exerted significantly less influence on auditory processing in the presence of childhood hearing impairment. Whereas normal-hearing children had remarkable difficulty ignoring irrelevant word input and focusing exclusively on voice-gender, hearing-impaired children were relatively successful at ignoring the linguistic dimension and attending selectively to the auditory dimension of speech. This result implies that the linguistic dimension of auditory speech input may have a different weight or processing value in the presence of childhood hearing impairment. It may be the case that hearing-impaired children encode spoken speech disproportionately in terms of the auditory dimensions, which offer important supplementary aids to speechreading. Further research is being carried out to address these possibilities. CONCLUSIONS: Both Stroop and Garner interference were significantly reduced in the presence of childhood hearing impairment. This pattern of results suggests that multidimensional speech processing is carried out in a less stimulus-bound manner in the presence of childhood hearing impairment.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2004

How do speakers avoid ambiguous linguistic expressions?

Three experiments assessed how speakers avoid linguistically and nonlinguistically ambiguous expressions. Speakers described target objects (a flying mammal, bat) in contexts including foil objects that caused linguistic (a baseball bat) and nonlinguistic (a larger flying mammal) ambiguity. Speakers sometimes avoided linguistic-ambiguity, and they did so equally regardless of whether they also were about to describe foils. This suggests that comprehension processes can sometimes detect linguistic-ambiguity before producing it. However, once produced, speakers consistently avoided using the same linguistically ambiguous expression again for a different meaning. This suggests that production processes can successfully detect linguistic-ambiguity after-the-fact. Speakers almost always avoided nonlinguistic-ambiguity. Thus, production processes are especially sensitive to nonlinguistic- but not linguistic-ambiguity, with the latter avoided consistently only once it is already articulated.

Communication↗
PubMed1993

Genetic and linguistic differentiation in the Americas.

The relationship between linguistic differentiation and evolutionary affinities was evaluated in three tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Two tribes (Nuu-Chah-Nulth and Bella Coola) speak Amerind languages, while the language of the third (Haida) belongs to a different linguistic phylum--Na-Dene. Construction of a molecular phylogeny gave no evidence of clustering by linguistic affiliation, suggesting a relatively recent ancestry of these linguistically divergent populations. When the evolutionary affinities of the tribes were evaluated in terms of mitochondrial sequence diversity, the Na-Dene-speaking Haida had a reduced amount of diversity compared to the two Amerind tribes and thus appear to be a biologically younger population. Further, since the sequence diversity between the two Amerind-speaking tribes is comparable to the diversity between the Amerind tribes and the Na-Dene Haida, the evolutionary divergence within the Amerind linguistic phylum may be as great as the evolutionary divergence between the Amerind and Na-Dene phyla. Hence, in the New World, rates of linguistic differentiation appear to be markedly faster than rates of biological differentiation, with little congruence between linguistic hierarchy and the pattern of evolutionary relationships.

Alaska↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Linguistic analysis of the speech output of schizophrenic, bipolar, and depressive patients.

Using speech samples of 100 patients suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar illness and major depression, we addressed the question of the extent to which the linguistic abnormalities in the speech of these patients represent diagnosis-specific characteristics or constitute independent, syndrome-like dimensions of the illnesses. All speech samples were transcribed by a professional linguist who was blind to both identity and diagnosis of the patients. The majority of the deviant linguistic variables was found to be common to all three diagnostic groups under comparison, while only a few linguistic variables exhibited statistically significant between-group differences. On the other hand, when the respective variables were analysed as a multivariate entity, the variety of subtle between-group differences allowed us to discriminate between the diagnostic groups at an overall performance of 72.7% correctly classified patients. There was an almost complete lack of association between linguistic abnormalities and psychopathology syndromes. In particular, we found no correlation between the syndrome 'formal thought disorder' and the large variety of linguistic variables used in this investigation. In consequence, we conjecture that linguistically deviant speech characteristics represent an independent syndrome complex manifested at varying intensities across mental illnesses, and that this syndrome complex deserves greater attention, not only with respect to the principal understanding of the underlying disturbances, but also as a potential target of therapeutical intervention.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Topic variability and linguistic convergence in marital couples' speech as related to specific attachment style.

Links between mental working models, attachment style, and linguistic strategies were analyzed in the present research, which focused on linguistic choices made by marital couples. Eight couples (16 Italian subjects, M age=49.1, SD=0.4) with drug-addicted sons and undergoing systemic therapeutic treatment were recruited. Conversational transcripts were coded by two judges. The research analyzed (a) the definition of a topics map derived from the Adult Attachment Interview, using the discursive level of the topic; (b) the systemic-functional analysis of the topics, through both the micro- and macro-unit levels and the lexical/semantic indexes of the discourse; (c) the within-couple convergence in terms of linguistic moves, and, more generally, of their cognitive strategies. Specifically, a hierarchical model of the topic organization was used to explain the recursivity of the thematic choices made by the participants. Secondly, the characterization of the topics in terms of their cognitive/emotive values (high/low "critical" topics) was explained, especially through some "linguistic markers" as disfluency or lexical/semantic indexes (i.e., linguistic variety and completeness indexes). Third, it was found that different and specific linguistic strategies were adopted by the couples in order to reiterate their internal working models. The high convergence of linguistic patterns inside the marital couple was discussed as representative of "dysfunctional" working models, from both the communicative and relational points of view.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Linguistic-Numeric Presentation Mode Effects on Risky Option Preferences

In this study, we examine preferences between lotteries with chances presented either numerically or linguistically. Presentation mode is predicted to affect preferences due to the perception of linguistic chance as skewed distributions of risk. Based upon weighting functions incorporating risk/uncertainty aversion from ambiguity theory and cumulative prospect theory, we predict that presentation mode effects on risky choices will be detectable in very small risks and in large risks. In two experiments, subjects chose between both gain and loss lotteries with constant payoffs and equivalent numeric and linguistic chances. Presentation mode affected choices when chances were above 50%, where lotteries with numeric chances were more frequently preferred in gains while lotteries with linguistic chances were more often preferred in losses. The effect of presentation mode for low-chance lotteries (5% and less) also affected choices such that numeric choices were generally preferred more frequently in losses and linguistically expressed choices were generally preferred more often in gains. Overall, these results suggest that theories of the effects of second order uncertainty on risky choice may be used to model decisions involving linguistic risk. They also suggest that the study of the perception of linguistic risk assessments can provide insight into the cognitive processing behind the weighting functions proposed to depict decision under risk and uncertainty. Finally, the results have practical implications since information providers can affect decision makers' choices by controlling presentation mode in such a way as to alter the relative attractiveness of uncertain events.

Journal Article↗
PubMed2003

Linguistic services in ambulatory clinics.

A review of the literature reveals few studies that focus on the challenge of language barriers in primary care settings. Recognizing the need for a national consensus on cultural and linguistic standards for health care in the United States, the Office of Minority Health recently released a set of standards for culturally and linguistically appropriate services (CLAS). These standards were utilized to examine the linguistic services available at eight ambulatory care centers in a small New England state in an effort to determine compliance with recommended national standards. Although myriad studies have focused on provision of linguistically appropriate care in emergency rooms (ERs), few studies have specifically examined ambulatory care settings. Numerous strategies have been adopted by individual clinics in an attempt to deal effectively with linguistic barriers. Yet without clear national regulations and dedicated funding for interpreter services, a large spectrum of services exists. Survey data were obtained from on-site visits at select community health clinics to ascertain availability, need, and utilization of linguistic services for patients with limited English proficiency. The majority of patients served by the clinics surveyed were predominantly Spanish-speaking. Results reveal that although most of the clinics provided informal mechanisms of interpreter services, few directly addressed linguistic services as a component of culturally competent care.

Ambulatory Care Facilities↗