Political integration of Mexican immigrants: explorations into the naturalization process.
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Acculturation↗
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Results for “Natural Language Processing”
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Broca's area and inflectional morphology: evidence from broca's aphasia and computer modeling.
In a series of articles Ullman (2001, 2004; Ullman et al., 1997) has proposed that regular inflection is critically subserved by Broca's area. This suggestion is motivated by the finding that English speaking Broca's aphasics show selective deficits with regular inflection. Here we argue that this proposal does not hold cross-linguistically but is based on a confound between inflectional suffix and regularity that is specific to the English language. We present data from two experimental studies of participle inflection with 13 German and 12 Dutch Broca's aphasics. None of these aphasic speakers are selectively impaired for regular inflection but instead most of them show selective deficits with irregular inflection. These data suggest that a selective regular deficit is not a characteristic of Broca's aphasia across languages, and that Broca's area is not critically involved in regular inflection. To investigate the nature and localization of the processes underlying inflection we present a connectionist neural network model that accounts for the deficits of the German aphasic speakers. The model implements the view that the inflection of all verb types is based on a single mechanism with multiple representations that emerge from experience-dependent brain development. We show that global damage to this model results in a selective deficit for irregular inflection that is comparable to that of the German aphasic speakers. This finding suggests that a selective impairment of irregular participles as observed by German and Dutch aphasic speakers does not presuppose two distinctly localized mechanisms or processes that can be selectively affected by brain damage.
Adult↗
Form is easy, meaning is hard: resolving a paradox in early child language.
A developmental paradox is discussed: studies of infant processing of language and language-like stimuli indicate considerable ability to abstract patterns over specific items and to distinguish natural from unnatural English sentences. In contrast, studies of toddler language production find little ability to generalize patterns over specific English words or constructions. Thus, infants appear to be abstract auditory or language processors whereas toddlers appear to be non-abstract, item-specific language users. Three resolutions are offered to this paradox. The first, that no resolution is necessary because only the toddler findings come from language use in a communicative context and so only the toddler findings are relevant to linguistic knowledge, is rejected. The second, that the contradictions are rooted in the differing methodologies of the two sets of studies (comprehension vs. production), is found to explain important aspects of the contradictory findings. The third, that the contractions come from the differing content of the stimuli in the studies, is also found to be explanatory and is argued to carry greater weight. Resolution 3 suggests that the patterns that infants extract from their linguistic input are not yet tied to meaning; thus, toddlers do not lose these earlier-abstracted forms but their use of them is limited until they have been integrated with meaning. It is argued that in language acquisition, learning form is easy but learning meaning, and especially linking meanings and forms, is hard.
Child Language↗
Innovations in anesthesia pre-screening through data systems and telecommunications.
In summary, the anesthesia pre-screening concept along with the supporting computer systems allow for fingertip nursing informatics, data collection, and retrievability, providing the continuity of care so emphasized in health care today. Departmental efficiency is maximized in both processing and communicating the patient information for the caregivers through the up-to-the-minute accuracy and safety built into the data system. At this point in APS implementation, the scope of cost-savings has yet to be fully identified, yet the perception is that it is quite substantial. At the same time, recent research results confirm our hypothesis that the personal touch provided by APS phone screening and individual case management has improved patient safety, convenience, and satisfaction along with overall effectiveness. Since the CAPS system will grow in scope and complexity over the next few years, the system will be migrated to a clientserver configuration. Although "client-server" may be an overused term, its potential for improved data accessibility, integrity, and raw processing throughput is great once the field solidifies in this area. The addition of graphical user interfaces and natural language facilities will further enhance the ease of use of the system. In the near term, an on-line version of the Physician's Desk Reference will be added for use during patient calls. This computerized version offers speed as well as a more comprehensive searching ability as opposed to its tree-based cousin.
Anesthesia Department, Hospital↗
Associative thinking in schizophrenia: a contextualist approach.
Explored the question of whether responses that appeared to be highly pathological on the basis of the word association test did indeed reflect an underlying aberrant associative process or whether the associations actually had a greater degree of meaning than was evident from the test (N = 60). Utilizing contextualist techniques designed by the authors, which were analogous to the word association test but yet measured schizophrenic associative thinking in specific contexts that more closely approximated natural language situations, the quality and purposiveness of the schizophrenics' associations were examined. The word association test technique was judged to be inadequate by itself to account for underlying associative processes involved in schizophrenic associative thought disorder. A majority of responses (70% schizophrenic, 81% nonschizophrenic) judged to be pathological on the basis of the word association test alone became meaningful in the context of a sentence created by the Ss to explain purposively their associations. The schizophrenics' experience of a stimulus word and consequent associations to that word became clearer when placed within an appropriate context (i.e., a sentence), rather than examined as isolated semantic features (as in the word association test).
Adult↗
Neuropsychology of multiple sclerosis.
Neuropsychological investigations have demonstrated that cognitive disorders are common (45-65%) in patients with multiple sclerosis. This review summarizes our current understanding of the nature and etiology of these disorders. Specifically, neuropsychological deficits regularly occur on measures of recent memory, attention, information-processing speed, executive functions, and visuospatial perception. In contrast, general intelligence, language, and certain aspects of memory (short-term capacity and implicit) are preserved. The degree and pattern of cognitive dysfunction is highly correlated with the amount and location of white-matter disease within the cerebral hemispheres. Natural history studies indicate that changes in cognitive test performance are correlated with increasing lesion load on magnetic resonance imaging. The development of brief cognitive-testing instruments for clinical screening and measuring treatment effects in clinical trials is underway. A clear weakness in the literature is the dearth of studies evaluating potential treatments for cognitive disorders.
Brain↗
An ultimate view of reading ability.
Research on reading and developmental reading disorders has almost exclusively questioned the immediate or proximate basis of these skills and deficits. A supplementary view is offered that considers reading ability from an evolutionary vantage. It is argued that in contrast to language, which has a long natural history in man and which has risen from a widespread biological adaptation in our species, reading has not, until very recently, exerted ecological pressure on humans and therefore no specific biological adaptations have occurred for these skills. It follows that developmental reading disorders may be due to genetically based, naturally occurring variants in neurological traits and not the result of pathological processes.
Animals↗
Uses of diagnostic expert systems in clinical care.
The development and testing of computerized systems to assist in the diagnostic process is a time honored research activity in medical information science. The focus of the majority of the applications produced is on providing accurate diagnostic suggestions when appropriate clinical information is entered. We believe that diagnostic knowledge has a much wider range of uses than that of simply assigning diagnostic labels. Below we describe three applications which illustrate alternate uses for diagnostic systems. Applications that assist in data collection, assess the quality of medical reports, and extract relevant clinical data from natural language x-ray reports are discussed. We believe that more effort should be directed toward studying the use of diagnostic knowledge bases in processes that help plan diagnostic strategies, in quality assurance applications, and in processes that facilitate all aspects of medical communication.
Clinical Medicine↗
Electrophysiology reveals semantic memory use in language comprehension.
The physical energy that we refer to as a word, whether in isolation or embedded in sentences, takes its meaning from the knowledge stored in our brains through a lifetime of experience. Much empirical evidence indicates that, although this knowledge can be used fairly flexibly, it is functionally organized in 'semantic memory' along a number of dimensions, including similarity and association. Here, we review recent findings using an electrophysiological brain component, the N400, that reveal the nature and timing of semantic memory use during language comprehension. These findings show that the organization of semantic memory has an inherent impact on sentence processing. The left hemisphere, in particular, seems to capitalize on the organization of semantic memory to pre-activate the meaning of forthcoming words, even if this strategy fails at times. In addition, these electrophysiological results support a view of memory in which world knowledge is distributed across multiple, plastic-yet-structured, largely modality-specific processing areas, and in which meaning is an emergent, temporally extended process, influenced by experience, context, and the nature of the brain itself.
Journal Article↗
Phenomenological aspects of consciousness--its disturbance in acute and chronic stages.
The meaning of a disturbance of consciousness is completely different in an acute as opposed to a chronic stage. In the acute stage, the grade of arousal is the most essential component in order to assess the changes of the level of intracranial pressure in neurosurgical emergency room. A new coma scale called Emergency Coma Scale has been proposed, which represents a combination of the Glasgow Coma Scale and the Japan Coma Scale. In the chronic stage, however, contents of consciousness or mental function deserve phenomenological and holistic investigations, keeping the difference between consciousness and mind in consideration, in order not only to treat and care for patients following cerebral injuries, stroke and mild cognitive impairment in aged people. We propose the difference in conception between consciousness and mind; that is, consciousness consists of psycho-sensory afferent system, mind of psycho-motor efferent and afferent system, and memory and language as liaison officers between them. This proposal would play a role to understand mental change in the natural aging processes, when memory and cognition are deteriorating gradually, but is still in evolution in the field of culture.
Acute Disease↗
Sex influences on material-sensitive functional lateralization in working and episodic memory: men and women are not all that different.
Research investigating the effects of sex on the lateralization of language functions has produced mixed results to date, with some studies finding sex differences and others not [Shaywitz, B.A., Shaywitz, S.E., Pugh, K.R., Constable, R.T., Skudlarski, P., Fulbright, R.K., Bronen, R.A., Fletcher, J.M., Shankweiler, D.P., Katz, L., et al., 1995. Sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for language. Nature 373 607-609.; Frost, J.A., Binder, J.R., Springer, J.A., Hammeke, T.A., Bellgowan, P.S., Rao, S.M., Cox, R.W., 1999. Language processing is strongly left lateralized in both sexes. Evidence from functional MRI. Brain 122 (Pt 2) 199-208.]. Further, few studies have evaluated how any such sex effects extend to tasks involving cognitive functions that may utilize language processes such as working and episodic memory. This study examined sex difference in material-sensitive functional activation (using fMRI) in working memory and episodic memory that included either words and faces. We performed these analyses on two large groups of healthy subjects with the goal of attempting to replicate results across two independent data sets. The results indicated that both males and females showed strong and consistent evidence for material-sensitive lateralization for both working and episodic memory, such that word tasks resulted in greater left-sided activation and face tasks resulted in greater right-sided activation. Further, few of the sex differences in regions showing material specificity effects in at least one gender replicated across studies, providing little evidence for any differences in lateralization patterns between the sexes. In conclusion, our data suggest that males and females show a similar pattern of lateralized activation to material type during working memory and recognition tasks.
Adult↗
Associative agnosias and the functions of the left hemisphere.
Associative agnosias are traditionally regarded as perceptual, and ideational apraxia as motor, deficits, but they can be understood as amnesias for generic knowledge, caused by bilateral or unilateral left-hemispheric cortical lesions. Current theories of hemispheric specialization explain these syndromes' mandatory link with left-hemispheric damage, and are validated by this link. This link reflects the multiple nature of generic, categorical representational systems, not all reducible to natural language, and the left hemisphere's principal role as their substrate, regardless of their dependence on language. The distinction between processing novel information, and processing based on well-established, routinized representations, captures a fundamental difference between the functions of the right and left hemispheres. The complementary link of apperceptive agnosias with right-and associative agnosias with left-hemisphere lesions is an expression of this general principle in the posterior cortex. Future studies of the neuroanatomy of agnosias in animals may offer insights into the evolutionary continuities of hemispheric specialization.
Agnosia↗
[FOXP2: from the specific disorder to the molecular biology of language. II. Implications for the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of language].
INTRODUCTION: Cloning FOXP2, the first gene linked to a hereditary variant of specific language impairment (SLI), has allowed researchers to conduct more precise studies into the nature and developmental path of the molecular bases governing the organisation and functioning of the neuron centres responsible for language processing. DEVELOPMENT: The FOXP2 gene codes for a transcriptional repressor that regulates the proliferation and/or migration of certain neuronal populations in the basal ganglia, cortex, cerebellum and thalamus, and presumably plays a part in the organisation and/or functioning of the fronto-thalamic-striatal system. Moreover, the analysis of the developmental history of the gene suggests that the transcriptional factor FOXP2, although it is quite old, has undergone certain modifications in its secondary structure and has acquired a potential site for phosphorylation for protein kinase C during the recent developmental history of the human species. CONCLUSIONS: The evidence discussed in this article allows us to suggest FOXP2 plays a significant role in the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of language. On the one hand, it seems to validate certain general models of linguistic processing that call for a more important role of the subcortical structures (above all for the basal ganglia) in that processing. On the other hand, it seems to suggest that the modifications undergone by FOXP2 would have also allowed certain regions (such as Broca's area) to be recruited for language, either by facilitating the appearance of syntax and/or verbal working memory or by transferring control of articulation to those regions, thereby laying down the foundations for the appearance of spoken language.
Brain↗
Why is language unique to humans?
Cognitive neuroscience has focused on language acquisition as one of the main domains to test the respective roles of statistical vs. rule-like computation. Recent studies have uncovered that the brain of human neconates displays a typical signature in response to speech sounds even a few hours after birth. This suggests that neuroscience and linguistics converge on the view that, to a large extent, language acquisition arises due to our genetic endowment. Our research has also shown how statistical dependencies and the ability to draw structural generalizations are basic processes that interact intimately. First, we explore how the rhythmic properties of language bias word segmentation. Second, we demonstrate that natural speech categories play specific roles during language acquisition: some categories are optimally suited to compute statistical dependencies while other categories are optimally suited for the extraction of structural generalizations.
Animals↗
A challenge to current models of past tense inflection: the impact of phonotactics.
Is past tense production better modelled by a Single Mechanism or a Words and Rules model? We present data concerning a phenomenon that has not been considered by either model-regular past tense verbs with contrasting phonotactics. One set of verbs contains clusters at the inflected verb end that also occur in monomorphemic words ('monomorphemically legal clusters', MLC) whereas the other has clusters that can only occur in inflected forms ('monomorphemically illegal clusters', MIC). We argue that if children apply a morphological rule, phonotactics will not affect performance. Conversely, if children store past tense forms, they will perform better on verbs with MLCs because these clusters are more frequent. We investigated three populations--typically developing children, Grammatical-SLI (G-SLI) and Williams Syndrome (WS)--using past tense elicitation tasks. In Experiment 1 we reanalyse data from van der Lely and Ullman [van der Lely, H. K. J. & Ullman, M. (2001). Past tense morphology in specifically language impaired and normally developing children. Language and Cognitive Processes, 16: 177-217] and show that G-SLI children perform better on MLC verbs, whereas for typically developing children phonotactics do not affect performance. In Experiment 2 we replicate these findings in new groups of G-SLI and typically developing children. In Experiment 3 we reanalyse data from Thomas et al. [Thomas, M. S. C., Grant, J., Barham, Z., Gsodl, M., Laing, E., Lakusta, L., Tyler, L.K., Grice, S., Paterson, S. & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2001) Past tense formation in Williams Syndrome. Language and Cognitive Processes, 16: 143-176] and show that phonotactics do not affect performance in individuals with WS. We argue that the results elucidate the underlying nature of morphology in these populations, and are better accommodated within a Words and Rules model of past tense acquisition.
Humans↗
[Test method for pre-speech language: I. Outline of test].
The purpose of this study is to determine infants' preliminary linguistic ability. For this a pre-speech language test method has been developed. The test method is as follows. First, a definition of language is given. Then the development process in infancy is explained according to the definition. Subsequently, the test items are decided according to the above process. (1) Definition of language: It is difficult to define language because of its many aspects. Here, for the language definition, the aspects are restricted to the following based on the properties of natural language. Section-1 Situation of language i) Formation of communication ii) Understanding and grasping of situation circumstance Section-2 Development of symbolizing function Section-3 Representing the function of language (generally, articulation of babbling and functional change) (2) Development of language: the above three aspects develop and change from preterm infancy to late infancy. The development process is as follows. Section-1 i) The formation of communication is confirmed by action situations between baby and mother. The actions include a steady gaze in the early stage and talking baby talk later. Requests for instruction assistance and emotional communication appear with gradual differentiation of communication. Section-1 ii) Understanding and grasping of the situation circumstance is confirmed with response to action from mother to baby in the early stage. These are then confirmed with the ability to understand the action and situation of surroundings as time and space extensity, and to give appropriate appeal to the surroundings. Subsequently, understanding with language only is acquired by daily experience, including language and understanding of the surrounding.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Age Factors↗
The role of segmentation in phonological processing: an fMRI investigation.
Phonological processes map sound information onto higher levels of language processing and provide the mechanisms by which verbal information can be temporarily stored in working memory. Despite a strong convergence of data suggesting both left lateralization and distributed encoding in the anterior and posterior perisylvian language areas, the nature and brain encoding of phonological subprocesses remain ambiguous. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the conditions under which anterior (lateral frontal) areas are activated during speech-discrimination tasks that differ in segmental processing demands. In two experiments, subjects performed "same/ different" judgments on the first sound of pairs of words. In the first experiment, the speech stimuli did not require overt segmentation of the initial consonant from the rest of the word, since the "different" pairs only varied in the phonetic voicing of the initial consonant (e.g., dip-tip). In the second experiment, the speech stimuli required segmentation since "different" pairs both varied in initial consonant voicing and contained different vowels and final consonants (e.g., dip-ten). These speech conditions were compared to a tone-discrimination control condition. Behavioral data showed that subjects were highly accurate in both experiments, but revealed different patterns of reaction-time latencies between the two experiments. The imaging data indicated that whereas both speech conditions showed superior temporal activation when compared to tone discrimination, only the second experiment showed consistent evidence of frontal activity. Taken together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that phonological processing per se does not necessarily recruit frontal areas. We postulate that frontal activation is a product of segmentation processes in speech perception, or alternatively, working memory demands required for such processing.
Adult↗
Neuropsychological differences between the dementias of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
The question of whether dementia of the Alzheimer type and dementia associated with Parkinson's disease are clinically separable is controversial. We examined possible neuropsychological differences in these two patient groups matched for overall severity of dementia. Patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type had more severe impairment on measurements of memory, language, and orientation, and, unlike patients with Parkinson's disease, there was evidence of apraxia. Patients with Parkinson's disease had more severe impairment related to speed of information processing, and, unlike patients with dementia of the Alzheimer type, they also had disturbance of mood. The nature of visuospatial abnormalities also differentiated the two groups. The pattern of neuropsychological differences is consistent with the cortical-subcortical hypothesis.
Affect↗