A Question Of Language Disorder: Studies Of Assessment, Management And Parent Attitude.

Children labelled "language disordered" failed to make academic progress in schools promoting investigations into the nature of their problems, attendant attitudes and contextual influences. Studies find differences in haptic, auditory and visual processing between normal and language disordered children. Individual management does not acknowledge this range of modality input problems and selectively targets language form for systematic development. The approach does not result in better school attainments. Perhaps the label "language disorder" limits perception of the extent of difficulties in other areas. In contrast, an interactive method is described, taking account of "inside" and "outside" the child factors. Educational success is produced by inter-relating the language system with the learning context. Full implementation of the interactive model seems unlikely given the present styles of professional training and existing institutional constraints. However, consumer dissatisfaction with current language Learning provision suggests this procedure offers a promising alternative

Designing multimodal interaction for the visually impaired

Although multimodal computer input is believed to have advantages over unimodal input, little has been done to understand how to design a multimodal input mechanism to facilitate visually impaired users\u27 information access. This research investigates sighted and visually impaired users\u27 multimodal interaction choices when given an interaction grammar that supports speech and touch input modalities. It investigates whether task type, working memory load, or prevalence of errors in a given modality impact a user\u27s choice. Theories in human memory and attention are used to explain the users\u27 speech and touch input coordination. Among the abundant findings from this research, the following are the most important in guiding system design: (1) Multimodal input is likely to be used when it is available. (2) Users select input modalities based on the type of task undertaken. Users prefer touch input for navigation operations, but speech input for non-navigation operations. (3) When errors occur, users prefer to stay in the failing modality, instead of switching to another modality for error correction. (4) Despite the common multimodal usage patterns, there is still a high degree of individual differences in modality choices. Additional findings include: (I) Modality switching becomes more prevalent when lower working memory and attentional resources are required for the performance of other concurrent tasks. (2) Higher error rates increases modality switching but only under duress. (3) Training order affects modality usage. Teaching a modality first versus second increases the use of this modality in users\u27 task performance. In addition to discovering multimodal interaction patterns above, this research contributes to the field of human computer interaction design by: (1) presenting a design of an eyes-free multimodal information browser, (2) presenting a Wizard of Oz method for working with visually impaired users in order to observe their multimodal interaction. The overall contribution of this work is that of one of the early investigations into how speech and touch might be combined into a non-visual multimodal system that can effectively be used for eyes-free tasks

Perception and Its Implication for the “Perceptually Handicapped Child” with Emphasis on Auditory Modality

It was the purpose of this study to present a review of the modern literature on perception, with an emphasis on the auditory modality, in an effort to summarize what research says concerning: 1. the neurological makeup of the perceiving organism; 2. the linguistic makeup of the perceiving organism; 3. the nature of innate perceptual capacities and of acquired percepts; 4. the nature of perceptual deficits and the importance of early identification; 5. the interrelationship of feedback and perception; 6. the interrelationship of auditory discrimination to perception; 7. the dynamics of system functions as it applies to perceptual choices; and 8. the feasibility of behavior modification as a remediation technique for perception deficits

Verbal comprehension after brain damage :a psycholinguistic investigation with special reference to cerebro-vascular accident

PhD ThesisA review of theory and practice in the examination of verbal comprehension in brain-dairiaged adults leads to the conclusion that this underdeveloped area of study can benefit from the application of theories from linguistics. An experimental investigation of (principally) adults who had suffered cerebro -vascular accident applied, amoxigst other linguistic theories, the division of language into phonological, syntactic and semantic levels of organization. The main findings were: a) Semantic abilities in speech and comprehension corresponded; syntactic abilities in speech corresponded with those in reading comprehension, but not aural comprehension; comprehension of phonemic distinctions corresponded with phonetic articulatory abilities, but not with degree of phonemic paraphasia. Tests of verbal comprehension which required simple manipulations of-objects or tokens were contaminated by gesture dyspraxia. Functional comprehension was not a reliable predictor of results on linguistic tests. b) Piphasic adults with left-brain damage experienced significantly more difficulties in comprehension when sequence was critical to the meaning of a word or sentence. At the syntactic level this occurred with reading as well as with aural input, indicating a central difficulty rather than one which is modality-specific. in aural comprehension, unlike all types of control subjects including children, aphasic adults found sentences with reversible elements in surface structure harder than sentences in which reversible deep relations are not made explicit in surface structure sequence. Sequencing appears to be a significant influence on verbal comprehension after left-brain damage. c) Right-brain-damaged adults who were not aphasic in speech, and who were familial right-handers, were selectively impaired in semantic comprehension. Semantic comprehension may be bilaterally represented in the brain, although comprehension at syntactic and phonological levels may depend principally on mechanisms lateralized to the left hemisphere.Ridley Fellowship, Newcastle University

Semantic radical consistency and character transparency effects in Chinese: an ERP study

BACKGROUND: This event-related potential (ERP) study aims to investigate the representation and temporal dynamics of Chinese orthography-to-semantics mappings by simultaneously manipulating character transparency and semantic radical consistency. Character components, referred to as radicals, make up the building blocks used dur...postprin

Negative vaccine voices in Swedish social media

Vaccinations are one of the most significant interventions to public health, but vaccine hesitancy creates concerns for a portion of the population in many countries, including Sweden. Since discussions on vaccine hesitancy are often taken on social networking sites, data from Swedish social media are used to study and quantify the sentiment among the discussants on the vaccination-or-not topic during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Out of all the posts analyzed a majority showed a stronger negative sentiment, prevailing throughout the whole of the examined period, with some spikes or jumps due to the occurrence of certain vaccine-related events distinguishable in the results. Sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool to track public opinions regarding the use, efficacy, safety, and importance of vaccination

An Ethnographic Investigation of Compensatory Strategies in Aphasia. (Volumes I and II).

An ethnographic investigation of compensatory strategies in two individuals with nonfluent aphasia was undertaken. Data were collected from videorecordings of natural conversations between subjects and a variety of partners, observations of speech-language pathology assessment and therapy sessions, participant observations, ethnographic interviews, lamination sessions and documentary evidence. Data were analyzed to identify compensatory strategies employed by the aphasic subjects, to determine patterns of occurrence and functions of compensatory strategies, to determine the expectations and practices of speech-language pathologists, and to identify underlying themes relative to compensatory strategy usage. An operational definition of compensatory strategy was derived from the data, and every compensatory strategy used by each subject was identified in videorecorded samples and subjected to behavioral coding across 38 dimensions of relevant contextual variables. Usage patterns and a rich, authentic description of 25 compensatory behaviors were drawn from these data and triangulated with observations, interviews and lamination sessions to ensure reliability and authenticity. Results indicated that subjects adopted a variety of idiosyncratic, contextually flexible compensatory strategies to satisfy transactional and interactional goals of communication. Identified compensatory behaviors included strategies specifically taught by the speech-language pathologists and natural, untrained compensations. Compensatory strategies were adjusted to contexts and conversational goals. The usage patterns suggested several overall motivations including: the need to exchange information, the drive to conserve energy, the desire to maintain autonomy, and the need for social acceptance. Although speech-language pathologists interviewed and the aphasia literature reviewed defined strategies primarily in terms of message transmission , many of the compensations adopted by the subjects subserved the goal of promoting interaction rather than conveying information. In fact, the flexibility and contextual sensitivity of compensatory strategies indicated the primacy of social motivations in communication. The results raised questions about traditional definitions of compensatory strategies and traditional aphasia management practices, and suggested the need to employ socially driven models of communication in aphasia