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

Proceedings of the International Conference Sensory Motor Concepts in Language & Cognition

This volume contains selected papers of the 2008 annual conference of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan (Vereinigung für sozialwissenschaftliche Japanforschung e.V. – VSJF). The academic meeting has addressed the issue of demographic change in Japan in comparison to the social developments of ageing in Germany and other member states of the European Union. The conference was organized by the Institute for Modern Japanese Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf and took place at the Mutter Haus in Kaiserswerth (an ancient part of Duesseldorf). Speakers from Germany, England, Japan and the Netherlands presented their papers in four sessions on the topics “Demographic Trends and Social Analysis”, “Family and Welfare Policies”, “Ageing Society and the Organization of Households” and “Demographic Change and the Economy”. Central to all transnational and national studies on demographic change is the question of how societies can be reconstructed and be made adaptive to these changes in order to survive as solidarity communities. The authors of this volume attend to this question by discussing on recent trends of social and economic restructuring and giving insight into new research developments such as in the area of households and housing, family care work, medical insurance, robot technology or the employment sector

Do informal caregivers of people with dementia mirror the cognitive deficits of their demented patients?:A pilot study

Recent research suggests that informal caregivers of people with dementia (ICs) experience more cognitive deficits than noncaregivers. The reason for this is not yet clear. Objective: to test the hypothesis that ICs ‘mirror' the cognitive deficits of the demented people they care for. Participants and methods: 105 adult ICs were asked to complete three neuropsychological tests: letter fluency, category fluency, and the logical memory test from the WMS-III. The ICs were grouped according to the diagnosis of their demented patients. One-sample ttests were conducted to investigate if the standardized mean scores (t-scores) of the ICs were different from normative data. A Bonferroni correction was used to correct for multiple comparisons. Results: 82 ICs cared for people with Alzheimer's dementia and 23 ICs cared for people with vascular dementia. Mean letter fluency score of the ICs of people with Alzheimer's dementia was significantly lower than the normative mean letter fluency score, p = .002. The other tests yielded no significant results. Conclusion: our data shows that ICs of Alzheimer patients have cognitive deficits on the letter fluency test. This test primarily measures executive functioning and it has been found to be sensitive to mild cognitive impairment in recent research. Our data tentatively suggests that ICs who care for Alzheimer patients also show signs of cognitive impairment but that it is too early to tell if this is cause for concern or not

Audiovisual Integration in Apraxia of Speech: EEG Evidence for Processing Differences

Speech perception is a unique audiovisual experience in part because timing of the speech signal is influenced by simultaneous overlapping gestures in coarticulation. Apraxia of speech (AOS) is a motor planning disorder that impairs coarticulation. Imaging studies show that brain regions damaged in AOS are critical to audiovisual speech perception. Although AOS is a motor planning disorder, individuals with AOS may have a disruption to the perceptual system for speech gestures. To evaluate this hypothesis we investigated audiovisual mismatch negativity (MMN) brain responses in adults with damage to Broca’s area (n =5) compared to a healthy age-matched comparison group (n = 5). We utilized the McGurk effect, in which incongruent auditory and visual information alters perception. Participants viewed videos of a speaker articulating the syllable /ba/ (standard) for 80% trials and /ga/ (deviant) for 20% of the trials while the auditory stimulus /ba/ remained consistent throughout. Responses to this McGurk audiovisual condition were compared to an inverse McGurk audiovisual condition in which the visual stimulus remained constant while the auditory stimulus changed, and a visual-only condition without sound to control for evoked activity from changes to the visual stimulus. Incongruent McGurk deviants elicited an MMN over left hemisphere electrodes in the comparison group, while the AOS group exhibited a later, attention-based response, a P300. The AOS group similarly responded to inverse McGurk deviants, which do not require fusion of the percept, with a P300 response, indicating that auditory and visual aspects of the incongruent McGurk deviants were not integrated. In the visual-only control condition, the AOS group showed a left-lateralized MMN, suggesting greater influence of visual processing when confronted with conflicting multisensory information compared to the comparison group. Overall, the comparison group’s responses were indicative of early and automatic audiovisual integration of incongruent McGurk percepts while the responses of the AOS group showed contributions of both attentional and visual processing. The timing of the response in the AOS group was correlated with speech production characteristics of apraxia, as well as performance on taxing motor speech tasks. Results of this study support the hypothesis that AOS is a disorder beyond motor planning, with implications for higher-level linguistic and cognitive systems