12 research outputs found

    Frequency effects in the processing of verbs and argument structure: Evidence from adults with and without acquired aphasia

    Get PDF
    Introduction In usage-based approaches to language, grammar is viewed as an emergent phenomenon that derives from humans’ repeated exposure to individual instances of particular linguistic expressions (Bybee, 2006). Goldberg’s (1995) construction grammar is a version of usage-based grammar that treats language as an inventory of form-meaning pairings, termed constructions. Usage-based approaches to language predict that factors of language use, such as frequency of occurrence, affect processing at every level of the linguistic system, from sounds to sentences. This approach is gaining increasing recognition in the field of aphasiology, where sentence-level frequency effects have historically been described in terms of deficits (Gahl & Menn, 2016). The current research adopts a usage-based approach to language and contributes new data on the topic of verb and sentence processing in typical adults and adults with acquired aphasia. Aims This research investigated the effects of two frequency-based properties of verbs on language processing in adults, including the frequency of a verb as a single word, termed lexical frequency, and the frequency of a verb in a particular syntactic construction, termed construction frequency. Specifically, this project aimed: (1) to examine the effect of construction frequency and lexical frequency on sentence processing in adults; (2) to explore whether the pattern of performance from adults with acquired aphasia was similar to or divergent from the performance of typical adults; and (3) to consider how residual linguistic capabilities in participants with aphasia affected their performance in experimental tasks. Methods In Phase 1, 20 typical adults and four adults with acquired aphasia took part in a verbal fluency task in which they named verbs that could occur in eight unique syntactic constructions. Noun phrases were encoded as pronouns, so no semantic activation was available from the lexemes contained in sentence stimuli, and a blank space stood in place of the verb. For example, a sentence corresponding to the conative construction was presented as you ___ at us. In Phase 2, 90 typical adults and 14 adults with acquired aphasia took part in a grammaticality judgement task and a sentence completion task. Participants silently read sentences like those in Phase 1 and were subsequently presented with a written verb. In the grammaticality judgement task, participants decided whether or not the verb could occur in the sentence stimulus. In the sentence completion task, participants replaced the blank space in the sentence stimulus with the given verb and produced the entire sentence aloud. Participants’ number of target responses and response times were measured in each task. The frequency of verbs in Phase 2 varied along two dimensions. These independent variables included construction frequency and lexical frequency, each of which had two levels, namely, high frequency and low frequency. These four groups resulted in a factorial design, where conditions differed with respect to levels of construction frequency and lexical frequency. Results In Phase 1, the number of times typical participants generated verbs in response to syntactic constructions was more strongly related to verbs’ construction frequency than lexical frequency, for most constructions. Sentence stimuli successfully elicited verbs from participants with aphasia. In Phase 2, typical participants showed an effect of construction frequency in the grammaticality judgement task and an effect of lexical frequency in the sentence completion task. These effects were moderated by construction and interactions. In general, group-level results from participants with aphasia were consistent with findings from typical participants. Some individuals with aphasia showed frequency effects to a greater or lesser extent than typical participants. Conclusion Results suggest that at the sentence level, the frequency of verbs as single words and the frequency of verbs in particular syntactic contexts affects language processing, depending on task demands. Findings confirm the predicted effect of linguistic experience on language use. Importantly, this project extends the number of investigations of pathological language undertaken in a usage-based linguistic framework. Results from participants with aphasia are discussed with reference to treatments for sentence processing deficits in aphasia, item selection for those treatments and theories of agrammatism

    Spokane Intercollegiate Research Conference 2021

    Get PDF

    Efficacy of Communicative Reading Strategies as an Instructional Approach for Adult Low-Ability Readers.

    Get PDF
    Twelve adult low-ability readers participated in a pretest-posttest control group study investigating the efficacy of Communicative Reading Strategies (CRS) as an instructional reading approach. Six adults received CRS instruction and constituted the experimental group. The remaining six adults received skill-based instruction and served as the control group. All participants demonstrated instructional level reading skills at or below a fifth grade level and completed 40 hours of instruction. Changes in performance on measures of word recognition, comprehension, and reading rate from pretest to posttest were used to compare CRS and control groups. Results of Mann Whitney U analyses revealed that both methods of instruction were effective in improving word recognition and comprehension abilities for most subjects. For individual subjects and mean group gains, the word recognition and comprehension results favored the CRS group, although these differences did not reach a level of statistical significance. Further analyses of the reading performance of CRS subjects revealed additional findings. Scaffolding provided by CRS interactions increased both the assisted word recognition level and assisted comprehension scores for most subjects at both pretest and posttest. Furthermore, reading gains made under scaffolded conditions at pretest were highly predictive of actual unassisted reading gains demonstrated after 40 hours of instruction. Measures of reading accuracy, fluency, rate, comprehension, and story retelling ability obtained from CRS subjects after every 10 hours of instruction was not representative of actual gains demonstrated at posttest

    The Stylometric Processing of Sensory Open Source Data

    Get PDF
    This research project’s end goal is on the Lone Wolf Terrorist. The project uses an exploratory approach to the self-radicalisation problem by creating a stylistic fingerprint of a person's personality, or self, from subtle characteristics hidden in a person's writing style. It separates the identity of one person from another based on their writing style. It also separates the writings of suicide attackers from ‘normal' bloggers by critical slowing down; a dynamical property used to develop early warning signs of tipping points. It identifies changes in a person's moods, or shifts from one state to another, that might indicate a tipping point for self-radicalisation. Research into authorship identity using personality is a relatively new area in the field of neurolinguistics. There are very few methods that model how an individual's cognitive functions present themselves in writing. Here, we develop a novel algorithm, RPAS, which draws on cognitive functions such as aging, sensory processing, abstract or concrete thinking through referential activity emotional experiences, and a person's internal gender for identity. We use well-known techniques such as Principal Component Analysis, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and the Vector Space Method to cluster multiple anonymous-authored works. Here we use a new approach, using seriation with noise to separate subtle features in individuals. We conduct time series analysis using modified variants of 1-lag autocorrelation and the coefficient of skewness, two statistical metrics that change near a tipping point, to track serious life events in an individual through cognitive linguistic markers. In our journey of discovery, we uncover secrets about the Elizabethan playwrights hidden for over 400 years. We uncover markers for depression and anxiety in modern-day writers and identify linguistic cues for Alzheimer's disease much earlier than other studies using sensory processing. In using these techniques on the Lone Wolf, we can separate their writing style used before their attacks that differs from other writing

    Application of linguistics in the teaching of the mother-tongue

    Get PDF

    Lexical Organisation in Chinese Spoken Word Production: Evidence from Studies of Homophones

    Get PDF
    The research reported in this thesis was designed to shed light on the nature of the functional lexical organisation in Mandarin Chinese spoken word production. Two main theoretical issues were investigated: The lexical representations of homophones in Chinese, and how activation is transmitted from lexical to phonological levels in Chinese spoken word production. The results of two experimental studies of word reading responses to homophones and non-homophonic words (matched for word frequency, and a range of other variables) found no effect of frequency inheritance, contrary to the hypothesis that homophones have a shared phonological representation. The results of six experimental studies that examined the priming of object naming times by the prior presentation of prime words of various relationships showed that there are clear direct effects of repetition, homophone, and phonological (atonal syllable) priming. However, the experiments found no homophone-to-semantic, phonological-to-semantic, or semantic-to-homophone mediated priming effects. These results offer no support for interactive processing models of Chinese word production. However, two experimental studies found that Chinese-English bilinguals show homophone priming of object naming that is mediated by the Chinese translation-equivalents of English prime words. The results of the research reported in this thesis support two general conclusions concerning the Chinese speech production system: homophones have independent lexical phonological representations, and the processing underlying spoken word production operates in a mainly serial and discrete manner

    Comprehension and memory for everyday events by the elderly

    Get PDF
    A large literature has described the effects of advancing age on cognitive laboratory tasks, but there have been few attempts to investigate its effects on everyday cognitive performance. The experiments reported are an attempt to explore the effects of age on the everyday memory task of comprehending and remembering events as conveyed by television and in everyday perception. The methodology used was cross-sectional with all subjects well-documented on a number of indices. These were assessed as predictors of performance on different cognitive tasks relating to the everyday memory task. Age per se was found to have a limited effect on performance, the best index of the cognitive effect of ageing being I.Q. test score. This index picked up most of the variance on the measurements taken. Experiments were designed to examine the elderlys' recall of television news broadcasts. These demonstrated that elderly people with low I.Q. test scores have difficulty recalling facts and details from such an information source. Subsequent experiments attempted to identify the processes which explain groups differences on this task
    corecore