Designers' models of the human-computer interface

Understanding design models of the human-computer interface (HCI) may produce two types of benefits. First, interface development often requires input from two different types of experts: human factors specialists and software developers. Given the differences in their backgrounds and roles, human factors specialists and software developers may have different cognitive models of the HCI. Yet, they have to communicate about the interface as part of the design process. If they have different models, their interactions are likely to involve a certain amount of miscommunication. Second, the design process in general is likely to be guided by designers' cognitive models of the HCI, as well as by their knowledge of the user, tasks, and system. Designers do not start with a blank slate; rather they begin with a general model of the object they are designing. The author's approach to a design model of the HCI was to have three groups make judgments of categorical similarity about the components of an interface: human factors specialists with HCI design experience, software developers with HCI design experience, and a baseline group of computer users with no experience in HCI design. The components of the user interface included both display components such as windows, text, and graphics, and user interaction concepts, such as command language, editing, and help. The judgments of the three groups were analyzed using hierarchical cluster analysis and Pathfinder. These methods indicated, respectively, how the groups categorized the concepts, and network representations of the concepts for each group. The Pathfinder analysis provides greater information about local, pairwise relations among concepts, whereas the cluster analysis shows global, categorical relations to a greater extent

Verb use in aphasic and non-aphasic personal discourse: What is normal?

Sentence and discourse analysis research provides evidence of both impaired and intact ability in verb production in aphasia, based on comparisons made within aphasic subtypes, and between aphasic and control speakers. Comparisons are complicated due to variation in elicitation tasks and genre, participant sample size, and aphasia subtype, as well as methodological differences in determining fluency. In this study, we examined the impact of aphasia on speakers’ capacity to talk about their quality of life, applying three analytical methods to 58 speakers’ discourse (29 predominantly fluent aphasic speakers; 29 non-aphasic speakers). Both speaker groups produced similar quantity, weight, and type of verbs, with substantial overlap in verb tokens. Relational, material and mental verbs were prevalent. Aphasic speakers had significantly lower predicate argument structure scores, and produced significantly more 0 argument structures, more [Aux+0] constructions, fewer 1 argument structures in general and fewer 1 argument structures with clausal embedding, compared to non-aphasic speakers. This study provides evidence for intact (semantic weight and type) and impaired (PAS) verb production in aphasia. The heterogeneity within both participant samples challenges assumptions of normality and typicality

Representation and processing of mass and count nouns: A review

Comprehension and/or production of noun phrases and sentences requires the selection of lexical-syntactic attributes of nouns. These lexical-syntactic attributes include grammatical gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), number (singular/plural) and countability (mass/count). While there has been considerable discussion regarding gender and number, relatively little attention has focused on countability. Therefore, this article reviews empirical evidence for lexical-syntactic specification of nouns for countability. This includes evidence from studies of language production and comprehension with normal speakers and case studies which assess impairments of mass/count nouns in people with acquired brain damage. Current theories of language processing are reviewed and found to be lacking specification regarding countability. Subsequently, the theoretical implications of the empirical studies are discussed in the context of frameworks derived from these accounts of language production (Levelt, 1989; Levelt et al., 1999) and comprehension (Taler and Jarema, 2006). The review concludes that there is empirical support for specification of nouns for countability at a lexical-syntactic level

Evidence for a functional specialization of ventral anterior temporal lobe for language.

The controlled semantic cognition framework proposes that the ventral anterior temporal lobes (vATL) in the left and right hemisphere function as an integrated hub region supporting transmodal semantic representations. The clinical evidence for the transmodal function of vATL is largely based on studies of semantic dementia patients with severe anomia, who also show impaired performance on nonverbal tasks that involve the retrieval of knowledge about objects and their prototypical use, such as the production of tool use pantomimes. Yet, evidence from patients with apraxia and functional neuroimaging studies in healthy adults does not implicate vATL in pantomime production. We, therefore, compared semantic retrieval of object-action associations for overt verb and pantomime production from picture and word stimuli. Our results show that, independent of stimulus modality, the retrieval of object-action associations for verb, but not pantomime, production is related to activity in bilateral vATL. Bilateral vATL activation was also observed for meaningless verbal responses that did not require the retrieval of object-action associations. Taken together, our results suggest that bilateral vATL is not engaged in the retrieval of object-action associations per se, but rather supports semantic representations that are functionally specialized for language. These findings have implications for the semantic cognition framework and our understanding of the dependence of conceptual knowledge on language

Imageability ratings across languages

Imageability is a psycholinguistic variable that indicates how well a word gives rise to a mental image or sensory experience. Imageability ratings are used extensively in psycholinguistic, neuropsychological, and aphasiological studies. However, little formal knowledge exists about whether and how these ratings are associated between and within languages. Fifteen imageability databases were cross-correlated using nonparametric statistics. Some of these corresponded to unpublished data collected within a European research network-the Collaboration of Aphasia Trialists (COST IS1208). All but four of the correlations were significant. The average strength of the correlations (rho = .68) and the variance explained (R (2) = 46%) were moderate. This implies that factors other than imageability may explain 54% of the results. Imageability ratings often correlate across languages. Different possibly interacting factors may explain the moderate strength and variance explained in the correlations: (1) linguistic and cultural factors; (2) intrinsic differences between the databases; (3) range effects; (4) small numbers of words in each database, equivalent words, and participants; and (5) mean age of the participants. The results suggest that imageability ratings may be used cross-linguistically. However, further understanding of the factors explaining the variance in the correlations will be needed before research and practical recommendations can be made

The relationship of semantic and syntactic aspects of verb representation

Most theories of language recognize the importance and complexity of verbs. Verbs convey both semantic and syntactic information, and therefore, the study of verb representation and processing can provide important insights into the nature and relationship of semantic and syntactic representation within the language processing system. Two models of verb representation were examined: (1) Semantic Complexity (Johnson-Laird, 1983); and (2) Conceptual Constituents (Pinker, 1989). The validity of these models was investigated by examining patterns of verb disruption in seven language impaired individuals. Investigation of patients' verb processing did not provide evidence for a model of verb representation based on semantic complexity, however, it did provide support for semantic representation of thematic roles within the lexicon separate from syntactic representation as posited by the conceptual constituent model. These findings were followed by an experiment investigating whether the language processing system has a bias for particular thematic roles in specific syntactic positions. The results indicated no bias for the syntactic position of specific thematic roles

A comparison of discrimination for speech and nonspeech and implications for theories of speech perception

The present paper reviewed the literature supporting and contradicting three theories of categorical perception in speech; the specialized speech processor theory, the cue duration theory, and the acoustic percept theory. Three experiments were then carried out to further investigate these theories. The first experiment compared subjects' perception of speech and three types of nonspeech stimuli (simple nonspeech, complex nonspeech, and reverse speech) and the effect of training on subjects' ability to discriminate these stimuli. The second experiment, dealt with a failure to replicate Pisoni (1977) using complex speech stimuli with the same parameters. The third experiment, compared speech and nonspeech perception in aphasic patients. Results failed to lend support to the specialized speech processing theory. Support for the cue duration theory and acoustic percept theory was mixed