Research Grants Fund New Studies on Breast and Childhood Cancers, Hearing Loss, Tuberculosis

Newswise — Finding cures for hearing loss, breast cancer and childhood cancer and a way to identify people at risk for tuberculosis are goals of the first recipients of grants from the Virginia and L.E. Simmons Family Foundation Collaborative Research Fund. The fund, a $3 million initiative to discover new ways to diagnose and treat diseases, supports collaboration among researchers at Rice University, Texas Children’s Hospital and The Methodist Hospital Research Institute.

from Newswise.com

Electrophysiological and behavioral evidence of syntactic priming in sentence comprehension.

Event-related potentials and eye tracking were used to investigate the nature of priming effects in sentence comprehension. Participants read 2 sentences (a prime sentence and a target sentence), both of which had a difficult and ambiguous sentence structure. The prime and target sentences contained either the same verb or verbs that were very close in meaning. Priming effects were robust when the verb was repeated. In the event-related potential experiment, the amplitude of the P600 was reduced in target sentences that followed prime sentences with the same verb but not in prime sentences with a synonymous verb. In the eye-tracking experiment, total reading times on the disambiguating region were reduced when the targets followed prime sentences with the same verb but not when targets followed prime sentences with a synonymous verb. The fact that verb overlap greatly boosted priming effects in reduced relative sentences may indicate that verb argument structures play an important role in online parsing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Exploiting degrees of inflectional ambiguity: Stem form and the time course of morphological processing.

The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant facilitation for unambiguous words only with a long 300-ms SOA. Experiment 2 showed that all potential readings of ambiguous inflections were activated under a short SOA. Whereas the prime-target form overlap did not affect the results under a short SOA, it significantly modulated the results with a long SOA. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results from masked priming were modulated by the morphological structure of the words but not by the prime-target form overlap alone. The results support approaches in which early prelexical morphological processing is driven by morph-based segmentation and form is used to cue selection between 2 candidates only during later processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Selective short-term memory deficits arise from impaired domain-general semantic control mechanisms.

Semantic short-term memory (STM) patients have a reduced ability to retain semantic information over brief delays but perform well on other semantic tasks; this pattern suggests damage to a dedicated buffer for semantic information. Alternatively, these difficulties may arise from mild disruption to domain-general semantic processes that have their greatest impact on demanding STM tasks. In this study, mild semantic processing impairments were demonstrated in 2 semantic STM patients. They performed well on untimed semantic tasks but were deficient in accuracy and reaction times on speeded tasks. Demanding semantic production tasks were also affected. These patients were compared with a case series of individuals with semantic aphasia whose multimodal semantic difficulties stemmed from poor cognitive control. STM and semantic performance were more impaired in this group, but there were qualitative similarities to the semantic STM patients. The difference between the 2 patient types may be a matter of degree. In semantic aphasia, severe disruption to semantic control leads to global semantic impairments, whereas in semantic STM milder disruption might impact mainly on STM tests because of the high control demands of these tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

The cross-script length effect: Further evidence challenging PDP models of reading aloud.

The interaction between length and lexical status is one of the key findings used in support of models of reading aloud that postulate a serial process in the orthography-to-phonology translation (B. S. Weekes, 1997). However, proponents of parallel models argue that this effect arises in peripheral visual or articulatory processes. The authors addressed this possibility using the special characteristics of the Serbian and Japanese writing systems. Experiment 1 examined length effects in Serbian when participants were biased to interpret phonologically bivalent stimuli in the alphabet in which they are words or in the alphabet in which they are nonwords (i.e., the visual characteristics of stimuli were held constant across lexical status). Experiment 2 examined length effects in Japanese kana when words were presented in the kana script in which they usually appear or in the script in which they do not normally appear (i.e., the phonological characteristics of stimuli were held constant across lexical status). Results in both cases showed a larger length effect when stimuli were treated as nonwords and thus offered strong support to models of reading aloud that postulate a serial component. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Trial-to-trial carryover in auditory short-term memory.

Using a short-term recognition memory task, the authors evaluated the carryover across trials of 2 types of auditory information: the characteristics of individual study sounds (item information) and the relationships between the study sounds (study set homogeneity). On each trial, subjects heard 2 successive broadband study sounds and then decided whether a subsequently presented probe sound had been in the study set. On some trials, the similarity of the probe item to stimuli presented on the preceding trial was manipulated. This item information interfered with recognition, and false alarms increased from 0.4% to 4.4%. Moreover, the interference was tuned so that only stimuli that were very similar to each other interfered. On other trials, the relationship among stimuli was manipulated to alter the criterion subjects used in making recognition judgments. The effect of this manipulation was confined to the trial on which the criterion change was generated and did not affect the subsequent trial. These results demonstrate the existence of a sharply tuned carryover of auditory item information but no carryover of the effects of study set homogeneity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved)

from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Children’s Production of Word Accents in Swedish Revisited

The two word accents in Stockholm Swedish (Accent I and Accent II) are distinguished by a consistent falling pitch contour on the stressed syllable of Accent II words. The current study presents new types of evidence that this feature of word accent can be systematically found in words produced by 16- to 18-monthold Swedish-speaking children. Compared to other disyllabic productions, the stressed syllable in Accent II words have a larger F0 decline, more sequences of high-low turning points identified by a stylized contour algorithm and an earlier F0 peak. In addition, a negative correlation is found between the value of F0 peak and F0 change in the stressed syllable. Taken together, these findings indicate that children learning Swedish have internalized a subtle but lexically relevant pitch contour by a very early stage of word production.

from Phonetica

Otoacoustic emissions and effects of contralateral white noise stimulation on transient evoked otoacoustic emissions in diabetic children

Objective
In this study, our aim was to determine presence of dysfunction in the efferent auditory system of children with type-I diabetes mellitus (DM) presenting no evidence of symptomatic neuropathy.

Methods
Thirty children with type-I DM (DM group) and 31 age matched healthy children (control group) with normal hearing and middle ear function were entered to the study. Distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAE), transiently evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAE), and spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAE) measurements were performed. Then, the TEOAE recording was repeated while a continuous broadband white noise (bandwidth: 50–8000 Hz) presented at 40 dB SL was delivered to the contralateral ear for efferent auditory system suppression.

Results
We found that contralateral stimulation (CS) with white noise resulted in significantly more pronounced suppression of the TEOAE response amplitude in healthy controls compared to DM group at 2000 and 4000 Hz frequencies. Further, a relatively higher percentage of the controls had suppression in at least three frequencies compared to DM group. SOAE prevalence was found to be higher in the DM group.

Conclusions
Our findings suggest presence of a dysfunction in medial olivocochlear efferent system in diabetic children. This may be regarded as an early central manifestation of diabetic neuropathy.

from the International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology

Siemens Hearing Instruments Launches Life And Motion – Advanced Technology Enables More Natural, Comfortable And Enhanced Hearing Experience

Siemens Hearing Instruments has launched Life™ and Motion™, two new hearing instruments developed for individuals who want discreet and fashionable devices that work with their lifestyle.

from Medical News Today.com

The ‘dialect myth’ and socio-onomastics. The names of the castles of Bellinzona in an integrational perspective

In this paper, it is argued that name variation and change cannot be studied in a satisfactory way within a variationist sociolinguistic framework, as the latter cannot ultimately cope with the psychological complexity involved in human communication. The reason why variationism does not describe a social ‘reality’ has to do with its insistence that lexical variants have to be assignable to ‘fixed codes’ (‘dialects’, ‘sociolects’, ‘style lects’) and that two speakers using different codes will result in misunderstandings and communication breakdowns. The present contribution offers an alternative approach to synchronic name variation inspired by an integrational semiology, thus treating linguistic signs (in this case, toponyms) as context-sensitive and in need of instantaneous referencing. By not considering proper names as part of any fixed codes the integrational fieldworker is able to observe language use unbiased, prepared to accept that in principle any name may be used between any two speakers in any situation. The objects of study for this paper are the names of the three Medieval castles of Bellinzona (Italian-speaking Switzerland), which the present author already investigated in an orthodox sociolinguistic perspective in the 1990s.

from Language & Communication

Eating Again After Stroke

Food is one of the great pleasures in life, but some are robbed of that enjoyment after suffering a stroke.

from Ivanhoe.com

Texas Medical Center researchers win collaborative grants

Simmons Family Foundation backs research on breast and childhood cancers, hearing loss, tuberculosis

from EurekAlert.org

AMA Affirms ASHA to Represent Professions in Valuation Process

The American Medical Association (AMA) reaffirmed ASHA’s lead role in the coding and valuation process for audiology and speech-language pathology services at a meeting on Oct. 2, 2008. The AMA’s decision followed a challenge by the American Academy of Audiology (AAA).

from the ASHA Leader

A study of sociolinguistic characteristics of Taiwan children’s peer-talk in a Mandarin—English-speaking preschool

This qualitative study presents sociolinguistic characteristics of peer-talk of 44 children in a Mandarin—English-speaking preschool in Taiwan where English was taught as a foreign language (EFL). Key findings: teacher-dominated talk influences children’s peer-talk; EFL and code-switching emerge in spontaneous peer-talk; children actively engage in EFL learning by using private speech for self-regulatory learning; children actively provide peer tutoring even though they are in the early stage of EFL learning; and language play creates emergent humor for children’s verbal participation in the EFL classroom, offering a way for them to resist authoritative voices and thus transform EFL into a living language.

from Journal of Early Childhood Research

Spoken Language Scores of Children Using Cochlear Implants Compared to Hearing Age-Mates at School Entry

This study investigated three questions: Is it realistic to expect age-appropriate spoken language skills in children with cochlear implants (CIs) who received auditory–oral intervention during the preschool years? What characteristics predict successful spoken language development in this population? Are children with CIs more proficient in some areas of language than others? We analyzed language skills of 153 children with CIs as measured by standardized tests. These children (mean age = 5 years and 10 months) attended programs in the United States (N = 39) that used an auditory–oral educational approach. Age-appropriate scores were observed in 50% of the children on measures of receptive vocabulary, 58% on expressive vocabulary, 46% on verbal intelligence, 47% on receptive language, and 39% on expressive language. Regression analysis indicated that, after controlling for the effects of nonverbal intelligence and parent education level, children who received their implants at young ages had higher scores on all language tests than children who were older at implantation. On average, children with CIs performed better on certain language measures than others, indicating that some areas of language may be more difficult for these children to master than others. Implications for educators of deaf children with CIs are discussed.

from the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education