Monthly Archives: March 2010
In Brain-Injured Children, Gesturing Predicts Language Delays
Children with brain injuries may use gesture to signal they need help in developing language, research at the University of Chicago shows. The children who make the fewest gestures early in development also develop spoken vocabulary more slowly.
from News-Medical.net
Words play an important role in infants’ cognition
Northwestern University researchers have found that even before infants begin to speak, words play an important role in their cognition. For 3-month-old infants, words influence performance in a cognitive task in a way that goes beyond the influence of other kinds of sounds, including musical tones.
from News-Medical.net
Cost-Effectiveness Of Topical Steroids For Glue Ear
This study estimated the cost-effectiveness of topical intranasal steroids for the treatment of otitis media with effusion (OME) in primary care from the perspective of the UK National Health Service and demonstrates that topical steroids are unlikely to be a cost-effective treatment for OME in general practice.
New, portable EEG-based device for people with motoric disabilities
Imec, Holst Centre and the lab of Neuro- and Psychophysiology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven today present the Mind Speller, a portable, easy-to-wear, intelligent textual and verbal communications prototype device enabling people with motoric disabilities (suffering from for example brain paralysis or speech or language disorders) to communicate.
from News-Medical.net
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association: Health Care Reform Legislation Signed Into Law
Yesterday, the president signed into law H.R. 3590, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. ASHA will be providing a more detailed analysis of the legislation. However, there are several critical issues impacting audiologists and speech-language pathologists.
from ASHA Web
UC Center Chosen To Study Auditory Brainstem Implants
Samy is working with an investigational device that will enable people who have lost hearing in both ears to still be able to process certain types of noise. The device bypasses structures within the ear and works by stimulating the brainstem, which sends a message to the brain that a noise has been “heard.”
Callier Study Examines Effects of Preterm Birth
A Callier Center researcher hopes a study she is conducting will shed light on how preterm birth could affect speech and language development in young children.
Agil Hearing Aid System Organizes Sounds, Helps With Cognitive Processing
Oticon A/S out of Smørum, Denmark has released a new hearing system that promises a more natural experience thanks to an advanced new sound processing algorithm.
from MedGadget.com
A potential new clinical trial design – the “cohort multiple randomised controlled trial”
The authors summarise those clinical scenarios where this study design would be more or less suitable, and note that a pilot study to the design has been carried out.
Morphological facilitation for regular and irregular verb formations in native and non-native speakers: Little evidence for two distinct mechanisms
The authors compared performance on two variants of the primed lexical decision task to investigate morphological processing in native and non-native speakers of English. They examined patterns of facilitation on present tense targets. Primes were regular (billed–bill) past tense formations and two types of irregular past tense forms that varied on preservation of target length (fell–fall; taught–teach). When a forward mask preceded the prime (Exp. 1), language and prime type interacted. Native speakers showed reliable regular and irregular length preserved facilitation relative to orthographic controls. Non-native speakers’ latencies after morphological and orthographic primes did not differ reliably except for regulars. Under cross-modal conditions (Exp. 2), language and prime type interacted. Native but not non-native speakers showed inhibition following orthographically similar primes. Collectively, reliable facilitation for regulars and patterns across verb type and task provided little support for a processing dichotomy (decomposition, non-combinatorial association) based on inflectional regularity in either native or non-native speakers of English.
What causes the bilingual disadvantage in verbal fluency? The dual-task analogy
We investigated the consequences of bilingualism for verbal fluency by comparing bilinguals to monolinguals, and dominant versus non-dominant-language fluency. In Experiment 1, bilinguals produced fewer correct responses, slower first response times and proportionally delayed retrieval, relative to monolinguals. In Experiment 2, similar results were obtained comparing the dominant to the non-dominant languages within bilinguals. Additionally, bilinguals produced significantly lower-frequency words and a greater proportion of cognate responses than monolinguals, and bilinguals produced more cross-language intrusion errors when speaking the non-dominant language, but almost no such intrusions when speaking the dominant language. These results support an analogy between bilingualism and dual-task effects (Rohrer et al., 1995), implying a role for between-language interference in explaining the bilingual fluency disadvantage, and suggest that bilingual fluency will be maximized under testing conditions that minimize such interference. More generally, the findings suggest a role for selection by competition in language production, and that such competition is more influential in relatively unconstrained production tasks.
The role of semantics in translation recognition: effects of number of translations, dominance of translations and semantic relatedness of multiple translations
This study aims to examine the influence of multiple translations of a word on bilingual processing in three translation recognition experiments during which French–English bilinguals had to decide whether two words were translations of each other or not. In the first experiment, words with only one translation were recognized as translations faster than words with multiple translations. Furthermore, when words were presented with their dominant translation, the recognition process was faster than when words were presented with their non-dominant translation. In Experiment 2, these effects were replicated in both directions of translation (L1–L2 and L2–L1). In Experiment 3, we manipulated number-of-translations and the semantic relatedness between the different translations of a word. When the two translations of a word (i.e., bateau) were related in meaning (synonyms such as the English translations boat and ship), the translation recognition process was faster than when the two translations of a word (i.e., argent) were unrelated in meaning (the two translations money and silver). The consequences of translation ambiguities are discussed in the light of the distributed conceptual feature model of bilingual memory (De Groot, 1992b; Van Hell and De Groot, 1998b).
The impact of a subordinate L1 on L2 auditory processing in adult bilinguals
For bilinguals born in an English-speaking country or who arrive at a young age, English (L2) often becomes their dominant language by adulthood. This study examines whether such adult bilinguals show equivalent performance to monolingual English native speakers on three English auditory processing tasks: phonemic awareness, spelling-to-dictation and auditory comprehension. The study contrasts three bilingual language groups differing in their L1: morphosyllabic/logographic L1 (Cantonese), morphosyllabic/alphabetic (Vietnamese) L1 and non-morphosyllabic/alphabetic L1 (Other). Particularly on the tasks that involved nonwords, the morphosyllabic bilingual groups performed most poorly, suggesting an effect of L1 phonological structure on English processing despite L1 having become subordinate to L2. The results indicate that even when a bilingual is born, raised and educated in their L2 environment, native equivalence in L2 is not assured.
Processing subject–verb agreement in a second language depends on proficiency
Subject–verb agreement is a computation that is often difficult to execute perfectly in the first language (L1) and even more difficult to produce skillfully in a second language (L2). In this study, we examine the way in which bilingual speakers complete sentence fragments in a manner that reflects access to both grammatical and conceptual number. In two experiments, we show that bilingual speakers are sensitive to both grammatical and conceptual number in the L1 and grammatical number agreement in the L2. However, only highly proficient bilinguals are also sensitive to conceptual number in the L2. The results suggest that the extent to which speakers are able to exploit conceptual information during speech planning depends on the level of language proficiency.
Age of acquisition and proficiency as factors in language production: Agreement in bilinguals
Research on the production of subject–verb number agreement in monolinguals suggests differences between and within languages in how it proceeds as a function of morphological richness. When agreement morphology is relatively rich, the influence of conceptual number over grammatical number is less than when it is relatively poor. Within the framework of Eberhard, Cutting and Bock’s (2005) marking and morphing account of agreement production, this finding is explained by how number features from the syntax and the lexicon are reconciled. This study asks: (1) Can this account of differences in agreement production as a function of morphological richness be extended to the case of bilinguals? (2) Do age of acquisition and/or proficiency modulate whether these differences surface in bilinguals? Agreement production was examined in early and late English–Spanish, and late Spanish–English bilinguals of varying proficiency. Higher-proficiency bilinguals patterned similarly to monolinguals, supporting the extension of the marking and morphing account.
