In a phonological assessment, the aim is to obtain systematic and reliable data of a child's speech output, which can then serve as a basis for a decision on an appropriate intervention (Wolk & Meisler, 1998). Whether phonological assessment should be derived from an analysis of picture-naming or a conversation with the child, and whether the two methods for elicitation generate equivalent results, has been debated among clinicians and researchers for an extended time (Masterson, Bernhardt & Hofheintz, 2005). The aim of the present study was to compare two methods of speech elicitation for phonological assessment: spontaneous conversation and picture-naming, respectively. In the study, the procedures have been used when assessing children with phonological disorders as well as children with typical language development. The results are presented using two levels of phonological analysis; degree of phonological impairment, in terms of percentage of phonemes correct (PPC), and type of phonological impairment, in terms of phonological simplification processes. Eighteen (18) children participated in the study, nine (9) with phonological impairment (age 3;10 – 5;11), and nine with typical phonologic development (age 3;2 – 4;6). No significant differences were found regarding the percentage of phonemes correct between the two elicitation methods, neither for the group of children with phonological impairment, nor for the group of children with typical phonological development. Thus, the degree of speech difficulties was the same regardless of elicitation method. In assessing the type of impairment, however, a comparison between the sensitivity and the specificity obtained in the two tests indicate that there is a difference in how well the two elicitation methods intercept the phonological simplification processes. In the two elicitating methods, exactly the same processes could not be found in the speech of any child. The discussion includes the consequences of word structure, position and context of phonemes in the different speech samples. Furthermore, advantages and disadvantages of using the different elicitation methods in phonological assessment are discussed. The present study contributes to an increased knowledge about the ability to capture phonological problems sing picture-naming and conversational speech samples, respectively, in assessing a child’s speech. Furthermore, the study presents input to the on-going debate on phonological assessment, and may contribute to reflectance when selecting a clinical assessment tool.

No description available.

Image format (Laws, Adlington, Gale, Moreno-Martínez, & Sartori, 2007), ceiling effects in controls (Fung et al., 2001; Laws et al., 2005; Moreno-Martínez, & Laws, 2007; 2008), and nuisance variables (Funnell & De Mornay Davis, 1996; Funnell & Sheridan, 1992; Stewart, Parkin & Hunkin, 1992) all influence the emergence of category specific deficits in Alzheimer‟s dementia (AD). Thus, the predominant use of line drawings of familiar, everyday items in category specific research is problematic. Moreover, this does not allow researchers to explore the extent to which format may influence object recognition. As such, the initial concern of this thesis was the development of a new corpus of 147 colour images of graded naming difficulty, the Hatfield Image Test (HIT; Adlington, Laws, & Gale, 2009), and the collection of relevant normative data including ratings of: age of acquisition, colour diagnosticity, familiarity, name agreement, visual complexity, and word frequency. Furthermore, greyscale and line-drawn versions of the HIT corpus were developed (and again, the associated normative data obtained), to permit research into the influence of image format on the emergence of category specific effects in patients with AD, and in healthy controls. Using the HIT, several studies were conducted including: (i) a normative investigation of the effects of category and image format on naming accuracy and latencies in healthy controls; (ii) an exploration of the effects of image format (using the HIT images presented in colour, greyscale, and line-drawn formats) and category on the naming performance of AD patients, and age-matched controls performing below ceiling; (iii) a longitudinal investigation comparing AD patient performance to that of age-matched controls, on a range of semantic tasks (naming, sorting, word-picture matching), using colour, greyscale, and line-drawn versions of the HIT; (iv) a comparison of naming in AD patients and age-matched controls on the HIT and the (colour, greyscale and line-drawn) images from the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) corpus; and (v) a meta-analysis to explore category specific naming in AD using the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) versus other corpora. Taken together, the results of these investigations showed first, that image format interacts with category. For both AD patients and controls, colour is more important for the recognition of living things, with a significant nonliving advantage emerging for the line-drawn images, but not the colour images. Controls benefitted more from additional surface information than AD patients, which chapter 6 shows results from low-level visual cortical impairment in AD. For controls, format was also more important for the recognition of low familiarity, low frequency items. In addition, the findings show that adequate control data affects the emergence of category specific deficits in AD. Specifically, based on within-group comparison chapters 6, 7, and 8 revealed a significant living deficit in AD patients. However, when compared to controls performing below ceiling, as demonstrated in chapters 7 and 8, this deficit was only significant for the line drawings, showing that the performance observed in AD patients is simply an exaggeration of the norm.

在Rosinski, Golinkoff, & Kukish(1975)提出字圖作業（picture-word task）之後，許多研究者紛紛使用此類作業來探討圖形唸名與字彙閱讀間的關係。過去許多研究在字圖作業上觀察到混淆字的呈現會影響圖形唸名的速度，這種效果稱為語意干擾（semantic interference），研究者亦提出了各種圖形唸名歷程的模式解釋來說明語意干擾效果的成因，同時藉由觀察其他變項對語意干擾效果的影響來區分各個模式的正確性。本研究將操弄混淆字與目標圖間的字形相似性、字音相似性以及不同的刺激呈現時距（SOA）來觀察語意干擾效果及影響因素。實驗一對混淆字與目標圖間字形相似的操弄僅在呈現時距為零時觀察到字形相似可以降低語意干擾效果；實驗二利用相同的作業形式操弄混淆字與目標圖間的字音相似性，未發現字音相似性的促發效果，但仍可觀察到語意干擾效果；實驗三同時操弄字形相似與字音相似變項，但亦未能得到形音的促發效果；最後的實驗四試圖以定義-命名作業（definition-naming task）將字圖唸名作業的效果推展到其他同樣使用文字為混淆刺激的類叫色作業（Stoop-like task）之上，結果發現語意干擾效果在不同的作業間具有普遍性。除此之外，在四個實驗中都可看到與圖形名稱完全相同的混淆字都有很強勁的促進反應效果。整體而言，本實驗以中文材料驗證了完全相似字的促發效果及語意干擾字對圖形唸名的語意干擾效果，但並未能觀察到字形及字音的相似性是否能有效降低語意干擾效果的結果，研究者將在討論中說明可能的解釋原因。

Seit etwa zwei Jahrzehnten stellt die kognitive und neuronale Verarbeitung von Nomen und Verben einen bedeutsamen Forschungsschwerpunkt im Bereich der Neurolinguistik und Neuropsychologie dar. Intensive Forschungsbemühungen der letzten Jahre erbrachten eine Reihe von Ergebnissen, die jedoch überwiegend inkonsistent und widersprüchlich sind. Eine häufig vertretene Annahme im Bezug auf die neuronale Basis der Nomen und Verb Verarbeitung ist die so genannte anterior-posterior Dissoziation. Demnach werden Nomen in temporalen und Verben in frontalen Regionen der sprachdominanten, linken Hemisphäre verarbeitet. Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht mit Hilfe der funktionellen Magnetresonanztomographie, welche kortikalen Regionen in den Abruf von Nomen und Verben beim stillen Bildbennen involviert sind. Ferner wird der Einfluss des Faktors age-of-acquisition (Erwerbsalter) auf die Hirnaktivierung beim Bildbenennen überprüft. Die Ergebnisse der Studie zeigen, dass der Abruf von Nomen und Verben ähnliche kortikale Aktivierungen in bilateral okzipitalen sowie links frontalen, temporalen und inferior parietalen Regionen hervorruft, wobei für Verben stärkere Aktivierungen in links frontalen und bilateral temporalen Arealen beobachtet wurden. Dieses Ergebnis widerspricht der Annahme einer anterior-posterior Dissoziation. Die beobachteten Aktivierungsmuster unterstützen dagegen die Auffassung, dass ein gemeinsames Netzwerk bestehend aus anterioren und posterioren Komponenten für die Verarbeitung von Nomen und Verben beim Bildbenennen verantwortlich ist. Die Studie ergab ferner, dass kortikale Aktivierungen beim Bildbenennen durch das Erwerbsalter moduliert werden. Dabei zeigten sich Aktivierungen für später erworbene Wörter im linken inferioren Frontallappen und im basal temporalen Sprachareal. Die Ergebnisse werden diskutiert und interpretiert vor dem Hintergrund aktueller kognitiver und neuroanatomischer Modelle der Sprachverarbeitung. / The cognitive and neuronal mechanisms underlying the retrieval of nouns and verbs are a complex issue, which has attracted the interest of neurolinguists and cognitive neuroscientists during the last two decades. Unfortunately, the results emerged from previous studies are often contradictory. A frequent claim in neurolinguistic literature is the anterior-posterior dichotomy of the noun and verb retrieval. Within this framework nouns are associated with left temporal brain areas whereas verbs rely on structures in the left frontal lobe. This thesis investigates the brain areas which are involved in silent naming of German noun and verb pictures by means of event related fMRI. In addition the influence of age-of-acquisition on brain activity during picture naming was examined. Noun and verb retrieval revealed a similar pattern of bilateral occipital, left frontal, temporal and inferior parietal cortical activation, albeit verb naming resulted in stronger activation in left frontal and bilateral temporal areas. The results do not confirm the anterior-posterior hypothesis. They support rather a similar cortical network for the processing of nouns and verbs in picture naming. Furthermore the results indicated that age-of-acquisition modulates brain activation during silent picture naming. Cortical activation for late learned words was detected in the left inferior frontal cortex and in the left basal temporal language area. The data were discussed and interpreted on the basis of current cognitive and neuroanatomical models of language processing.

Reading is a fundamental skill for functioning in today’s society. Given the breadth of activities that require reading, it is important to develop a comprehensive model of basic reading processes. Furthermore, considering that many pictures co-appear with words in everyday life, it is imperative to understand the nature of picture identification processes, as well as how they interact with reading processes. As such, the present thesis focuses on developing a model of reading and extending it to include picture processing. In the present research, experiments on word identification (Experiments 1 and 2) examined onset reaction time (RT) in a word naming task using an additive factors method. The pattern of additive and overadditive joint effects on naming RT among Instructions (INST: name all, name words), Word Frequency (WF: log10HAL), Semantic Neighbourhood Density (SND: Inverse Ncount), and Word Type (WT: regular, exception) supported a cognitive chronometric architecture consisting of at least two cascaded stages of processing, with the orthographic lexical system as the locus of the INST x WF and the INST x SND interactions, and the phonological output system as the locus of the WF x WT and the SND x WT interactions. Additivity between INST and WT supports the notion that these variables affect separable systems, and a WF x SND interaction supports a common locus of their effects. These results support a dual-route cascaded model over parallel processing models of basic reading. We also examined response duration (RD) in these data by recording and hand-marking vocal responses, which provides evidence that reading processes are ongoing even after the initiation of a vocal response, and supports the notion that the more lexically a word is read, the shorter the RD. As such, the effects of WT and INST on RD were opposite to their effects on RT. Given the dissociating effects between RT and RD, these results provide new challenges to all models of basic reading processes. Experiments on picture and word identification (Experiments 3 and 4) involved localizing common systems and connections between these processes, and served to extend the dual-route model of reading. These experiments examined naming RT and RD for exception and regular words, and their corresponding pictures. The pattern of joint effects on RT among Format (pictures, words), Picture-Orthography Agreement, WF, and WT (regular, exception) supported a triple-route cascaded model. The results suggest the orthographic lexical system is accessed for both picture and word naming, and demonstrated a dissociation between regular and exception words on RT versus RD, whereas pictures consistently yielded an exception item advantage for both measures. Experiment 4 examined Arabic digits and their corresponding number words, and found that Arabic digits produce shorter RDs than number words. In general, the results suggest that the picture and word identification systems are strongly coupled between the picture memory system and the orthographic lexical system, particularly for items that rely on “whole-word” lexical representations. We argue that RD provides a wider window for exploring cognition, and a converging measure of lexical processing, which must be considered when studying basic identification processes of any stimulus type. The development of a comprehensive model of basic reading processes will help identify behavioural markers of normal reading processes, and will serve to advance research on basic word recognition. In addition, given that a broad definition of ‘literacy’ should include picture processing, the development of a model that includes picture processing will serve to advance research on how reading and picture processing interact with each other, which may be critical for individuals with low literacy skills.

Compounding, constructing new words out of previously known words by means of simple concatenation mostly, can be counted as one of the major word production mechanisms in the majority of languages. Their importance in the history of human languages warrants a detailed study with respect to the language faculty and related cognitive aspects. In the last decade, compound production as well as comprehension have become highly debated and investigated areas of research. Morphological priming is one frequently employed paradigm for the investigation of compounding. Whether morphologically complex words undergo a decomposition-composition process, respectively, during comprehension and production or whether they are all listed in full form in the lexicon is one key question hitherto addressed in several studies related to English, German, Dutch and Chinese nominal compound words. The present study is concerned with compound production in Turkish. Various types of Turkish compounds were investigated ((i) bare JCs (

The purpose of this thesis is to give a detailed account of gesture and movement phenomena observed in children. The analysis method is multimodal interaction analysis, otherwise known as Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA). The analysis is based on children performing the Picture Naming Game (PiNG), a vocabulary test for young children. During the PiNG, the researcher will place printed pictures in front of the child, and the child is tasked with naming the de- picted object. The central phenomenon discovered and analysed with multimodal interaction analysis in this thesis was that the children would occasionally pick up a picture and turn it around. These children’s turning movements are generally anal- ysed as being fidgets, and possibly related to increased cognitive taxation, or, seen as social, and part of a metaphoric gesture shared with the researcher. Addition- ally, the researcher’s interactions are also examined. The researcher uses additional prompts as interactional tools during the PiNG, and four types of such prompts are identified, each with gestural and verbal counterparts. Some proposals for future research that would complement this current thesis are offered, and finally some ideas for future research inspired by this thesis are discussed.

No description available.

Vocabulary growth during the preschool years is critical for language development. Preschool children with developmental disabilities often have more difficulty with learning and developing language, therefore making more errors in vocabulary. It is important to recognize what type of errors children are demonstrating, especially as it relates to receptive and expressive language abilities. This study explores the error patterns preschool children with developmental disabilities make during receptive and expressive single word vocabulary tests. A secondary analysis of preexisting data was conducted from a sample of 68 preschool children with developmental disabilities ranging in severity. Based on a coding system developed by the author, errors were classified according to type. The majority of the errors children made were classified as No Response types of errors, with the second most common error being Semantic Perceptual errors of receptive and expressive picture naming tasks. Understanding the types of errors preschool children with disabilities make will help to enhance their language and therapy needed to thrive as a learner, especially as they begin elementary school.