Lecture 9: Language and Reading II

Producing Language

  • Extralinguistic context: The physical and social setting in which language is encountered.
  • Prosody: Patterns of pauses and pitch changes that characterize speech production.
    • Reveals speaker’s mood.
    • Directs attention focus and theme.
    • Highlights intended meaning.
  • Pragmatic rules: How people actually use a language, including conversational "rules" and assumptions.

Conversations

  • Given-new contract: Speakers construct sentences including:
    • Given information.
    • New information.
    • New information can then become given information.
    • Example:
      • "Ed was given an alligator for his birthday."
      • "The alligator was his favorite present."
      • "We checked the picnic supplies… The beer was warm."
      • "We got some beer out of the truck… The beer was warm."
  • Syntactic coordination: Using similar grammatical constructions.
  • Syntactic priming: Production of a specific grammatical construction by one person increases the chances the other person will use that construction.
    • Reduces computational load in conversation.

Language and Contents of Thought

  • Language can shape the way we think.
  • It can be used to shift attitudes and impressions.
    • "Cheney shot Whittington" places the blame squarely on Cheney.
    • "Whittington got shot by Cheney" uses the passive voice to distance Cheney from direct agency in the shooting.
    • "Whittington got peppered pretty good" removes Cheney from the equation.
  • Used by politicians, marketing, and public relations.

Culture, Language, and Cognition: The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

  • Differences among languages reflect and contribute to differences in underlying thought processes.
  • Strong version: Language shapes the way we perceive and experience the world.
  • Weak version: Language doesn’t affect subjective experience per se, but it does reflect and shape differences in higher cognitive processes such as categorization.

Language and Color Perception

  • Differing divisions of the color spectrum exist between languages (e.g., English vs. Russian).
  • Russian differentiates between lighter blues and darker blues.
  • Faster response when stimuli fell in different categories of blue than the same.

Language and Spatial Information

  • Preschoolers exposed to spatial language while playing outperform those not exposed when later tested on mental rotation tasks.
  • English speakers are more likely than Spanish speakers to use agentive language (e.g., “She broke the vase”) than non-agentive language (“The vase broke”) when describing accidents.

Language and Emotion

  • Access to the meaning of emotion words enhances people’s ability to perceive facial expressions of emotions.
  • Studies support the conceptual act theory of emotion.
  • Processing and experience of emotion are shaped by conceptual knowledge about emotions, which in turn is supported by language.

Language and Culture

  • Some research suggests that children see the world similarly before learning language, but once learned, language heightens or dampens which aspects of the world children notice.
  • Through language, outputs of different cognitive computations can be combined, giving rise to the creativity that defines us as a species.

Aphasia

  • A disruption of language.
  • Damage to Broca’s area leads to non-fluent aphasia:
    • Intact comprehension.
    • Impaired production.
  • Damage to Wernicke’s area leads to fluent aphasia:
    • Impaired comprehension.
    • Intact language production, although largely nonsensical.

Broca’s Aphasia

  • Paul Broca's patient, Tan (Mr. Leborgne), was mute for 20 years but could understand most of what was said to him and only responded with "tan" along with gestures.
  • He had sustained severe damage to the inferior left pre-frontal cortex.
  • This was the first clue for the localization of language function in the brain.

Characteristics of Broca’s Aphasia

  • Speech is agrammatical, effortful, telegraphic, sparse, and repetitive.
    • Example: "well I had trouble with…oh, almost everything that happened from the…eh, eh … golly … the word I can remember, you know, is ah…when I had the … ah … biggest … a … that I had the trouble with, you know … that I had the trouble with … “
  • Comprehension is maintained.
  • Became known as a problem in the production of speech.

Wernicke’s Aphasia

  • Carl Wernicke recognized that comprehension problems could also be aphasia.
  • Wernicke was particularly interested in patients who had comprehension problems, rather than production problems.
  • Such patients consistently showed brain damage to the left posterior, temporal lobe, mid-temporal gyrus, now known as Wernicke’s area.

Characteristics of Wernicke’s Aphasia

  • Language production is maintained.
  • Language is fluent and effortless.
  • However, it appears to be devoid of meaning.
    • Example: "Boy, I’m sweating, I’m awful nervous, you know, once in a while I get caught up, I can’t mention the tarripoi, a month ago, quite a little, I’ve done a lot well, I impose a lot, while, on the other hand, you know what I mean, I have to run around, look it over, trebbin and all that sort of stuff…"

Summary of the Aphasias

  • Broca’s Aphasia
    • Qualities of Spontaneous Speech: Nonfluent; slow, with few words and laborious effort. Inflection and articulation are impaired, but words are meaningful, with nouns, transitive verbs, and important adjectives. Small grammatically words are often dropped.
    • Word Comprehension: Fair to good
    • Repetition: Impaired
    • Naming: Impaired, though patient recognizes objects
    • Reading Comprehension: Fair to good
    • Writing: Impaired
    • Location of Lesion: Posterior inferior frontal lobe
  • Wernicke’s Aphasia
    • Qualities of Spontaneous Speech: Fluent; often rapid, voluble, and effortless. Inflection and articulation are good, but sentences lack meaning and words are malformed (paraphasias) or invented (neologisms). Speech may be totally incomprehensible.
    • Word Comprehension: Impaired
    • Repetition: Impaired
    • Naming: Impaired
    • Reading Comprehension: Impaired
    • Writing: Impaired
    • Location of Lesion: Posterior superior temporal lobe

Aphasias (General Notes)

  • Diminish or abolish the ability to comprehend and/or produce language, while sparing the ability to perceive relevant stimuli and to produce intelligible words.
  • Is NOT a result of hearing loss, and is NOT the result of damage to motor control.
  • Successful treatment is dependent on:
    • Time after trauma
    • Age
    • Education level
    • Handedness

What is Dyslexia?

  • Approximately 10% of the population can be diagnosed as dyslexic.
  • For an individual to be diagnosed as dyslexic, they must show the following:
    • Reading substantially below average for their age.
    • Adequate teaching exposure.
    • Adequate socio-economic opportunity.
    • No other disturbances of an organic origin (e.g., autism, intellectual developmental disorder, etc.).
    • Normal to above-average IQ.

"Definition of Exclusion"

  • In other words, we consider a child to be dyslexic when there is no other obvious explanation for their reading difficulty.
  • In many ways, this definition is an experimental one.
  • It is useful for identification and communication purposes but may be impractical in the "real world."
    • Example: can a child from an emotionally challenging background, or a child with ADHD, have dyslexia?

Reports of Dyslexia

  • "It is a lonely existence to be a child with a disability which no-one can see or understand, you exasperate your teachers, you disappoint your parents, and worst of all you know that you are not just stupid."
  • Most people would describe dyslexia as “reading backwards” or “the words moving over the page” or “not being able to see words properly.”
  • However, in most cases, that describes a different disorder.
  • Dyslexia is primarily a difficulty in phonics.

Phonics

  • Phonics, or phonological awareness, or phonological decoding:
    • Phonemic awareness is the awareness that language is made up of individual and unique sounds.
    • Reading ultimately involves associating sounds that we know (phonics) with squiggles on a page.

Reading + Eye Movement Patterns

  • Dyslexic readers' eye patterns differ in characteristic ways from normal readers:
    • Fixate longer on words.
    • More regressive eye movements.
    • Fixations are less stable.
    • Poor binocular convergence.

Dual Route Model (Coltheart et al. 2001)

  • Model includes:
    • Visual analysis
    • GPC rules
    • Direct lexical access
    • Speech
    • Response buffer
  • Words like "FLOWER," "MERINGUE," and "YACHT" are read via direct lexical access because they are familiar, and can’t be sounded out.
  • Words like "PERPLISTERONK," "SPLANT," and "ECTOPLASM" are read phonetically because you need to sound them out

Phonological Dyslexia

  • Can’t use the phonological route.
  • Patient tries to access the lexical route.

Surface Dyslexia

  • Can’t use the lexical route.
  • Patient tries to sound out and makes regularisation errors.

Dyslexia and Visual Processing

  • Originally considered to be a difficulty in visual processing.
  • This belief was abandoned; dyslexic readers consistently shown to have normal vision.
  • In the 1970s and 1980s: demonstrated dyslexic readers show deficit in processing visual information carried by the dorsal stream of the visual system.
  • Theories of Dyslexia:
    • Transient Deficit
    • Magno-deficit
    • Dorsal stream deficit

Streams of Visual Processing

  • Ventral Stream
    • Colour sensitive
    • Detail
    • Movement insensitive
    • Higher contrast
    • Slow
  • Dorsal Stream
    • Colour insensitive
    • Global form
    • Movement
    • Spatial processing
    • Lower contrast
    • Fast
  • Dyslexic readers have difficulties in processing information transmitted by the dorsal stream.

Visual Processing (cont.)

  • Children at risk for dyslexia are also less sensitive to tasks that require magnocellular processing.
  • This can predict subsequent reading skill.
  • People who are illiterate don’t have dorsal processing problems.
  • Therefore, unlikely that poor visual processing arises as a result of failing to read.

Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

  • Delayed language
    • Receptive: following basic instructions and understanding sentences
    • Expressive: generating language, rapid automatized naming, category naming
  • 50% comorbidity with dyslexia
  • Similar definition of exclusion to dyslexia, but for language.

Suggested Cause?

  • Auditory Temporal Sampling Hypothesis is one theory
  • May also apply to dyslexia
  • Intervention:
    • Speech therapists
    • Fast ForWord
    • Controversial…
    • Scientific outcomes have been difficult to replicate

Stuttering

  • Repeated movements and fixed postures of the speech mechanisms.
  • Possibly genetic.
  • 5% of children.
  • Recovery characteristics are unclear:
    • Girls seem to recover more often than boys.
    • Recovery prognosis is better if recovery starts soon after onset.
  • Cause: largely unknown.
  • Potentially results from differences in the brain involved in speech motor signals.

Differences to Non-Stutterers

  • Stronger activation in the motor area on the right side in stutterers.
  • Stutterers may fail to develop left hemisphere dominance of speech.
  • Timing and motor control by cerebellum are impaired.

William’s Syndrome

  • Not strictly a disorder of language.
  • A genetic disorder with a number of physical characteristics.
  • Intellectual impairment, below-average visuo-spatial skills (e.g., cannot draw, do arithmetic, use scissors or knives).
  • Poor social cognition.
  • No fear of strangers.
  • Highly social and empathetic.

William’s Syndrome (cont.)

  • A consequence of missing some genetic material on chromosome #7.
  • Typically not inherited.
  • One missing gene produces elastin - protein allowing stretching.

William’s Syndrome (cont.)

  • Despite the intellectual impairment, language skills are relatively normal.
  • Huge discrepancy between IQ and language skills.
  • Excellent vocabulary, normal grammar, expressive and articulate.
    • DS: “Dogs, cats, fish, bird, fish”
    • WS: “Brontosaurus, tyranadon, tyrannosaurus rex, dinosaurs, elephant, dog, cat, lion, baby hippopotamus, ibex, whale, bull, yak, zebra, puppy, kitten, tiger, koala, dragon”
  • Rich and expansive story-telling skills.
  • Although semantics are often slightly off
    • “I will have to evacuate it” in describing pouring out a jug of water.
  • Very musically gifted. Drawing and description of an elephant by a teenager with WMS, Full Scale IQ of 49. Bellugi et al. (1999)