Aging and the priming of newly learned associations.

In each of 2 experiments, 32 young (aged 18–25 yrs) and 32 elderly (aged 63–79 yrs) adults studied 36 sentences of the form NOUN1-VERB-NOUN2. They then made item-recognition judgments regarding whether single nouns had occurred in the sentences. After 2 or more presentations of each sentence, both young and elderly Ss showed equivalent priming between the nouns within the sentences; a noun was recognized faster when it was tested immediately after the other noun from the same sentence than when it was tested following a noun from a different sentence. After only 1 presentation of each sentence, young Ss showed priming but elderly Ss did not. Under all study conditions, young Ss were superior to the elderly in cued recall of the same sentences. It is argued that priming provides a sensitive measure of what is stored in memory and so will be useful for studies of aging. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Syntactic processes in the production of noun phrases.

Two picture–word interference experiments investigated syntactic and lexical-semantic processes during the production of Dutch noun phrases of the form article?+?adjective?+?noun or adjective?+?noun. For both types of noun phrases, utterance onset latencies were longer when the distractor word and the target noun had different grammatical gender than when they had the same grammatical gender. Adjective distractors that were semantically related to the target adjectives led to longer utterance onset latencies for noun phrases of the form adjective?+?noun, but not for noun phrases of the form article?+?adjective?+?noun. The results are discussed in the framework of recent models of language production. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Concreteness of relational effects on recall of adjective–noun pairs.

Studied the effects of concreteness and relatedness of adjective–noun pairs on free recall, cued recall, and memory integration. The authors report on 2 experiments in which Ss read phrases or sentences containing adjective–noun pairs that vary in rated concreteness and intrapair relatedness. In Exp 1 normative ratings on imagery and relatedness were provided by 23 graduate and 20 undergraduate students. 64 undergraduates participated in the memory experiment. Exp 2 extended Exp 1 by using complete sentences rather than adjective–noun word pairs. 72 undergraduates volunteered to participate in the memory experiment and a separate group of 14 volunteered to participate in a sentence rating task. Consistent with predictions from dual coding theory and prior results with noun–noun pairs, both experiments showed that the effects of concreteness were strong and independent of relatedness in free recall and cued recall. The 2 attributes also had independent (additive) effects on integrative memory as measured by conditionalized free recall of pairs. Integration as measured by the increment from free to cued recall occurred consistently only when pairs were high in both concreteness and relatedness. Relatedness, adjective imagery, and noun imagery ratings, along with word frequencies for adjectives and nouns, and sentences with relatedness ratings are appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Parallelism in the production of noun phrases: Experiments and reaction time models.

In 3 experiments, the authors investigated the temporal coordination of the processes involved in the production of noun phrases (NPs). Speakers of German described drawings of colored objects by noun phrases with or without a determiner (e.g., [the] red table). Participants received, for varying amounts of time, advance information about either the color or the object. For a small number of nouns in the response set, advance information about the color led to shorter reaction times for no-determiner NPs than for definite-determiner NPs. For larger numbers of nouns, advance information about the object led to an additional reaction time benefit for definite-determiner NPs. A mathematical model is shown to account for these results. This model assumes that articulation can be initiated only after the grammatical encoding of the whole noun phrase has been completed, but that phonological encoding of the 1st element of an utterance is initiated as soon as the necessary grammatical information is available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Similarity-based interference during language comprehension: Evidence from eye tracking during reading.

The nature of working memory operation during complex sentence comprehension was studied by means of eye-tracking methodology. Readers had difficulty when the syntax of a sentence required them to hold 2 similar noun phrases (NPs) in working memory before syntactically and semantically integrating either of the NPs with a verb. In sentence structures that placed these NPs at the same linear distances from one another but allowed integration with a verb for 1 of the NPs, the comprehension difficulty was not seen. These results are interpreted as indicating that similarity-based interference occurs online during the comprehension of complex sentences and that the degree of memory accessibility conventionally associated with different types of NPs does not have a strong effect on sentence processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dysarthric sentence intelligibility: contribution of iconic gestures and message predictiveness

This study examined changes in the sentence intelligibility scores of speakers with dysarthria in association with different signal-independent factors (contextual influences). This investigation focused on the presence or absence of iconic gestures while speaking sentences with low or high semantic predictiveness. The speakers were 4 individuals with dysarthria, who varied from one another in terms of their level of speech intelligibility impairment, gestural abilities, and overall level of motor functioning. Ninety-six inexperienced listeners (24 assigned to each speaker) orthographically transcribed 16 test sentences presented in an audio + video or audio-only format. The sentences had either low or high semantic predictiveness and were spoken by each speaker with and without the corresponding gestures. The effects of signal-independent factors (presence or absence of iconic gestures, low or high semantic predictiveness, and audio + video or audio-only presentation formats) were analyzed for individual speakers. Not all signal-independent information benefited speakers similarly. Results indicated that use of gestures and high semantic predictiveness improved sentence intelligibility for 2 speakers. The other 2 speakers benefited from high predictive messages. The audio + video presentation mode enhanced listener understanding for all speakers, although there were interactions related to specific speaking situations. Overall, the contributions of relevant signal-independent information were greater for the speakers with more severely impaired intelligibility. The results are discussed in terms of understanding the contribution of signal-independent factors to the communicative process.     

Pictures in sentences: Understanding without words.

In 5 experiments with a total of 120 Ss of college age, sentences were presented in which a pictured object replaced a word (rebus sentences). Sentences were shown using rapid serial visual presentation at a rate of 10 or 12 words/second. With one set of materials (Exp I and II), Ss took longer to judge the plausibility of rebus sentences than all-word sentences, although the accuracy of judgment and of recall were similar for the 2 formats. With 2 new sets of materials (Exps III and V), rebus and all-word sentences were virtually equivalent except in 1 circumstance: when a picture replaced the noun in a familiar phrase such as seedless grapes. In contrast, when the task required overt naming of the rebus picture in a sentence context, latency to name the picture was markedly longer than to name the corresponding word, and the appropriateness of the sentence context affected picture naming but not word naming (Exp IV). It is concluded that the results fail to support theories that place word meanings in a specialized lexical entry. Instead, the results suggest that the lexical representation of a noun or familiar noun phrase provides a pointer to a nonlinguistic conceptual system, and it is in that system that the meaning of a sentence is constructed. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb imagery and noun phrase concreteness in the recognition and recall of sentences.

Examined the role of verb imagery and noun phrase concreteness in determining sentence imagery and memory in 2 experiments with a total of 111 male and 17 female university students. Semantic changes in sentences were recognized more often if the noun phrases were concrete rather than abstract. Free recall of sentences was affected similarly by phrase concreteness. Verb imagery, however, had no effect on either recognition or recall performance. Analysis of recall by type of word indicated that organization of recall centered upon the nouns. Implications of these results for the hypothesis of imaginal coding of concrete sentence meaning are discussed. (French summary) (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Verb retrieval and sentence production in aphasia

This paper presents a subject with a selective verb retrieval deficit. Nouns were produced more successfully than verbs in spontaneous speech, picture naming and when naming to definition. The word class effect was not observed in comprehension tasks, reading aloud or writing. This indicated that it was due to a specific problem in accessing verbs' phonological representations from semantics. The second part of the paper explores the implications of the verb deficit for sentence production. Analyses of narrative speech revealed a typically agrammatic profile, with minimal verb argument structure and few function words and inflections. Two investigations suggested that the sentence deficit was at least partly contingent upon the verb deficit. In the first, the subject was asked to produce a sentence with the aid of a provided noun or verb. The noun cues were not effective in eliciting sentences, whereas verb cues were. The second investigation explored the effects of therapy aiming to improve verb retrieval. This therapy resulted in better verb retrieval and improved sentence production with those verbs. These findings suggest that an inability to access verbs' phonological representations can severely impair sentence formulation. Implications for models of sentence production are considered.     

Building syntactic structure in speaking

We investigated how people produce simple and complex phrases in speaking using a newly developed immediate recall task. People read and tried to memorize a target sentence, then read a prime sentence, then did a distractor task involving the prime sentence. Despite the delay and activity between memory and recall, people could still recall the target sentence although the syntactic form of the recalled sentence was influenced by the syntactic form of the prime sentence. This result replicates the syntactic priming effect found with other experimental paradigms. Using this task, we tested how people used abstract syntactic plans to produce simple and complex noun phrases. We found syntactic priming both when targets and prime sentences matched in complexity and when they did not match, suggesting that simple and complex noun phrases are built by the same syntactic routines during speech production.     

Role of Grammatical Gender and Semantics in German Word Production.

Semantic substitution errors (e.g., saying "arm" when "leg" is intended) are among the most common types of errors occurring during spontaneous speech. It has been shown that grammatical gender of German target nouns is preserved in the errors (E. Mane, 1999). In 3 experiments, the authors explored different accounts of the grammatical gender preservation effect in German. In all experiments, semantic substitution errors were induced using a continuous naming paradigm. In Experiment 1, it was found that gender preservation disappeared when speakers produced bare nouns. Gender preservation was found when speakers produced phrases with determiners marked for gender (Experiment 2) but not when the produced determiners were not marked for gender (Experiment 3). These results are discussed in the context of models of lexical retrieval during production. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Horizontal Information Flow in Spoken Sentence Production.

In 4 experiments the authors used a variant of the picture-word interference paradigm to investigate whether there is a temporal overlap in the activation of words during sentence production and whether there is a flow of semantic and phonological information between them. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrate that 2 semantically related nouns produce interference effects either when they are in the same or different phrases of a sentence. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that 2 phonologically related nouns produce facilitation effects but only when they are within the same phrase of a sentence. The results argue against strictly serial models of multiple-word access and provide evidence of a flow of semantic and phonological information between words during sentence production. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The activation of word class information during speech production.

In 5 picture-word interference experiments the activation of word class information was investigated. The first experiment, in which subjects used bare nouns to describe the pictures, failed to reveal any interference effect of noun distractor words as opposed to closed-class distractor words. In the next 4 experiments the pictures were named by using a definite determiner and the noun completing a sentence fragment. The data demonstrate that noun distractors interfere more strongly with picture naming than do non-noun distractors. This held for both visual and auditory presentation of the distractor words. The interference effect showed up in a time window where semantic interference can usually be observed, supporting the assumption that at an early stage of lexical access semantic and syntactic activation processes overlap. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interaction entre facteurs phonologiques et sémantiques dans un épreuve de catégorisation lexicale.

Studied interactions between semantic class (persons vs inanimate objects) and type of initial phoneme (consonant vs vowel) in a lexical categorization task involving rapid identification of the grammatical gender (masculine vs feminine) of French nouns. Human Ss: 40 normal male and female Canadian adults (aged 17–32 yrs) (university students) (native French speakers) (Exp 1). 40 normal male and female Canadian adults (aged 17–47 yrs) (university students) (native French speakers) (Exp 2). In both experiments, Ss were asked to categorize animate and inanimate nouns beginning with consonants or vowels according to their grammatical gender. In 1 experimental condition, Ss used the labels "feminine" and "masculine" to express their choice of gender. In another condition, Ss used the indefinite feminine article ("une") or the indefinite masculine article ("un") to express their choice of gender. In Exp 1, animate and inanimate nouns were mixed together in the experimental list. In Exp 2, animate and inanimate nouns were presented in semantically homogeneous blocks. The speed and error rates of Ss' categorization performances were determined. (English abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aphasic patients' sensitivity to structural and meaning violations when monitoring for nouns and verbs in sentences.

Aphasic patients with and without impairment of semantically reversible sentence comprehension and 2 groups of normal controls were monitored for unambiguous noun or verb targets while listening to sentence pairs. Four conditions of target-word/sentence-pair congruence were created by manipulating the predictability of the target word from a context sentence and by inserting targets into structures that were appropriate or inappropriate for the target's grammatical class. Normal and aphasic listeners showed comparable sensitivity to structural violations under different conditions of semantic predictability, and there was little difference in the performance of aphasic patients with and without comprehension disorder. These results support the argument that normal sensitivity to syntactic requirements can be found in patients with reversible sentence comprehension disorder. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Sentence comprehension in Alzheimer's disease: Effects of grammatical complexity, speech rate, and repetition.

Caregivers of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are often advised to modify their speech to facilitate the patients' sentence comprehension. Three common recommendations are to (a) speak in simple sentences, (b) speak slowly, and (c) repeat one's utterance, using the same words. These three speech modifications were experimentally manipulated in order to investigate their individual and combined effects on sentence comprehension in AD. Fifteen patients with mild to moderate AD and 20 healthy older persons were tested on a sentence comprehension task with sentences varying in terms of (a) degree of grammatical complexity, (b) rate of presentation (normal vs. slow), and (c) form of repetition (verbatim vs. paraphrase). The results indicated a significant decline in sentence comprehension for the AD group. Sentence comprehension improved, however, after the sentence was repeated in either verbatim or paraphrased form. However, the patients' comprehension did not improve for sentences presented at the slow speech rate. This pattern of results is explained vis-à-vis the patients' working memory loss. The findings challenge the appropriateness of several clinical recommendations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Scope of lexical access in spoken sentence production: Implications for the conceptual–syntactic interface.

Building on P. H. Allum and L. Wheeldon (2007), the authors conducted 5 experiments to investigate the scope of lexical access during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Speakers described pairs of pictured objects, and on critical trials, 1 object was previewed. In Japanese, sentence onset is speeded by the preview of each of the 2 pictures used to elicit a sentence initial coordinated noun phrase (Experiment 1). When the same displays are used to elicit an alternative Japanese listing structure, onset latencies are speeded only by the preview of the first picture to be named (Experiment 2). The findings of Experiment 1 were therefore not the result of stimulus design. Experiment 3 replicated the findings of Experiment 1 in English. Experiments 4 and 5 tested a subject phrase consisting of a noun phrase modified by a prepositional phrase in English and Japanese. In both languages, only preview of the first picture to be named speeds responses, irrespective of whether it occurs in the head phrase (English) or not (Japanese). These results suggest that prior to utterance onset, only access to the nouns for the first phrase to be produced is required, even if this is not the head phrase. The implications for speech production models are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dissociation between syntactic and semantic processing during idiom comprehension.

Syntactic and semantic processing of literal and idiomatic phrases were investigated with a priming procedure. In 3 experiments, participants named targets that were syntactically appropriate or inappropriate completions for semantically unrelated sentence contexts. Sentences ended with incomplete idioms (kick the…) and were biased for either a literal (ball) or an idiomatic (bucket) completion. Syntactically appropriate targets were named more quickly than inappropriate ones for both contextual biases, suggesting that syntactic analysis occurs for idioms. In a final experiment, targets were either concrete (expected) or abstract (unexpected) nouns. For literal sentences, the abstract targets were named more slowly than the concrete targets. In contrast, there was no concreteness effect for idiomatic sentences, suggesting that the literal meaning of the idiom is not processed. Overall, the results provide evidence for dissociation between syntactic and semantic processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)