Sensitivity to syntactic structure: Good versus poor premorbid schizophrenics.

24 16-35 yr old acute schizophrenics with either good or poor premorbid histories were compared with control groups of 24 undergraduates and 12 6th-grade children on their sensitivity to syntactic structure in speech perception. Ss listened to strings of unconnected words, sentences with clicks embedded before, in, or after a clause break, and a passage of connected discourse that was interrupted at specific intervals after either a l- or 2-clause sentence. During designated test pauses they wrote down as many words as they could recall and indicated the location of the click in the sentences. The schizophrenics showed poor overall recall but did not differ from the control groups in the proportion of recall attributable to syntactic structure. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of syntactic structure and propositional number on patterns of regional cerebral blood flow

BACKGROUND: Intravascular catheters are associated with severe infections in patients, but only few reports on this problem in animal research exist. OBJECTIVE: We report on catheter-related bacterial colonization and its consequences in long-term catheterized animals. MATERIAL AND METHOD: Foxhounds were instrumented with intravascular catheters and flow probes to study the regulation of renal blood flow and pressures. RESULTS: After flushing the catheters, alterations in renal blood flow were observed and these could be related to bacterial colonization of intravascular catheters with Pseudomonas species. After attention had been focused on aseptic technique in all experimental phases and prophylactic antibiotic lock instituted, the occurrence of Pseudomonas bacteremia ceased, and the magnitude and incidence of catheter-related colonization and infection by Pseudomonas species dropped considerably. CONCLUSION: The catheter-related colonization that occurred spontaneously in these animals resembled findings in animal experiments in which catheter-related infections were deliberately induced as well as observations made with regard to catheter-related infections in patients. This report emphasizes the importance of asepsis when working with animals with long-term intravascular catheters. We suggest that monitoring for this complication, e.g., by means of catheter cultures at the time of removal, should routinely be part of protocols for animal experiments using long-term intravascular catheters.     

Temporal structure of syntactic parsing: Early and late event-related brain potential effects.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from participants listening to or reading sentences that were correct, contained a violation of the required syntactic category, or contained a syntactic-category ambiguity. When sentences were presented auditorily (Experiment 1), there was an early left anterior negativity for syntactic-category violations, but not for syntactic-category ambiguities. Both anomaly types elicited a late centroparietally distributed positivity. When sentences were presented visually word by word (Experiment 2), again an early left anterior negativity was found only for syntactic-category violations, and both types of anomalies elicited a late positivity. The combined data are taken to be consistent with a 2-stage model of parsing, including a 1st stage, during which an initial phrase structure is built and a 2nd stage, during which thematic role assignment and, if necessary, reanalysis takes place. Disruptions to the 1st stage of syntactic parsing appear to be correlated with an early left anterior negativity, whereas disruptions to the 2nd stage might be correlated with a late posterior distributed positivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

洁净型煤复合固硫添加剂的应用

通过实验的方法，讨论了洁净型煤中添加剂对其使用特性和固硫特性的影响。实验结果表明，洁净型煤在高温固硫、燃烧温度，抗跌强度上都达到使用要求，同时大大降低了对环境的污染。     

Effects of d-amphetamine on speaking in isolated humans

The effects of oral d-amphetamine, 5--20 mg were studied in isolated humans who produced speech monologues during experimental sessions. Drug effects were studied under double-blind conditions by making repeated observations within each subject after placebo or active drug. In the first experiment, d-amphetamine 15 mg was studied in 4 isolated subjects who had received instructions that they should talk some of the time during experimental sessions. All subjects spoke more after active drug than after placebo. In the second experiment, d-amphetamine 5--20 mg was studied in 4 subjects who were instructed to talk, but who also earned points under a fixed interval 5 min schedule by speaking (i.e. by closure of a voice operated relay). Point delivery did not generally influence patterns of speech over time. Reliable drug produced increases in amount of talking were observed in 3 of 4 subjects. Adjective checklist self report scores indicating a stimulant drug effect were also sensitive to effects of d-amphetamine. Under controlled laboratory conditions, an increase in speaking is a reliable behavioral effect of d-amphetamine in isolated humans producing speech monologues.     

A syntactic complexity effect with visual patterns: evidence for the syntactic nature of the memory representation

In a series of 3 experiments, participants learned visual patterns that contained the same number of visual features but varied in the complexity of the interrelations among the features. The results indicate a large and orderly effect of the pattern's syntactic complexity on recognition speed. Evidence is provided that this effect was not due to physical characteristics, target-foil similarity, speed-accuracy trade-off, or level of pattern learning. A multiple-encoding explanation of the effect is described. According to this framework, there is an initial, automatically generated encoding of the pattern as a short-term pictorial representation that becomes the basis for the construction of a second syntactic-propositional encoding. In this model, the participant's "sense of familiarity" for a particular stimulus is associated only with the syntactic-propositional encoding.     

Cognitive penetrability of syntactic priming in Broca's aphasia.

Agrammatic Broca's aphasia has been explained as an impairment of automatic syntactic processes. The present study investigated whether controlled processes play a role in agrammatics' handling of syntactic information. Agrammatic patients and normal controls performed a cross-modal priming task with sentence fragments and visual targets forming either grammatical or ungrammatical pairs. In Exp 1, Ss of both groups were instructed to ignore the auditory prime. The grammaticality effect observed in a previous study disappeared for the aphasic Ss but not for normal controls. Exp 2 demonstrated that for normal controls, the grammaticality effect was present even with a larger prime-target interval. These findings indicate that although automatic parsing routines in normal Ss are impervious to strategic effects, agrammatic Broca patients appear to use syntactic information in a controlled fashion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic and syntactic forces in noun phrase production.

Three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of phrases in Dutch. Bilingual participants were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an adjective + noun phrase in Dutch including the translation of the noun. In 2 experiments, the authors blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender. Participants performed the task slower when the target nouns were of the same semantic category than when they were from different categories and faster when the target nouns had the same gender than when they had different genders. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed. The authors replicated the results of the first 2 experiments, and no interaction was found. These findings suggest a feedforward flow of activation between lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Event-related brain potentials and case information in syntactic ambiguities

In an ERP study, German sentences were investigated that contain a case-ambiguous NP that may be assigned accusative or dative case. Sentences were disambiguated by the verb in final position of the sentence. As our data show, sentences ending in a verb that assigns dative case to the ambiguous NP elicit a clear garden-path effect. The garden-path effect was indicated by a broad centro-posterior negative shift that occurred between 300 and 900 msec after the dative-assigning verb was presented. No enhanced P600 following the misanalysis was observed. Noun phrases whose case ambiguity was resolved in favor of accusative case and unambiguously dative-marked NPs did not trigger significant ERP differences. We will discuss the implications of our results for parsing and its neuropsychological correlates. The results of this study support a parser design according to which the so-called structural case (nominative or accusative) is assigned without any delay in the absence of morpho-lexical counterevidence. It is argued that the enhancement of a negative ERP component with a "classical" N400 topography reflects the difficulty of reanalysis due to reaccessing morpho-lexical information that lies outside the domain of the parsing module. Consequently, ERP responses to garden-path effects are not confined to a late positivity but vary depending on the level of processing involved in reanalysis. The fact that garden-path effects may also elicit an N400 can be linked to the nonhomogeneous linguistic properties of the constructions from which they arise.     

Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies

This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory--the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT)--has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is hypothesized to be quantified in terms of the number of syntactic categories that are necessary to complete the current input string as a grammatical sentence. Furthermore, in accordance with results from the working memory literature both memory cost and integration cost are hypothesized to be heavily influenced by locality (1) the longer a predicted category must be kept in memory before the prediction is satisfied, the greater is the cost for maintaining that prediction; and (2) the greater the distance between an incoming word and the most local head or dependent to which it attaches, the greater the integration cost. The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including (1) the lower complexity of subject-extracted relative clauses compared to object-extracted relative clauses, (2) numerous processing overload effects across languages, including the unacceptability of multiply center-embedded structures, (3) the lower complexity of cross-serial dependencies relative to center-embedded dependencies, (4) heaviness effects, such that sentences are easier to understand when larger phrases are placed later and (5) numerous ambiguity effects, such as those which have been argued to be evidence for the Active Filler Hypothesis.     

The effects of syntactic expectations during reading.

Two experiments examined the effects of knowing the syntactic structure of a sentence before reading it. In Exp I, 24 college students were required to remember a sequence of numbers before reading a sentence displayed at a constant rate. When the syntactic structure was known beforehand, Ss were able to devote more effort to rehearsing the numbers while reading the sentence. Consequently, their recall of the number sequence was superior. In Exp II, 8 undergraduates were timed while reading individual sentences. When the syntactic structure was known beforehand, reading times decreased. Results are explained in terms of linguistic decisions, memory storage during reading, and reading as an interactive process. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Behavioral treatment of the speaking stomach syndrome

The speaking stomach syndrome consists of persisting gurgling sounds in the gastric region, synchronous with breathing. A characteristic finding in patients suffering from this syndrome is an abnormal pattern of respiration, with extreme activity of the abdominal muscles and active involvement of the diaphragm. To teach the patient a different way of breathing using combined thoracic/abdominal respiration, with no, or hardly any, active contraction of the abdominal muscles, is an essential feature of treatment. This is accomplished in three steps. The treatment was successful in the three cases. Problems encountered in therapy are discussed.     

Reliability of prosodic cues for resolving syntactic ambiguity

Although previous research has shown that listeners can use prosody to resolve syntactic ambiguities in spoken sentences, it is not clear whether naive, untrained speakers in experimental situations ordinarily produce the prosodic cues necessary for disambiguating such sentences. In a series of experiments, the authors found that neither professional nor untrained speakers consistently produced such prosodic cues when simply reading ambiguous sentences in a disambiguating discourse context. Speakers who were aware of the ambiguities and were told to intentionally pronounce the sentences with one meaning of the other, however, did produce sufficient prosodic cues for listeners to identify the intended meanings.     

An experimental analog of public speaking.

Tested an experimental model of a commonly reported stress-producing situation, public speaking, on 12 Ss, 23-42 yr. old, on 2 occasions. Finger sweat prints and arousal ratings taken during the simulated public speaking and during the anticipation of it were significantly different from each other and from those during pre- and poststress periods. There was consistency in slope and level of response both within and between Ss on the physiological and the psychological measures. Results indicate that the stress-producing properties of public speaking can be reproduced to some degree in somewhat artificial but controlled conditions of the laboratory. The model has acceptable stimulus properties and its use in experimental situations seems justifiable. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution.

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reading processes during syntactic analysis and reanalysis.

Conducted 2 experiments to examine the processing of garden path sentences such as While the boy scratched the dog yawned loudly. The ambiguous phrase of such sentences was varied, and the task of the 64 undergraduates was to read each sentence while their eye movements were monitored and then judge whether the sentence was grammatical. Early closure sentences were judged grammatical less often than were late closure sentences. Sentences with a long ambiguous phrase were judged grammatical less often than were those with a short ambiguous phrase. Reading times were shorter for sentences with a long ambiguous phrase. The latter finding reflects Ss' tendency to read more quickly as they proceed through a sentence. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Respiratory function during speaking and singing in professional country singers

Respiratory function during speaking and singing was investigated in six male professional country singers. Function was studied using magnetometers to transduce anteroposterior diameter changes of the rib cage and abdomen while subjects performed various respiratory maneuvers, speaking activities, and singing activities. Results indicated that respiratory behavior during speaking was generally the same as that of other normal subjects. Respiratory behavior during singing resembled that of speaking. Discussion includes comparison of respiratory performance of present singers with untrained singers and classically trained singers. Implications are offered regarding how the results might be applied to the prevention of voice disorders by education and training of country singers.