The study reveales psycholinguistic peculiarities of understanding of indirect meaning of the proverbs and idioms of Ukrainian speaking pre-school children. The experiment took place on the basis of pre-school education establishments of Ukraine. The participation number is 378 children at the age of 5 years (till 5.5 years). The used psycholinguistic methods are: а) «evaluation of understanding of the indirect metaphors meaning» (Vygotskyi, 2000); b) «evaluation of proverbs understanding» (Luriia, 1998). The other used psycholinguistic methods are: а) «Proverbs understanding» (Luriia, 1998), adopted for the diagnoses of metaphoric understanding of idioms meaning by children; b) «The interpretation choice of one of the given variants of meanings» (Baskakova & Glukhov, 2008; Eliseeva, Gutsc & Marini, 2017); c) selection of one of several possible paraphrases (Winner, Rosenstiel & Gardner, 1976; Vosniadou & Ortony, 1983). Children were proposed to express themselves in order to find o...

"The presentation guides you to discover in a fresh way how TESOL is a partial and integral expression of the Christian path to wholeness by virtue of the process of cultural, linguistic and identity paradigm shifts. What a meta-cognitive model integrating TESOL and Christianity does, is build from the empirical to the realm of the mind, heart and spirit - which is core transformation.  It’s a journey to an unseen and ideal place, much like Norton’s “imagined communities”.  This can be translated, of course, to Abraham’s journey to a heavenly city.  We meet our students there, in no-man’s-land as it were, and this model gives teachers and students a handle on how to move forward.

How humans possess the language ability is a matter of long controversy among the linguists. Some of them believe that the ability of language is the result of innate knowledge. Unlike other species humans possess that innate ability which is genetically coded. To them language is the outcome of nature (genes). Conversely, others claim that the ability of language is learned through experience extracting all the linguistic information from the outside environment. It is the outcome of nurture (environmental factors/stimuli). At present, there is no clear winner regarding the debate as both genes and environmental factors/stimuli seem to play a vital and important role in language acquisition.

Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes, and personality differences.

■ Many previous studies have shown that predictable words are read faster and lead to reduced neural activation, consistent with a model of reading in which words are activated in advance of being encountered. The nature of such preactivation, however, has typ-ically been studied indirectly through its subsequent effect on word recognition. Here, we use magnetoencephalography to study the dynamics of prediction within serially presented adjective–noun phrases, beginning at the point at which the pre-dictive information is first available to the reader. Using corpus transitional probability to estimate the predictability of a noun, we found an increase in activity in the left middle temporal gyrus in response to the presentation of highly predictive adjectives (i.e., adjectives that license a strong noun prediction). Moreover, we found that adjective predictivity and expected noun frequency interacted, such that the response to the highly predictive adjec-tives (e.g., stainless) was ...

Six lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the influence of complex structure on the processing speed of English compounds. All experiments revealed that semantically transparent compounds (eg, rosebud) were processed more quickly than matched monomorphemic words (eg, giraffe). Opaque compounds (eg, hogwash) were also processed more quickly than monomorphemic words. However, when the experimental materials and/or procedure encouraged decomposition/integration, this advantage ...

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not differ from fixations to a distractor in the constraining-verb condition. In Experiment 2, cross-splicing introduced phonetic information that temporarily biased the input toward the cohort competitor. Fixations to the cohort competitor temporarily increased in both the neutral and constraining conditions. These results favor models in which mapping from the input onto meaning is continuous over models in which contextual effects follow access of an initial form-based competitor set.

Contrary to what occurs with negative pictures, negative words are, in general, not capable of interfering with performance in ongoing cognitive tasks in normal subjects. A probable explanation is the limited arousing power of linguistic material. Especially intense words (insults and compliments), neutral personal adjectives, and pseudowords were presented to 28 participants while they executed a lexical decision task. Insults were associated with the poorest performance in the task and compliments with the best. Amplitude of the late positive component of the event-related potentials, originating at parietal areas, was maximal in response to compliments and insults, but latencies were delayed in response to the latter. Results suggest that intense emotional words modulate ongoing cognitive processes through both bottom-up (attentional capture by insults) and top-down (facilitation of cognitive processing by arousing words) mechanisms.

In languages where the position of lexical stress within a word is not predictable from print, readers rely on distributional information extracted from the lexicon in order to assign stress. Lexical databases are thus especially important for researchers willing to address stress assignment in those languages. Here we present Q2Stress, a new database aimed to fill the lack of such a resource for Italian. Q2Stress includes multiple cues readers may use in assigning stress, such as type and token frequency of stress patterns as well as their distribution with respect to number of syllables, grammatical category, word beginnings, word endings, and consonant-vowel structures. Furthermore, for the first time, data for both adults and children are available. Q2Stress may help researchers to answer empirical as well as theoretical questions about stress assignment and stress-related issues, and more in general, to explore the orthography-tophonology relation in reading. Q2Stress is designed as a user-friendly resource, as it comes with scripts allowing researchers to explore and select their own stimuli according to several criteria as well as summary tables for overall data analysis.

It can be difficult to judge the effectiveness of encoding techniques in a within-subject design. Consider the production effect-the finding that words read aloud are better remembered than words read silently. In the absence of a baseline, a within-subject production effect in a mixed study list could reflect a benefit of reading aloud, a cost of reading silently, or both. To help interpret within-subject data, memory researchers have compared within-subject and between-subjects designs, with the between-subjects (i.e., pure list) conditions serving as baselines against which the within-subject (i.e., mixed-list) conditions are compared. In the present article, the authors highlight a shortcoming of using this comparison to assess costs and benefits in recognition. Unlike between-subjects experiments where separate false alarm rates are obtained for each condition, the typical within-subject experiment yields a collapsed false alarm rate, which, the authors argue, can potentially b...

“語言與現代化”學術研討會
  2017年10月18-20日，澳門

主旨演講：
論語言與認知的跨學科研究成果與趨勢
—— 以工作記憶為視角

溫植勝博士、副教授
澳門理工學院語言暨翻譯學校

【摘要】：本文的目的旨在展示國內外認知科學界和語言學界圍繞工作記憶與語言學習所展開的跨學科研究所取得的最新成果，並藉此對今後的相關研究做出展望。文章首先扼要回顧總結認知（神經）科學界對工作記憶進行的多層面本體研究，然後將這些研究成果與語言學界研究界近年探討工作記憶對語言學習不同方面影響作用的實證研究結果想結合，繼而提出一個工作記憶與語言習得的創新性理論假設與研究框架。文章將結合現有的研究成果著重對今後的相關研究提出多方面的具體建議。



【演講者簡介】：溫植勝博士，現為澳門理工學院語言暨翻譯高等學校副教授，中國英漢語比較研究會心理語言學專業委員會理事。香港中文大學應用語言學博士，美國密歇根大學訪問研究學者。任教於粵港澳多所重點高校本科和研究生課程多年，在國內外重要學術期刊發表論文30多篇；近年致力於語言習得與認知科學等交叉學科的理論與實踐研究，其英文學術專著（2016）和編著（2015）由英國著名的Multilingual Matters出版。曾獲語言學界國際頂尖期刊《語言學習》2012年度頒發的“《語言學習》期刊圓桌會議專項研究基金”獎項資助。
(Contact: (853)8599-6389; Email: edwardwen@ipm.edu.mo)

The present study investigated the predicative metaphor in Korean focusing on the controversial issue of processing of metaphoric expression (indirect access vs. direct access) using an ERP technique. Two offline tasks and an ERP experiment were conducted employing the four experimental conditions such as literal meaning, conventional metaphor, novel metaphor & anormal meaning condition. The results showed that N400 was elicited in the literal meaning compared to conventional metaphor condition. In addition, the N400 & P600 was elicited in the novel metaphor and anormal meaning conditions compared to the literal or conventional metaphor condition, but the effect size in novel metaphor condition was smaller than the one in the anormal condition. These findings are interpreted as supporting evidence on the direct access model which argued that the metaphoric expression can be processed easily and quickly like the literal sentence if it is sufficiently salient.

Se indaga el sentido de la conferencia de Sloterdijk
“Normas para el Parque humano” así como las
polémicas por ella suscitada. Se realiza un diagnóstico
de la capacidad crítica del humanismo tradicional. En el
marco del naufragio del humanismo como escuela y
utopía domesticadora humana -marco en el que
Sloterdijk reclama una revisión genético-técnica de la
humanidad- se indaga ¿qué criterios pueden
establecerse para normar las inevitables luchas por los
derechos de la crianza humana? ¿Quiénes y sobre qué
bases debieran hoy detentar el derecho a la crianza?
¿Cómo determinar quiénes son los que educan y los que
son educados? Se proponen nuevos caminos que
tienen en la mediación de la técnica su formulación
discursiva y sus orígenes en las disidencias que, desde
la propia tradición filosófica, reducían la estancia del
hombre en el mundo a su expresión leída y escrita.

Social  connection  is a concept that has existed since the  beginning of the  human  race.
Ever  since  humans  began  to roam  the  planet,  they have  created, and  maintained  social ties.
These interactions make civilization  possible. Through  the course of time, methods of interaction
with others have become more and  more  sophisticated. Interactions have grown more complex as
technology    has    expanded  and  created  more  possibilities. One of t he  most  revolutionary
breakthroughs in communication  is the  internet. The internet has made it possible for  persons to
keep  in  touch no  matter  where  they  may  be on the  globe. With the  potential for any two
individuals  to  interact  through  the  internet,  our  social  connections  are  seemingly  endless.
Popular  social  networking  sites  (SNS) have  developed  to  facilitate  these  connections.
Among  these  sites are: Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the very famous  Facebook. These SNS
allow individuals  to  create  their own “profile” for other members to view. Personal information
posted  about  oneself  includes  details about  personal  interests, hobbies, as  well as information
about jobs. Profiles may also feature photographs, status updates to let  others know what is going
on in your life, to  a “wall” on  which other  members can  write notes, giving  users  the  ability to
search  for,  find, and  interact  with peers  from ones  past, as well  as their present.

The concept of sound symbolism proposes that even the tiniest sounds comprising a word may suggest the qualities of the object which that word represents. Cancer-related medication names, which are likely to be charged with emotional meaning for patients, might be expected to contain such sound-symbolic associations. We analyzed the sounds in the names of 60 frequently-used cancer-related medications, focusing on the medications' trade names as well as the names (trade or generic) commonly used in the clinic. We assessed the frequency of common voiced consonants (/b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /z/; thought to be associated with slowness and heaviness) and voiceless consonants (/p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/; thought to be associated with fastness and lightness), and compared them to what would be expected in standard American English using a reference dataset. A Fisher's exact test for independence showed the chemotherapy consonantal frequencies to be significantly different from standard English (p=0.009 for trade; p<0.001 for "common usage"). For the trade names, the majority of the voiceless consonants were significantly increased compared to standard English; this effect was more pronounced with the "common usage" names (for the group, O/E=1.62; 95% CI [1.37, 1.89]). Hormonal and targeted therapy trade names showed the greatest frequency of voiceless consonants (for the group, O/E=1.76; 95% CI [1.20, 2.49]). Our results suggest that taken together, the names of chemotherapy medications contain an increased frequency of certain sounds associated with lightness, smallness and fastness. This finding raises important questions about the possible role of the names of medications in the experiences of cancer patients and providers.

Türkische Kinder zeigen beim Erwerb des Deutschen als Zweitsprache häufig Schwierigkeiten mit der Zuordnung von Nomina zu ihrer jeweiligen Genusklasse (Femininum, Maskulinum oder Neutrum) - einer grammatischen Kategorie, die ihre Muttersprache nicht kennt. Da das nominale Genusmerkmal an verschiedenen syntaktischen und lexikalischen Verarbeitungsprozessen beteiligt ist, könnte die Förderung des Genuserwerbs bei diesen Kindern einen wichtigen Ansatzpunkt für die Unterstützung des sprachlichen Strukturaufbaus darstellen. Bisher liegt allerdings kaum Evidenz zu der Frage vor, ob und mit welchen Förder- bzw. Trainingsmethoden die Verarbeitung von Genusmerkmalen effektiv unterstützt werden kann und ob alle türkisch-deutschen Kinder von den gleichen Methoden optimal profitieren. In der hier beschriebenen Pilotstudie wurde versucht, den Genuserwerb von acht Zweitund Drittklässlerinnen bzw. -klässlern mit türkischer Erstsprache mit zwei unterschiedlichen sprachlichen Trainingsmethoden zu un...

The paper endeavors to investigate the conceptual metaphor awareness via a psycholinguistic experiment done by Serbian grammar school and EFL students. The analysis is carried to determine the extent to which the students are aware of the differences between metaphor identification processes in the two languages and whether, in an attempt to offer satisfactory solutions, they resort to applying the mother tongue knowledge in case of not being able to interpret foreign language metaphors. The psycholinguistic experiment conducted in this research is composed of 28 metaphorical and non-metaphorical sentences in Serbian and English taken from the available corpora. The experiment was conducted by presenting the participants with equal stimuli,, where they were supposed to determine whether there is metaphorical content present in the sentences or not. In the final section of the research the results of the two analyses are compared to reveal that the assumptions we set off with were mo...

The aim of this research was to investigate one of the features of text display in books printed for young readers. The feature chosen as the focus for this study was the position of the line-break with respect to the phrase structure of the sentence. When reading aloud, children tend to equate line length with a complete sentence, thus disrupting their fluency and, possibly, comprehension. This research was specifically designed t o investigate the effect of a line-break after each word in the sentence pattern: subject-verb-object-adverbial. In an associated experiment, positioning effects of the word were investigated in coorGiating positions between clauses, phrases and words occurring at the end of one line or at the beginning of the next. These experimental line-breaks were embedded in a story which had an identical parallel form in which none of the sentences was violated by line-breaks. In total, 254 five-to eight-year-old children were tape-recorded reading pairs of texts aloud, with a three-week break between recordings. These tapes were analysed for disruptions of fluency and comprehension. A hierarchy of difficulty in relation to the occurrence of the line-breaks for these sentence patterns has been identified.

Understanding a sentence requires a working memory of the partial products of comprehension, so that linguistic relations between temporally distal parts of the sentence can be rapidly computed. We describe an emerging theoretical framework for this working memory system that incorporates several independently motivated principles of memory: a sharply limited attentional focus, rapid retrieval of item (but not order) information subject to interference from similar items, and activation decay (forgetting over time). A computational model embodying these principles provides an explanation of the functional capacities and severe limitations of human processing, as well as accounts of reading times. The broad implication is that the detailed nature of crosslinguistic sentence processing emerges from the interaction of general principles of human memory with the specialized task of language comprehension.

Is it living or not? The ability to differentiate between animate and inanimate entities is of considerable value in everyday life, since it allows for the dissociation of individuals that may willfully cause an action from objects that cannot. The present fMRI study aimed to shed light on the neural correlates of animacy at a relational-interpretive level, i.e. on the role of animacy in the establishment of relations between entities that are more or less likely to cause an event and differ in their potential to act volitionally. To this end, we investigated the processing of visually presented transitive German sentences (nominative-accusative structures) in which the factors animacy and argument order were manipulated. The relations between the arguments differed in that the animate subject either acted on an inanimate object (a very natural construction in terms of transitivity) or on an animate object (resulting in a sentence deviating from an unmarked transitive structure). Participants performed an acceptability judgment task. Violations of unmarked transitivity yielded a significant activation increase within the posterior left superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), thus suggesting a specific role of this cortical region in the relational use of animacy information. This result indicates that the influence of animacy as a relational feature differs from the impact of this parameter on the word level and is in line with other neuroimaging studies showing an engagement of the pSTS when a matching between syntax and semantics is required. A comparison between object-and subject-initial conditions further revealed a robust effect of argument order in the pars opercularis of the left inferior frontal gyrus (a subregion of Broca's area), thereby replicating previous findings demonstrating a sensitivity of this region to finegrained language-specific linearization rules.

Cortical processing of emotional words differs from that of neutral words. Using EEG event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study examines the functional stage(s) of this differentiation. Positive, negative, and neutral nouns were randomly mixed with pseudowords and letter strings derived from words within each valence and presented for reading while participants' EEG was recorded. Results indicated emotion effects in the N1 (110-140 ms), early posterior negativity (EPN, 216-320) and late positive potential (LPP, 432-500 ms) time windows. Across valence, orthographic word-form effects occurred from about 180 ms after stimulus presentation. Crucially, in emotional words, lexicality effects (real words versus pseudowords) were identified from 216 ms, words being more negative over posterior cortex, coinciding with EPN effects, whereas neutral words differed from pseudowords only after 320 ms. Emotional content affects word processing at pre-lexical, lexical and post-lexical levels, but remarkably lexical access to emotional words is faster than access to neutral words.

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) – often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) ‘cross-level harmony constraint’, the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically – and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's ‘cross-level harmony constraint’ may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I dis...

Knowing how to learn a language maximizes the chances of effective learning. Metacognition, an emerging concept in cognitive psychology, aids learners to enrich their knowledge of the learning process and makes them autonomous learners. This paper details an experiment conducted with fifty freshmen in college on autonomous learning of…

In this paper we present a semantic analysis of the imperfective paradox based on the Event Calculus (van Lambalgen & Hamm 2004), a planning formalism characterizing a class of models which can be computed by connectionist networks. We report the results of a questionnaire that support the semantic theory and suggest that different aspectual classes of VPs in the progressive give rise to different entailment patterns. Further, a processing model is outlined, combining the semantic analysis with the psycholinguistic principle of immediacy in the framework of recurrent networks. The model is used to derive predictions concerning the electrophysiological correlates of the computations described by the Event Calculus.

A prevailing neurobiological theory of semantic memory proposes that part of our knowledge about concrete, highly imageable concepts is stored in the form of sensory -motor representations. While this theory predicts differential activation of the semantic system by concrete and abstract words, previous functional imaging studies employing this contrast have provided relatively little supporting evidence. We acquired event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants performed a semantic similarity judgment task on a large number of concrete and abstract noun triads. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the degree to which the words in the triad were similar in meaning. Concrete nouns, relative to abstract nouns, produced greater activation in a bilateral network of multimodal and heteromodal association areas, including ventral and medial temporal, posterior -inferior parietal, dorsal prefrontal, and posterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, abstract nouns produced greater activation almost exclusively in the left hemisphere in superior temporal and inferior frontal cortex. Increasing task difficulty modulated activation mainly in attention, working memory, and response monitoring systems, with almost no effect on areas that were modulated by imageability. These data provide critical support for the hypothesis that concrete, imageable concepts activate perceptually based representations not available to abstract concepts. In contrast, processing abstract concepts makes greater demands on left perisylvian phonological and lexical retrieval systems. The findings are compatible with dual coding theory and less consistent with single-code models of conceptual representation. The lack of overlap between imageability and task difficulty effects suggests that once the neural representation of a concept is activated, further maintenance and manipulation of that information in working memory does not further increase neural activation in the conceptual store. D

Why do some students frequently ask questions and actively seek out answers in the classroom, while others avoid this? Many language teachers might have commonly asked themselves this question. The present study is an empirical investigation of the concept of curiosity in the field of second language acquisition (SLA). Using a mixed-methods design, we aim to conceptualize language learning curiosity (LLC) within the framework of interest/deprivation (I/D) model of curiosity (Litman and Jimerson in J Personal Assess 82(2): 147-157, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327752jpa8202_3 ) and see how it may be recognizably distinct from L2 psychological constructs, as well as how it connects with related constructs such as willingness to communicate, enjoyment, and anxiety. To measure LLC and depict its underlying dimensions, a new curiosity scale was developed and validated in this study. Overall, our results suggest that LLC can be conceived as an affective-cognitive variable reflecting a...

En faisant un premier tour d'horizon des resultats actuels de la recherche en biographie langagiere, de son point de vue theorique et methodologique, l'auteure presente les perspectives nouvelles que ce courant apporte a la recherche en linguistique, en particulier sur l'acquisition du langage. L'interet pour la biographie langagiere s'est developpe rapidement dans les annees 1990 et tout specialement en Europe. La biographie langagiere peut, a bien des egards, contribuer a une analyse plus differenciee de l'acquisition du langage. En exposant les principes du courant, l'auteure presente differentes recherches en cours et leurs premiers resultats. Exemple est donne a travers notamment la presentation d'un projet du Fonds national suisse de la recherche entre les Universites de Bâle et de Prague. Cette etude vise a demontrer l'apport de la biographie langagiere pour une analyse neurobiologique du plurilinguisme.

The concept of sound symbolism proposes that even the tiniest sounds comprising a word may suggest the qualities of the object which that word represents. Cancer-related medication names, which are likely to be charged with emotional meaning for patients, might be expected to contain such sound-symbolic associations. We analyzed the sounds in the names of 60 frequently-used cancer-related medications, focusing on the medications' trade names as well as the names (trade or generic) commonly used in the clinic. We assessed the frequency of common voiced consonants (/b/, /d/, /g/, /v/, /z/; thought to be associated with slowness and heaviness) and voiceless consonants (/p/, /t/, /k/, /f/, /s/; thought to be associated with fastness and lightness), and compared them to what would be expected in standard American English using a reference dataset. A Fisher's exact test for independence showed the chemotherapy consonantal frequencies to be significantly different from standard English (p=0.009 for trade; p<0.001 for "common usage"). For the trade names, the majority of the voiceless consonants were significantly increased compared to standard English; this effect was more pronounced with the "common usage" names (for the group, O/E=1.62; 95% CI [1.37, 1.89]). Hormonal and targeted therapy trade names showed the greatest frequency of voiceless consonants (for the group, O/E=1.76; 95% CI [1.20, 2.49]). Our results suggest that taken together, the names of chemotherapy medications contain an increased frequency of certain sounds associated with lightness, smallness and fastness. This finding raises important questions about the possible role of the names of medications in the experiences of cancer patients and providers.

Words derive their structure not only from the sounds they include but also from the organization of those sounds within the word. This organization is the phonotactic level of the word: roughly, its shape including the sequence of its elements. Often, children with immature or disordered phonologies demonstrate phonotactic as well as phonetic limitations. Sometimes, the child may produce an age-appropriate variety of consonants and vowels but be unable to use them in the configurations required by the language: final consonants, clusters, multisyllabic words, and so forth. In such cases, the most appropriate therapy goals may be phonotactic, rather than phonetic, ones. Studies have shown that clinical focus on a new word or syllable shape may generalize well beyond the specific sound or sounds targeted in that position. These ideas are explored in this article, along with specific therapy results and recommendations for various phonotactic limitations.

This paper evaluates the Language Policy and Planning's (LPP) Methodological Rich Points (MRP) in the geographic, ethnic and linguistic composition of Afghanistan. The theoretical construct is taken from the work of Nancy H. Hornberger on MRP in LPP. The paper explores a range of primary and secondary sources, and finds that the presence of inequality, marginalization and oppression in intra-ethnic and intralanguage group relations, sharing of resources and power account for neglect of the MRP in Afghan LPP. The geographic details in conjunction with explanation of historical process of migrations and conquests explains that most of the minority language speakers are concentrated in the difficult to reach areas of Afghanistan for their safety. Further, the limiting factors of Afghan geography explains the preservation of minority languages from the effects of majority languages. The study concludes with the proposal that it would be helpful to avoid the pitfalls of the current L...

The objective of this research was to compare the number and types of grammatical and non-grammatical silent pauses presented by stutterers and subjects with Asperger syndrome in their narratives. Method: Ten children who stutter and four participants with Asperger syndrome (mean ages of both groups 10 years) were assessed at the Speech and Language Disorders Department of the Universidade Federal de São Paulo/Brasil. They narrated a story based on a pre-selected sequence of pictures. They were filmed and their productions were analyzed using version 5.0.47 of Praat (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/download win.html). Silent intervals in the speech that ranged from 0.25 to 4 s were considered pauses. The pauses were classified as grammatical and non-grammatical, depending on the words that preceded and followed them. Results: Both groups presented grammatical and non-grammatical pauses and the former predominated. The children with Asperger syndrome produced a greater number of pauses than the stutterers. Educational objectives: The reader will be able to: (1) characterize the use of pauses in the oral narrative; (2) distinguish a grammatical pause from a non-grammatical pause regarding the use and function; (3) recognize the pattern of pause found in the two populations.

Dissociations in the recognition of specific classes of words have been documented in brain-injured populations. These include deficits in the recognition and production of morphologically complex words as well as impairments specific to particular syntactic classes such as verbs. However, functional imaging evidence for distinctions among the neural systems underlying these dissociations has been inconclusive. We explored the neural systems involved in processing different word classes in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study, contrasting four groups of words co-varying morphological complexity (simple, monomorphemic words vs complex derived or inflected words) and syntactic class (verbs vs nouns/adjectives). Subtraction of word from letter string processing showed activation in left frontal and temporal lobe regions consistent with prior studies of visual word processing. No differences were observed for morphologically complex and simple words, despite adequate power to detect stimulus specific effects. A region of posterior left middle temporal gyrus showed significantly increased activation for verbs. Post hoc analyses showed that this elevated activation could also be related to semantic properties of the stimulus items (verbs have stronger action associations than nouns, and action association is correlated with activation). Results suggest that semantic as well as syntactic factors should be considered when assessing the neural systems involved in single word comprehension.

The goal of the present study was to delineate phonology's role in silent reading using event-related brain potential (ERP) techniques. Terminal endings of high cloze sentences were manipulated in four conditions in which the terminal word was: (1) the high cloze ending and thus orthographically, phonologically and semantically congruent (e.g., The gambler had a streak of bad luck.); (2) a pseudohomophone that was orthographically incongruent, but was phonologically congruent to the anticipated ending (e.g., The ship disappeared into the thick phog [fog].); (3) a word that was orthographically, phonologically and semantically incongruent to expectations (e.g., The dog chased the cat up the Queen [tree].); or (4) a nonword and consequently orthographically, phonologically and semantically incongruent to expectations (e.g., The gas station is about two miles down the bole [road].). A N270 was elicited by orthographically incongruent words and nonwords (conditions 2, 3 and 4), likely reflecting violations of orthographic form expectations, while the presence of the N400 to semantically incongruent words and nonwords (conditions 3 and 4) reflected violations of semantic expectations. The relative absence of the N400 response to pseudohomophones (condition 3) indicates that integrating word meaning with sentential context is influenced by the phonological representation of the presented letter string. The implication of these results for theories of word recognition is discussed. D