Language and crossed finger localization in patients with schizophrenia

Language deficits are frequently reported in studies of patients with schizophrenia. The present study sought to test the hypothesis that such deficits are related to callosal function in this group. The FAS test of verbal fluency and Perin's Spoonerisms test of phonological processing were the tests of language. Callosal function was assessed using a Crossed Finger Localisation Test (CFLT), which is a measure of the interhemispheric transfer of somatosensory information. Patients with schizophrenia performed less well than controls on measures of language function. as well as on the CFLT. Significant positive correlations between CFLT performance and language function were present in the patient group, but not the control group. These findings extend on previous studies that report functional abnormalities of the corpus callosum in schizophrenia and are consistent with the hypothesis that language deficits in schizophrenia are related to impaired callosal functioning in this group. However, other explanations cannot be ruled Out.

Children’s essentialist reasoning about language and race

Across four studies, we directly compared children’s essentialist reasoning about the stability of race and language throughout an individual’s lifespan. Monolingual English-speaking children were presented with a series of images of children who were either White or Black; each face was paired with a voice clip in either English or French. Participants were asked which of two adults each target child would grow up to be – one who was a ‘match’ to the target child in race but not language, and the other a ‘match’ in language but not race. Nine- to 10-year-old European American children chose the race-match, rather than the language-match. In contrast, 5–6-year-old European American children in both urban, racially diverse, and rural, racially homogeneous environments chose the language-match, even though this necessarily meant that the target child would transform racial categories. Although surprising in light of adult reasoning, these young children demonstrated an intuition about the relative stability of an individual’s language compared to her racial group membership. Yet, 5–6-year-old African American children, similar to the older European American children, chose the race-match, suggesting that membership in a racial minority group may highlight children’s reasoning about race as a stable category. Theoretical implications for our understanding of children’s categorization of human kinds are discussed.

Perception of Filtered Speech by Children with Developmental Dyslexia and Children with Specific Language Impairments

Here we use two filtered speech tasks to investigate children’s processing of slow (<4 Hz) versus faster (∼33 Hz) temporal modulations in speech. We compare groups of children with either developmental dyslexia (Experiment 1) or speech and language impairments (SLIs, Experiment 2) to groups of typically-developing (TD) children age-matched to each disorder group. Ten nursery rhymes were filtered so that their modulation frequencies were either low-pass filtered (<4 Hz) or band-pass filtered (22 – 40 Hz). Recognition of the filtered nursery rhymes was tested in a picture recognition multiple choice paradigm. Children with dyslexia aged 10 years showed equivalent recognition overall to TD controls for both the low-pass and band-pass filtered stimuli, but showed significantly impaired acoustic learning during the experiment from low-pass filtered targets. Children with oral SLIs aged 9 years showed significantly poorer recognition of band pass filtered targets compared to their TD controls, and showed comparable acoustic learning effects to TD children during the experiment. The SLI samples were also divided into children with and without phonological difficulties. The children with both SLI and phonological difficulties were impaired in recognizing both kinds of filtered speech. These data are suggestive of impaired temporal sampling of the speech signal at different modulation rates by children with different kinds of developmental language disorder. Both SLI and dyslexic samples showed impaired discrimination of amplitude rise times. Implications of these findings for a temporal sampling framework for understanding developmental language disorders are discussed.

Football Talk: Sociological Reflections on the Dialectics of Language and Football

The paper examines the relationship between football and language from a sociological point of view. This has often been couched in negative terms but the paper argues that such a view distorts the majority of ‘Football Talk’. The discourse surrounding football within everyday interactions is often positive and integrative. ‘Football Talk’ acts as a lingua franca amongst football supporters. This language code is therefore both inclusive and exclusive.

Criminal Conversations: Rogues, Words and the World in the Work of Daniel Defoe

Even as Daniel Defoe's roguish protagonists notably Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack try to separate themselves from illicit itinerants, they are implicated further in deviance. Moll and Jack both embody and exploit ambiguous moral and spatial arrangements, and use hybrid linguistic formulations, all of which collocate the roguish and the reputable. By brilliantly realizing this interpenetration of words and worlds, Defoe problematises eighteenth-century efforts to demarcate the illicit and itinerant along the lines of space, rank, gender and language. Such efforts facilitated deviant mobility as much as they demonised it. Much scholarship has attended to Defoe's representations of criminality and poverty. This article develops such research to re-position him in a tradition of rogue-writing that stylishly problematises normative discriminatory practices.

‘Reason’ and ‘tickle’ as pragmatic constructs in the discourse of advertising

This paper explores certain pragmatic features of advertising discourse. It focuses on and expands upon a binary distinction between types of advertising discourse which was proposed initially by Bernstein (1974) and which has been touched upon more recently by other commentators such as Cook (1992). This is the distinction between reason advertisements (those which suggest a motive or reason for purchase) and tickle advertisements (those which appeal to humour, emotion and mood). It will be argued that Bernstein's distinction can be accommodated relatively systematically within contemporary frameworks of language and discourse. Drawing on a range of work in pragmatics and in systemic-functional linguistics, this paper takes some tentative steps towards the development of a theoretical model with accounts for this particular communicative-cognitive dimension of advertising discourse.

Prosodic Characteristics of Skilled Reading: Fluency and Expressiveness in 8- 10-year-old Readers

Statistical methods of describing prosody were used to study fluency, expressiveness and their relationship among 8-10-year-old readers. There were robust relationships between expressiveness and variables associated with pitch mobility; and between fluency and measures associated with temporal organization. Interactions indicated that the relationships were not simple. Differences between groups depended on sentence content and position. Some measures offer a basis for rules aimed at assigning individuals to skill categories. The effects suggest psychological hypotheses about the underlying mechanisms.

'Le récit de vie(s)': immobility and fluidity in Ying Chen's works

The article explores the themes of fluidity and immobility in the works of Ying Chen, a francophone Chinese writer whose early texts are associated with 'les écritures migrantes' of Quebec. From her third book, the narratives take on a post-death perspective and the narrator moves between her present existence and past lives.