18 resultados para Verbal fluency

em CentAUR: Central Archive University of Reading - UK


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Developmental stammering (DS, also known as idiopathic stammering or stuttering) is a disorder of speech fluency that affects approximately 0.75% to 1% of the populations of Great Britain, Australia and America,(1-4) although a recent study puts the point prevalence figure at between 1% and 3% in the UK.(5) Prevalence is generally thought to be similar amongst communities worldwide, although there have been occasional suggestions that this figure might be lower in countries where there is less pressure on verbal acuity.(6) DS may be distinguished from neurogenic stammering, which can occur subsequent to neurological damage of various aetiologies (for example, stroke, tumour, degenerative disease) and psychogenic stammering, whose onset can be related to a significant psychological event such as bereavement. While a diagnosis of neurogenic stammering might be made in early childhood and adolescence, both neurogenic and psychogenic types are typically associated with an adult onset. DS is by far the most common form of stammering and usually develops in the pre-school years. The mean age at onset is 4 2, with 75% of cases beginning before the age of 6.(1) However, occasionally, stammering onset may be seen as late as 12 or 13 years of age.

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Objective: To examine the interpretation of the verbal anchors used in the Borg rating of perceived exertion (RPE) scales in different clinical groups and a healthy control group. Design: Prospective experimental study. Setting: Rehabilitation center. Participants: Nineteen subjects with brain injury, 16 with chronic low back pain (CLBP), and 20 healthy controls. Interventions: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measures: Subjects used a visual analog scale (VAS) to rate their interpretation of the verbal anchors from the Borg RPE 6-20 and the newer 10-point category ratio scale. Results: All groups placed the verbal anchors in the order that they occur on the scales. There were significant within-group differences (P > .05) between VAS scores for 4 verbal anchors in the control group, 8 in the CLBP group, and 2 in the brain injury group. There was no significant difference in rating of each verbal anchor between the groups (P > .05). Conclusions: All subjects rated the verbal anchors in the order they occur on the scales, but there was less agreement in rating of each verbal anchor among subjects in the brain injury group. Clinicians should consider the possibility of small discrepancies in the meaning of the verbal anchors to subjects, particularly those recovering from brain injury, when they evaluate exercise perceptions.

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In a workshop setting, two pieces of recorded music were presented to a group of adult non-specialists; a key feature was to set up structured discussion within which the respondents considered each piece of music as a whole and not in its constituent parts. There were two areas of interest, namely to explore whether the respondents were likely to identify the musical features or to make extra-musical associations and, to establish the extent to which there would be commonality and difference in their approach to formulating the verbal responses. An inductive approach was used in the analysis of data to reveal some of the working theories underpinning the intuitive musicianship of the adult non-specialist listener. Findings have shown that, when unprompted by forced choice responses, the listeners generated responses that could be said to be information-poor in terms of musical features but rich in terms of the level of personal investment they made in formulating their responses. This is evidenced in a number of connections they made between the discursive and the non-discursive, including those which are relational and mediated by their experiences. Implications for music education are considered.

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This article argues that a native-speaker baseline is a neglected dimension of studies into second language (L2) performance. If we investigate how learners perform language tasks, we should distinguish what performance features are due to their processing an L2 and which are due to their performing a particular task. Having defined what we mean by “native speaker,” we present the background to a research study into task features on nonnative task performance, designed to include native-speaker data as a baseline for interpreting nonnative-speaker performance. The nonnative results, published in this journal (Tavakoli & Foster, 2008) are recapitulated and then the native-speaker results are presented and discussed in the light of them. The study is guided by the assumption that limited attentional resources impact on L2 performance and explores how narrative design features—namely complexity of storyline and tightness of narrative structure— affect complexity, fluency, accuracy, and lexical diversity in language. The results show that both native and nonnative speakers are prompted by storyline complexity to use more subordinated language, but narrative structure had different effects on native and nonnative fluency. The learners, who were based in either London or Tehran, did not differ in their performance when compared to each other, except in lexical diversity, where the learners in London were close to native-speaker levels. The implications of the results for the applicability of Levelt’s model of speaking to an L2 are discussed, as is the potential for further L2 research using native speakers as a baseline.

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What are the precise brain regions supporting the short-term retention of verbal information? A previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study suggested that they may be topographically variable across individuals, occurring, in most, in regions posterior to prefrontal cortex (PFC), and that detection of these regions may be best suited to a single-subject (SS) approach to fMRI analysis (Feredoes and Postle, 2007). In contrast, other studies using spatially normalized group-averaged (SNGA) analyses have localized storage-related activity to PFC. To evaluate the necessity of the regions identified by these two methods, we applied repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to SS- and SNGA-identified regions throughout the retention period of a delayed letter-recognition task. Results indicated that rTMS targeting SS analysis-identified regions of left perisylvian and sensorimotor cortex impaired performance, whereas rTMS targeting the SNGA-identified region of left caudal PFC had no effect on performance. Our results support the view that the short-term retention of verbal information can be supported by regions associated with acoustic, lexical, phonological, and speech-based representation of information. They also suggest that the brain bases of some cognitive functions may be better detected by SS than by SNGA approaches to fMRI data analysis.

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This article addresses the question of how far working memory may affect second language (L2) learners' improvement in spoken language during a period of immersion. Research is presented testing the hypothesis that individual differences in working memory (WM) capacity are associated with individual variation in improvements in oral production of questions in English. Thirty-two Chinese adult speakers of English were tested, before and after a year's postgraduate study in the United Kingdom, to measure grammatical accuracy and fluency using a question elicitation task, and to measure WM using a battery of first language (L1) and L2 WM tests. Story recall in L1 (Mandarin) was significantly associated with individuals' improvement in oral grammatical measures (p < .05). However, there was no significant mean improvement across the cohort in grammatical accuracy, although there was for fluency. The findings suggest that WM may aid certain aspects of individuals' L2 oral proficiency during academic immersion through postgraduate study. They also indicate that academic immersion in itself can lead to improvements in oral proficiency, independent of WM capacity, but there is no general guarantee of significant grammatical change. Further research to clarify the opportunities for input and interaction available in academic immersion settings is called for.

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Spatial memory is important for locating objects in hierarchical data structures, such as desktop folders. There are, however, some contradictions in literature concerning the effectiveness of 3D user interfaces when compared to their 2D counterparts. This paper uses a task-based approach in order to investigate the effectiveness of adding a third dimension to specific user tasks, i.e. the impact of depth on navigation in a 3D file manager. Results highlight issues and benefits of using 3D interfaces for visual and verbal tasks, and introduces the possible existence of a correlation between aptitude scores achieved on the Guilford- Zimmerman Orientation Survey and Electroencephalography- measured brainwave activity as participants search for targets of variable perceptual salience in 2D and 3D environments.

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The aim of this paper is to examine the acquisition pattern of person and number verb morphology within the generative framework and to compare the results of the analyses with previous research in Greek and other European languages. The study considers previous data on the acquisition of subject-verb agreement, and thereafter, examines the acquisition of person and number morphology in a new dataset of two monolingual Greek-speaking children. The analyses present quantitative data of accuracy of person and number marking, error data, and qualitative analyses addressing the productivity of person and number marking. The results suggest that person and number morphology is used correctly and productively from a very early age in Greek speaking children. The findings provide new insight into early Greek language acquisition and are also relevant for research in early development of languages with rich inflectional morphology.

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Short-term memory (STM) impairments are prevalent in adults with acquired brain injuries. While there are several published tests to assess these impairments, the majority require speech production, e.g. digit span (Wechsler, 1987). This feature may make them unsuitable for people with aphasia and motor speech disorders because of word finding difficulties and speech demands respectively. If patients perceive the speech demands of the test to be high, the may not engage with testing. Furthermore, existing STM tests are mainly ‘pen-and-paper’ tests, which can jeopardise accuracy. To address these shortcomings, we designed and standardised a novel computerised test that does not require speech output and because of the computerised delivery it would enable clinicians identify STM impairments with greater precision than current tests. The matching listening span tasks, similar to the non-normed PALPA 13 (Kay, Lesser & Coltheart, 1992) is used to test short-term memory for serial order of spoken items. Sequences of digits are presented in pairs. The person hears the first sequence, followed by the second sequence and s/he decides whether the two sequences are the same or different. In the computerised test, the sequences are presented in live voice recordings on a portable computer through a software application (Molero Martin, Laird, Hwang & Salis 2013). We collected normative data from healthy older adults (N=22-24) using digits, real words (one- and two-syllables) and non-words (one- and two- syllables). Their performance was scored following two systems. The Highest Span system was the highest span length (e.g. 2-8) at which a participant correctly responded to over 7 out of 10 trials at the highest sequence length. Test re-test reliability was also tested in a subgroup of participants. The test will be available as free of charge for clinicians and researchers to use.

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This study investigates the effects of a short-term pedagogic intervention on the development of L2 fluency among learners studying English for Academic purposes (EAP) at a university in the UK. It also examines the interaction between the development of fluency, and complexity and accuracy. Through a pre-test, post-test design, data were collected over a period of four weeks from learners performing monologic tasks. While the Control Group (CG) focused on developing general speaking and listening skills, the Experimental Group (EG) received awareness-raising activities and fluency strategy training in addition to general speaking and listening practice i.e following the syllabus. The data, coded in terms of a range of measures of fluency, accuracy and complexity, were subjected to repeated measures MANOVA, t-tests and correlations. The results indicate that after the intervention, while some fluency gains were achieved by the CG, the EG produced statistically more fluent language demonstrating a faster speech and articulation rate, longer runs and higher phonation time ratios. The significant correlations obtained between measures of accuracy and learners’ pauses in the CG suggest that pausing opportunities may have been linked to accuracy. The findings of the study have significant implications for L2 pedagogy, highlighting the effective impact of instruction on the development of fluency.

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Parents’ verbal communication to their child, particularly the expression of fear-relevant information (e.g., attributions of threat to the environment), is considered to play a key role in children’s fears and anxiety. This review considers the extent to which parental verbal communication is associated with child anxiety by examining research that has employed objective observational methods. Using a systematic search strategy, we identified 15 studies that addressed this question. These studies provided some evidence that particular fear-relevant features of parental verbal communication are associated with child anxiety under certain conditions. However, the scope for drawing reliable, general conclusions was limited by extensive methodological variation between studies, particularly in terms of the features of parental verbal communication examined and the context in which communication took place, how child anxiety was measured, and inconsistent consideration of factors that may moderate the verbal communication–child anxiety relationship. We discuss ways in which future research can contribute to this developing evidence base and reduce further methodological inconsistency so as to inform interventions for children with anxiety problems.