Comparison of Preschooler Verbal and Graphic Symbol Production Across Different Syntactic Structures

The present study focuses on the impact of graphic symbols used in Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) on clause construction. It is not yet well-understood to what extent communication produced via graphic symbols differs from verbal production. This study attempts shed light on the impact of the graphic symbol modality on message construction beyond individual differences, language knowledge, and language-specific patterns by providing a direct comparison between children’s verbal and graphic symbol production. Nineteen typically developing Hebrew-speaking children aged 4–5 years were presented with 16 short videos of actions and were asked to express what they saw verbally and by choosing among graphic symbols displayed on an iPad communication board. The 570 clauses produced by the children were coded and analyzed. A significant difference was found in favor of verbal speech across different syntactic structures in terms of utilization of the target lexicon, syntactic complexity, and expected target word order. These results are consistent with the existing literature for English. Implications for AAC practices are discussed, highlighting the notion that using graphic symbols to represent spoken language may not reflect actual linguistic knowledge and that adequate, explicit instruction is necessary for graphic representation of more complex linguistic structures.

The relationship between speech and gestures in persons with aphasia: Evidence from the Czech perspective

In my research, I replicate two fundamental hypotheses established by Jakob et al. (2011): 1) Persons with aphasia (PWA) produce more gestures than healthy control persons (HCP) during interpretation of texts; 2) The more speech-restricted a person with aphasia is, the more gestures he/she produces during the interpretation of a text. I work with 6 persons with diagnosed aphasia and 10 healthy control persons (or persons with no evident speech deficiency). From a methodological point of view, I point out the necessity to include a description of non-verbal elements in language description and, at the same time, to describe the data of the damage in persons with aphasia. I also introduce some possible perspectives for exploring the categories and the extent of speech damage in persons with aphasia and various ways in which they compensate for verbal deficiency with the aid of gestures. From the viewpoint of data processing methods, on the one hand, I explore the speech parameters: among others, quantity of words, and, on the other hand, the gesture parameters: quantity of gestures, diversity of gestures, etc. I find that Czech aphasic persons do use gestures to support their restricted verbal production and to substitute for verbal production where they do not have access to any given lexical items. My data also correlate with the general assumptions on speech production when considering different types of aphasia.

Narrative Self-Representations of Socially Oriented Expectations of Persons with Intellectual Disabilities

The article examines the theoretical and methodological foundations and empirical implementation of the approach to the study of narrative self-representations in the field of socially oriented expectations of young and adult persons with intellectual disabilities. Socially oriented expectations largely determine the behavioral representations of the subject in relation to the outside world and other people. There are no special methods for studying the socially oriented expectations of adults with intellectual disabilities, in connection with which an approach can be proposed using the content analysis of narrative representations obtained in the framework of the study of socially oriented personality self-structures (social self). In this case, the coding is based on two parameters: the frequency of occurrence of representative references and the emotional orientation of representative references to socially oriented expectations. With the use of latent coding, based on the semantic analysis of speech units and representative references, it becomes possible to distinguish semantic clusters describing areas of life for which respondents have socially oriented expectations of a particular emotional orientation. This approach makes it possible to overcome the difficulties of analyzing the verbal production of persons with intellectual disabilities, arising in connection with the presence of systemic speech underdevelopment in the latter. The high values of the coefficient of agreement of expert opinions obtained in this study indicate the relevance of the proposed method for obtaining reliable data. The quantitative ratio of the narrative representations of socially oriented expectations between adolescence and adulthood changes insignificantly, there is a qualitative redistribution of the inter-thematic semantic load, as well as a change in the emotional component of the narrative representations of socially oriented expectations of persons with mild intellectual disabilities.

Children’s development of humour in everyday interactions: two case-studies in French and Brazilian Portuguese

In order to understand how children learn to recognize and use humor in their own cultural environment, we have chosen to study their production in two different languages and cultures. We studied a French-speaking monolingual child and a Brazilian Portuguese-speaking child, video-recorded once a month up to seven years old. The detailed multimodal linguistic coding of our data enabled us to draw the multimodal paths the two children followed from the first instances of shared amusement initiated by the adult, expressed mainly through reactive behavior such as laughing, to the children’s own verbal production of successful humor in dialogue. Our study demonstrates that the production of children’s humor is closely linked to the family input (their micro-culture), and to children’s multimodal linguistic and meta-cognitive development. We did not observe important differences between the two children at the macro-cultural level, but there were noticeable inter-individual differences.

Studie verbální produkce předškolních dětí s vývojovou dysfázií

This study aims to analyse a range of the productive vocabulary and quality of verbal expression in Czech monolingual specific-language-impaired (SLI) preschool children. SLI children´s production was also compared to a verbal production of typically developing (age-matched) peers. An assessment tool was developed to measure the range and the quality of children´s production of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Both aspects of verbal production (the range and the quality) were also proved to be closely correlated. Research results reveal statistically significant differences between the SLI and a comparison group at both range and the quality of verbal expression. A more detailed examination shows that the differences between SLI and typically developing children´s production manifest themselves in the usage of adjectives the most and the least in the usage of nouns.

EVALUATION OF THE ACCURACY OF PERSONALITY JUDGMENTS BASED ON WRITTEN VERBAL PRODUCTION

The process of personality judgment occurs in daily social interactions and represents an attempt to identify characteristics of someone else's personality, in the way to explain past and predict future behaviors. The results of this process have implications on future decisions and actions of people. This research aimed to examine the accuracy of non-expert ratings of Extraversion and Conscientiousness based on short written texts. The sample consisted of 215 participants (Mage = 28.58, SD = 10.30; 80.5% females). The exclusion criterion was that participants were psychologists or psychology students, i.e., individuals familiar with personality research and taxonomies. Participants rated Extraversion and Conscientiousness, based on the texts written by five different individuals. Criteria used to estimate the accuracy of judgments were the agreement between self-report measures on HEXACO PI-R from people who wrote the texts and ratings from participants, as well as the agreement between multiple raters. The results showed that there was a moderate self-other agreement for Extraversion and Conscientiousness. Also, the results showed that there was a high between-raters agreement for Extraversion and Conscientiousness. This study indicates that it is possible to judge one’s personality based on written verbal production, as well that raters tend to form similar impressions about the personality from written texts.

Cognitive resilience in bilinguals and its potentiality in dealing with cognitive load

Previous studies have demonstrated different patterns of results regarding cognitive benefits of bilingualism, ranging from bilingual advantage to no effect of bilingualism. This study examined the potential effect of bilingualism on cognitive resilience and performance. We recruited 21 Persian monolinguals and 19 Persian-English bilinguals. Color-Word Stroop task was used concurrently with verbal production tasks in order to produce three levels of task difficulty, i.e., doing the Stroop task while being silent (level 1), alphabet reciting (level 2), and counting odd numbers (level 3). We investigated the pattern of changes in Stroop task performance when faced with different difficulty levels Bilinguals showed less change in their performance in the Stroop task when faced with high cognitive load (high task difficulty level). However, monolinguals showed a significant decrease in their performance when the cognitive load increased. Our data support the “Bilingual Advantage” view. However, this advantage is highlighted in cognitively demanding tasks.

Influence of long-term fasting and intermittent fasting on the cognitive abilities

Fasting as skipping or abstaining from eating or drinking for a certain time is known mainly due to religion. In addition to religious reasons, we can also fast for weight loss or detoxication. We have decided to examine the impact of fasting on the human organism more closely, especially on the cognitive functions, such as short-term memory, attention, concentration, language skills, abstract reasoning, etc. The research completed 16 participants (M+F; 25.8y±2.7; 179.5cm±11.6; 74.6kg±15.1). There were divided into 2 groups (long-term fasting (LTF) and intermittent fasting (IF)). For measurement cognitive function we used Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), which was completed by all participants in the study before and after the fasting period. The research completed 16 participants. The total score of MoCA decreased in both group after the fasting period, more in the IF group (-1.1 points), but not statistically significant. Values for short-term memory evaluation decreased in both groups, also in the IF group more (-0.9 points), there was a large effect size. Verbal production values decreased in both group and these changes were statistically significant with small effect size. Our results suggest that long-term fasting and intermittent fasting may reduce genitive abilities. Especially short-term memory can be influenced by intermittent fasting. Both fasting methods decreased the level of verbal production.

Mental synthesis and creative thinking in typically developed Italian

The study concerns the relationships between mental synthesis and creative thinking in typically developed Italian children. Creative Mental Synthesis task was applied to analyze the mental synthesis of visualized forms (Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992) by means of rotation, dimension, superimposition, and inclusion. It consisted of a paper-pencil protocol with three stimuli, a capital letter V, a square, and a circle: each child was instructed to imagine combining the stimuli to make meaningful objects and was allowed to imagine the stimuli in any size and to combine them in anyway, without altering or modifying the structural shapes. Test of Creative Thinking (Williams, 1994) was used to measure fluency, flexibility, elaboration, originality, and verbal production; it was made up of a protocol with 12 frames, containing incomplete graphic stimuli shown to children who were asked to draw a picture. Results: the more the children were able in mental synthesis and, mainly, in inclusion and superimposition of visual forms, the more they better performed in elaboration, flexibility, and originality. Future research could deepen the role of mental imagery in development of creativity through curricula focused on strategies for strengthening the processes related to mental imagery. Keywords: Mental imagery; creative thinking; typical development;

A unified neurocognitive model of the anterior temporal lobe contributions to semantics, language, social behaviour & face recognition

The anterior temporal lobes (ATL) have become a key brain region of interest in cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Contemporary explorations are founded upon neuropsychological investigations of semantic dementia (SD) that describe the patients’ selective semantic impairment and the variations in their language, behavioural and face recognition abilities. The purpose of this investigation was to generate a single unified model which captures the known cognitive-behavioural variations in SD, and integrates with the considerable database on healthy semantic function and other patient groups. A new analytical approach was able to capture the graded neuropsychological differences and map these to the patients’ distribution of frontotemporal atrophy. Multiple regression and principal component analyses confirmed that the degree of generalised semantic impairment was related to the patients’ total, bilateral ATL atrophy. Verbal production and word-finding abilities were related to total ATL atrophy as well as to the balance of left>right ATL atrophy. Behavioural apathy was found to relate positively to the degree of orbitofrontal atrophy and negatively to total temporal volumes. Disinhibited behaviour was related to right ATL and orbitofrontal atrophy and face recognition to right ATL volumes. Rather than positing mutually-exclusive sub-categories, the data-driven model repositions semantics, language, social behaviour and face recognition into a continuous frontotemporal neurocognitive space.