RESUMEN
The present study is the first to investigate, using conversation analysis, the effects of a family member's participation in conversation regarding the assessment of need for treatment. We aim at describing the course of a treatment negotiation, focusing on interactional dynamics and on disclosure of paranoid symptoms in a clinically challenging situation characterized by an acutely psychotic patient with (1) disorganized discourse, (2) poor insight, (3) aspiration to avoid hospital treatment, and (4) a relative who was supporting in-patient care. In the triadic conversation, in which the patient, his relative, and the psychiatrist participated, different consecutive phases were distinguished. The Relative Prominent Information Phase (RIP) was characterized by the relative's statements on the patient's problematic behavior, and conflicting views between the patient and his relative led to denial of symptoms by the patient. When the patient was prominent in the latter Patient Prominent Information Phase (PIP), the display of several different social actions and corresponding linguistic devices were linked with more overt talk about paranoid experiences by the patient, albeit in a disorganized manner. RIP and PIP were followed by an Evaluation and Decision Phase (EDP).
Asunto(s)
Actitud Frente a la Salud , Familia/psicología , Trastornos Paranoides/psicología , Revelación de la Verdad , Comunicación , Emociones , Femenino , Humanos , Control Interno-Externo , MasculinoRESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Disorganized speech, manifested as derailment, tangentiality, incoherence and loss of goal, occurs commonly in schizophrenia. Studies of language processing have demonstrated that semantic activation in schizophrenia is often disordered and, moreover, the ability to use contextual cues is impaired. AIMS: To reconstruct the origins and most plausible intended meanings of disorganized discourse sequences in a clinical interview with a patient with thought-disordered schizophrenia. METHODS & PROCEDURES: We assessed the so-called pragmatic felicity of every turn using a novel tool called the Overall Comprehensibility of Turn (OCT) Scale. In addition to felicity analysis, all topics and referents of turns were registered. Three most disorganized discourse sequences from the transcribed interview were chosen for the thematic and semantic analysis, in which we attempted to reconstruct the structure and meaning of those sequences utilizing (1) the notion of discourse model extending up to contextual background knowledge, (2) the (re)occurrence of topical items, together with (3) the knowledge from findings of disordered semantic activation in schizophrenia. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The linguistic analyses showed that the disrupted sequences were characterized by (1) unexpected, seemingly irrelevant topic intrusion, (2) pragmatically inappropriate chain of topic extensions, and (3) fuzzy reference together with disturbed ordering of propositions. The underlying causes seemed to be, respectively, (1) long-term semantic activation of topics, which popped out sporadically along the conversation, (2) overreliance on lexical-semantic associations, and (3) the inability to sequence the utterances and link them together using explicit or implicit bridging assumptions necessary to a coherent and cohesive message. All scrutinized passages violated the expectations of the addressee in on-line conversation. However, the post-hoc analysis showed that they contained items which were relevant to the global topic. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Latent sources, motivations and even meanings, at least to some extent, of seemingly disorganized utterances can become analysable through linguistic analyses. The results suggest that continuity in the treatment is essential, because a practitioner who shares background knowledge with the patient has better opportunities to capture the relevance of the superficially disorganized utterances. Moreover, especially the most disorganized sequences should warrant thorough attention because they can convey, beneath their unexpected or obscure surface structure, items which are psychologically important to the patient. The results of this study should be taken into account in the training of interactional skills of professionals who work with schizophrenia patients.
Asunto(s)
Trastornos de la Comunicación/psicología , Trastornos del Lenguaje/psicología , Esquizofrenia/complicaciones , Lenguaje del Esquizofrénico , Semántica , Adulto , Cognición , Comunicación , Trastornos de la Comunicación/diagnóstico , Comprensión , Humanos , Trastornos del Lenguaje/diagnóstico , Lingüística , Masculino , Psicología del Esquizofrénico , Grabación de Cinta de VideoRESUMEN
The present linguistic analyses of two children (aged 8 and 10) with Asperger Syndrome (AS) and their two matched controls are based on dyadic therapist-child conversations and on picture description tasks. The circa 100 analysis features covering aspects of (i) lexicon (e.g. prominalization), (ii) structural characteristics of turns, (iii) co-operation features (e.g. shared/non-shared elaboration of themes), (iv) prosody, (v) cognitive aspects (e.g. involvement/commitment, world of discourse) and (vi) affect features, show that the AS speakers describe, rather than narrate their conceptualizations, whether (practically) self-initiated (dyadic discourse) or prompted through pictures (narratives). In previous experimental studies of spatially deictic expressions and spatial orientation, it has been shown that the spatial and low-level social cognition of these AS subjects was unimpaired. However, in the present study AS discourse carries features of impaired inter-personal and inter-subjective performance, manifest, for example, in linguistic deixis, atypical power-oriented features and lack of joint activity.
Asunto(s)
Síndrome de Asperger/psicología , Comunicación , Lingüística , Conducta Social , Conducta Verbal , Afecto , Niño , Cognición , Humanos , Lenguaje , Masculino , Narración , Grabación de Cinta de VideoRESUMEN
The authors compared sublexical and supralexical approaches to morphological processing with unambiguous and ambiguous inflected words and words with ambiguous stems in 3 masked and unmasked priming experiments in Finnish. Experiment 1 showed equal facilitation for all prime types with a short 60-ms stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) but significant facilitation for unambiguous words only with a long 300-ms SOA. Experiment 2 showed that all potential readings of ambiguous inflections were activated under a short SOA. Whereas the prime-target form overlap did not affect the results under a short SOA, it significantly modulated the results with a long SOA. Experiment 3 confirmed that the results from masked priming were modulated by the morphological structure of the words but not by the prime-target form overlap alone. The results support approaches in which early prelexical morphological processing is driven by morph-based segmentation and form is used to cue selection between 2 candidates only during later processing.
Asunto(s)
Atención/fisiología , Reconocimiento Visual de Modelos/fisiología , Enmascaramiento Perceptual/fisiología , Semántica , Vocabulario , Análisis de Varianza , Señales (Psicología) , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Estimulación Luminosa/métodos , Tiempo de Reacción/fisiología , Lectura , Factores de TiempoRESUMEN
This study investigated the effect of L1 on the recognition of L2 Swedish inflected nouns. Two groups of late L2 learners with typologically very different native languages, Hungarian (agglutinative) and Chinese (isolating), participated in a visual lexical decision experiment. The target words were matched inflected vs. monomorphemic nouns from three frequency levels. The Hungarian group showed a morphological processing cost (longer reaction times for the inflected words) for low and medium frequency words but not for high frequency words, suggesting morphological decomposition of low and medium frequency Swedish inflected nouns. In contrast, for the Chinese group the reaction times of the inflected vs. monomorphemic words were similar at all frequency levels, indicating full-form processing of all the inflected nouns. This cross-language difference suggests that L1 can exert an effect on the morphological processing in L2. The application of full-form processing for the Swedish inflected nouns in the Chinese group might reflect strategy transfer from their isolating native language to Swedish.
Asunto(s)
Lenguaje , Multilingüismo , Conducta Verbal , Vocabulario , Percepción Auditiva , China , Humanos , Hungría , Tiempo de Reacción , Suecia , Percepción VisualRESUMEN
The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with low-frequency inflected nouns, while with medium- and high-frequency inflections, full-form processing was apparently employed. The bilinguals demonstrated a similar pattern. The results suggest that morpheme-based recognition is employed even in a morphologically limited language when the inflectional forms occur rarely. With more frequent inflectional forms, full-form representations have developed for both mono- and bilingual speakers. In a comparable study employing a morphologically rich language, Finnish, Lehtonen and Laine (2003, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 213-225) observed full-form access only at the high-frequency range and only for monolinguals. These differences suggest that besides word frequency and language background, the morphological richness of a language affects the processing mode employed with polymorphemic words.
Asunto(s)
Lenguaje , Multilingüismo , Reconocimiento en Psicología , Vocabulario , Adulto , Femenino , Finlandia , Humanos , Lingüística/métodos , Lingüística/estadística & datos numéricos , Masculino , SueciaRESUMEN
We measured brain activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while Finnish-Norwegian bilinguals silently translated sentences from Finnish into Norwegian and decided whether a later presented probe sentence was a correct translation of the original sentence. The control task included silent sentence reading and probe sentence decision within a single language, Finnish. The translation minus control task contrast activated the left inferior frontal gyrus (Brodmann's area 47) and the left basal ganglia. The left inferior frontal activation appears to be related to active semantic retrieval and the basal ganglia activation to a general action control function that works by suppressing competing responses.
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Encéfalo/fisiología , Imagen por Resonancia Magnética , Multilingüismo , Semántica , Traducciones , Adulto , Ganglios Basales/fisiología , Mapeo Encefálico , Cerebelo/fisiología , Femenino , Finlandia , Lateralidad Funcional/fisiología , Humanos , Lenguaje , Masculino , Corteza Motora/fisiología , Noruega , Corteza Prefrontal/fisiología , Lectura , Lóbulo Temporal/fisiologíaRESUMEN
The aim of the present study was to investigate differences in brain activation in a family with SLI as compared to intact individuals with normally developed language during processing of language stimuli. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to monitor changes in neuronal activation in temporal and frontal lobe areas in 5 Finnish family members with specific language impairment (SLI) and 6 individuals in an intact control group. Magnetic resonance (MR) image acquisitions were made while the participants listened to series of isolated vowel sounds, pseudowords, and real words. The stimuli were digitized single Finnish vowel sounds, 3-phoneme pseudowords, and 3- and 4-phoneme real words. MR scanning was made with a 1.5 T Siemens Vision Plus scanner, and the auditory stimuli were presented according to an event-related fMRI design. The results showed significant differences between the family with SLI and the intact control group with regard to brain activation in areas in the temporal and frontal lobes. Temporal lobe activation differences were most pronounced in the middle temporal gyrus bordering the superior temporal sulcus. The control participants also activated an area in the inferior frontal lobe in BA 44. It is concluded that individuals with SLI showed reduced activation in brain areas that are critical for speech processing and phonological awareness. The present functional brain imaging data fit well with other recent imaging data that also showed structural abnormalities in the same and neighboring areas.
Asunto(s)
Familia , Lóbulo Frontal/fisiología , Trastornos del Lenguaje/fisiopatología , Imagen por Resonancia Magnética , Percepción del Habla/fisiología , Lóbulo Temporal/fisiología , Estimulación Acústica , Adolescente , Adulto , Anciano , Estudios de Casos y Controles , Niño , Análisis por Conglomerados , Femenino , Lóbulo Frontal/patología , Humanos , Trastornos del Lenguaje/genética , Imagen por Resonancia Magnética/métodos , Masculino , Persona de Mediana Edad , Linaje , Lóbulo Temporal/patologíaRESUMEN
Hemisphere lateralization for speech perception was investigated in a Finnish family with specific language impairment. We used dichotic presentations of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables, consisting of the six stop-consonants paired with the vowel /a/, under three different attentional instructions. The dichotic listening technique means that two different speech stimuli are presented simultaneously, one in each ear. Left hemisphere dominance for speech perception is assessed from a preference for the right ear stimulus. Response accuracy was compared in five members, over three generations, of a family with SLI with 5 healthy control subjects. The dichotic listening task was performed under three different instructions, to attend only to the right ear stimulus, to attend only to the left ear stimulus, or with no instruction about attention. The subjects indicated orally which of the six CV-syllables they heard on each trial. There were 36 dichotic presentations of the CV-syllables for each instruction. The CV-syllables were played from a CD with digitized stimuli. The results showed no difference between the groups during the no instruction condition, indicating normal speech lateralization in the SLI group. However, the SLI group was deficient in modifying the ear advantage through focused attention to the left ear, thus indicating an attentional/executive deficit in addition to a deficit in left hemisphere lateralization. It is concluded that individuals with specific language impairment may have a cognitive deficit related to attention in addition to a language processing deficit related to left hemisphere function.
Asunto(s)
Atención , Salud de la Familia , Lateralidad Funcional/fisiología , Trastornos del Lenguaje/fisiopatología , Percepción del Habla , Pruebas de Audición Dicótica/métodos , Oído/fisiopatología , Femenino , Finlandia , Humanos , Masculino , Análisis Multivariante , Linaje , Pruebas de Discriminación del Habla , Escalas de WechslerRESUMEN
Focusing of attention to a specific speech source plays an important role in everyday speech perception. However, little is known of the neuronal substrates of focused attention in speech perception. Thus, the present study investigated the effects on neuronal activation of directed attention to auditory stimuli that differed in semantic content. Using an event-related fMRI protocol, single vowels, three-phoneme pseudowords and three- and four-phoneme real nouns and words were randomly presented to the subjects during four different instructional conditions. One condition was passive listening without any specific instructions of focusing of attention. The other conditions were attention focused on either the vowels, the pseudowords or the words. Thus, the acoustic stimulation was constant across conditions. The subjects were 13 healthy adults. Functional MRI was performed with a 1.5 T scanner, using an event-related design. During passive listening, there were significant activations bilaterally in the superior temporal gyrus. Instruction to attend to the pseudowords caused activation in middle temporal lobe areas, extending more anterior compared to the activations seen during passive listening. Instruction to attend to the vowel sounds caused an increase in activation in the superior/medial temporal lobe, with a leftward asymmetry. Instruction to attend to the words caused a leftward asymmetry, particularly in the middle and superior temporal gyri. It is concluded that attention plays a modulatory role in neuronal activation to speech sounds, producing specific activations to specific stimulus categories that may act to facilitate speech perception.
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Atención/fisiología , Encéfalo/anatomía & histología , Encéfalo/fisiología , Imagen por Resonancia Magnética , Percepción del Habla/fisiología , Adulto , Femenino , Humanos , Masculino , Neuronas/fisiología , Distribución Aleatoria , SemánticaRESUMEN
This case study adds a new dimension to the discourse on the authorship issue in facilitated communication. The linguistic structure produced by a young Finnish man with severe cerebral palsy was examined. Data are based on transcripts he produced from 1993 until 1996 after facilitated communication had been introduced to him. In the data analysis, as explicit criteria for his idiosyncrasies, we used patterns typical of children acquiring Finnish as their first language and those found in normal slips of the tongue, acquired aphasia, and specific language impairment. Based on the analysis (i.e. the idiosyncrasy and agrammaticality of word-forms and sentences), we strongly suggest that his output can hardly be a product of any other speaker of Finnish, including that of his facilitators.
Asunto(s)
Equipos de Comunicación para Personas con Discapacidad , Trastornos de la Comunicación/terapia , Trastornos del Lenguaje/terapia , Lingüística , Logopedia/métodos , Anomalías Múltiples , Adulto , Parálisis Cerebral/complicaciones , Humanos , Trastornos del Lenguaje/etiología , MasculinoRESUMEN
A series of four visual-visual priming experiments investigates the role of bound stem allomorphs in the representation and processing of Finnish case inflected nouns. Niemi et al. (1994) and Laine et al. (1994) argue that Finnish nouns are parsed into stem and affix in reception and that the bound stem allomorphs have separate (visual) lexical representations. Recently Järvikivi and Niemi (in press) have provided converging evidence for their claim based on a series of lexical decision experiments with Finnish stem allomorphs. The results from the present series of four follow-up experiments reported here showed that (isolated) bound stem allomorphs primed the recognition of the corresponding monomorphemic nouns significantly compared both to phonologically unrelated pseudowords and to phonologically minimally different pseudowords. Furthermore, not only did both phonologically transparent and opaque case inflected nouns prime the corresponding nominative singulars, but also there was no difference in priming between the two. The results are well in accordance and corroborate the hypotheses drawn from the earlier investigations. Moreover, they further indicate that bound stem allomorphs have representations on a purely formal level only, i.e., they serve as indices of and entering points to morphological/morphosyntactic information.
Asunto(s)
Cognición , Vocabulario , Humanos , Lenguaje , Fonética , Tiempo de ReacciónRESUMEN
This study investigates the role of derivational morphology in lexical processing in two typologically quite different languages: Finnish and English. While Finnish is a language with an extremely rich morphology, English morphology is relatively poor. Consequently, the role of morphology in storing and processing words would be expected to be greater in Finnish than in English. With a series of visual lexical decision experiments in both languages, we find that the opposite is the case for derivational morphology: for English, parsing of morphological constituents is often required, whereas for Finnish, full-form storage and access seems to be the rule. We try to explain this counterintuitive finding by making an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of both languages.