Talking about paranoid experiences: Interactional dynamics of accomplishing disclosure of psychotic symptoms in triadic conversation.

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.

Disordered semantic activation in disorganized discourse in schizophrenia: a new pragma-linguistic tool for structure and meaning reconstruction.

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.

Linguistic reflections of social engagement in Asperger discourse and narratives: A quantitative analysis of two cases.

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.

Exploiting degrees of inflectional ambiguity: stem form and the time course of morphological processing.

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.

L1 effects on the processing of inflected nouns in L2.

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.

Recognition of inflected words in a morphologically limited language: frequency effects in monolinguals and bilinguals.

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.

Brain correlates of sentence translation in Finnish-Norwegian bilinguals.

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.

FMRI brain activation in a finnish family with specific language impairment compared with a normal control group.

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.

Speech lateralization and attention/executive functions in a Finnish family with specific language impairment (SLI).

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.

The effects of attention on speech perception: an fMRI study.

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.

Grammar and lexicon in facilitated communication: a linguistic authorship analysis of a Finnish case.

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.

Form-based representation in the mental lexicon: priming (with) bound stem allomorphs in Finnish.

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.

Counterintuitive cross-linguistic differences: More morphological computation in English than in Finnish.

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.