A comparison of computerized and paper-based language tests with adults with aphasia.

Purpose: This study investigated whether computers are a useful tool in the assessment of people with aphasia (PWA). Computerized and traditionally administered versions of tasks were compared to determine whether (a) the scores were equivalent, (b) the administration was comparable, (c) variables such as age affected performance, and (d) the participants' perceptions of the computerized and traditionally administered versions of the tasks were similar.

Method: Fifteen PWA were assessed on 2 language tasks-sentence-picture matching and grammaticality judgment-in 3 conditions: computer only, computer with the clinician present, and traditional.

Contrasting effects of feature-based statistics on the categorisation and basic-level identification of visual objects.

Conceptual representations are at the heart of our mental lives, involved in every aspect of cognitive functioning. Despite their centrality, a long-standing debate persists as to how the meanings of concepts are represented and processed. Many accounts agree that the meanings of concrete concepts are represented by their individual features, but disagree about the importance of different feature-based variables: some views stress the importance of the information carried by distinctive features in conceptual processing, others the features which are shared over many concepts, and still others the extent to which features co-occur.

Deficits for semantics and the irregular past tense: a causal relationship?

The regular and irregular past tense has become a focus for recent debates about the structure of the language processing system, asking whether language functions are subserved by different neural and functional mechanisms or whether all processes can be accommodated within a single unified system. A critical claim of leading single mechanism accounts is that the relationship between an irregular stem and its past tense form is primarily semantic and not morphological in nature. This predicts an obligatory relationship between semantic performance and access to the irregular past tense, such that a semantic deficit necessarily leads to impairments on the irregulars.