Relationship Between Cognitive Functions and Multilevel Language Processing: Data From Chinese Speakers With Aphasia and Implications.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the relationship between nonverbal cognitive functions and language processing of people with aphasia (PWA) by taking a data-driven approach, as well as multiple cognitive components and multilevel linguistic perspectives. It is hypothesized that language performance is differentially associated with cognitive processing of PWA, with executive functions (EFs) playing a stronger role in language tasks with increasing linguistic complexity.

Method: A language battery assessing word comprehension/production, sentence comprehension, and discourse production, together with a series of nonlinguistic cognitive tasks targeting simple/complex attention, short-term/working memory, or EFs, was administered to 53 Cantonese-speaking PWA.

Dissociation of tone merger and congenital amusia in Hong Kong Cantonese.

While the issue of individual variation has been widely studied in second language learning or processing, it is less well understood how perceptual and musical aptitude differences can explain individual variation in native speech processing. In the current study, we make use of tone merger in Hong Kong Cantonese, an ongoing sound change that concerns the merging of tones in perception, production or both in a portion of native speakers, to examine the possible relationship between tone merger and musical and pitch abilities. Although a previous study has reported the occurrence of tone merger independently of musical training, it has not been investigated before whether tone-merging individuals, especially those merging tones in perception, would have inferior musical perception and fine-grained pitch sensitivities, given the close relationship of speech and music.

N170 reflects orthographic uniqueness point effects in English among native Japanese and Korean readers.

Orthographic uniqueness point (OUP) refers to the letter position of a word at which it is distinguishable from other lexical items in the language. Previous findings of OUP effects have been mixed and mainly demonstrated in native readers of alphabetic languages. The current study investigated whether OUP effects could be shown among non-native readers in a visual repetition detection task.

Functional orthographic units in Chinese character reading: Are there abstract radical identities?

Previous research has shown that the components of Chinese characters (e.g., semantic components, phonetic components, and radicals) serve as processing units in reading.

Top-down and bottom-up mechanisms as reflected by beta and gamma oscillations in speech perception: An individual-difference approach.

Recent neurophysiological studies have proposed distinct roles of β and γ oscillations in implementing top-down and bottom-up processes. The present study aims to test this hypothesis in the domain of speech perception. We examined β and γ oscillations elicited to a tone contrast in a passive oddball paradigm, and their relationships with discrimination sensitivity d' and RT from two groups of healthy adults who showed high and low discrimination sensitivity to the contrast.

Interactions of age of acquisition and lexical frequency effects with phonological regularity: An ERP study.

Across languages, lexical frequency and age of acquisition (AoA) are important predictors of word reading that are naturally correlated, and both variables have been shown to interact with phonological regularity. Previous behavioral findings in Chinese have shown stronger regularity effects in low frequency relative to high frequency characters. Meanwhile, the arbitrary mapping hypothesis predicts stronger interference effects in late-acquired irregular words.

Use of co-verbal gestures during word-finding difficulty among Cantonese speakers with fluent aphasia and unimpaired controls.

Background: Co-verbal gestures refer to hand or arm movements made during speaking. Spoken language and gestures have been shown to be tightly integrated in human communication.

Aims: The present study investigated whether co-verbal gesture use was associated with lexical retrieval in connected speech in unimpaired speakers and persons with aphasia (PWA).

Impact of characteristics of L1 literacy experience on picture processing: ERP data from trilingual non-native Chinese and English readers.

Previous studies involving ex-illiterate and young readers of alphabetic scripts have shown that processing of non-verbal visual stimuli may be affected by literacy, which is attributable to intensive perceptual training during reading acquisition. This study examined whether the characteristics of one's native writing system, with respect to visual complexity and overall shape of orthographic unit, would influence the processing of pictured objects using event-related potential (ERP) with linear mixed-effects modeling. Kanji and Hangul constitute an interesting contrast as they differ in visual complexity but are similar in orthographic shape.

Induced gamma oscillations index individual differences in speech sound perception and production.

Auditory neuroscience has provided strong evidence that neural oscillations synchronize to the rhythm of speech stimuli, and oscillations at different frequencies have been linked to processing of different language structures. The present study aims to examine how these ubiquitous neurophysiological attributes may inform us about the brain processes that underpin individual differences in speech perception and production, which in turn elucidate the specific functions of neural oscillations in the domain of speech processing. To this end, we recorded electrophysiological responses to a lexical tone contrast in a passive auditory oddball paradigm from two groups of healthy tone-language speakers who were equal in perceptual discriminability but differed in response latency and production distinctiveness of the tone contrast.

Cantonese AphasiaBank: An annotated database of spoken discourse and co-verbal gestures by healthy and language-impaired native Cantonese speakers.

This article reports the construction of a multimodal annotated database of spoken discourse and co-verbal gestures by native healthy speakers of Cantonese and individuals with language impairment: the Cantonese AphasiaBank. This corpus was established as a foundation for aphasiologists and clinicians to use in designing and conducting research investigations into theoretical and clinical issues related to acquired language disorders in Chinese. Details in terms of the purpose, structure, and levels of annotation of the database (containing part-of-speech-annotated orthographic transcripts with Romanization and the corresponding videos) are described.

An analysis of topics and vocabulary in Chinese oral narratives by normal speakers and speakers with fluent aphasia.

This study analysed the topic and vocabulary of Chinese speakers based on language samples of personal recounts in a large spoken Chinese database recently made available in the public domain, i.e. Cantonese AphasiaBank ( http://www.

A Comparison of Coverbal Gesture Use in Oral Discourse Among Speakers With Fluent and Nonfluent Aphasia.

Purpose: Coverbal gesture use, which is affected by the presence and degree of aphasia, can be culturally specific. The purpose of this study was to compare gesture use among Cantonese-speaking individuals: 23 neurologically healthy speakers, 23 speakers with fluent aphasia, and 21 speakers with nonfluent aphasia.

Method: Multimedia data of discourse samples from these speakers were extracted from the Cantonese AphasiaBank.

Measuring discourse coherence in anomic aphasia using Rhetorical Structure Theory.

Purpose: The existing body of work regarding discourse coherence in aphasia has provided mixed results, leaving the question of coherence being impaired or intact as a result of brain injury unanswered. In this study, discourse coherence in non-brain-damaged (NBD) speakers and speakers with anomic aphasia was investigated quantitatively and qualitatively.

Method: Fifteen native speakers of Cantonese with anomic aphasia and 15 NBD participants produced 60 language samples.

Cognitive basis of individual differences in speech perception, production and representations: The role of domain general attentional switching.

This study investigated whether individual differences in cognitive functions, attentional abilities in particular, were associated with individual differences in the quality of phonological representations, resulting in variability in speech perception and production. To do so, we took advantage of a tone merging phenomenon in Cantonese, and identified three groups of typically developed speakers who could differentiate the two rising tones (high and low rising) in both perception and production [+Per+Pro], only in perception [+Per-Pro], or in neither modalities [-Per-Pro]. Perception and production were reflected, respectively, by discrimination sensitivity d' and acoustic measures of pitch offset and rise time differences.

A Quantitative Study of Right Dislocation in Cantonese Spoken Discourse.

Right Dislocation (RD) has been suggested to be a focus marking device carrying an affective function motivated by limited planning time in conversation. The current study investigated the effects of genre type, planning load and affective function on the use of RD in Cantonese monologues. Discourse data were extracted from a recently developed corpus of oral narratives in Cantonese Chinese containing language samples from 144 native Cantonese speakers evenly distributed in age, education levels and gender.

Individual differences in processing pitch contour and rise time in adults: A behavioral and electrophysiological study of Cantonese tone merging.

One way to understand the relationship between speech perception and production is to examine cases where the two dissociate. This study investigates the hypothesis that perceptual acuity reflected in event-related potentials (ERPs) to rise time of sound amplitude envelope and pitch contour [reflected in the mismatch negativity (MMN)] may associate with individual differences in production among speakers with otherwise comparable perceptual abilities. To test this hypothesis, advantage was taken of an on-going sound change-tone merging in Cantonese, and compared the ERPs between two groups of typically developed native speakers who could discriminate the high rising and low rising tones with equivalent accuracy but differed in the distinctiveness of their production of these tones.

Electrophysiological evidence of sublexical phonological access in character processing by L2 Chinese learners of L1 alphabetic scripts.

While Chinese character reading relies more on addressed phonology relative to alphabetic scripts, skilled Chinese readers also access sublexical phonological units during recognition of phonograms. However, sublexical orthography-to-phonology mapping has not been found among beginning second language (L2) Chinese learners. This study investigated character reading in more advanced Chinese learners whose native writing system is alphabetic.

Analysis of Intonation Patterns in Cantonese Aphasia Speech.

This paper presents a study on intonation patterns in Cantonese aphasia speech. The speech materials were spontaneous discourse recorded from seven pairs of aphasic and unimpaired speakers. Hidden Markov model based forced alignment was applied to obtain syllable-level time alignments.

Co-verbal gestures among speakers with aphasia: Influence of aphasia severity, linguistic and semantic skills, and hemiplegia on gesture employment in oral discourse.

Unlabelled: The use of co-verbal gestures is common in human communication and has been reported to assist word retrieval and to facilitate verbal interactions. This study systematically investigated the impact of aphasia severity, integrity of semantic processing, and hemiplegia on the use of co-verbal gestures, with reference to gesture forms and functions, by 131 normal speakers, 48 individuals with aphasia and their controls. All participants were native Cantonese speakers.

Relationship between individual differences in speech processing and cognitive functions.

A growing body of research has suggested that cognitive abilities may play a role in individual differences in speech processing. The present study took advantage of a widespread linguistic phenomenon of sound change to systematically assess the relationships between speech processing and various components of attention and working memory in the auditory and visual modalities among typically developed Cantonese-speaking individuals. The individual variations in speech processing are captured in an ongoing sound change-tone merging in Hong Kong Cantonese, in which typically developed native speakers are reported to lose the distinctions between some tonal contrasts in perception and/or production.

A Coding System with Independent Annotations of Gesture Forms and Functions during Verbal Communication: Development of a Database of Speech and GEsture (DoSaGE).

Gestures are commonly used together with spoken language in human communication. One major limitation of gesture investigations in the existing literature lies in the fact that the coding of forms and functions of gestures has not been clearly differentiated. This paper first described a recently developed Database of Speech and GEsture (DoSaGE) based on independent annotation of gesture forms and functions among 119 neurologically unimpaired right-handed native speakers of Cantonese (divided into three age and two education levels), and presented findings of an investigation examining how gesture use was related to age and linguistic performance.

Effects of context and word class on lexical retrieval in Chinese speakers with anomic aphasia.

Background: Differences in processing nouns and verbs have been investigated intensely in psycholinguistics and neuropsychology in past decades. However, the majority of studies examining retrieval of these word classes have involved tasks of single word stimuli or responses. While the results have provided rich information for addressing issues about grammatical class distinctions, it is unclear whether they have adequate ecological validity for understanding lexical retrieval in connected speech which characterizes daily verbal communication.

An ERP study of effects of regularity and consistency in delayed naming and lexicality judgment in a logographic writing system.

Phonological access is an important component in theories and models of word reading. However, phonological regularity and consistency effects are not clearly separable in alphabetic writing systems. We investigated these effects in Chinese, where the two variables are operationally distinct.

An FMRI study of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese.

This study examined whether the degree of complexity of a grammatical component in a language would impact on its representation in the brain through identifying the neural correlates of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese. In particular, the processing of Chinese nominal classifiers and verbal aspect markers were investigated in a sentence completion task and a grammaticality judgment task to look for converging evidence. The Chinese language constitutes a special case because it has no inflectional morphology per se and a larger classifier than aspect marker inventory, contrary to the pattern of greater verbal than nominal paradigmatic complexity in most European languages.