Background: It is a well-documented finding that phonemic speech errors in aphasia reflect certain characteristics of their intended targets. However, only few studies have investigated spontaneous speech productions of jargon-aphasic patients, in which lexical targets may be completely unrecognisable (abstruse phonemic neologisms). There is some evidence that these neologisms correspond to the...

Objectives Cognitive deficits and language disorders, such as difficulty in word retrievals, are common among the elderly people. Verbal fluency as an index of word finding is one of the first cognitive functions that decline due to aging. Considering the lack of norms of verbal fluency in normal elderly Persian-speakers, the purpose of this research was to determine verbal fluency performance ...

BACKGROUND Deficits in lexical retrieval, present in approximately 40% of HIV+ patients, are thought to reflect disruptions to frontal-striatal functions and may worsen with immunosuppression. Coupling frontal-striatal tasks such as lexical retrieval with functional neuroimaging may help delineate the pathophysiologic mechanisms underlying HIV-associated neurological dysfunction. OBJECTIVE We...

Inner speech, that little voice that people often hear inside their heads while thinking, is a form of mental imagery. The properties of inner speech errors can be used to investigate the nature of inner speech, just as overt slips are informative about overt speech production. Overt slips tend to create words (lexical bias) and involve similar exchanging phonemes (phonemic similarity effect), ...

Two underlying components of verbal fluency tasks have been identified as clustering (the ability to generate successive words within a sub-category) and switching (the ability to shift from one sub-category to another). Selective impairment of switching ability occurs in patients with frontostriatal pathology, whilst clustering ability is compromised with temporal lobe dysfunction. Letter flue...

It has been proposed that a serial founder effect could have caused the present observed pattern of global phonemic diversity. Here we present a model that simulates the human range expansion out of Africa and the subsequent spatial linguistic dynamics until today. It does not assume copying errors, Darwinian competition, reduced contrastive possibilities or any other specific linguistic mechan...

Changes of cognitive function in PD have been extensively documented and defined as a 'frontal' type executive dysfunction. One of the main components of this executive dysfunction is the impairment of verbal fluency. The aim of the present study was to assess semantic and phonemic fluency in a large sample of PD patients and to investigate the effect of clinical and sociodemographic variables ...

The relative effectiveness of two computer-assisted instructional programs designed to provide instruction and practice in foundational reading skills was examined. First-grade students at risk for reading disabilities received approximately 80 h of small-group instruction in four 50-min sessions per week from October through May. Approximately half of the instruction was delivered by specially...

Listeners tend to categorize an ambiguous speech sound so that it forms a word with its context (Ganong, 1980). This effect could reflect feedback from the lexicon to phonemic activation (McClelland & Elman, 1986), or the operation of a task-specific phonemic decision system (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000). Because the former account involves feedback between lexical and phonemic levels, it p...

When a speaker talks, the consequences of this can be heard (audio) and seen (visual). We use a novel visual phonemic restoration task to assess behavioral discrimination and neural signatures (ERP) of audiovisual processing in typically developing children with a range of social and communicative skill and in children with autism. In an auditory oddball design we presented two types of stimuli...