Order among chaos: Cross-linguistic differences and developmental trajectories in pseudoword reading aloud using pronunciation Entropy.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: De Simone E
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8133407 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Most psycholinguistic models of reading aloud and of speech production do not include linguistic representations more fine-grained than the phoneme, despite the fact that the available empirical evidence suggests that feature-level representations are activated during reading aloud and speech production. In a series of masked-priming experiments that employed the reading aloud task, we investigated effects of phonological features, such as voicing, place of articulation, and constriction location, on response latencies in English and Russian. We propose a hypothesis that predicts greater likelihood of obtaining feature-priming effects when the onsets of the prime and the target share more feature values than when they share fewer. We found that prime-target pairs whose onsets differed only in voicing (e.g., /p/-/b/) primed each other consistently in Russian, as has already been found in English. Response latencies for prime-target pairs whose onsets differed in place of articulation (e.g., /b/-/d/) patterned differently in English and Russian. Prime-target pairs whose onsets differed in constriction location only (e.g., /s/ and /ʂ/) did not yield a priming effect in Russian. We conclude that feature-priming effects are modulated not only by the phonological similarity between the onsets of primes and targets but also by the dynamics of feature activation and by the language-specific relationship between orthography and phonology. Our findings suggest that feature-level representations need to be included in models of reading aloud and of speech production if we are to move forward with theorizing in these research domains. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
| S-EPMC8482789 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Japanese kanji (morphograms) have two ways of reading: on-reading (Chinese-style pronunciation) and kun-reading (native Japanese pronunciation). It is known that some Japanese patients with semantic dementia read kanji with on-reading but not with kun-reading. To characterize further reading impairments of patients with semantic dementia, we analyzed data from a total of 9 patients who underwent reading and writing tests of kanji and kana (Japanese phonetic writing) and on-kun reading tests containing two-character kanji words with on-on reading, kun-kun reading, and specific (so-called Jukujikun or irregular kun) reading. The results showed that on-reading preceding (pronouncing first with on-reading) and kun-reading deletion (inability to recall kun-reading) were observed in nearly all patients. In the on-kun reading test, on-reading (57.6% correct), kun-reading (46.6% correct), and specific-reading (30.0% correct) were more preserved in this decreasing order (phonology-to-semantics gradient), although on-reading and kun-reading did not significantly differ in performance, according to a more rigorous analysis after adjusting for word frequency (and familiarity). Furthermore, on-substitution (changing to on-reading) errors in kun-reading words (27.0%) were more frequent than kun-substitution (changing to kun-reading) errors in on-reading words (4.0%). These results suggest that kun-reading is more predominantly disturbed than on-reading, probably because kun-reading and specific-reading are closely associated with the meaning of words.
| S-EPMC8374332 | biostudies-literature
Project description:OBJECTIVES:To determine impacts on social-emotional development at school entry of a pediatric primary care intervention (Video Interaction Project [VIP]) promoting positive parenting through reading aloud and play, delivered in 2 phases: infant through toddler (VIP birth to 3 years [VIP 0-3]) and preschool-age (VIP 3 to 5 years [VIP 3-5]). METHODS:Factorial randomized controlled trial with postpartum enrollment and random assignment to VIP 0-3, control 0 to 3 years, and a third group without school entry follow-up (Building Blocks) and 3-year second random assignment of VIP 0-3 and control 0 to 3 years to VIP 3-5 or control 3 to 5 years. In the VIP, a bilingual facilitator video recorded the parent and child reading and/or playing using provided learning materials and reviewed videos to reinforce positive interactions. Social-emotional development at 4.5 years was assessed by parent-report Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition (Social Skills, Attention Problems, Hyperactivity, Aggression, Externalizing Problems). RESULTS:VIP 0-3 and VIP 3-5 were independently associated with improved 4.5-year Behavior Assessment System for Children, Second Edition T-scores, with effect sizes (Cohen's d) ?-0.25 to -0.30. Receipt of combined VIP 0-3 and VIP 3-5 was associated with d = -0.63 reduction in Hyperactivity (P = .001). VIP 0-3 resulted in reduced "Clinically Significant" Hyperactivity (relative risk reduction for overall sample: 69.2%; P = .03; relative risk reduction for increased psychosocial risk: 100%; P = .006). Multilevel models revealed significant VIP 0-3 linear effects and age × VIP 3-5 interactions. CONCLUSIONS:Phase VIP 0-3 resulted in sustained impacts on behavior problems 1.5 years after program completion. VIP 3-5 had additional, independent impacts. With our findings, we support the use of pediatric primary care to promote reading aloud and play from birth to 5 years, and the potential for such programs to enhance social-emotional development.
| S-EPMC5914489 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The aim of this study was to explore if and to what extent Austrian-English late sequential bilinguals who have been living in a second language (L2) environment for several decades are perceived to sound native in their first language (L1) when being compared to monolingual Austrian German (AG) control speakers. Furthermore, this investigation aimed to identify if listeners differ in their judgments of nativeness of L1 pronunciation depending on their own language background. For this purpose, two groups of native Austrian German listeners (N = 30 each), who differed regarding their linguistic background (Austrian German monolingual and Austrian German-English bilingual listeners) were asked to rate spontaneous speech samples produced by Austrian English bilingual and Austrian German monolingual speakers. Results showed that the bilingual L1 speech was perceived to sound overall less native compared to monolingual control speech. It was further observed that the two listener groups significantly differed in their perception of nativeness: Bilingual listeners were overall less likely to judge bilingual L1 pronunciation to sound non-native compared to monolingual listeners. To date, this is the first study to show that listener experience influences their perception of nativeness of L1 pronunciation and, thus, adds a new dimension to the notion of the native speaker.
| S-EPMC8531519 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Reading acquisition in alphabetic languages starts with learning the associations between speech sounds and letters. This learning process is related to crucial developmental changes of brain regions that serve visual, auditory, multisensory integration, and higher cognitive processes. Here, we studied the development of audiovisual processing and integration of letter-speech sound pairs with an audiovisual target detection functional MRI paradigm. Using a longitudinal approach, we tested children with varying reading outcomes before the start of reading acquisition (T1, 6.5 yo), in first grade (T2, 7.5 yo), and in second grade (T3, 8.5 yo). Early audiovisual integration effects were characterized by higher activation for incongruent than congruent letter-speech sound pairs in the inferior frontal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Audiovisual processing in the left superior temporal gyrus significantly increased from the prereading (T1) to early reading stages (T2, T3). Region of interest analyses revealed that activation in left superior temporal gyrus (STG), inferior frontal gyrus and ventral occipitotemporal cortex increased in children with typical reading fluency skills, while poor readers did not show the same development in these regions. The incongruency effect bilaterally in parts of the STG and insular cortex at T1 was significantly associated with reading fluency skills at T3. These findings provide new insights into the development of the brain circuitry involved in audiovisual processing of letters, the building blocks of words, and reveal early markers of audiovisual integration that may be predictive of reading outcomes.
| S-EPMC8636811 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Reading aloud involves computing the sound of a word from its visual form. This may be accomplished 1) by direct associations between spellings and phonology and 2) by computation from orthography to meaning to phonology. These components have been studied in behavioral experiments examining lexical properties such as word frequency; length in letters or phonemes; spelling-sound consistency; semantic factors such as imageability, measures of orthographic, or phonological complexity; and others. Effects of these lexical properties on specific neural systems, however, are poorly understood, partially because high intercorrelations among lexical factors make it difficult to determine if they have independent effects. We addressed this problem by decorrelating several important lexical properties through careful stimulus selection. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data revealed distributed neural systems for mapping orthography directly to phonology, involving left supramarginal, posterior middle temporal, and fusiform gyri. Distinct from these were areas reflecting semantic processing, including left middle temporal gyrus/inferior-temporal sulcus, bilateral angular gyrus, and precuneus/posterior cingulate. Left inferior frontal regions generally showed increased activation with greater task load, suggesting a more general role in attention, working memory, and executive processes. These data offer the first clear evidence, in a single study, for the separate neural correlates of orthography-phonology mapping and semantic access during reading aloud.
| S-EPMC2901017 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The mechanisms for chaos terrain formation on Europa have long been a source of debate in the scientific community. There exist numerous theoretical and numerical models for chaos formation, but to date there has been a lack of quantifiable observations that can be used to constrain models and permit comparison to the outputs of these chaos models. Here, we use mapping and statistical analysis to develop a quantitative description of chaos terrain and their observed morphologies. For nine chaos features, we map every block, or region of pre-existing terrain within disrupted matrix. We demonstrate that chaos terrains follow a continuous spectrum of morphologies between two endmembers, platy and knobby. We find that any given chaos terrain's morphology can be quantified by means of the linearized exponential slope of its cumulative block area distribution. This quantitative metric provides a new diagnostic parameter in future studies of chaos terrain formation and comparison.
| S-EPMC9287068 | biostudies-literature
Project description:ObjectivesMany children in low- and middle-income countries fail to reach their developmental potential. We sought to determine if a parenting program focused on the promotion of reading aloud enhanced parent-child interactions and child development among low-income families in northern Brazil.MethodsThis was a cluster-randomized study of educational child care centers randomly assigned to receive an additional parenting program (intervention) or standard child care without a parenting component (control). Parent-child dyads were enrolled at the beginning of the school year and were assessed at enrollment and at the end of the school year. Families in intervention centers could borrow children's books on a weekly basis and could participate in monthly parent workshops focused on reading aloud. We compared parents and children in intervention and control centers 9 months after the start of the intervention on measures of parent-child interaction and child language, cognitive, and social-emotional development.ResultsFive hundred and sixty-six parent-child dyads (279 intervention; 287 control) in 12 child care clusters (26-76 children per cluster) were assessed at enrollment; 464 (86%) contributed follow-up data. Parents in the intervention group engaged in significantly greater cognitive stimulation (Cohen's d = 0.43) and higher quantity and quality of reading interactions (d = 0.52-0.57) than controls; children in the intervention scored significantly higher than controls on receptive vocabulary (d = 0.33), working memory (d = 0.46), and IQ (d = 0.33).ConclusionsAn innovative program focused on the promotion of parent-child reading aloud resulted in benefits to parent-child interactions and to child language and cognitive development that were greater than those provided by educational child care alone. This promising approach merits further evaluation at scale.
| S-EPMC5744270 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The study of the foraging behavior of group animals (especially ants) is of practical ecological importance, but it also contributes to the development of widely applicable optimization problem-solving techniques. Biologists have discovered that single ants exhibit low-dimensional deterministic-chaotic activities. However, the influences of the nest, ants' physical abilities, and ants' knowledge (or experience) on foraging behavior have received relatively little attention in studies of the collective behavior of ants. This paper provides new insights into basic mechanisms of effective foraging for social insects or group animals that have a home. We propose that the whole foraging process of ants is controlled by three successive strategies: hunting, homing, and path building. A mathematical model is developed to study this complex scheme. We show that the transition from chaotic to periodic regimes observed in our model results from an optimization scheme for group animals with a home. According to our investigation, the behavior of such insects is not represented by random but rather deterministic walks (as generated by deterministic dynamical systems, e.g., by maps) in a random environment: the animals use their intelligence and experience to guide them. The more knowledge an ant has, the higher its foraging efficiency is. When young insects join the collective to forage with old and middle-aged ants, it benefits the whole colony in the long run. The resulting strategy can even be optimal.
| S-EPMC4060675 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The current study investigated how aging affects production and self-correction of errors in connected speech elicited via a read aloud task. Thirty-five cognitively healthy older and 56 younger participants read aloud 6 paragraphs in each of three conditions increasing in difficulty: (a) normal, (b) nouns-swapped (in which nouns were shuffled across pairs of sentences in each paragraph), and (c) exchange (in which adjacent words in every two sentences were reversed in order). Reading times and errors increased with task difficulty, but self-correction rates were lowest in the nouns-swapped condition. Older participants read aloud more slowly, and after controlling for aging-related advantages in vocabulary knowledge, produced more speech errors (especially in the normal condition), and self-corrected errors less often than younger participants. Exploratory analysis of error types revealed that aging increased the rate of function word substitution errors (saying the instead of a), whereas younger participants omitted content words more often than did older participants. This pattern of aging deficits reveals powerful effects of vocabulary knowledge on speech production and suggests aging speakers can compensate for aging-related decline in control over speech production with their higher vocabulary knowledge and careful attention to speech planning in more difficult speaking conditions. These results suggest a model of speech production in which planning of speech is relatively automatic, whereas monitoring and self-correction are more attention-demanding, in turn leaving speech production relatively intact in aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
| S-EPMC6367048 | biostudies-literature