The speaking brain and the literate brain speech fails, psycholinguistic, syntax and parsing, semantic memory, Dell's model, apraxia for speech, dysarthria,

1. Cognitive Psychology
Lesson 8 - Spring 2019
The speaking brain
The literate brain
Professor Valentina Bazzarin
USAC Reggio Emilia

2. How a new
technology is
changing the lives
of people who
cannot speak
https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2018/
jan/29/how-a-new-technology-is-changing-the-li
ves-of-people-who-cannot-speak-podcast

3. There are surprisingly many
ways for the power of speech
to fail. There are disorders
such as stuttering or apraxia, in
which syllables are scrambled;
motor neurone disease and
cerebral palsy, which rob
people of the muscle control
required to articulate; traumatic
brain injury; stroke; anatomical
excisions like Joe’s; multiple
sclerosis; autism.
Speech fails

4. 2 million in USA
1% of people in Britain use or
need AAC
In the US, more than 2 million people require digital “adaptive alternative
communication” (AAC) methods to help compensate for speech deficits. A 2008
study by the disability charity Scope estimated that 1% of people in Britain use or
need AAC.

5. ● Listeners can impose boundaries between
words even when these words are not
separated by silence;
● Phoneme pronunciation varies tremendously;
● Context allows listeners to fill in missing
sounds;
● Visual cues from the speaker’s mouth help
us to interpret ambiguous sounds.
Source:
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/35720/6-542JFall-2001

6. The speaking brain

7. Dual stream model
The Dual Stream model of
speech/language processing holds that
there are two functionally distinct
computational/neural networks that
process speech/language information,
one that interfaces
sensory/phonological networks with
conceptual-semantic systems, and one
that interfaces sensory/phonological
networks with motor-articulatory
systems (Hickok & Poeppel, 2000,
2004, 2007).

8. Do non-human
animals have
language?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCk
Other species are clearly
able to communicate with
each other. However, even if
non-human animals may have
some basic cognitive
prerequisite for language it
is doubtful that they
possess anything akin to the
specific human capacity
(Hauser et al. 2002)

9. Psycholinguistic issues and terminology
Check also the lexicon at p. 236 in Ward’s book (2nd edition) and this source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linguistics_terminology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics#Issues_and_areas_of_research

10. Semantic memory and the meaning of words
In the Collins and Quinlan
(1969) model, semantic
features are organized
hierarchically with
super-ordinate information
accessed first. Subsequent
models have retained the
idea that knowledge may
consist of a network of
interconnected features but
do not make the assumption
of hierarchical organization.

11. Category specificity in other domains of knowledge
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S00283932020
01616
In Allport’s (1985) model, concepts are distributed over many
different domains of knowledge rather than being divided into a
dichotomy (e.g. functional/sensory).

12. Understanding
and producing
sentences
Parsing / Garden-path
sentences
Words carry not only
information about meaning
but they also carry
information about syntactic
roles (grammatical classes
such as nouns, verbs, and so
on).
https://youtu.be/2A-FDN7-gyo

13. Syntax and
Parsing
Is syntax (and
parsing) independent
from semantic?
Syntax: order and
structure of words within a
sentence.
Parsing: the process of
assigning a syntactic
structure to words

14. The role of phonological short-term memory in sentence
processing
Agrammatism: Halting, “telegraphic speech” production that
is devoid of function words (e.g. of, at, the, and), bound
morphemes (e.g. -ing, -s) and often verbs.
Wernicke’s aphasia: A type of aphasia traditionally
associated with a damage to Wernicke’s area and associated
with fluent but nonsensical speech and poor comprehension.
Broca’s aphasia: A type of aphasia traditionally associated
with damage to Broca’s area and linked to symptoms such as
agrammatism and articulatory deficit.

15. Retrieving
spoken
words
Repetition priming: a
stimulus seen previously
will be identified faster on
subsequent occasion
Lexicalization: in speech
production, the selection of
a word based on the meaning
that one wish

16. Speech
errors
1
Freudian slip: the
substitution of one word
for another that is
sometimes thought to
reflect the hidden
intention of the speaker.
Malapropisms: A speech
error that consists of a
word with a similar
phonological form to the
intended word.
Anomia: word finding
difficulties.

17. Speech
errors
2
Spoonerisms: A speech
error in which initial
consonants are swapped
between words.
Tip-of-tongue phenomenon:
A state in which a person
knows, conceptually, the
word that he or she wishes
to say but it is unable to
retrieve the corresponding
spoken form.

18. Lemma, Lexeme and Dell’s model
Lemma: A modality
independent word-level entry
that specifies the syntactic
components of the word.
Lexeme: the phonological
code that drives
articulation
https://youtu.be/BwIheViSzeQ

19. Articulation: closing the communication loop
Apraxia for speech:
difficulties in shaping the
vocal tract
Dysarthria: impaired muscular
contractions of the
articulatory apparatus
https://youtu.be/cEOy3APLA-g

20. The literate brain
The ability to read and
write is essentially a
cultural intervention. It
enables humans to exchange
ideas without face-to-face
contact and results in
permanent record for
posterity.

21. Expert system
Some of the skills we need
to read are:
- visual recognition
- manipulation of sounds
- learning
- memory
Literacy, unlike speaking,
requires a considerable
amount of formal tuition.
As such, literacy provides
cognitive neuroscience
with an interesting
example of “expert
system”.

22. A dedicated neural structure
The brain may acquire,
through experience, a
dedicated neural structure
for literacy but this will
be a result of ontogenetic
development (of the
individual) rather than
phylogenetic development (of
the species).
https://www.rd.com/culture/benefits-of-reading/

23. Origin and
diversity of
writing systems
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUF_17XXJC8

24. Writing has its historical origins
in early pictorial representation.
Attempt to depict an object or a
concept.
Different cultures appear to have
made this conceptual leap
independently of each other
(Gaur,1987). This accounts for some
of the great diversity of writing
systems.

25. Key terms
Logographs: written languages based on the one-word-one-symbol principle.
Kanji: A japanese writing system based on the logographic principle.
Kana: A japanese writing system in which each character denotes a
syllable.
Opaque orthography: A system of written language with an irregular (or
semi-regular) correspondence between phonemes and graphemes (like as
French and English).
Transparent orthography: A system of written language with a regular
correspondence between phonemes and graphemes (like as Italian and
Spanish).

26. Visual word recognition. Cognitive mechanisms.
Cattell (1886): there is a little processing cost, in terms of
reaction times, for recognizing long relative to short words.
The visual process of recognizing a word as familiar is strongly
affected by word length.
Letters are processed parallel rather than serially one by one.
Recognizing printed words (all the information is instantanely
available) is thus likely to employ different kinds of mechanism
from recognizing spoken words (the information is revealed piecemeal
and must me integrated over time).
Evidence for TOP-DOWN INFORMATION in visual word recognition

27. Word superiority effect: it is
easier to detect the presence of a
single letter presented briefly if
the letter is presented in the
context of a word.
Lexical decision: A two-way forced
choice judgment about whether a
letter string (or phoneme string)
is a word or not.
Visual lexicon: a store of known
written words.

28. A visual word form area
Characteristics of the visual word form area:
- Responds to learned letters (or true fonts) compared to
pseudo-letters (or false fonts) of comparable visual complexity
(e.g. CAR and ç@&).
- Repetition priming suggests that it responds to both upper and
lower case letters even when visually dissimilar (e.g. “a”
primes “A” more than “e” primes “A”)
- Subliminal presentation of words activates the area which
suggests that is accessed automatically
- Electrophysiological data comparing true and false fonts
suggests that the region is activated early, at around 150-200
ms after stimulus onset

29. Location of the
visual word form
area
The visual word form area is
located on the rear
under-surface of the brain,
primarily in the left
hemisphere.
It responds to written words
more than consonant string,
and irrespective of whether
they are presented in the
left or right visual field.
https://visionhelp.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/doctor-
im-having-some-trouble-reading-part-3/visual-word-f
orm-area-2/

30. Key terms
Pure alexia: A difficulty in reading words in which reading time
increases proportionally to the length of the word.
May be related to:
- difficulties in visual perception;
- attentional/perceptual problems;
- fails in processing of the visual stimuli in the visual “lexicon”
(word recognition system).
Attentional dyslexia: an inability to report the constituent letters
of words that can be read (together with intact reading of isolated
letters).
Neglect dyslexia: reading errors that affect one side of a word.

31. Peripheral and
central dyslexias
Dyslexias may be of two types:
central and peripheral (Table 4).
In central dyslexias, linguistic
processing is undermined, that
is, the letter-to-sound
conversion is impaired.
In peripheral dyslexias, the
visual perceptual system is
compromised, and the
understanding of what has been
read is then hindered.
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S0021-75572004000
300012&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en

32. Key terms
Peripheral dyslexia: disruption of reading arising up to the
level of computation of a visual word form.
Central dyslexia: disruption of riding arising after
computation of a visual word form (e.g. in accessing
meaning, or translating to speech).
Saccade: a movement of the eyes.
Fixation: a stationary pause between eye movements.

33. What do studies of eye movement reveal about reading a
text?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSEWrbcrFc0http://www.visiontherapy.co.uk/eye-tracking-p
roblems/

34. Does understanding a text
require phonological
mediation?
When reading, even
silently, there is a sense
in which the words are
read in one’s head, often
called inner speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzj7r
3GCgdo

35. Phonological
mediation and
homophones
Phonological mediation:
the claim that accessing
the spoken forms of words
in an obligatory component
of understanding visually
presented words.
Homophone: words that
sound the same but have
different meanings (and
often different
spellings). E.g. ROWS and
ROSE

36. What has functional imaging revealed about the existence of
multiple routes?
Functional imaging will
undoubtedly be critical for
establishing the neural
basis of reading and has
identified many regions
that respond to different
aspects of the task.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzj7r3GCgdo

37. Is the same reading system universal across languages?
The dual-route model is an attractive framework for understanding
reading in opaque languages (where there is a mix of regular and
irregular spelling-to-sound patterns).
Evidences suggest that the same reading system is indeed used across
other languages but the different routes and components may be
weighted differently according to the culture-specific demands.
Italian speakers appear to activate more strongly areas involved in
phonemic processing when reading words, whereas English speakers
activate more strongly regions implicated in lexical retrieval
(Paulesu et. al. 2000).

38. Spelling and writing: a model
Dysgraphia: difficulties in spelling and writing
Producing written language may be less common as a task for many
people than reading. For instance, many adult developmental
dyslexics can get by adequately reading but only manifest their true
difficulties when it comes to spelling.
In surface dysgraphia patients are better at spelling to dictation
regularly spelled words and non-words and are poor with irregularly
spelled words (e.g. “yacht” spelled as YOT)

39. A dual-route model of spelling
Schematic representation of the
dual-route model of the spelling
system and the processes
involved in writing. This figure
was adapted from: COGNITIVE
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY IN CLINICAL
PRACTICE edited by David Ira
Margolin (1992)
Ch. 10 “Oral and written spelling impairments” by
Margolin & Goodman-Schulman pp. 263 – 297, Figure
10.1 from p. 265 (adapted). By permission of Oxford
University Press, USA.

40. A focus on dysgraphia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMfl5kqSWmk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-3ezmP9XCo

41. The graphemic
buffer
Graphemic buffer: A
short-term memory
component that maintains a
string of abstract letter
identities while output
processes (for writing,
typing, etc.) are engaged.

42. Spelling errors
In patients with a damage
to the graphemic buffer
- single letter
substitutions, additions,
omissions and transposition;
- spelling errors clustered
in the middle of words;
- longer words more likely
to be misspelled than
shorter ones;
- equivalent spelling errors
in different modalities of
output.

43. Output processes
in writing and oral
spelling: key
terms
Ellis (1979;1982) refers to
3 different levels of
description of a letter:
- Grapheme: most abstract
description that
specifies letter
identity.
- Allograph: Letters are
specified for shape (e.g.
case, print versus
script)
- Graph: Letters that are
specified in terms of
stroke order, size and
direction.

44. Damage affecting
writing over spelling

45. Does spelling use the same mechanism as reading?
Not only is the functional architecture of spelling very
similar to that used for reading, there is also evidence to
suggest that some of the cognitive components (and neural
regions) are shared between the tasks. There is evidence to
suggest sharing of the visual/orthographic lexicon and of the
graphemic buffer. However this evidence suggests also that the
representation of letters used in writing is primarily
grapho-motoric and that this differs from the more visuospatial
codes that support both reading and imagery of letters.