Cognitive capacity of very young children.

Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3 years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again discriminate correctly. The discriminative ability of the younger children shows that the logical capacity for cognitive operations exists earlier than previously acknowledged.

What children do in spite of what they know.

New studies support the hypothesis that young children have basic cognitive capacities but utilize them inefficiently; older children aid these capacities with generally valid cognitive heuristics which produce poor performance on critical problems.

Language discrimination by human newborns and by cotton-top tamarin monkeys.

Humans, but no other animal, make meaningful use of spoken language. What is unclear, however, is whether this capacity depends on a unique constellation of perceptual and neurobiological mechanisms or whether a subset of such mechanisms is shared with other organisms. To explore this problem, parallel experiments were conducted on human newborns and cotton-top tamarin monkeys to assess their ability to discriminate unfamiliar languages. A habituation-dishabituation procedure was used to show that human newborns and tamarins can discriminate sentences from Dutch and Japanese but not if the sentences are played backward. Moreover, the cues for discrimination are not present in backward speech. This suggests that the human newborns' tuning to certain properties of speech relies on general processes of the primate auditory system.

Noninvasive therapy of incidental de novo renal cell carcinoma in a kidney allograft 12 years after transplantation: report of a case and review of literature.

BACKGROUND: Immunosuppressive therapy increases the incidence of posttransplantation cancer. Primary renal cell carcinoma (RCC) represents 4.6% of all cancers in transplant recipients. The treatment options for RCC in a renal allograft include radical nephrectomy or nephron-sparing surgery. We report the case of a patient who underwent percutaneous radiofrequency ablation (RFA) of a RCC in the grafted kidney. PATIENT AND METHODS: Twelve years after undergoing heterotopic, allogenic kidney transplantation, a de novo lesion was diagnosed in the upper pole of the kidney graft in a 77-year-old patient during routine duplex ultrasonography. The magnetic resonance image showed a spherical lesion of 17 mm in diameter, which undoubtedly showed radiological signs of a RCC. After adequately informing the patient about alternative treatment strategies and the associated risks, we made an interdisciplinary decision for a percutaneous RFA of the lesion. RESULTS: After the intervention, graft function remained unchanged and is still good at 6 months with no signs of local recurrence on follow-up MRI. A small coagulation defect at the site of the former lesion was the only morphological change. There was also no evidence of distant tumor spread. CONCLUSION: Percutaneous RFA seems an acceptable, allograft-preserving treatment option associated with low morbidity and mortality for RCC in a renal allograft considering the significant risks associated with open partial nephrectomy in a kidney graft.

Cross-linguistic approaches to speech processing.

Recent advances in the field of speech processing indicate that speakers of differing languages process speech relying on units that are appropriate to the rhythmical properties of their maternal tongue. Studies with young infants suggest that the acquisition of these processing routines takes place before the end of the first year of life. Further evidence shows that the left hemisphere initially processes any language and gradually becomes specialized for the maternal language.

Language-specific listening.

Languages differ in their phonological structure and physcholinguists have begun to explore the conseqence, of this fact for speech perception. We review research documenting that listeners attune their perceptual processes finaly to exploit the phonological regularities of their nativ language. As a consequence, these perceptual process are fill-adapted to listening to languages that do not display such, regularities. Thus, not only do late language-learners have trouble speaking a second language, also they do not hear it as native speakers do; worse, they apply their native language listening prosedures which may actually interfere with successful processing of the non-native input. We also present data from studies on infants showing that the initial attuning occurs early in life; very yong infants are sensitive to the relevant phonological regularities which distinguish different languages, and quickly distinguish the native language of their environment from languages with different regularities.

[Prophylactic gastric surgery]. / Prophylaktische Chirurgie des Magens.

A premalignant condition with high risk of gastric cancer is the basis for prophylactic gastric surgery. The germline mutation carrier in the E-cadherin gene has a lifetime risk of 70-80% for diffuse-type gastric cancer, and high-grade intraepithelial neoplasia has a 60-70% gastric cancer risk. Other premalignant conditions such as HNPCC syndrome (5% gastric cancer) and low-grade intraepithelial neoplasia (10% risk) are moderate risk factors for developing gastric cancer. They do not justify prophylactic surgery, but surveillance is required. In case high-grade intraepithelial neoplasia or early gastric cancer is detected, an option is extended radicality with total gastrectomy instead of subtotal gastric resection. Positive family history and early-onset of gastric cancer are risk factors to consider when discussing prophylactic gastrectomy or extended radicality.

The word frequency effect and lexical access.

Some recent experiments suggest that only open class words show a frequency effect. Closed class items are accessed independently of their frequency. We carried out five experiments to test the validity of this hypothesis for the French language. All our results suggest that the frequency effect applies equally well to the open and closed class items.

Cerebral activations during number multiplication and comparison: a PET study.

Positron emission tomography was used to examine the cerebral networks underlying number comparison and multiplication in eight normal volunteers. Cerebral blood flow was measured within anatomical regions of interest defined in each subject using magnetic resonance imaging. Three conditions were used: rest with eyes closed, mental multiplication of pairs of arabic digits and larger-smaller comparison of the same pairs. Both multiplication and comparison activated the left and right lateral occipital cortices, the left precentral gyrus, and the supplementary motor area. Beyond these common activations, multiplication activated also the left and right inferior parietal gyri, the left fusiform and lingual gyri, and the right cuneus. Relative to comparison, multiplication also yielded superior activity in the left lenticular nucleus and in Brodmann's area 8, and induced a hemispheric asymmetry in the activation of the precentral and inferior frontal gyri. Conversely, relative to multiplication, comparison yielded superior activity in the right superior temporal gyrus, the left and right middle temporal gyri, the right superior frontal gyrus, and the right inferior frontal gyrus. These results underline the role of bilateral inferior parietal regions in number processing and suggest that multiplication and comparison may rest on partially distinct networks.

Illiteracy and brain damage--1. Aphasia testing in culturally contrasted populations (control subjects).

One hundred neurologically healthy adults were tested for their pointing (choosing one of four or six line drawings as the match to an auditorily presented linguistic stimulus), naming (from line drawings), and repetition abilities. All subjects were unilingual adult right-handers. Fifty-seven subjects were totally unschooled illiterates and 43 were fluent readers. Statistically significant differences were found to exist between the scores of the illiterate and literate subpopulations across all tasks. With the focus being placed on these cultural differences, the discussion bears on: (a) the interaction between linguistic and iconographic factors in certain types of naming and pointing tasks currently used in clinical and research aphasiology, (b) some of the linguistic parameters which are apparently at stake in repetition behavior, and (c) the circumstances in which aphasiological research dealing with groups of patients cannot yield reliable data without reference to neurologically healthy controls. It is argued that, when testing brain-damaged patients of different cultural backgrounds, one runs the risk of over- or underestimating the frequency of aphasia if one does not refer to norms which explicitly take educational level into account.

Illiteracy and brain damage. 3: A contribution to the study of speech and language disorders in illiterates with unilateral brain damage (initial testing).

This report bears on the behavior of 188 unilateral stroke subjects when administered an aphasia screening test comprising a short interview as well as naming, repetition, word-picture matching and sentence-picture matching tasks. All subjects were unilingual lusophone adult (40 yr of age or older) right-handers. Furthermore, they were either totally unschooled illiterates or they had received school education and thereafter retained writing skills and reading habits. Subjects were tested less than 2 months after a first unilateral stroke. In all tasks, global error scores were greater among left and right brain-damaged illiterate and literate subjects than among their controls. In repetition and matching, these differences were statistically significant for the left but not for the right-stroke groups, irrespective of the literacy factor. In naming, on the other hand, significant differences were found not only for the two left-stroke groups but also for the right-stroke illiterate group although not for the right-stroke literate one. Likewise, some degree of word-finding difficulty and of reduction in speech output as well as sizeable production of phonemic paraphasias were observed in the interviews of several right-stroke illiterates, clearly less in those of right-stroke literates. These findings lead us to suggest that cerebral representation of language is more ambilateral in illiterates than it is in school educated subjects although left cerebral "dominance" remains the rule in both.

Cross-linguistic regularities in the frequency of number words.

We examine the frequency of numerals and ordinals in seven different languages and/or cultures. Many cross-cultural and cross-linguistic patterns are identified. The most striking is a decrease of frequency with numerical magnitude, with local increases for reference numerals such as 10, 12, 15, 20, 50 or 100. Four explanations are considered for this effect: sampling artifacts, notational regularities, environmental biases and psychological limitations on number representations. The psychological explanation, which appeals to a Fechnerian encoding of numerical magnitudes and to the existence of numerical points of reference, accounts for most of the data. Our finding also has practical importance since it reveals the frequent confound of two experimental variables: numerical magnitude and numeral frequency.

Correlates of linguistic rhythm in the speech signal.

Spoken languages have been classified by linguists according to their rhythmic properties, and psycholinguists have relied on this classification to account for infants' capacity to discriminate languages. Although researchers have measured many speech signal properties, they have failed to identify reliable acoustic characteristics for language classes. This paper presents instrumental measurements based on a consonant/vowel segmentation for eight languages. The measurements suggest that intuitive rhythm types reflect specific phonological properties, which in turn are signaled by the acoustic/phonetic properties of speech. The data support the notion of rhythm classes and also allow the simulation of infant language discrimination, consistent with the hypothesis that newborns rely on a coarse segmentation of speech. A hypothesis is proposed regarding the role of rhythm perception in language acquisition.

An investigation of young infants' perceptual representations of speech sounds.

The present study examined the ability of newborns and 2-month-olds to detect phonetic differences between syllables. By relying on the modified high-amplitude sucking procedure, which did not permit the infants to use a simple same-different response, the present experiments tapped the perceptual representations of the speech sounds. Infants as young as a few days old displayed some capacity to represent differences in a set of syllables varying in their phonetic composition, although there was no convincing evidence that their representations were structured in terms of phonetic segments. Finally, evidence of developmental changes in speech processing were noted for the first time with infants in this age range. The change noted was a tendency from global toward more specific representations on the part of the older infants.

Anatomical variability in the cortical representation of first and second language.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to assess inter-subject variability in the cortical representation of language comprehension processes. Moderately fluent French-English bilinguals were scanned while they listened to stories in their first language (L1 = French) or in a second language (L2 = English) acquired at school after the age of seven. In all subjects, listening to L1 always activated a similar set of areas in the left temporal lobe, clustered along the left superior temporal sulcus. Listening to L2, however, activated a highly variable network of left and right temporal and frontal areas, sometimes restricted only to right-hemispheric regions. These results support the hypothesis that first language acquisition relies on a dedicated left-hemispheric cerebral network, while late second language acquisition is not necessarily associated with a reproducible biological substrate. The postulated contribution of the right hemisphere to L2 comprehension is found to hold only on average, individual subjects varying from complete right lateralization to standard left lateralization for L2.

Brain processing of native and foreign languages.

We used positron emission tomography to study brain activity in adults while they were listening to stories in their native language, in a second language acquired after the age of seven, and in a third unknown language. Several areas, similar to those previously observed in monolinguals, were activated by the native but not by the second language. Both the second and the unknown language yielded distinct left-hemispheric activations in areas specialized for phonological processing, which were not engaged by a backward speech control task. These results indicate that some brain areas are shaped by early exposure to the maternal language, and are not necessarily activated by the processing of a second language to which they have been exposed for a limited time later in life.

Language discrimination by newborns: toward an understanding of the role of rhythm.

Three experiments investigated the ability of French newborns to discriminate between sets of sentences in different foreign languages. The sentences were low-pass filtered to reduce segmental information while sparing prosodic information. Infants discriminated between stress-timed English and mora-timed Japanese (Experiment 1) but failed to discriminate between stress-timed English and stress-timed Dutch (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, infants heard different combinations of sentences from English, Dutch, Spanish, and Italian. Discrimination was observed only when English and Dutch sentences were contrasted with Spanish and Italian sentences. These results suggest that newborns use prosodic and, more specifically, rhythmic information to classify utterances into broad language classes defined according to global rhythmic properties. Implications of this for the acquisition of the rhythmic properties of the native language are discussed.

Is numerical comparison digital? Analogical and symbolic effects in two-digit number comparison.

Do Ss compare multidigit numbers digit by digit (symbolic model) or do they compute the whole magnitude of the numbers before comparing them (holistic model)? In 4 experiments of timed 2-digit number comparisons with a fixed standard, the findings of Hinrichs, Yurko, and Hu (1981) were extended with French Ss. Reaction times (RTs) decreased with target-standard distance, with discontinuities at the boundaries of the standard's decade appearing only with standards 55 and 66 but not with 65. The data are compatible with the holistic model. A symbolic interference model that posits the simultaneous comparison of decades and units can also account for the results. To separate the 2 models, the decades and units digits of target numbers were presented asynchronously in Experiment 4. Contrary to the prediction of the interference model, presenting the units before the decades did not change the influence of units on RTs. Pros and cons of the holistic model are discussed.

Dichotic perception and laterality in neonates.

Groups of 4-day-old neonates were tested for dichotic discrimination and ear differences with the High-Amplitude-Sucking procedure. In the first experiment, dichotic speech discrimination was attested by comparison with a control group. Furthermore, among those subjects who showed a substantial recovery of sucking response at least after one of the two syllable changes, it was observed that significantly more subjects manifested a stronger reaction to a right-ear change than to a left-ear change. In the second experiment, 4-day-old neonates were tested on syllable and music timbre discrimination. The significant Stimulus Type x Ear interaction observed suggests perceptual asymmetries indicative of very precocious brain specialization.

Agrammatism in sentence production without comprehension deficits: reduced availability of syntactic structures and/or of grammatical morphemes? A case study.

A French-speaking patient with Broca's aphasia--following a left-hemisphere lesion involving the sylvian region but sparing Broca's area--is presented. Like G. Miceli, A. Mazzuchi, L. Menn, and H. Goodglass's (1983, Brain and Language, 19, 65-97) case 2, this patient produces agrammatic speech in the absence of any comprehension deficit. Unlike Miceli's patient, though, agrammatic speech can be observed in all sentence production tasks (from spontaneous speech to repetition, oral reading, and writing) whereas production of individual words--be they open class or closed class--is almost always intact. On the basis of extensive (psycho)linguistic testing, it is argued that this patient's deficit is not central and not crucially syntactic (at least) at the level of knowledge but seems to disrupt specifically those (automatic?) processes responsible for both retrieval and production of free-standing grammatical morphemes whenever they have to be inserted into phrases and sentences.