The contrastive value of lexical stress in visual word recognition: evidence from Spanish / El valor contrastivo del acento léxico en el reconocimiento visual de palabras: evidencia del español

BACKGROUND: Many pairs of words in Spanish, in particular many verbal forms, differ only in the syllable stressed, such as aNImo (I encourage) and aniMÓ (he encouraged). Consequently, word stress may acquire a lexical contrastive value that has been confirmed by Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastian, and Mehler (1997) for Spanish speakers though not for French speakers in auditory perception. METHOD: This study contrasts the priming effect produced by pairs of written words that differ only in their stress pattern with the priming effect in repetition priming, stress only priming (with no orthographic relation), and morphological priming, in visual word recognition. RESULTS: The results, using short and masked prime presentation, showed facilitation for different stress (orthographically identical) pairs (rasGÓ/RASgo) compared to totally unrelated pairs (dorMÍ/RASgo) but no facilitation compared to orthographically unrelated (but stress related) pairs (PERsa/RASgo). However, identity pairs (RASgo-RASgo) produced facilitation compared to both orthographically unrelated conditions. At long SOA, orthographically related (stress unrelated) pairs produced significant facilitation, as occurred with morphologically related pairs (RASga/RASgo), on the orthographically unrelated words (PERsa/RASgo). CONCLUSION: These results confirm the early and prelexical importance of word stress for lexical selection in Spanish, as is the case with orthographic and phonological features

ANTECEDENTES: muchos pares de palabras en español, en particular muchas formas verbales, difieren solo en la sílaba acentuada, tal como aNImo y aniMÓ. Así el acento puede adquirir un valor contrastivo que fue confirmado por Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastian y Mehler (1997) en español, pero no en francés, en percepción auditiva. MÉTODO: este estudio contrasta el efecto de primado en pares de palabras que difieren en su patrón de acentuación con el efecto de repetición, el primado solo de acento (sin relación ortográfica) y el primado morfológico en reconocimiento visual de palabras. RESULTADOS: usando priming enmascarado se obtuvo facilitación para los pares con diferente acento (rasGÓ/RASgo) comparando con los pares sin relación (dorMÍ/RASgo), pero no se produjo comparando con los no relacionados de igual acento (PERsa/RASgo). Sin embargo, los pares idénticos (RASgo-RASgo) produjeron facilitación comparando con ambas condiciones ortográficamente relacionadas. Con un SOA largo los pares con diferente acento (ortográficamente iguales ) produjeron una facilitación significativa, como ocurrió con los pares relacionados morfológicos (RASga/RASgo), sobre los pares ortográficamente diferentes (PERsa/RASgo). CONCLUSIÓN: estos resultados confirman la importancia del procesamiento temprano y preléxico del acento para la selección léxica en español, como ocurre con las características ortográficas y fonológicas de las palabras

The contrastive value of lexical stress in visual word recognition: Evidence from Spanish.

BACKGROUND: Many pairs of words in Spanish, in particular many verbal forms, differ only in the syllable stressed, such as aNImo (I encourage) and aniMÓ (he encouraged). Consequently, word stress may acquire a lexical contrastive value that has been confirmed by Dupoux, Pallier, Sebastian, and Mehler (1997) for Spanish speakers though not for French speakers in auditory perception. METHOD: This study contrasts the priming effect produced by pairs of written words that differ only in their stress pattern with the priming effect in repetition priming, stress only priming (with no orthographic relation), and morphological priming, in visual word recognition. RESULTS: The results, using short and masked prime presentation, showed facilitation for different stress (orthographically identical) pairs (rasGÓ/RASgo) compared to totally unrelated pairs (rasGÓ/RASgo) but no facilitation compared to orthographically unrelated (but stress related) pairs (PERsa/RASgo). However, identity pairs (RASgo-RASgo) produced facilitation compared to both orthographically unrelated conditions. At long SOA, orthographically related (stress unrelated) pairs produced significant facilitation, as occurred with morphologically related pairs (RASga/RASgo), on the orthographically unrelated words (PERsa/RASgo). CONCLUSION: These results confirm the early and prelexical importance of word stress for lexical selection in Spanish, as is the case with orthographic and phonological features.

¿Es la dislexia un trastorno perceptivo-visual? Nuevos datos empíricos / Is dyslexia a visual perceptive disorder? New empirical data

Numerosos estudios han demostrado que el origen de la dislexia evolutiva es de tipo fonológico, ya que los disléxicos tienen dificultades importantes para procesar fonemas. Sin embargo, se siguen utilizando criterios visuales para diagnosticar la dislexia, así como para desarrollar métodos de intervención. Este estudio pretende comprobar si realmente existen problemas perceptivo-visuales en los niños disléxicos. Un grupo de niños disléxicos evolutivos y otro grupo de niños sin dificultad lectora, emparejados en edad cronológica, participaron en dos experimentos. Uno de los estudios estaba basado en el test Reversal y el otro era una tarea de decisión visual, en la cual los participantes tenían que decidir si dos letras eran iguales o diferentes. Se presentaron 40 pares de letras, para medir tiempos de reacción y errores. Los disléxicos tenían un rendimiento similar a los controles en la detección de estímulos visuales diferentes. Los disléxicos evolutivos no parecen presentar problemas perceptivo-visuales, sino una dificultad específica para recuperar el código fonológico de los grafemas (AU)

Several studies have shown that a phonological deficit is the origin of developmental dyslexia, because dyslexics have important difficulties in mapping orthographic to phonological codes. However, visual criteria are still used for the diagnosis of dyslexia and to develop methods of intervention. This study attempts to determine whether there are visual problems in dyslexic children. To this aim, dyslexic children and children without reading difficulties, matched by chronological age, participated in two experiments. One study was based on the Reversal test and the other was a visual decision task in which participants had to decide whether two letters were the same or different. There were 40 pairs of letters, to measure reaction times and mistakes. The results showed that dyslexics had similar performance to controls in the detection of different visual stimuli. Developmental dyslexics do not appear to have visual perceptual problems, but a particular difficulty to retrieve the phonological code of graphemes (AU)

[Is dyslexia a visual perceptive disorder? New empirical data]. / ¿Es la dislexia un trastorno perceptivo-visual? Nuevos datos empíricos.

Several studies have shown that a phonological deficit is the origin of developmental dyslexia, because dyslexics have important difficulties in mapping orthographic to phonological codes. However, visual criteria are still used for the diagnosis of dyslexia and to develop methods of intervention. This study attempts to determine whether there are visual problems in dyslexic children. To this aim, dyslexic children and children without reading difficulties, matched by chronological age, participated in two experiments. One study was based on the Reversal test and the other was a visual decision task in which participants had to decide whether two letters were the same or different. There were 40 pairs of letters, to measure reaction times and mistakes. The results showed that dyslexics had similar performance to controls in the detection of different visual stimuli. Developmental dyslexics do not appear to have visual perceptual problems, but a particular difficulty to retrieve the phonological code of graphemes.

[Syndromes or symptoms in the assessment of aphasic patients?]. / ¿Síndromes o síntomas en la evaluación de los pacientes afásicos?

The procedure generally used to diagnose aphasic patients consists of classifying them in one of the classic syndromes on the basis of the analysis of their symptoms. However, this taxonomy has several important problems, the main one being that it does not take into account the variability of aphasic patients, as there are many more disorder profiles than those included in the syndromes. In order to test the homogeneity of a sample of patients diagnosed with the classic taxonomy, 15 aphasic patients (5 Broca, 5 Wernicke and 5 Conduction) and 5 healthy controls were tested with nine comprehension and production tasks. Participants were aged 38 to 81 years old. The results indicate the existence of great variability in patients labeled with the same diagnosis, as revealed by the differences in within-group scores in each task, and a limited adjustment to the expected profile, with some patients showing symptoms allegedly corresponding to other syndromes. Our results call attention to the need to study each patient individually and interpret their disorders regardless of the syndromes.

[Lexico-semantic processing in Williams syndrome]. / Procesamiento léxico-semántico en el síndrome de Williams.

People with Williams syndrome, a neurodevelopmental genetic syndrome, typically have good language skills as compared to other cognitive abilities, as far as intellectual disability is concerned. They have a large vocabulary and they frequently use uncommon or rarely-used words. This has led some authors to consider that they have a peculiar semantic system, different from that of people with typical development. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by comparing the performance of a group of young adults with Williams syndrome to a control group using various lexico-semantic tasks, including semantic and phonological fluency. The results indicate that the semantic system of people with Williams syndrome does not seem to differ much from those in the control group because the words they produced were similar to those of the control group with regard to word frequency, length or the typicality of the responses within the categories.

¿Síndromes o síntomas en la evaluación de los pacientes afásicos? / Syndromes or symptoms in the assessment of aphasic patients?

El procedimiento generalmente empleado para diagnosticar a los pacientes afásicos consiste en analizar sus síntomas y en base a esos síntomas clasificarlos en uno de los síndromes clásicos. Sin embargo, esa taxonomía tiene algunos problemas importantes, el principal que no tiene en cuenta la variedad de pacientes afásicos existentes, ya que hay muchos más trastornos de los que recogen los síndromes. Con objeto de comprobar el grado de homogeneidad de una muestra de pacientes pertenecientes a diferentes síndromes, en este estudio se aplicaron nueve tareas de comprensión y producción oral a quince pacientes (cinco afásicos de Broca, cinco de Wernicke y cinco de Conducción) y a cinco personas sanas, con edades comprendidas entre 38 y 81 años. Los resultados muestran la existencia de una gran heterogeneidad entre los pacientes etiquetados bajo un mismo síndrome, tal como indica la variabilidad de puntuaciones dentro de los grupos en cada tarea. Por otra parte se observa un escaso ajuste al perfil esperado, ya que algunos pacientes presentan síntomas correspondientes a otros síndromes. Nuestros resultados sugieren la necesidad de estudiar a cada paciente de forma individual e interpretar sus trastornos independientemente de los síndromes (AU)

The procedure generally used to diagnose aphasic patients consists of classifying them in one of the classic syndromes on the basis of the analysis of their symptoms. However, this taxonomy has several important problems, the main one being that it does not take into account the variability of aphasic patients, as there are many more disorder profiles than those included in the syndromes. In order to test the homogeneity of a sample of patients diagnosed with the classic taxonomy, 15 aphasic patients (5 Broca, 5 Wernicke and 5 Conduction) and 5 healthy controls were tested with nine comprehension and production tasks. Participants were aged 38 to 81 years old. The results indicate the existence of great variability in patients labeled with the same diagnosis, as revealed by the differences in within-group scores in each task, and a limited adjustment to the expected profile, with some patients showing symptoms allegedly corresponding to other syndromes. Our results call attention to the need to study each patient individually and interpret their disorders regardless of the syndromes (AU)

Procesamiento léxico-semántico en el síndrome de Williams / Lexico-semantic processing in Williams syndrome

Las personas con síndrome de Williams, un trastorno genético del neurodesarrollo, se caracterizan por buenas habilidades lingüísticas en comparación con otras habilidades cognitivas, enmarcadas en un cuadro de discapacidad intelectual. Poseen un buen vocabulario y utilizan con frecuencia palabras raras o de escaso uso. Eso ha llevado a algunos autores a considerar que estas personas poseen un sistema léxico-semántico peculiar y diferente del de las personas con desarrollo típico. En este estudio se pone a prueba esta hipótesis comparando la ejecución de un grupo de jóvenes con SW con otro grupo control en varias tareas léxico-semánticas, entre ellas las de fluidez semántica y fonológica. Los resultados muestran que el sistema léxico-semántico de las personas con SW no parece ser diferente al de los controles, pues los ejemplares que producen son similares a los de los sujetos control, tanto en lo que se refi ere a la frecuencia de las palabras, como a su longitud o a la tipicidad de los ejemplares de las categorías (AU)

People with Williams syndrome, a neurodevelopmental genetic syndrome, typically have good language skills as compared to other cognitive abilities, as far as intellectual disability is concerned. They have a large vocabulary and they frequently use uncommon or rarely-used words. This has led some authors to consider that they have a peculiar semantic system, different from that of people with typical development. In this study, we tested this hypothesis by comparing the performance of a group of young adults with Williams syndrome to a control group using various lexico-semantic tasks, including semantic and phonological fluency. The results indicate that the semantic system of people with Williams syndrome does not seem to differ much from those in the control group because the words they produced were similar to those of the control group with regard to word frequency, length or the typicality of the responses within the categories (AU)

[Learning to read in children with Williams syndrome]. / Aprendizaje de la lectura en los niños con síndrome de Williams.

People with Williams syndrome are characterized by linguistic abilities that are higher than their level of intelligence. There is controversy concerning their reading level because there are few studies. The aim of this work was to test reading abilities in a group of school-age children with Williams syndrome. Their performance was contrasted with a control group of the same mental age. Three kinds of tasks were used: word and pseudoword reading, phonological awareness, and naming speed. Results show that the Williams syndrome children performed similarly to control children in reading accuracy but were slower in reading words and pseudowords. They were also slower in the naming speed tasks. These results suggest that Williams syndrome children do not have difficulties in developing grapheme-phoneme decoding but do present some difficulties in developing lexical reading.

[Variability in the semantic errors produced by brain-injured patients]. / Variabilidad en los errores semánticos producidos por pacientes con daño cerebral.

One of the most common types of errors produced by aphasic patients during oral word production is semantic errors. However, although aphasia semantic errors are often treated as a single homogenous group, there are, in fact, several subtypes defined by the nature of the error-target relationship: paradigmatic, if the two words are category coordinates; syntagmatic, if they are associatively related but from different semantic categories; and superordinate, if the meaning of the error is broader than the meaning of the target. The goal of this study was to investigate whether or not these various subtypes of semantic errors have a similar processing origin. With this objective, we compared the patterns of semantic errors made by a group of Alzheimer patients in a picture-naming task with those made by a group of aphasic patients. We examined the percentages of the different error types, the degree of association between target and error, and the frequency values both of errors and targets. The results suggest that the three subtypes of semantic errors have different origins: the superordinate appear to arise at the semantic level, the syntagmatic at the lexical level, and the paradigmatic at both levels of processing.

Aprendizaje de la lectura en los niños con síndrome de Williams / Learning to read in children with Williams Syndrome

Las personas con síndrome de Williams se caracterizan por tener capacidades lingüísticas superiores a lo que corresponderían por su inteligencia. Respecto al nivel de lectura existe controversia dada la escasez de estudios. El objetivo de este trabajo era comprobar las capacidades de lectura de un grupo de niños con SW en edad escolar, y para ello se contrastó su ejecución con un grupo control de la misma edad mental. Tres tipos de tareas fueron utilizadas: lectura de palabras y pseudopalabras, tareas metafonológicas y de denominación rápida. Los resultados muestran que el grupo con SW tiene una ejecución similar al grupo control en la precisión lectora de pseudopalabras, aunque son más lentos en la lectura tanto de palabras como de pseudopalabras. También son más lentos en las tareas de denominación rápida. Estos resultados sugieren que los SW no tienen dificultades para desarrollar los mecanismos de conversión grafema-fonema, pero muestran ciertas dificultades en el desarrollo de la lectura léxica

People with Williams syndrome are characterized by linguistic abilities that are higher than their level of intelligence. There is controversy concerning their reading level because there are few studies. The aim of this work was to test reading abilities in a group of school-age children with Williams syndrome. Their performance was contrasted with a control group of the same mental age. Three kinds of tasks were used: word and pseudoword reading, phonological awareness, and naming speed. Results show that the Williams syndrome children performed similarly to control children in reading accuracy but were slower in reading words and pseudowords. They were also slower in the naming speed tasks. These results suggest that Williams syndrome children do not have difficulties in developing grapheme-phoneme decoding but do present some difficulties in developing lexical reading

Variabilidad en los errores semánticos producidos por pacientes con daño cerebral / Variability in the semantic errors produced by brain-injured patients

Uno de los errores más comunes que cometen los pacientes afásicos durante la producción oral son los errores semánticos. Pero hablar de errores semánticos no es referirse a un tipo único de errores, sino que existen varios subtipos según la relación que exista entre la intención y el error: paradigmáticos cuando la relación es de tipo coordinado; sintagmáticos cuando la relación es de tipo asociado y supraordinados cuando el significado del error engloba al del target. El objetivo de este estudio fue comprobar si estos subtipos de errores semánticos tienen un origen común o proceden de diferentes puntos del sistema. Para ello se comparó el patrón de errores semánticos cometidos por un grupo de enfermos de Alzheimer y otro de pacientes afásicos en una tarea de denominación de dibujos. Se realizaron análisis de los porcentajes de errores, del grado de asociación entre el target y el error, así como de la frecuencia de los errores y sus targets. Los resultados sugieren que los tres subtipos de errores semánticos tienen un origen diferente: los supraordinados se podrían originar a nivel semántico, los sintagmáticos a nivel léxico y los paradigmáticos en ambos niveles de procesamiento

One of the most common types of errors produced by aphasic patients during oral word production is semantic errors. However, although aphasia semantic errors are often treated as a single homogenous group, there are, in fact, several subtypes defined by the nature of the error-target relationship: paradigmatic, if the two words are category coordinates; syntagmatic, if they are associatively related but from different semantic categories; and superordinate, if the meaning of the error is broader than the meaning of the target. The goal of this study was to investigate whether or not these various subtypes of semantic errors have a similar processing origin. With this objective, we compared the patterns of semantic errors made by a group of Alzheimer patients in a picture-naming task with those made by a group of aphasic patients. We examined the percentages of the different error types, the degree of association between target and error, and the frequency values both of errors and targets. The results suggest that the three subtypes of semantic errors have different origins: the superordinate appear to arise at the semantic level, the syntagmatic at the lexical level, and the paradigmatic at both levels of processing