A Review of Developmental and Applied Language Research on African American Children: From a Deficit to Difference Perspective on Dialect Differences

by stockman

because absence of inflectional morphology and substitution of /f/ for /th/ is a symptom of language disorders in native speakers of SAE, AAVE speaking children are sometimes sent to special ed. Clinicians need to know about dialects!

Putative sex differences in verbal abilities and language cortext: A critical review

by Wallentin

This author reviewed many studies of gender differences in the brain. He found that there are some observed differences in early childhood and that some psychological problems are more likely to strike males than females, but other than that, there are no real differences in male and female brains, despite what is often printed in textbooks.

An overview on Primary Progressive Aphasia and its variants.

amici et al.

"We present a review of the literature on Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) together with the analysis of neuropsychological and neuroradiologic profiles of 42 PPA patients. Mesulam originally defined PPA as a progressive degenerative disorder characterized by isolated language impairment for at least two years. The most common variants of PPA are: 1) Progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA), 2) semantic dementia (SD), 3) logopenic progressive aphasia (LPA). PNFA is characterized by labored speech, agrammatism in production, and/or comprehension. In some cases the syndrome begins with isolated deficits in speech. SD patients typically present with loss of word and object meaning and surface dyslexia. LPA patients have word-finding difficulties, syntactically simple but accurate language output and impaired sentence comprehension. The neuropsychological data demonstrated that SD patients show the most characteristic pattern of impairment, while PNFA and LPA overlap within many cognitive domains. The neuroimaging analysis showed left perisylvian region involvement. A comprehensive cognitive, neuroimaging and pathological approach is necessary to identify the clinical and pathogenetic features of different PPA variants."

Sometimes it's just aphasia but aphasia and memory problems looks like dementia.

FUnctional neuroimging indices of normal and atypical spoken language

by weber and gaillard
in brain, behavior, and learning

in general, studies of infant and older children's left hemispheres support the critical period hypothesis.

"Overall, evidence supports the theory that areas of language processing may be less consolidated and more bilateral in younger children"

94% of healthy right-handed adults have language in left hemisphere.

processing measures of cognitive-linguistic interactions for children with language impairment and reading disabilities

by windsor and kohnert
in brain, behavior, and learning

cognitive-linguistic processing emphasizes that lang. is part of a broader cognitive system and that processing proficiency is a better measure of capability than performance measures.

"Language performance measures are heavily experience-dependent"

the authors found tasks that seperated bilingual kids from normal readers from RD kids.

Rapid Automatic Naming tasks "tap into a common cognitive skills setthat underlies performance across languages."

these tasks de-emphasize experience.

defining and differentiating dysgraphia, dyslexia, and language learning disability within a working memory model

by virginia w. berninger
in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"children with dyslexia have selective impairment in phonological awareness, but those with language learning disabilities have selective impairment in phonological, morphological (especially derivational suffixes), and syntactic awareness."

"neither executive function nor working memory is ... fully modular." they interact with each other

orthographic--dysgraphia
orthographic and phonological--dyslexia
orthographic, phonological, and morphological--language learning disability

critical periods in second language learning

by john t. bruer
in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"There is a difference between establishing the existence of a critical period phenomenon and proviing a causal theory that might account for such a phenomenon."

maturational theories: endogenous causes for opening and closures of critical periods
learning theories: exogenous causes for at least the closures

Emergentism and language impairment in children: its all about change

by julia l. evans

in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

"Cognitivism" uses the omputer as a metaphor for the human brain.
"Empiriciam" versus "Nativism": nurture v. nature. Combined view: "interactionist perspective"

Emergentism: the brain is a complex system that may have "radical novelty." It is a coherent integrated whole. Self-organization.


"STudies of typical and atypical lang. development are shifting away from the focus on the static, globally ordered, stage-like patterns in children's language, toward an emergentist view of language development as a flexible, transient, variable phenomenon."

Atypical neurodevelopmental variation as a basis for learning disorders

gilger & wilkins

in brain, behavior, an learning in language and reading disorders

Atypical Brain development (ABD) = genetic developmental disorders

About 10% o our population is dyslexic, and "progenitors of today's population with dslexia may have had better interpersonal skills or spatial orientation abilities that gave them some sort of procreative edge () e.g., West 1999)."

"The RD concept was created by societal demands and were it not for the written alphabet would not otherwise exist. Reading itself was not instrumental to our development and survival as a species, although correlated traits may have been..."

NOte 1: "In other linguistic populations in which written language is more phonetically consistent, such as Italian, the frequency of RD may be significantly lower."

Theories of developmental dyslexia: insights from a multiple case study of dyslexic adults

by Ramus et al.

Summary
A multiple case study was conducted in order to assess
three leading theories of developmental dyslexia: (i) the
phonological theory, (ii) the magnocellular (auditory
and visual) theory and (iii) the cerebellar theory.
Sixteen dyslexic and 16 control university students were
administered a full battery of psychometric, phonological,
auditory, visual and cerebellar tests. Individual
data reveal that all 16 dyslexics suffer from a phonological
de®cit, 10 from an auditory de®cit, four from a
motor de®cit and two from a visual magnocellular
de®cit. Results suggest that a phonological de®cit can
appear in the absence of any other sensory or motor
disorder, and is suf®cient to cause a literacy impairment,
as demonstrated by ®ve of the dyslexics. Auditory
disorders, when present, aggravate the phonological
de®cit, hence the literacy impairment. However, auditory
de®cits cannot be characterized simply as rapid
auditory processing problems, as would be predicted by
the magnocellular theory. Nor are they restricted to
speech. Contrary to the cerebellar theory, we ®nd little
support for the notion that motor impairments, when
found, have a cerebellar origin or re¯ect an automaticity
de®cit. Overall, the present data support the
phonological theory of dyslexia, while acknowledging
the presence of additional sensory and motor disorders
in certain individuals."

University students with dyslexia were compared to a control group without dyslexia. Both groups were given a variety of tasks: phonological, auditory, balance/cerebellar, language-related.

"16 dyslexics out of 16 had
poor performance in phonology, 10 in audition, four in
cerebellar function and two in magnocellular vision."

Cerebral organization of component processes in reading

by pugh et al.

AN fMRI study found that "Orthographic processing made maximum demands on extrastriate sites, phonological processing on a number of frontal and temporal sites, and lexical-semantic processing was most strongly associated with middle and superior temporal sites." Men and women processed reading differently: "females did not show an increase in the numbers of activated pixels from the rhyme to semantic category subtractions while males did."

p9 typo? "males displayed greater activation in the LH" shouldn't it be RH?

"in extrastriate regions (as in the total area analysis) females fail to show patterns of increased activation for real words (semantic category-line) relative to nonwords (rhyme-line) while males do show them.

lateral extrastriate region - orthographic processing
medial extrastriate region - real words than to nonword strings of letters
frontal regions - phonological processing
temporal regions - phonological and semantic processing

phonological and semantic networks overlap spatially in women more than man

Rethinking the neurological basis of language

stowe, haverkort, zwarts

The clasical view of neurolinguistics assumed that language was localized in the left hemisphere, Broca's and Wernicke's area were the main areas involved in language, and they were only involved in language. These are incorrect.

Peterson et al. performed the first neuroimaging study of normal individuals in 1989.

In the classical view, Broca's was involved in production and Wernicke's in comprehension. Neuroimaging studies have shown that linguistic centers cannot be split up this way.

They are both necessary for normal language functioning. Both light up for semantic and syntactic tasks. Broca's area might be responsible for general working memory and storage of information. This is why Broca's aphasics have trouble with syntax and leave out function words.

It is possible that there are two functionally seperate systems in one anatomical area. Broca's area can be divided into 3 sections. It sometimes lights up when a person hears music.

The anterior temporal lobe on both the right and left sides are somehow involved in the comprehension of syntactically, lexically, or semantically ambiguous sentences.

articulatory rehearsal and error detection are utilized when the sentence is difficult or ambiguous. This lights up motor areas and the right cerebellum, which may be involved in error detection.

The superior frontal gyrus is involved in semantic evaluation.

The anterior insula is used in articulation. The "left anterior insula is important for fine motor coordination in speech."

"The posterior inferior temporal and fusiform gyrus are important for various aspects of langauge processing.

These areas are not dedicated to language, but are part of the language system.

The right frontal lobe is important for understanding metaphors, for humor comprehension, and inferring topic shifts.

The right hemisphere figures out nonliteral meanings of sentences.

"when processing demands increase, activation in the right hemisphere increases."

"Language as a complete anatomical network is not modular, relative to other cognitive functions. Component functions within the language network may be specific to language."

"interpreting Words"

Chapter 5 of Images of Mind by Michael Posner, 1994

The researchers first asked subjects to perform a very simple task: looking at a cross on a computer monitor. The tasks became increasingly complex until the authors finally asked the subjects to produce words in response to a prompt. PET scans were taken during every task. The researchers identified the areas of the brain involved in looking at the simplest task; when these areas of the brain were activated during the next task, the researchers subtracted these areas from the second scans to identify the areas of the brain needed for the second task. Eventually, the researchers were able to isolate the areas of the brain used for accessing lexical meaning.

There are 2 models of how humans read; neurological and cognitive. They disagree as to whether or not our visual interpretation of the word goes through the phonetic representation before we comprehend it. The cognitive model says no, that top-down processing will recognize the word. The neurological model (Wernicke first said it) says yes.

Language processing can proceed thru many dif. areas of the brain.

A verb generation task made many different areas of the brain light up, including Broca's area.

Practicing the verb generation task changes the neural pathways required for the exercise.

Prediction of children's reading skills using behavioral, functional, and structural neuroimaging measures

by Hoeft et al. 2007 in Behavioral Neuroscience


Neuroimaging methods combined with behavioral tests predicts children's future reading skills better than either method in isolation.

The Bilingual Brain: What is Right and What is Left?

by Jyotsna Vaid. Chapter 6 in the 2008 book: An Introduction to Bilingualism

http://books.google.com/books?id=87snuOaE7DwC&pg=PA129&lpg=PA129&dq=bilingualism+brain+mapping&source=bl&ots=zw8VnSFYRn&sig=csX6fsI5nqrvM14F7qM0FOLn0bY&hl=en&ei=wRteSszjOI7SMonw6L8C&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

There is no consensus.

High spatial resolution is crucial in bilingual neuroimaging studies.

Mechelli et al 2004: bilinguals had greater grey matter density than monolinguals.

The bilingual brain: Cerebral representation of languages

Franco Fabbro 2001

"When a second language is learned formally and mainly used
at school, it apparently tends to be more widely represented in the cerebral cortex
than the first language, whereas if it is acquired informally, as usually happens with
the first language, it is more likely to involve subcortical structures (basal ganglia
and cerebellum) (cf. Paradis, 1994; Fabbro & Paradis, 1995; Fabbro et al., 1997;
Fabbro, 2000)."

Right hemisphere is associated with pragmatics (Chantraine et al 1998)

L2 language processes (phonology, morphology, syntax) are not in the right hemisphere (Paradis 1994, 1998)

Klein et al. 1995 performed the first neuroimaging study on bilinguals

Translation and comprehension are subserved by different processes.

Changes in aphasic discourse after contrasting treatments for anomia

del toro and altmann, raymer, leon, blonder, and rothi

This paper introduces new discourse concept: Utterance with New Information (UNI)

Researchers interviewed aphasic subjects, hired transcriptionist to transcribe, gave treatment, then gave another interview and transcribed. They counted instances of nouns, verbs, etc. and were unable to say that treatment led to better utterances.

But they were able to find greater quality of discourse after treatment.

"These findings demonstrate that discourse analysis can be a viable adjunct for assessing word retrieval treatment outcomes, especially given that improving discourse is the ultimate goal of aphasia treatment."

Neural Substrates of Language Acquisition

Patricia Kuhl and Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola

Neuroimaging is being used with infants. "The goal on experiments on infants has been to determine whether the initial state and the learning mechanisms are speech specific and species specific."

"The combination of computational and social abilities may be exclusive to humans (Kuhl 2007)."

"The studies suggest that exposure to language in the first year of life begins to set the neural architecture in a way that vaults the infant forward in the acquisition of language."

EEG/ERP is inexpensive, noiseless, "excellent temporal resolution"

At birth infants are capable of distinguishing between all phonemes that are possible in human languages, but with exposure to the native language, infants learn to "tune out" the phonemes that are not distinguished in their native language.

"By the end of the first year, the infant brain is no longer universally prepared for all languages, but instead primed to acquire the language(s) to which the infant brain has been exposed."

So adults truly cannot learn a second language the same way infants learn their first.

In a study (Kuhl et al 2003), a group of infants exposed to a live person speaking Mandarin were able to distinguish Mandarin sounds, while groups exposed to television and audio Mandarin tested the same as groups that were never exposed to Mandarin at all. So social interaction is very important to infant language acquisition. This could be due to the ways humans learned language for centuries--we could be evolutionary accustomed NOT to learn language from computers.

"A sudden increase in vocabulary typically occurs between 18 and 24 months of age--a "vocabulary explosion" (Granger & Brent 2004, Fernald et al. 2006)--but word learning begins much earlier. Infants show recognition of their own name at four and a half months (Mandel et al. 1995)." p. 520

"new words may be encoded in the same neural regions as previously learned words."

""Newborns tested by Imada et ak showed no activation in motor speech areas for any signals, whereas auditory areas responded robustly to all signals, suggesting that perception-action linkages for speech develop by three months of age as infants produce vowel-like sounds."

"Studies across languages showed that by one year of age infants do not accept mispronunciations of common words, words in stressed syllables, or monosyllabic words, indicating that their representations of these words are well-specified by that age." references omitted

Researchers are "strongly interested" in which comes first: phonemes or words, or if learning is bidirectional.

Data on bilingual infants has conflicting results.

Some believe that it may take bilingual infants longer to accumulate a normal vocabulary in their native languages because of decreased input. There have not been many studies on bilingual infants.

Un nase or una nase? What gender marking within switched DPs reveals about the architecture of the bilingual language faculty

Katja Francesca Cantone and Natascha Muller

MacSwan (1999,2000) postulated that the grammars of each language in a bilingual mind are differentiated.

The authors examined the speech of bilingual German and Italian children from ages 1-5. In this paper, the children's DPs (determiner phrases?) were examined, particularly when the children used a noun from one language in an utterance that was primarily in the other language. Genders were sometimes switched along with the noun. The authors propose that this means that "gender is an abstract lexical feature of nouns which is stored in the lexicon and thus reject the view that gender is a functional head in syntax."

MacSwan (1999, 2000) argued that bilinguals have 2 seperate lexicons but "one and the same Computational System"

"it is not the noun endings -o and -a which carry gender"

They say that in one phase of growth, bilingual children mix up gendres between the two semi-autonomous systems.

Second language research using magnetoencephalography: a review

schmidt and roberts

This article first touts MEG as a very useful tool in studying SLA and neurolinguistics, then summarizes previous SLA MEG studies.

MEG is the magnetic version of EEg. Subjects are more comfortable doing an MEG than other neuroimaging devices. But it is expensive and subjects must stay very still.


Phiko and others (2001;2002) found that the L2 is processed more like the L3 than the L1 in early bilinguals.

Zhang and others (2001; 2005) found that Japanese can detect the difference in /r/ and /l/ when there is no vowel afterwards. This suggests "backward masking."


The MEG was used with Japanese and German speakers to determine that both groups recognized kanji "holistically, rather than piecemeal."


Ihara and Kakigi found that Koreans process Hangul and Kana in different parts of their brains.

Phonology can also be studied with the MEG. Differences in pitch changes resulting in changed meaning of words can be taught to SLL. French and Spanish speakers show different areas of the brain allotted to vowels because French has 7 more vowels than Spanish.

Bialystok et al 2005 examined whether bilinguals perform better than monolinguals at the Simon task. The two groups had speedy responses when different areas of the brain were activated. Bilinguals were fast when the "cingulate and superior and inferior frontal regions" and slower with the "right visual cortex." Monolinguals were fast with the "left middle frontal activation" and slow with the "right motor cortex."

Valaki et al (2004) found that Mandarin speakers' brains were less strongly lateralized.