282 research outputs found
Growing trees: the acquisition of the left periphery
No full textWe suggest here a Growing Trees approach for the description of the acquisition of various syntactic structures in Hebrew, based on the main results reported in Friedmann and Reznick (this volume) and on our own research on a corpus of natural productions. The heart of our account is that stages of acquisition follow the geometry of the syntactic tree, along the lines of the cartographic analysis of the clause, with early stages of acquisition corresponding to small portions of the adult syntactic tree, which keeps growing with the growth of the child. The lower parts of the tree are acquired first, and higher parts are acquired later. We propose three stages of acquisition connected to the development of functional layers of the syntactic tree. In the first stage, the IP is acquired, including the lexical and inflectional layers. This allows for the appearance of A-movement structures, including SV/VS alternations with unaccusative verbs, alongside SV sentences with unergative/transitive verbs. The second stage involves the acquisition of the lower part of the left periphery, up to QP, which allows for the acquisition of subject and object Wh questions, some adjunct questions, yes/no questions, and sentence-initial adverbs. In the third stage, the rich structure of the left periphery is completely acquired, including the higher CP field. This is the stage in which sentential embedding (of finite declarative and interrogative clauses), subject and object relative clauses, why questions, and topicalization appear. A further, different type of stage, which occurs on the already-grown tree and which is independent of structure building, is the acquisition of intervention configurations, allowing for the mastery of structures involving movement of a lexically-restricted object across an intervening lexically-restricted subject. The paper illustrates the fruitful dialogue between the science of syntax acquisition and the cartography of syntactic structures
From dyslexia to dyslexias, from dysgraphia to dysgraphias, from a cause to causes: A look at current research on developmental dyslexia and dysgraphia
No full text[No abstract available
No case for Case in locality: Case does not help interpretation when intervention blocks A-bar chains
No full textWe discuss a robust yet at first sight surprising fact: individuals who have problems understanding sentences with object A-bar movement cannot use overt Case marking of the object to interpret these sentences and to associate the DPs with thematic roles. We tested the effect of overt Case marking of the object in typically developing Hebrew-speaking children by comparing their comprehension of 'which 'object questions with and without the object Case marker 'et', and found that there was no difference in comprehension between the two. A similar pattern was found in an adolescent with syntactic SLI. We then tested the comprehension of object topicalized structures in the order OVS, where the only element identifying these sentences as object-first sentences and distinguishing them from simple SVO sentences was the object marker. We tested this in three populations with object A-bar movement problems: individuals with agrammatism, adolescents with syntactic SLI, and orally-trained children with hearing impairment, as well as in analysis of previous data on typically-developing children acquiring Hebrew. All populations failed to understand the sentence, but did not consistently reverse the thematic roles of the two noun phrases. This suggests that they were sensitive to the presence of the Case marker but could not use it for interpretation. We argue that these findings immediately follow from the way intervention and locality are computed, under the featural Relativized Minimality approach. Case is not among the features triggering movement, therefore a Case difference is not taken into account in trying to build a movement chain across an intervener. As a result, the object chain cannot be built across the intervening subject in the relevant cases, and overt Case marking of the object cannot help rescue the structure. Thematic role assignment in complex movement configurations requires the building of movement chains; if chain formation fails, strategies based on overt morphological cues do not help. These results argue for a feature-selective approach to locality and for encapsulated syntactic computation of movement
The head the construct: Construct state nominals as a novel window to syntactic movement difficulties in hearing impairment
No full textChildren with hearing-impairment often show difficulties related to different kinds of syntactic movement. According to current syntactic analyses, Hebrew construct state nominals (CSN) involve syntactic movement, in which the noun moves to the determiner position. This kind of movement has never been tested in individuals with hearing-impairment. In this study we examined how Hebrew-speaking hearing-impaired children produce definite CSNs. A well-functioning movement of N to D prevents an overt determiner before the head of the definite CSN, and therefore we took the (incorrect) addition of a determiner before the head noun as an indication of a difficulty in moving the N to D. The participants were 32 children with hearing-impairment aged 9;1–12;2 whose performance was compared to 18 hearing children aged 8;10–10;7. We tested their oral reading of 63 CSNs in texts. The results showed that the children with hearing-impairment had a remarkable difficulty in reading the CSNs. The most noticeable error they made was that they incorrectly added a determiner before the head of the definite CSN, in addition to the determiner preceding the complement of the noun. The hearing control children virtually never made this error. Since the D position before the head should not be available if the noun had moved to D, we concluded that they could not properly move the noun to D. This illustrates, for the first time, a deficit in N-to-D movement in this population. The difficulty in N-to-D movement in the nominal domain is consistent with these children’s difficulties in other movement-derived structures in the clausal domain such as object A-bar movement and V-to-C movement. More broadly, these results support a movement analysis of CSN
Disentangling principle C: A contribution from individuals with brain damage
No full textWe suggest a disentangling approach according to which the use of referring expressions obeys two types of guidelines. Deviance in repeating referential expressions (R-expressions) can result from two possible sources: one is the violation of the syntactic principle C, ruling out configurations in which c-command holds between the two identical R-expressions; the other is a Go-Lighter (GL) economy principle, applying in discourse and arguably based on shared knowledge and theory of mind (TOM), operative also in environments in which c-command does not hold. To examine this disentangling approach, we tested 36 brain-damaged patients: 20 who had aTOMia, a deficit in TOM, and 16 brain-damaged patients with good TOM, and 29 healthy control participants. Experiment 1 tested the comprehension of principles A and B using a sentence-picture-matching task. Experiment 2 tested principles C and GL using a sentence-choice task. Experiment 3 tested sentence interpretation according to principles C and GL using sentence-picture matching. In line with the disentangling approach, the individuals with poor TOM (and good syntax) failed to rule out and interpret repeating expressions that rely solely on the Go-Lighter principle, but succeeded in judging and interpreting sentences in which the repetition is ruled out by the syntactic principle C
Letter Position Dyslexia
No full textthis paper two Hebrew-speaking acquired dyslexic patients with occipito-parietal lesions are presented, who suffer from a highly selective deficit to letter position encoding. As a result of this deficit, they predominantly make errors of letter migration within words (such as reading broad for board) in a wide variety of tasks: oral reading, lexical decision, same-different decision and letter location. The deficit is specific to orthographic material, and is manifested mainly in medial letter positions. The implications of the findings to models of reading and attention are discussed. In recent years several distinct types of acquired dyslexia have been identified. These discoveries owe much to a fruitful interaction between the study of reading disorders and information processing models. The models of normal single word reading have been constructed and shaped by the identification of selective deficits, each indicative of failures in different parts and stages of the reading process (e.g., Coltheart, 1981; Patterson, 1981). On the other hand, new dyslexic patterns have been identified following predictions derived from information processing models and other, already known, types of dyslexia have become better understood through their use. Most of the components of these word-reading models have been found to have correlates in selective reading deficits. The later stages of reading, such as the orthographic lexicon, the grapheme to phoneme converter, and the connections between them, have been found to be selectively impaired in various central dyslexias (Shallice & Warrington, 1980). We thank Uri Hadar, David Swinney, and Karalyn Patterson for their helpful comments and discussions. Address correspondence to Naama Friedmann, School ..
Supplementary materials to “Reducing interference improves the memorization of multiplication facts in case of hypersensitivity to interference”
No full textSupplementary materials to “Dotan, D., & Friedmann, N. (2019). Reducing interference improves the memorization of multiplication facts in case of hypersensitivity to interference. Journal of Numerical Cognition, 5(3), 400-430. https://doi.org/10.5964/jnc.v5i3.203”DL's performance in the training program and in the sensitivity-to-interference assessment task: Raw results.notReviewedpublishedVersio
Multiple patterns of dyslexia in a shallow orthography: Principles for a diagnostic screening of developmental dyslexias.
No full textDyslexia is a term that refers to a variety of reading impairments, each resulting from damage to a different component of the reading model. This view is common in the study of acquired dyslexias, but is less accepted in the realm of developmental dyslexia. In this study we examine whether we can identify various types of developmental dyslexia (Friedmann & Coltheart, in press) in Italian readers, by using a reading test that includes stimuli that are sensitive to the various types of dyslexia. The new test is aimed to detect not only surface, deep, and phonological developmental dyslexias, but also dyslexias that result from a deficit of the orthographic-visual analyzer, which involves three main processing units: letter identification, letter position detection, and letter-to-word binding (Ellis & Young, 1988).
METHOD
Participants. 262 primary school children (from 2nd to 5th grade) were assessed (50% Male).
Materials. We developed and administered a new reading test that includes lists of 165 words, 40 nonwords, and 25 word pairs, created to detect the various types of dyslexia. A specific coding scheme for the classification of reading errors was developed (adapted from the TILTAN battery: (Friedmann & Gvion, 2003). In addition, we ran standard measures of reading skills (Cornoldi & Colpo, 2006; Zoccolotti et al. , 2005).
Analysis. Poor readers (N = 52; 20%) and skilled readers (N= 210) were identified on the basis of the standard measures. An analysis of error types was carried out on the skilled readers’ performance, to obtain normative profiles for each grade.
RESULTS
Accuracy for skilled readers was 90%, and 75% for poor readers. The agreement between standard tests and the new assessment procedure in identifying poor readers was 94%: The new diagnostic assessment detected 11 poor readers who were not identified with the usual diagnostic procedure.
In Italian skilled readers, all expected types of errors were found. Percentage distributions of errors for word lists showed that 41% of errors can be referred to the functions of the orthographic-visual analyzer (Letter Position, Attentional, and Visual Dyslexias), 18% can be identified as typical of Vowel Dyslexia and 27% can be considered as Surface errors. Other errors (about 14%) can be linked to dysfunctions of sublexical reading route. As for poor readers, two different groups were identified: Group A (about 50%), that showed an error distribution similar to skilled readers, but a lower level of accuracy; Group B, in which children showed a pattern of errors corresponding to a specific impairment in one component of the process (Figure 1)
CONCLUSIONS
The new screening method allowed us to detect also in Italian the several types of dyslexia described by Friedmann and Coltheart (in press). The new assessment seems to help in discriminating, among poor readers, children with a general lower level of accuracy (Group A), but with no specific impairment, and children with major impairment in one component of the process (Group B). Further research, will allow us to verify the hypothesis that this two profiles can be associated to different developmental trajectories
La crisi del progresso. Saggio di storia delle idee 1895-1935
No full textIl volume comprende la traduzione italiana di un famoso saggio di Georges Friedmann e una introduzione del curatore che inquadra l'autore nella storia intellettuale dell'epoca.The book contents the italian translation of a famous essay by Georges Friedmann and an Introduction by the editor that situates the author in the intellectual history at that time
Professional or amateur? The phonological output buffer as a working memory operator
No full textThe Phonological Output Buffer (POB) is thought to be the stage in language production where phonemes are held in working memory and assembled into words. The neural implementation of the POB remains unclear despite a wealth of phenomenological data. Individuals with POB impairment make phonological errors when they produce words and non-words, including phoneme omissions, insertions, transpositions, substitutions and perseverations. Errors can apply to different kinds and sizes of units, such as phonemes, number words, morphological affixes, and function words, and evidence from POB impairments suggests that units tend to substituted with units of the same kind-e.g., numbers with numbers and whole morphological affixes with other affixes. This suggests that different units are processed and stored in the POB in the same stage, but perhaps separately in different mini-stores. Further, similar impairments can affect the buffer used to produce Sign Language, which raises the question of whether it is instantiated in a distinct device with the same design. However, what appear as separate buffers may be distinct regions in the activity space of a single extended POB network, connected with a lexicon network. The self-consistency of this idea can be assessed by studying an autoassociative Potts network, as a model of memory storage distributed over several cortical areas, and testing whether the network can represent both units of word and signs, reflecting the types and patterns of errors made by individuals with POB impairment
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