Building a Nyoongar work practice model for Aboriginal youth mental health: prioritising trust, culture and spirit, and new ways of working.

Mainstream youth mental health services struggle to comprehend the connection between colonisation and service provision for Aboriginal young people. This is the consensus agreed by Aboriginal Elders from Perth, Western Australia and young Aboriginal leaders within their communities (Wright, Culbong, Crisp, Biedermann, & Lin (2019). 1-7). What is required is a more nuanced, culturally relevant approach to both an understanding of the impact of colonisation on mental health and help-seeking behaviour if they are to provide equitable access for Aboriginal young people.In this paper, we report on a three-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted on Whadjuk Nyoongar country in Perth, Western Australia. An innovative model of care framework developed from the project and described in this paper, focuses on key components that both inform and assist service providers in improving service provision to Aboriginal young people. The model, depicted as a tree, symbolises strength and growth, with the 'roots' of the tree, holding trust, culture and spirit. This paper details a culturally-safe co-design process that was held and directed with Elders, in partnership with young people, youth mental health service staff and youth policy staff.

Not all bilinguals are the same: A meta-analysis of the moral foreign language effect.

Emerging evidence shows bilinguals employ different decision-making strategies in their foreign language compared to their native language (known as the Foreign Language Effect). When completing moral dilemmas, accumulating research findings indicate that bilinguals are more likely to endorse the utilitarian option. We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate whether linguistic variables (proficiency, immersion, and language similarity) moderate utilitarian responding to moral dilemmas in a foreign language. A systematic literature search extracted experiments comparing binary responses to moral dilemmas among bilingual participants. Analyses confirmed a moral Foreign Language Effect within personal dilemmas, though this effect was moderated by self-reported reading proficiency, whereby bilinguals with higher self-reported reading proficiency were less likely to make a utilitarian choice. Our findings suggest that not all bilinguals may experience a Foreign Language Effect, with low self-reported reading proficiency being the most likely indicator of whether their response tendencies to a moral dilemma change in the foreign language.

Too harts, won sole: Using dysgraphia treatment to address homophone representation.

Previous spoken homophone treatment in aphasia found generalization to untreated homophones and interpreted this as evidence for shared phonological word form representations. Previous written treatment of non-homophones has attributed generalization to orthographic neighbours of treated items to feedback from graphemes to similarly spelled orthographic word forms. This feedback mechanism offers an alternative explanation for generalization found in treatment of spoken homophones. The aim of this study was to investigate the mechanism underpinning generalization (if any) from treatment of written homophones. To investigate this question a participant with acquired dysgraphia and impaired access to orthographic output representations undertook written spelling treatment. Generalization to untreated items with varying degrees of orthographic overlap was investigated. Three experimental sets included homographs (e.g., bank-bank), heterographs (e.g., sail-sale), and direct orthographic neighbours (e.g., bath-path). Treatment improved written picture naming of treated items. Generalization was limited to direct neighbours. Further investigation of generalization found that items with a greater number of close neighbours in the treated set showed greater generalization. This suggests that feedback from graphemes to orthographic word forms is the driving force of generalization. The lack of homograph generalization suggests homographs do not share a representation in the orthographic lexicon.

"If you don't speak from the heart, the young mob aren't going to listen at all": An invitation for youth mental health services to engage in new ways of working.

AIM: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people are more likely to experience mental health issues or end their life by suicide than non-Aboriginal youth, but are less likely to access mental health services for support. Systemic change is required if mainstream youth mental health services are to be relevant and culturally secure for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people. METHODS: Building Bridges (2017-2019) is a three-year participatory action research project being conducted in partnership with the Nyoongar community and three mainstream youth mental health services in Perth, Western Australia. The project involves Nyoongar Elders and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people working directly with senior management and key staff of youth mental health services to co-design, implement and evaluate a framework for systems change. The aim of the project is to increase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people's engagement with services and improve mental health outcomes for young people and their families. RESULTS: This paper outlines the engagement process that underpinned the first phase of the project. Our research methods are premised by an investment in establishing safe spaces for the Elders, young people and service staff to engage in open, honest dialogue. We present two key activities that illustrate this process of building trust and deepening understanding, namely: spending time "On Country" and engaging in a "storying" process. CONCLUSIONS: Building Bridges demonstrates the centrality of trusting relationships for systemic change and the way in which meaningful engagement is at the core of both the process and the outcome.

Effects of semantic neighbourhood density on spoken word production.

When producing words, it is generally agreed that semantically related words are activated along with the target. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which the number of such semantically related words affects the production of spoken words. The research presented here explores, in detail, the influence of semantic neighbourhood density-the number of words of similar meaning in the lexicon-on picture naming performance in both unimpaired speakers and a large group of individuals with aphasia. In Experiment 1, six different semantic neighbourhood density measures were compared using principal component analysis. Four different semantic neighbourhood density components were identified: feature-based, context-based, association-based, and distant. In Experiment 2, these new measures were used as predictors in an analysis of picture naming data from unimpaired English speakers: no significant effects of semantic neighbourhood factors were observed on either latency or accuracy. Finally, Experiment 3 reports an analysis of picture naming responses of a large group of individuals with aphasia (n = 193), examining the influence of the semantic neighbourhood density measures. Effects of the feature-based semantic neighbourhood measure on accuracy varied across participants with no overall main effect. This same measure increased the probability of a coordinate error compared with a correct response but also compared with an omission. Results are best accommodated by theories of word production that incorporate mechanisms by which semantically related concepts can both facilitate and inhibit target production.

Plural dominance and the production of determiner-noun phrases in French.

In two experiments, we examined the functional locus of plural dominance in the French spoken word production system, where singulars and plurals share the same phonological word form. The materials included singular-dominant (singular more frequent than plural) and plural-dominant nouns (plural more frequent than singular). In Experiment 1, participants were instructed to produce determiner-noun phrases in response to singular and plural depictions of objects. In contrast to the dominance-by-number interaction that is typically observed in English, Dutch and German, the French picture-naming data revealed a main effect of number, but no effect of plural dominance. When participants were instructed to produce determiner-noun phrases in a reading aloud task (Experiment 2), where number is orthographically marked, a number-by-dominance interaction emerged. Our data suggest that plural dominance is encoded at the word form level within the context of recent theories of spoken word production.

Garlic and ginger are not like apples and oranges: Effects of mass/count information on the production of noun phrases in English.

In this study a picture-word interference paradigm was used to investigate how grammatical mass/count information is processed during noun phrase production in English. Theories of lexical processing distinguish between two different types of lexical-syntactic information: variable extrinsic lexical-syntactic features, such as number (singular, plural), and fixed intrinsic lexical-syntactic properties, such as grammatical gender (e.g., masculine, feminine). Previous research using the picture-word interference paradigm has found effects of distractor lexical-syntactic congruency for grammatical gender but no congruency effects for number. We used this phenomenon to investigate whether mass/count information is processed similarly to grammatical gender. In two experiments, participants named pictures of mass or count objects using determiner noun phrases (e.g., Experiment 1 with mass and plural count nouns: "not muchmass ricemass", "not manycount pegscount"; Experiment 2 with mass and singular count nouns: "some ricemass", "a pegcount"), while ignoring distractors that were countability congruent or incongruent nouns. The results revealed a countability congruency effect for mass and plural count nouns in Experiment 1 and for singular count nouns, but not mass nouns in Experiment 2. This is similar to grammatical gender suggesting that countability processing is predominantly driven by a noun's lexical-syntactic information.

Understanding Bilingual Word Learning: The Role of Phonotactic Probability and Phonological Neighborhood Density.

Purpose: Previous research has shown that the language-learning mechanism is affected by bilingualism resulting in a novel word learning advantage for bilingual speakers. However, less is known about the factors that might influence this advantage. This article reports an investigation of 2 factors: phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density. Method: Acquisition of 15 novel words varying in phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density was examined in high-proficiency, early onset, Mandarin-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. Results: Both bilinguals and monolinguals demonstrated a significant effect of phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density. Novel word learning improved when the phonological neighborhood density was higher; in contrast, higher phonotactic probability resulted in worse learning. Although the bilingual speakers showed significantly better novel word learning than monolingual speakers, this did not interact with phonotactic probability and phonological neighborhood density manipulations. Conclusion: Both bilingual and monolingual word learning abilities are constrained by the same learning mechanisms. However, bilingual advantages may be underpinned by more effective allocation of cognitive resources due to their dual language experience.

Meditation and auditory attention: An ERP study of meditators and non-meditators.

The findings of a study by Cahn and Polich (2009) suggests that there is an effect of a meditative state on three event-related potential (ERP) brain markers of "low-level" auditory attention (i.e., acoustic representations in sensory memory) in expert meditators: the N1, the P2, and the P3a. The current study built on these findings by examining trait and state effects of meditation on the passive auditory mismatch negativity (MMN), N1, and P2 ERPs. We found that the MMN was significantly larger in meditators than non-meditators regardless of whether they were meditating or not (a trait effect), and that N1 amplitude was significantly attenuated during meditation in non-meditators but not expert meditators (an interaction between trait and state). These outcomes suggest that low-level attention is superior in long-term meditators in general. In contrast, low-level attention is reduced in non-meditators when they are asked to meditate for the first time, possibly due to auditory fatigue or cognitive overload.

How 'some garlic' becomes 'a garlic' or 'some onion': Mass and count processing in aphasia.

This paper informs our understanding of the representation and processing of mass and count nouns through an investigation of the underlying causes of mass/count specific impairments in in two people with aphasia, DEH and GEC. The factors influencing the production of mass and count nouns and noun phrases was comprehensively assessed. The results showed that GEC's impairment affected mass noun naming, resulting in the production of semantic paraphasias and no responses. In contrast, DEH frequently substituted mass determiners with count determiners leading to ungrammatical noun phrases. In comparison to younger control group, a control group of older adults showed similar difficulties to DEH with mass noun phrases, although less severe, indicating effects of cognitive ageing on lexical and semantic processing. DEH and the elderly controls' results replicate and support previous findings regarding the lexical-syntactic representation of mass/count information. GEC's difficulties extend these findings by providing additional evidence for a semantic component in the representation of countability (e.g., a semantic feature/concept COUNTABLE for count nouns, UNCOUNTABLE for mass nouns) which contributes to mass and count noun selection. GEC's mass noun difficulties are suggested to result from weaker connection strength between noun lemmas and mass concepts compared to count concepts as a result of the overall lower frequency distribution of mass nouns.

Representation and processing of mass and count nouns: a review.

Comprehension and/or production of noun phrases and sentences requires the selection of lexical-syntactic attributes of nouns. These lexical-syntactic attributes include grammatical gender (masculine/feminine/neuter), number (singular/plural) and countability (mass/count). While there has been considerable discussion regarding gender and number, relatively little attention has focused on countability. Therefore, this article reviews empirical evidence for lexical-syntactic specification of nouns for countability. This includes evidence from studies of language production and comprehension with normal speakers and case studies which assess impairments of mass/count nouns in people with acquired brain damage. Current theories of language processing are reviewed and found to be lacking specification regarding countability. Subsequently, the theoretical implications of the empirical studies are discussed in the context of frameworks derived from these accounts of language production (Levelt, 1989; Levelt et al., 1999) and comprehension (Taler and Jarema, 2006). The review concludes that there is empirical support for specification of nouns for countability at a lexical-syntactic level.

From "some butter" to "a butter": an investigation of mass and count representation and processing.

This paper investigates the representation of mass and count nouns at the lexical-syntactic level, an issue that has not been addressed to date in psycholinguistic theories. A single case study is reported of a man with aphasia, R.A.P., who showed a countability specific deficit that affected processing of mass noun grammar. R.A.P. frequently substituted mass noun determiners (e.g., some, much) with count noun determiners (e.g., a, many). Experimental investigations determined that R.A.P. had a modality-neutral lexical-syntactic impairment. Furthermore, a series of novel experiments revealed that R.A.P.'s processing of mass noun determiners varied depending on how mass nouns were depicted (single vs. multiple depictions) and how congruent these were with the conceptual-semantic information of target determiners (e.g., "some" corresponds to multiple but not single concepts). R.A.P.'s determiner difficulties emerged only when mass nouns and determiners were number incongruent. The results of this research clearly indicate that nouns are lexical-syntactically specified for countability, but that the derivation of countability can additionally be influenced by conceptual-semantics.

An untapped resource: treatment as a tool for revealing the nature of cognitive processes.

This paper focuses on the role of treatment in cognitive neuropsychological research, arguing that treatment for cognitive impairments should be viewed as a powerful methodology for developing, evaluating, and extending cognitive theories. We suggest that the key aim of cognitive neuropsychology should be characterized as the use of data from the investigation and treatment of individuals with cognitive disorders to develop, evaluate, and extend theories of normal cognition. To support this assertion, this paper discusses examples of how treatment studies have informed theory. The major methodological tool is generalization logic, both generalization across items and generalization across tasks. However, an alternative is to use case series methodology to test predicted correlations between particular cognitive skills and response to treatment. These methods enable explicit testing of a theory or discrimination between theories, focusing on the nature of cognitive representations, the architecture of the cognitive system, and the acquisition of cognitive skills.

Computational modelling of phonological dyslexia: how does the DRC model fare?

This paper investigates the patterns of reading impairment in phonological dyslexia using computational modelling with the dual-route cascaded model of reading (DRC, Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001). Systematic lesioning of nonlexical and phonological processes in DRC demonstrates that different lesions and severity of those lesions can reproduce features of phonological dyslexia including impaired reading of nonwords, relatively spared reading of words, an advantage for reading pseudohomophones. Using the same stimuli for model and for patients, lesions to DRC were also used to simulate the reading accuracy shown by three individuals with acquired phonological dyslexia. No single lesion could replicate the reading performance of all three individuals. In order to simulate reading accuracy for one individual a phonological impairment was necessary (addition of noise to the phoneme units), and for the remaining two individuals an impairment to nonlexical reading procedures (increasing the time interval between each new letter being processed) was necessary. We argue that no single locus of impairment (neither phonological nor nonlexical) can account for the reading impairments of all individuals with phonological dyslexia. Instead, different individuals have different impairments (and combinations of impairments) that together provide the spectrum of patterns found in phonological dyslexia.

Homographic and heterographic homophones in speech production: does orthography matter?

This paper investigates homophone naming performance in an individual with impaired word retrieval. The aim of the study is to investigate the status of homophone representations using treatment of homophone picture naming in aphasia. The focus of this paper is the representation of heterographic homophones (words which sound the same but are spelled differently, e.g., 'knight' vs. 'night'). Additionally, we replicate and expand previous findings regarding homographic homophones of Biedermann and Nickels (2008) in English and Biedermann et al. (2002), in German. Two theoretical positions about the mental representation of homophones are tested. First, do homophones - regardless of whether they are spelled the same or differently - share a phonological word form (e.g., Levelt et al., 1999; Dell, 1990)? Or second, do they have independent phonological word forms? (e.g., Caramazza et al., 2001; Miozzo and Caramazza, 2005)? In addition, might it be the case that homographic and heterographic homophones behave differently in word production reflecting different word form representations? These theoretical accounts are put to the test by looking at the generalisation of improvement following the treatment of homophone naming in aphasia, in particular, whether picture naming improves for both homophone meanings if only one is treated using a phonological cueing hierarchy. Treated and untreated homophones improved significantly, regardless of their spelling. Homographic and heterographic homophones showed the same pattern of generalisation. There was no generalisation for phonologically related controls. The pattern of generalisation extends our previous findings (Biedermann et al., 2002; Biedermann and Nickels, 2008) by showing evidence that heterographic homophones benefit to the same extent as homographic homophones. These results are interpreted as favouring a theory where both homographic and heterographic homophones share a single phonological representation. It is inferred that facilitation of naming takes place at the level of phonological representations, where orthography seems to have no influence.

The representation of homophones: more evidence from the remediation of anomia.

This paper compares two theoretical positions regarding the mental representation of homophones: first, that homophones have one phonological word form but two grammatical representations (lemmas, e.g., Levelt et al., 1999; Dell, 1990), or second, that they have two separate phonological word forms (e.g., Caramazza et al., 2001). The adequacy of these two theoretical accounts for explaining the pattern of generalisation obtained in the treatment of homophone naming in aphasia is investigated. Two single cases are presented, where phonological treatment techniques are used to improve word retrieval. Treatment comprised picture naming of one member of a homophone pair using a phonological cueing hierarchy. A significant improvement in word retrieval was found for both the treated and the untreated homophones, while there was no improvement for phonologically and semantically related controls. It is argued that the data support a shared representation for homophones at the word form level. However, current theories cannot explain the pattern of generalisation found without the addition of a mechanism for repetition priming (e.g., suggested by Wheeldon and Monsell, 1992) and feedback between word form and lemmas to explain the results.

Information retrieval in Tip of the Tongue states: new data and methodological advances.

Research on Tip of the Tongue (ToT) states has been used to determine whether access to syntactic information precedes access to phonological information. This paper argues that previous studies have used insufficient analyses when investigating the nature of seriality of access. In the first part of this paper, these complex issues are discussed and suitable analyses proposed. In the second part, new experimental data are presented. In Experiment 1, English speakers were asked to give information about mass/count status and initial phoneme of nouns, when in a ToT state. In Experiment 2, German speakers were asked to report grammatical gender and initial phoneme of nouns, when in a ToT state. Evidence that syntactic and phonological information are accessed independently was obtained for both languages. Implications for models of language production and further methodological issues in ToT research are discussed.