The English Sublexical Toolkit: Methods for indexing sound-spelling consistency.

This work introduces the English Sublexical Toolkit, a suite of tools that utilizes an experience-dependent learning framework of sublexical knowledge to extract regularities from the English lexicon. The Toolkit quantifies the empirical regularity of sublexical units in both the reading and spelling directions (i.e., grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme) and at multiple grain sizes (i.e., phoneme/grapheme and onset/rime unit size). It can extract multiple experience-dependent regularity indices for words or pseudowords, including both frequency indices (e.g., grapheme frequency) and conditional probability indices (e.g., grapheme-to-phoneme probability). These tools provide (1) superior estimates of the regularities that better reflect the complexity of the sublexical system relative to previously published indices and (2) completely novel indices of sublexical units such as phonographeme frequency (i.e., combined units of individual phonemes and graphemes that are independent of processing direction). We demonstrate that measures from the toolkit explain significant amounts of variance in empirical data (naming of real words and lexical decision), and either outperform or are comparable to the best available consistency measures. The flexibility of the toolkit is further demonstrated by its ability to readily index the probability of different pseudowords pronunciations, and we report that the measures account for the majority of variance in these empirically observed probabilities. Overall, this work provides a framework and resources that can be flexibly used to identify optimal corpus-based consistency measures that help explain reading/spelling behaviors for real and pseudowords.

Interpolated retrieval retroactively increases recall and promotes cross-episode memory interdependence.

Retrieving existing memories before new learning can lead to retroactive facilitation. Three experiments examined whether interpolated retrieval is associated with retroactive facilitation and memory interdependence that reflects integrative encoding. Participants studied two lists of cue-response word pairs that repeated across lists (A-B, A-B), appeared in list 1 (A-B, -), or included the same cues with changed responses in each list (A-B, A-C). For A-B, A-C pairs, the tasks interpolated between lists required recall of list 1 (B) responses (with or without feedback) or restudy of complete list 1 (A-B) pairs. In list 2, participants only studied pairs (experiment 1) or studied pairs, attempted to detect changed (C) responses, and attempted to recall list 1 responses for detected changes (experiments 2 and 3). On a final cued recall test, participants attempted to recall list 1 responses, indicated whether responses changed between lists, and if so, attempted to recall list 2 responses. Interpolated retrieval was associated with subsequent retroactive facilitation and greater memory interdependence for B and C responses. These correlational findings are compatible with the view that retrieval retroactively facilitates memories, promotes coactivation of existing memories and new learning, and enables integrative encoding that veridically binds information across episodes.

Pseudoword spelling: insights into sublexical representations and lexical interactions.

ABSTRACTIn this work we introduce a new tool for measuring English spelling-sound consistency, the PG Toolkit, which we use to conduct detailed analyses of pseudoword spellings that provide new insights into the nature of sublexical and lexical representations. There are several key findings: first, sound-spelling consistency measured at two different "grain sizes", phonographeme and onset/rime, each explained unique variance in pseudoword spelling. Second, lexical skill was more related to pseudoword accuracy at the onset/rime level than at the phonographeme level, and individuals who chose more consistent mappings to spell pseudowords tended to have better lexical skill. Finally, no unique contribution of consistency in the reading direction ("feedback") was found after controlling for consistency in the spelling direction. Taken together, the results validate the various measures provided by the PG Toolkit and establish new evidence that supports an interpretation of sublexical processes as operations over hierarchically-structured representations.

Written discourse in diagnosis for acquired neurogenic communication disorders: current evidence and future directions.

Purpose: We aimed to perform the first review of research focusing on written discourse performance in people with acquired neurogenic communication disorders. In studies from 2000 onward, we specifically sought to determine: (1) the differences between patient populations and control groups, (2) the differences between different patient populations, (3) longitudinal differences between patient populations, and (4) modality differences between spoken and written discourse performance. Methods: We completed a thorough search on MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane, APAPsycinfo, Web of Science, and Scopus databases. We identified studies that focus on written discourse performance in people with aphasia, primary progressive aphasia, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease. Results: Nineteen studies were identified from the review of literature, some of which addressed more than one of our review questions. Fifteen studies included a comparison between clinical populations and controls. Six studies compared different characteristics of patient populations. Three studies reported changes over time in progressive disorders. Six studies targeted different modalities of discourse. Conclusion: Differences in linguistic features by patient populations are not yet clear due to the limited number of studies and different measures and tasks used across the studies. Nevertheless, there is substantial evidence of numerous linguistic features in acquired neurogenic communication disorders that depart from those of healthy controls. Compared to the controls, people with aphasia tend to produce fewer words, and syntactically simpler utterances compared to the controls. People with Alzheimer's disease produce less information content, and this feature increases over time, as reported in longitudinal studies. Our review imparts additional information that written and spoken discourse provide unique insights into the cognitive and linguistic deficits experienced by people with aphasia, Alzheimer's disease, mild cognitive impairment and primary progressive aphasia and provide targets for treatment to improve written communication in these groups.

Treatment of the Linguistic and Temporal Components of Lexical Activation to Improve Word Retrieval in Aphasia.

Current approaches to treatments for word processing impairments in aphasia emphasize two components to target, the linguistic content, semantic or phonological representations of words, and the processing component, access to and retrieval of those representations. In this study, we explore these two components of a treatment to improve lexical activation that supports access and retrieval of word representations. Five people with aphasia participated. The treatment task was repetition of concrete word pairs after a 5-s response delay which was intended to provide practice in maintaining activation of the words for that 5-s period before reproducing them. Two of the five participants demonstrated a difficulty in maintaining activation of single words in repetition, with accuracy decreasing significantly after the 5-s interval. The treatment was applied to all participants, however, to determine if its benefit was specific to those with the activation maintenance impairment. Results confirmed that the activation maintenance treatment in the context of this repetition task led to more treatment gains for the two participants who demonstrated this specific impairment. They made gains on four of the nine measures compared to improvements on one to two measures for the other participants. A second question addressed in this study was the relative importance of the item component (linguistic content) of the treatment and the processing component, maintenance of activation. To that end, there were two conditions of treatment probes, (1) repeated content for all treatment, immediate post-treatment and 3-month maintenance probes and (2) novel content for probes in these three phases of treatment. Only one participant showed significant improvement in treatment when items were novel for all probes. We discuss the possibility that this outcome reflects a more specific deficit in the temporal processing component of lexical activation compared to the two other participants who showed better performance on probes with repeated items in treatment and post-treatment phases. Clinical implications of this study and directions of future research are discussed.

Decoding complex emotions and humanization show related face processing effects.

Inferring others' complex emotions is central to ascribing humanness to others. However, little past research has investigated the perceptual processes linking the inference of complex emotions to judging others' humanness. To this end, we disrupted the low-level perceptual processes typically employed in face processing via face inversion. Of interest was whether the inversion-driven deficits in complex emotion judgments and in humanness judgments were related. In three experiments, we find that disrupting efficient face processing via face inversion undermined the accurate decoding of complex emotions from the eyes (Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2) and triggered more dehumanized evaluations of target eye regions (Experiments 1a and 1b) and faces (Experiment 2). Critically, these inversion effects on emotion decoding and dehumanization were positively correlated. People who demonstrated stronger inversion effects on the accuracy of decoding complex emotions also demonstrated stronger inversion effects on dehumanizing evaluations. Taken together, these findings provide novel evidence that sensitivity to complex emotions and (de)humanization are related through a shared perceptual basis in efficient face processing. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Literacy Learning.

Previous research indicates that writing practice may be more beneficial than nonmotor practice for letter learning. Here, we report a training study comparing typing, visual, and writing learning conditions in adults (N = 42). We investigated the behavioral consequences of learning modality on literacy learning and evaluated the nature of the learned letter representations. Specifically, the study addressed three questions. First, are the benefits of handwriting practice due to motor learning per se or to other incidental factors? Second, do the benefits generalize to untrained tasks? And third, does handwriting practice lead to learning and strengthening only of motor representations or of other types of representations as well? Our results clearly show that handwriting compared with nonmotor practice produces faster learning and greater generalization to untrained tasks than previously reported. Furthermore, only handwriting practice leads to learning of both motor and amodal symbolic letter representations.

Re-learning to be different: Increased neural differentiation supports post-stroke language recovery.

Identifying the neural changes that support recovery of cognitive functions after a brain lesion is important to advance our understanding of human neuroplasticity, which, in turn, forms the basis for the development of effective treatments. To date, the preponderance of neuroimaging studies has focused on localizing changes in average brain activity associated with functional recovery. Here, we took a novel approach by evaluating whether cognitive recovery in chronic stroke is related to increases in the differentiation of local neural response patterns. This approach is supported by research indicating that, in the intact brain, local neural representations become more differentiated (dissimilar) with learning (Glezer et al., 2015). We acquired fMRI data before and after 21 individuals received approximately 12 weeks of behavioral treatment for written language impairment due to a left-hemisphere stroke. We used Local-Heterogeneity Regression Analysis (Purcell and Rapp, 2018) to measure local neural response differentiation associated with written language processing, assuming that greater heterogeneity in the pattern of activity across adjacent neural areas indicates more well-differentiated neural representations. First, we observed pre to post-treatment increases in local neural differentiation (Local-Hreg) in the ventral occipital-temporal cortex of the left hemisphere. Second, we found that, in this region, higher local neural response differentiation prior to treatment was associated with less severe written language impairment, and that it also predicted greater future responsiveness to treatment. Third, we observed that changes in neural differentiation were systematically related to performance changes for trained and untrained items. Fourth, we did not observe these brain-behavior relationships for mean BOLD responses, only for Local-Hreg. Thus, this is the first investigation to quantify changes in local neural differentiation in the recovery of a cognitive function and the first to demonstrate the clear behavioral relevance of these changes. We conclude that the findings provide strong support for the novel hypothesis that the local re-differentiation of neural representations can play a significant role in functional recovery after brain lesion.

The use of spelling for variant classification in primary progressive aphasia: Theoretical and practical implications.

Currently, variant subtyping in primary progressive aphasia (PPA) requires an expert neurologist and extensive language and cognitive testing. Spelling impairments appear early in the development of the disorder, and the three PPA variants (non-fluent - nfvPPA; semantic - svPPA; logopenic - lvPPA) reportedly show fairly distinct spelling profiles. Given the theoretical and empirical evidence indicating that spelling may serve as a proxy for spoken language, the current study aimed to determine whether spelling performance alone, when evaluated with advanced statistical analyses, allows for accurate PPA variant classification. A spelling to dictation task (with real words and pseudowords) was administered to 33 PPA individuals: 17 lvPPA, 10 nfvPPA, 6 svPPA. Using machine learning classification algorithms, we obtained pairwise variant classification accuracies that ranged between 67 and 100%. In additional analyses that assumed no prior knowledge of each case's variant, classification accuracies ranged between 59 and 70%. To our knowledge, this is the first time that all the PPA variants, including the most challenging logopenic variant, have been classified with such high accuracy when using information from a single language task. These results underscore the rich structure of the spelling process and support the use of a spelling task in PPA variant classification.

Re-learning and remembering in the lesioned brain.

It is well known that re-learning language skills after a brain lesion can be very difficult. However, while learning and memory challenges have been extensively researched in amnesic individuals, very little research attention has been directed at understanding the characteristics of learning and memory that are relevant to recovery and rehabilitation of acquired language impairments. Even in the absence of damage to the medial temporal lobe regions classically associated with learning and memory, these individuals often suffer damage to frontal and other subcortical areas associated with learning and memory that may contribute to the learning challenges they face. Therefore, an understanding of the learning and memory profiles of post-stroke language impairments is important for the development and optimization of rehabilitation approaches. In two studies, we examine the degree to which certain basic characteristics of learning and memory, identified in neurotypical individuals, are intact in individuals with post-stroke language impairment. We specifically consider fundamental principles regarding the optimal spacing of learning trials that have been shown to reliably operate in neurotypical adults, across a wide range of language domains. We report on two studies that examine whether or not these principles also apply in language re-learning and retention for individuals with acquired deficits in written language production. Study 1 compared distributed vs. clustered training schedules, while Study 2 examined-for the first time in the context of re-learning-the relationship between the spacing of training trials and the retention period. This investigation revealed that, despite significant cognitive deficits and brain lesions, remarkably similar principles govern re-learning and retention in the lesioned brain as have been found to apply in neurologically healthy individuals. These results allow us to begin to integrate our understanding of recovery with the broader literature on learning and memory and have implications for the optimal organization of rehabilitation. Specifically, the findings raise questions regarding the traditional compression of rehabilitation within relatively short time windows.

Statistical analysis in Small-N Designs: using linear mixed-effects modeling for evaluating intervention effectiveness.

BACKGROUND: Advances in statistical methods and computing power have led to a renewed interest in addressing the statistical analysis challenges posed by Small-N Designs (SND). Linear mixed-effects modeling (LMEM) is a multiple regression technique that is flexible and suitable for SND and can provide standardized effect sizes and measures of statistical significance. AIMS: Our primary goals are to: 1) explain LMEM at the conceptual level, situating it in the context of treatment studies, and 2) provide practical guidance for implementing LMEM in repeated measures SND. METHODS & PROCEDURES: We illustrate an LMEM analysis, presenting data from a longitudinal training study of five individuals with acquired dysgraphia, analyzing both binomial (accuracy) and continuous (reaction time) repeated measurements. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: The LMEM analysis reveals that both spelling accuracy and reaction time improved and, for accuracy, improved significantly more quickly under a training schedule with distributed, compared to clustered, practice. We present guidance on obtaining and interpreting various effect sizes and measures of statistical significance from LMEM, and include a simulation study comparing two p-value methods for generalized LMEM. CONCLUSION: We provide a strong case for the application of LMEM to the analysis of training studies as a preferable alternative to visual analysis or other statistical techniques. When applied to a treatment dataset, the evidence supports that the approach holds up under the extreme conditions of small numbers of individuals, with repeated measures training data for both continuous (reaction time) and binomially distributed (accuracy) dependent measures. The approach provides standardized measures of effect sizes that are obtained through readily available and well-supported statistical packages, and provides statistically rigorous estimates of the expected average effect size of training effects, taking into account variability across both items and individuals.

From complexity to distinctiveness: The effect of expertise on letter perception.

Fluent, adult readers of alphabetic languages encounter hundreds of millions of individual letters. What is the impact of such extensive experience on the perception and identification of letters? Recent evidence indicates that expert and naïve observers perceive letters differently. Here, we focus on the relationship between expertise and letter complexity (number of visual features) and distinctiveness (overlap in features with the other letters of the alphabet). Using a same-different letter judgement task, we examined the performance of individuals with high levels of expertise with Roman letters, but with different amounts of experience with the Arabic alphabet. The results reveal a trade-off between letter complexity and distinctiveness, such that while naïve individuals are sensitive only to letter complexity and not distinctiveness, the opposite is true for individuals with high expertise with an alphabet. These findings reveal a learning trajectory in which, with increasing experience, the influence of letter complexity is supplanted by distinctiveness, which requires an understanding of the relationship of each letter to the other possible letter shapes in the alphabet as a whole.

The effects of alphabet and expertise on letter perception.

Long-standing questions in human perception concern the nature of the visual features that underlie letter recognition and the extent to which the visual processing of letters is affected by differences in alphabets and levels of viewer expertise. We examined these issues in a novel approach using a same-different judgment task on pairs of letters from the Arabic alphabet with 2 participant groups: 1 with no prior exposure to Arabic and 1 with reading proficiency. Hierarchical clustering and linear mixed-effects modeling of reaction times and accuracy provide evidence that both the specific characteristics of the alphabet and observers' previous experience with it affect how letters are perceived and visually processed. The findings of this research further our understanding of the multiple factors that affect letter perception and support the view of a visual system that dynamically adjusts its weighting of visual features as expert readers come to more efficiently and effectively discriminate the letters of the specific alphabet they are viewing. (PsycINFO Database Record