Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Test
neuropsychological battery used to evaluate adults suspected of having aphasia
Cookie Theft picture
word retrieval task that can reveal what kind of aphasia a patient has
Wernicke's Aphasia
notable anomia, poor auditory comprehension; poor repetition, well-articulated speech but includes many filler words (um, stuff), many phonemic and semantic errors
Literal phonological paraphasia
More than half of the spoken words said correctly. Other words mispronounced, syllables out of sequence, etc. (e.g. "I slipped on the lice (ice) and broke my arm;" "ephelant" for "elephant," "bife" for "knife")
semantic paraphasia
a word is produced that deviates in meaning from the intended word (Poeck, 1982). The actually produced word very often has some semantic similarity to the intended word. For instance, an aphasic patient whom I asked to describe a picture of a man reading
neologism
newly-coined word or expression
anosognosia
impairs a person's ability to understand and perceive his or her illness; lack of awareness of their condition
alexia
inability to read
agraphia
inability to write
decoding deficit
problems with coding phoneme to words; problems with specifying the phonological code of words during production
lemma
base form of a word
nodes
representations at different levels
thresholds
level that has to be passed before activation occurs
excitation/inhibition
certain words are activated while others are inhibited to narrow down to the one idea that needs to be conveyed
lexical competition
one word is competing with another due to similar phonological beginnings, causing patients with Wernicke's to look at it longer (activated longer) than in normal people
Spreading activation
semantically similar words activating each other (i.e., the word 'sparky' activating the word 'dog')
Conduction aphasia
inability to repeat words/phrases, respond to sentences/questions in conversations
Arcuate fasciculus
nerves that connect Wernicke's to Broca's area; the brain area that causes conduction aphasia when damaged
anomia
core symptom of aphasia; greater than normal word retrieval problem
pure anomia
Chronic word retrieval problem and for things that normal people would not have trouble retrieving. Damage to white matter - angular gyrus is the main place that leads to anomia. Might not only be restricted to written speech but also when they are readin
semantic anomia
Degraded semantic knowledge. May be unable to even place the object in its correct category (e.g., they are unable to say that a spatula is a "utensil") or describe its function (to flip pancakes or hamburgers). Typically associated with damage to left or
Boston Naming Task
neuropsychological assessment tool to measure confrontational word retrieval in individuals with aphasia or other language disturbance caused by stroke, Alzheimer's disease, or other dementing disorder; contains 60 line drawings graded in difficulty from
network
interconnected system of words
word association task
shows lexical networks in the brain
collocation
word pairs that occur together more often than would be expected by chance (chocolate chip)
coordination
same level of detail (skirt-pants; can include antonyms: dusk-dawn, big-little)
hyponym
dog and cat are hyponyms of each other because they share the same hypernym (animal).
superordinate; hypernym
a word with a broad meaning that more specific words fall under
superordinate-basic-subordinate levels
animal-dog-Golden Retriever
category verification
a chihuahua is an animal" takes longer to identify than "a dog is an animal
property verification
4 legs, fur, etc., longer to identify if at different levels
hierarchical semantic model
nodes are activated in a hierarchical fashion in the memory network. If, for example, activation of plant spreads to flower and then to rose, subjects should take longer to detect the relation between plant and rose than that between either plant and flow
Spreading activation semantic model
Knowledge is represented in terms of nodes and associative pathways between the nodes. Specifically, concepts are represented in memory as nodes, and relations between the concepts as associative pathways between the nodes. When part of the memory network
Prototypicality
Determinant of the associative strength between a category concept and members of the category. Prototypicality (or simply typicality), is a measure of how representative an object is of a category. Higher prototypicality will get verified faster.
Category-specific impairments
Many patients better at naming tasks for non-living than living things
Inflectional morphemes
morphological variant of a word, usually to signal grammatical; only 8 in English (-s,-ed, -ing)
Derivational morphemes
change the meaning or part of speech (-ful, -ness, -ly)
Decompositional view
Words are made up of constituent morphemes; each stem is a separate entry. prefixes & suffixes added on-line as we speak; de-composed as we listen ("morpheme stripping")
Words-as-basic-units view
each word is its own primitive
Cognitive economy
efficiency and flexibility of mental lexicon
Compound words
Some compound words appear to be treated as word1 + word2, because a prime can facilitate RT for word1 only (e.g., 'pea' primes 'bean' + 'pole'), but NOT all words
imageability
the degree in which a word can be seen concretely (e.g., apple) and not abstractly (e.g., justice)
Partial activation
part of a word is activated but still unable to recall a word (first syllable, number of syllables, ending, etc.; 'bathtub effect')
Transmission deficit
lemma and lexeme connection too weak, doesn't pass the threshold to be retrieved
interloper
phonological cues that inhibit TOT retrieval
Blocking hypothesis
given a word that is phonetically or semantically similar, it would block the retrieval of the target word
Root morpheme
the root word that is similar to a part of the target word that helps retrieval
Neighborhood effects
words are easier to retrieve if they are given hints that are around the same phonetically (sitter, bitter, etc., for litter)
Bathtub effect
remembering the sounds of beginning and ending words
perseveration
keep the beginning phoneme of one word and use it for the next word i.e. "blue blonnets
Spoonerisms
a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect, as in the sentence "you have hissed the mystery lectures" accidentally spoken instead of the intended sentence "you hav
Serial model of speech production
1. Identification of meaning -what do you want to convey
2. Structure
3. Prosody
4. Content words
5. Function words
6. Grammatical morphemes
Intonation contour
The main stress of the sentence takes place at the verb and the minor stress occurs on the last word, the noun.
Interactive model of speech production
interaction between the semantic and phonological systems in word choice and speech errors
Lexical bias effect
errors are usually words because we have a lexical editor that corrects our nonwords
Cross-modal priming technique
given ambiguous context for a word, looks at which meaning is activated (e.g., bug in an ambiguous context, bug/ant and bug/spy both activated)
Vehicle
carries the weight of the word (aka, base): lends characteristics to less familiar objects
Topic
less familiar object in a metaphor
Two-stage processing
when the literal meaning is defective, looks at nonliteral meaning
Structure-mapping
comparison process in which a person aligns objects and maps information from the base to the target
Category view
metaphors are understood by treating the vehicle (Y) of a metaphorical statement as an abstract category
ex.: "Good ideas are diamonds!" ("Diamonds" stand in for abstract category of valuable things)
Career of Metaphor
initially prefer analogy (simile) but as figurative language becomes familiar, prefers metaphors (categorical)
Conventionality
how widely used a metaphor is
Familiarity
how frequent is a particular phrase used
Universalism
thoughts and perceptions are carved the same way across populations
Spatial conception of time
the thought process of time in a spatial manner (seen in Australian Aborigines where they face one way while talking about time) as well as other cultures. Could be vertical or horizontal or both or completely based on NSEW directionality.