Volume 45, Issue 2 - Clinical Linguistics. Edited by Monika Polczynska, Yishai Tobin and Shimon Sapir

Speech and Language Impairments of Arabic-Speaking Jordanian Children Within Natural Phonology and Phonology as Human Behaviour The present contribution is concerned with a pilot study of empirical issues in the analysis of speech and language impairments in the speech of a sample of Arabic-speaking Jordanian children. The study aims at developing diagnostic tools for assessing the developmental status of the phonological processes in the child's disordered speech based on the chronology of their development in normally developing children. It also aims at providing a sound linguistic basis for this development. The theoretical linguistic basis for the study is taken from Natural Phonology (NP) and Phonology as Human Behaviour (PHB). Additionally, one of the theoretical goals is to provide further external evidence for developing the NP theory. The results of this study confirm, on one hand, some of the common patterns that are reported in the literature concerning phonological disorders language-universally, and on the other hand, they show some Arabic language specific features as well.

Differences Between Grammatical and Lexical Development in Japanese Specific Language Impairment: A Case Study Paradis and Gopnik (1997) and Fukuda and Fukuda (2001a, b) suggested that the performance of children with specific language impairment (SLI) could be explained by deficits in their knowledge of grammar, whereas their lexicon appears to be intact. The purpose of this study was to examine this hypothesis with longitudinal data from a Japanese child with SLI from the ages of 9 to 14. Tests with tense, passives, case-marking, demonstrative pronouns and vocabulary were administered during this period. The results were as follows. The participant's lexical age developed rapidly. In contrast, the percent correct of her passives did not increase significantly from the ages of 9 to 14. Moreover, the percent correct on tense was 50% at the age of 14 when non-words were used. In case-marker production with passives, it was 50% even at the age of 14 when reversed word order was used. However, the percent correct of demonstrative pronouns was 50% at the age of 11, and it increased rapidly to 100% within a year. The results of this study provide further empirical support for the hypothesis that the deficit in children with SLI can be attributed to an impairment in their grammatical knowledge which seems to spare their lexicon.

SV and VS Total Interrogatives in Ibero-Romance: The Role of Phonetically Unrealised Elements in Agrammatism This paper aims to characterise difficulties with the order VS in agrammatic speech. To fulfill this aim, we test the production of yes/no questions in 15 agrammatic subjects and 15 matched non-damaged control native speakers of Catalan, Galician and Spanish. The Ibero-Romance varieties under investigation are null subject languages, i.e. they allow post-verbal subjects with independence of the nature of the verb (Rizzi 1982; Belletti 1988; Belletti and Leonini 2004). This is due to the possibility of licensing a null pronominal subject, an "associate" (Chomsky 1995), in the pre-verbal position. The elicitation of yes/no questions provides us with a suitable testing ground since both the orders SV and VS are accepted. Even though our agrammatic sample revealed mastery of yes/no questions to a level of 67.78% crosslinguistically, their pattern of response diverged from non-pathological adult-like usage (with the SV option preferred by agrammatics). Since the projection of the CP-field is required with independence of subject placement (Rizzi 1997, 2002), structural accounts (Tree-Pruning Hypothesis, Friedmann and Grodzinsky 1997) seem to suffer from some shortcomings in accounting for these results. We explore the possibility that the systematic avoidance of the VS order derives from its involvement of an additional expletive pro in pre-verbal position.

Idiom Processing in Aphasic Patients The aim of the present paper is to provide insight into the issue of idiom comprehension in patients who are in the process of recovery from the syndrome of aphasia. Research in figurative language comprehension has seen a robust development in the recent decades. However, it has not been until quite recently that psycholinguists began to delve into the aspect of metaphorical language comprehension in brain damaged populations. It was observed that even though the ability to produce and understand language is recovered in the majority of patients with head trauma, the impairment of some aspects of comprehension may protract. The understanding of idioms, metaphors, similes and proverbs, due to their specific, non-literal character, has been evidenced to pose a serious problem to aphasic patients, as they fail to decipher the figurative meaning of the utterance, and, instead, tend to process the message literally (Papagno et al. 2004). In the present study, three patients who suffered from aphasic disorder were tested for comprehension of idioms by means of two multiple choice tasks. The obtained results corroborated the hypothesis that patients who are in the process of recovery from aphasia encounter various pitfalls in the comprehension of idiomatic language. Predominantly, they exhibit an inclination to choose the erroneous, literal paraphrases of the presented idioms over their correct, idiomatic counterparts. The present paper aims at accounting for the reasons underlying such a tendency.

New Tests for Language Mapping with Intraoperative Electrical Stimulation of the Brain to Preserve Language in Individuals with Tumors and Epilepsy: A Preliminary Follow-Up Study Intraoperative Electrical Stimulation (IES) of the brain is performed to localise and spare language functional areas before extraction of brain tissue in patients with tumors and epilepsy. The procedure is very precise and highly effective. Yet, it is argued that language tests used during IES are too limited. This article presents new language tests that have a potential of minimising post-operative risk to language function. It is a continuation of a previous study (Połczyńska 2008) and it contains extended versions of earlier presented tests, as well as new tests designed in three sets: (1) Grammar-focused tests for the dominant left hemisphere, (2) Non-dominant righthemisphere tests and (3) Tests for the subcortex. To assure maximum safety and efficiency of the tests before they are used during IES for the first time, it is suggested that they are first used with patients with intractable epilepsy who have a multielectrode subdural grid implanted onto their cortex to trace the source of seizures. The subdural grid gives a chance to carry out an electrical stimulation of those areas of the cortex which are covered with a grid. This type of language mapping is carried out in a ward and is not time-limited.

Correlation Between Vowel Centralisation and Incomplete Stop Articulation in Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injury Traumatic brain injury (TBI) often results in dysarthria, a motor speech disorder. Two processes often linked with TBI dysarthria are vowel centralisation and incomplete stop articulation. It is not clear to what extent these two processes are interrelated and to what extent they might serve as indices of the severity of dysarthria secondary to TBI. The purpose of this study is to test the hypothesis that patients who centralise vowels will also have difficulties producing stop consonants with complete stricture. Polish dysarthric speakers post TBI (n=6) and ten age-matched healthy controls with normal speech (n=10) performed the Polish Dysarthria Test for TBI Patients (PDTTP) (Połczyńska-Fiszer and Pufal 2006). Three of the TBI subjects had moderate dysarthria and three mild dysarthria. The test investigates phonemes in isolation as well as in diverse phonetic contexts in different elicitation tasks, including spontaneous speech. The data from the PDTTP were transcribed phonetically and analysed acoustically. Vowel centralisation and incomplete stop articulation appear to be strongly correlated (r=0.90). It was found that the degree of TBI dysarthria correlates with the frequency of occurrence of these two processes. Thus, the two processes may serve as important indices of severity of dysarthria in TBI.

Why Does the Vowel Space Area as an Acoustic Metric Fail to Differentiate Dysarthric from Normal Vowel Articulation and what can be Done About It? Background. The vowel space area (VSA) has been used as an acoustic metric of dysarthric vowel articulation, but with varying degrees of success. Here we test the hypothesis that the failure of the VSA to differentiate dysarthric from normal vowel articulation has to do in part with statistical "noise" that is introduced by insensitivity of Euclidean distances that define the VSA to vowel centralisation. Methods. Differences in vowel production between 5 dysarthric young men post traumatic brain injury (TBI) and 5 young men who served as healthy controls (HC) were tested with four acoustic metrics: the triangular VSA, constructed with the first (F1) and second (F2) formants of the vowels /i/, /u/, /a/, and the Euclidean distances (EDs) between the vowels /i/ and /u (EDiu), /i/ and /a/ (EDia), and /a/ and /u/ (EDau) that define the VSA. The formant frequencies of these metrics were logarithmically scaled to reduce irrelevant interspeaker variability. Results. The VSA failed to differentiate between the TBI and HC groups, as did the the EDia, and EDau. In contrast, the EDiu effectively differentiated between groups, both statistically (unpaired t-test, p=0.0174) and in terms effect size (1.88, large). The significant difference was in the expected direction, indicating vowel centralisation and articulatory undershoot in the TBI speakers. Conclusion. The VSA is likely to perform poorly as an acoustic metric of dysarthric speech because of "noise" introduced by Euclidian distances (EDs) metrics that are not sensitive to the articulatory abnormality (in this study, the EDia and EDau). Thus, rather than using the VSA, it might be more beneficial to use only those EDs that are likely to be sensitive to vowel centralisation, as might be the case with the EDiu.

A Biological basis for Aphasia Treatment: Mirror Neurons and Observation-Execution Matching Aphasia is caused by damage to the human brain, and recovery requires adaptive changes to the structure and function of this organ. Despite this obvious fact, biology plays little role in rehabilitation of persons with aphasia. Although linguistics can be useful in characterizing aphasic behaviour, thus providing a way to assess the effects of therapy, there is little evidence to suggest that linguistic models of impairment can themselves form the basis of effective therapy. Biological evidence from primates has demonstrated the presence of neurons that have both visual and motor properties, which discharge both when an action is performed and during observation of the same action. We postulate that behavioural stimulation of this system may play an important role in motor learning for speech and thereby aid language recovery after stroke. IMITATE is a computer-assisted system for aphasia therapy based on action observation and imitation. IMITATE therapy consists of silent observation of audio-visually presented words and phrases spoken aloud by six different speakers, followed by a period during which the participant orally repeats the stimuli. The treatment approach is motivated by the physiology of the brain in an effort to change specific anatomical connections, and the treatment method draws strongly from psychological evidence on learning. IMITATE is currently being used in a clinical trial, and results will not be known until these data are available in late 2010. At that juncture, it will be possible to evaluate fully the efficacy of IMITATE and to inform theoretically about the mechanism of action and the role of a human mirror system in aphasia treatment.

Phonology as Human Behaviour: Clinical Phonetics, Phonology and Prosody This paper introduces the theory of Phonology as Human Behaviour (PHB); summarises the basic theoretical and methodological tenets of the theory and shows how it has been applied to clinical phonetics, phonology and prosody. The theory of PHB, developed by William Diver and his students of the Columbia School, combines aspects of the "communication factor" inherent in Prague School phonology with aspects of the "human factor" inherent in André Martinet's functional diachronic phonology. The major parameters of the theory are presented according to the Saussurean-based semiotic definition of language as a sign system used by human beings to communicate. The fundamental axiom underlying the theory is that language represents a compromise in the struggle to achieve maximum communication with minimal effort. The major contribution of the theory is that it provides a motivation to explain the non-random distribution of phonemes within the speech signal in language in general and in typical and atypical speech in particular.