signlanguage-forthe-mindandbody

[signlanguage-forthe-mindandbody]

Aerobic Fitness & Language Processing

If I were a parent I would not force my child to do more active activities but I would highly encourage it. I think putting too much pressure on kids at a young age has them create unrealistic expectations for themselves. What do you think? I am not saying that you should stop telling your child they can accomplish anything, I am saying the opposite. Telling your child they can be president or a princess or whatever they want to be. Once children get to around middle school age they start caring a lot about what other people think. When you add physical fitness to this I think it can cause children to put a lot of pressure on themselves, especially young girls. This study is really about some potential benefits of physical fitness

  The study uses ERP’s. ERP is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event. N400 is  a component of the ERP that is related to meaning. This has been linked to the access of important information with long-term memory. P600 is a component of ERP that is related to grammar. Semantic processing helps us relate words we hear just of meaning in language. Syntactic processing is the ordering and arrangements of words into phrases and sentences.

The main question or goal of the study was about the relationship between children’s fitness and their ability in the classroom. The hypothesis was that higher fitness may be related to the “richer network of words and their meanings”, this relates to the greater ability to find or fix syntactic errors. 

This study consisted of 46 children. There were three parts of the study; aerobic fitness, offline academic achievement, and online sentence processing task. Aerobic fitness had everyone walk for two minutes then they jogged at a consistent speed then the participants were asked to increase 2.5% speed every two minutes until they could not anymore. Heart rate was measured and ratings of perceived exertion (RPE). offline academic achievement included reading, spelling, arithmetics. The reading version and the spelling and arithmetic portion. Online sentence processing task consisted of a total of 80 sentences that were available in congruent, semantic, and syntactic forms. Children were asked to monitor for the semantic and syntactic mistakes. An example of congruent is “you wear shoes on your feet”. An example of semantic “at school we sing shoes and dance”. An example of violation “you shoes wear on your feet”.

Achievement showed there was a higher fit children outperformed lower fit children on tests of reading, spelling, and arithmetic. The reaction time showed higher fit children exhibited overall shorter response time than lower fit children. The results also revealed that higher fit children performed more accurately across sentence types. ERP measures N400. The findings from this revealed that higher fit children had a shorter N400 across all the trials compared to the lower fit children. ERP measures P600. The higher fit children showed a larger P600 effect over the central parietal region, this was compared to lower fit children.

The more aerobically fit children scored higher on academic tests for reading and spelling. This helped to measure their ability to correctly pronounce and spell difficult words. Higher fit children were more capable of bringing online processes that have been associated with the analysis and/or repairs of these errors. This was shown by the larger P600 effect. Higher fit children also achieved higher scores on offline measures of academic achievements and how they are related to language skills. Higher fit children also had shorter RTS and just a greater accuracy overall.

This study was important because it showed that higher fit children perform better in school interesting areas. Children also were showing an increase in brain activity in certain parts of the brain while performing specific tasks. This adds to the idea that fitness promotes cognitive and brain health. This includes how an understanding of how increased cardiovascular health can be beneficial to language processing. There are limitations to this study. Both groups differed on academic achievements along with fitness level. This limits the interpretation of the current ERP findings. Rest and exercise sessions were also measured separately so there was a counterbalance. There was also a possibility that the word item that were used to control the N400 could have influenced the results. 

 In conclusion, there is a relationship between children’s fitness and their ability in the classroom. Higher fitness has been associated with a stronger ability in the classroom. That is the most important take home message. I have struggled my whole life with my weight. Being too thin and being a little heavy. I have realized that when my physical health is better my mental health is better. When my mental health is better, I do better in school. My parents always put a lot of pressure on me. This is what I think affected my physical health and my school work.

References

Scudder. (2014). Aerobic Fitness & Language Processing. Aerobic Fitness & Language

Processing .

[signlanguage-forthe-mindandbody]

Children Creating Language

Imagine a world where we could not communicate with one another using our words. Imagine a world where we could only use our hands and reading lips to understand one another. This is a reality to the deaf community. This was difficult to study because most children are exposed to languages. Do children learn languages because they are very good at picking up on rules and regularities in their input or are children able to create/reinvent these rules without input? Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) is a new language that is being created by a group of deaf adults and their children. This is a sign language that was developed in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Sadly, before this language was developed the deaf community was ostracized in Nicaragua. They used simple iconic signs to communicate with one another but there was not a community. 

How do different cohorts of NSL signers use grammatical structures? Cohorts are defined as a group of people who are bound together as a group. Cohorts are people who are generally the same age. Researchers use cohorts to see how different ages compare to one another on the same topic at a certain point in time. The main focus of the current study is on spatial modulations. Spatial modulations are defined as “building blocks” of all sign languages that have been studied so far. These link signs grammatically. In the study spatial modulations were used with body orientation to provide grammatical differences and information. This study tested sign language users of different ages and different groups. The ages of the groups were early aged (<6.5 years old), the middle group (6.5-10 years old), and the late group (>10 years). There was group 1=pre-1983 and group 2=1983 and later. This is how old the signers were when they entered the school, not how age was manipulated. The analyses included the popularity of spatial modulations, how often the spatial modulations indicated the shared reference, and overall the measure of shared references.

In the article there were three major predictions. The second cohort was predicted to produce more spatial modulations than the first cohort. This was thought to be because the language was more developed when the second cohort was exposed. The next prediction was the younger you were exposed to the language, the more spatial modulations should be observed.

There were 24 Nicaraguan Sign Language signers. They split these signers up by the age of exposure to sign language and their cohort. Each signer was shown a two minute cartoon and were videotaped when signing the story to another peer who was deaf. This included the number of spatial modulations per verb produced, the number of spatial modulations that shared a referent specifically signs to a specific location that referred to the same person or object and signing rate in morphemes per minute.The results showed the main effect of age Early = Middle > Late. The main effect of cohort was p = .06. First < second. The pair comparisons; early: first < second, midde: first < second (marginal), late: first = second.

Imagine a world where we could not communicate with one another using our words. In conclusion, children have the ability to create grammar even without speaking. Over the summer I had an internship with the Family Resource Network in New Jersey. My internship was specifically with the EDGE 2.0 program. EDGE stands for Employment, Development, Guidance, and Engagement. This is a transition-to-work program that assists deaf high school and college students to develop independence, self-advocacy, and employment related skills in preparation for the “real world”. I mainly helped deaf college students find resources on their campuses like the counseling center, center for academic resources, disability and student accessibility services, and etc.

References

Senghas, Ann, and Marie Coppola. “Children Creating Language: How Nicaraguan Sign

Language Acquired a Spatial Grammar.” Psychological Science, vol. 12, no. 4, 2001, pp. 323–328., doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00359.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.00359

[signlanguage-forthe-mindandbody]

Iconicity & Semantic Relatedness in Sign Language

I did not realize how lucky I was to be able to communicate with words until taking this course. My cousins went to a deaf school from the ages of five to eleven. Neither of my cousins are deaf but my Aunt and Uncle wanted them to be exposed to children who learned differently because they thought it would be beneficial to their learning experiences. Due to this, my sister and I learned sign language as well so that we could help them with homework and communicate with them. This research discusses iconicity in signs. Some signs are non-iconic which in simpler terms means that it is harder to realize what they mean because they are not as obvious as other signs like“love” for example. Love in my opinion is obvious because a lot of people know it. There is even an iPhone emoji for it. To sign love you put up your pinky finger, pointer finger and thumb.

There are some important terms discussed in the research that it is important to define. Priming is defined as the implicit memory effect. This is with exposure to a stimulus influence to a later stimulus. In psychology specifically it is used to train someone’s memory, in positive and negative ways.  Priming is when exposure to one thing can later alter a behavior or a thought. Lexical priming effects have been found for words that are phonologically, morphologically, or semantically related. Priming effects provide evidence for how linguistic information is structured and accessed in the mental lexicon. Identifying modality-independent and modality-specific effects is imperative for knowing what aspects of lexical processing are universal to all written languages. Along with documenting how the characteristics of sign versus speech shape lexical access and word recognition. Sign phonology is not based on sound and does not involve oral articulation. It is not clear why different priming patterns are observed for different phonological units in sign language. Iconicity is the form of a sign and its meaning. Lastly, Modality is the model quality. This is a particular mode in which something exists or is experienced or expressed.

There were a couple of words throughout this study that I knew but needed a little more clarification for. These words were iconicity, semantic, lexical, priming, and priming effect, and modality. The goal of this study was to replicate the semantic priming effects initially observed in the article. The other goal of this study was to examine a modality-specific semantic property of sign language. Semantic is the study of meaning in language, this is concerned with like-words, phrases, signs, and symbols. Lexical is relating to the words or vocabulary of a language.

In this study there were twenty deaf signers, six were men and fourteen were women. All participants were exposed to American Sign Language or ASL by the age of five years. All but three participants had at least one deaf signing parent or older sibling. All participants used ASL on a daily basis as their primary or preferred form of communication. Sixty-eight hearing participants with no knowledge of ASL rated a large corpus of ASL signs for iconicity and semantic relatedness. An additional five deaf signers who did not participate in the experiment provided iconicity, semantic relatedness, and familiarity ratings for the stimuli. The target sign PIANO was primed equally by the iconic sign GUITAR and the non-iconic sign MUSIC.

Semantically related and unrelated prime-target sign pairs were created in which the prime was either iconic or non-iconic. The first set was designed to find out whether iconicity emphasized semantic priming. The second set was designed to find out whether iconic signs were recognized faster than non-iconic signs in a lexical decision task. When both are preceded by primes that are semantically unrelated. Participants were instructed in ASL to decide whether the second sign of each pair was a true ASL sign. They responded by pressing the appropriate button which was marked either a green “YES” or a red “NO”. Each participant did this twelve times.

The results showed targets preceded by semantically related primes were responded to significantly faster than targets preceded by unrelated primes. The iconicity of the prime did not increase the priming effect. There was no difference between response latency for targets preceded by iconic vs. non-iconic primes. The amount of priming created by iconic and non-iconic semantically related primes was basically identical. 

Psycholinguistic research has shown both similarities and differences in lexical access and representation for signed and spoken languages. Lexical access for both involves a sequential mapping process. Both words and signs must be phonologically decoded and encoded. Lexical access for sign language involves a two-stage recognition process where one set of elements are initially assessed and identified then that leads to lexical recognition. This occurs earlier for signs than words because of the high degree of simultaneous phonological structure. Although phonological organization differs by modality, the organization of lexical semantic structure does not.

In conclusion, iconicity did not increase the priming effect. Iconic signs were not recognized faster or more accurately than non-iconic signs. These confirm the existence of semantic priming for sign language. Iconicity does not play a robust role in on-line lexical processing. Signers were faster when making lexical decisions to signs that were preceded by a semantically related prime than by an unrelated prime. Semantic priming is a universal linguistic process that is unaffected by language. 

Earlier I talked about how my cousins and I learned sign language. I think this was overall an amazing idea on my Aunt and Uncle’s part. I would not go as far as to say that I can sign perfectly but I can sign enough to help my cousins with homework. I would also be able to help someone navigate and be able to make life a lot easier for them. This relates to iconicity. We learned sign language by studying symbols, objects, images, and events. This allowed me to understand signs and symbols between me and my instructor.

References

Bosworth, R. G., & Emmorey, K. (2010). Effects of iconicity and semantic relatedness on lexical 

access in american sign language. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,

Memory, and Cognition, 36(6), 1573-1581. doi: 10.1037/a0020934