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Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Jan 2022Although we can learn new information while asleep, we usually cannot consciously remember the sleep-formed memories - presumably because learning occurred in an...
Although we can learn new information while asleep, we usually cannot consciously remember the sleep-formed memories - presumably because learning occurred in an unconscious state. Here, we ask whether sleep-learning expedites the subsequent awake-learning of the same information. To answer this question, we reanalyzed data (Züst et al., 2019, Curr Biol) from napping participants, who learned new semantic associations between pseudowords and translation-words (guga-ship) while in slow-wave sleep. They retrieved sleep-formed associations unconsciously on an implicit memory test following awakening. Then, participants took five runs of paired-associative learning to probe carry-over effects of sleep-learning on awake-learning. Surprisingly, sleep-learning diminished awake-learning when participants learned semantic associations that were congruent to sleep-learned associations (guga-boat). Yet, learning associations that conflicted with sleep-learned associations (guga-coin) was unimpaired relative to learning new associations (resun-table; baseline). We speculate that the impeded wake-learning originated in a deficient synaptic downscaling and resulting synaptic saturation in neurons that were activated during both sleep-learning and awake-learning.
Topics: Adult; Association Learning; Female; Humans; Learning; Male; Mental Recall; Sleep; Vocabulary; Wakefulness; Young Adult
PubMed: 34863922
DOI: 10.1016/j.nlm.2021.107569 -
Developmental Science May 2022Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities...
Mutualism is a developmental theory that posits positive reciprocal relationships between distinct cognitive abilities during development. It predicts that abilities such as language and reasoning will influence each other's rates of growth. This may explain why children with Language Disorders also tend to have lower than average non-verbal cognitive abilities, as poor language would limit the rate of growth of other cognitive skills. The current study tests whether language and non-verbal reasoning show mutualistic coupling in children with and without language disorder using three waves of data from a longitudinal cohort study that over-sampled children with poor language at school entry (N = 501, 7-13 years). Bivariate Latent Change Score models were used to determine whether early receptive vocabulary predicted change in non-verbal reasoning and vice-versa. Models that included mutualistic coupling parameters between vocabulary and non-verbal reasoning showed superior fit to models without these parameters, replicating previous findings. Specifically, children with higher initial language abilities showed greater growth in non-verbal ability and vice versa. Multi-group models suggested that coupling between language and non-verbal reasoning was equally strong in children with language disorder and those without. This indicates that language has downstream effects on other cognitive abilities, challenging the existence of selective language impairments. Future intervention studies should test whether improving language skills in children with language disorder has positive impacts on other cognitive abilities (and vice versa), and low non-verbal IQ should not be a barrier to accessing such intervention.
Topics: Child; Humans; Intellectual Disability; Language; Language Development Disorders; Language Disorders; Language Tests; Longitudinal Studies; Symbiosis; Vocabulary
PubMed: 34862694
DOI: 10.1111/desc.13208 -
Journal of Intellectual Disability... Jan 2022This study examined the association between executive functioning and language in young adults with Down syndrome (DS).
BACKGROUND
This study examined the association between executive functioning and language in young adults with Down syndrome (DS).
METHOD
Nineteen young adults with DS (aged 19-24 years) completed standardised measures of overall cognition, vocabulary, verbal fluency and executive function skills.
RESULTS
Friedman's analysis of variance (χ (3) = 28.15, P < .001) and post hoc comparisons indicated that, on average, participants had a significantly lower overall non-verbal than verbal cognitive age equivalent and lower expressive than receptive vocabulary skills. Using Spearman correlations, performance on a verbal measure of cognition inhibition was significantly negatively related to receptive vocabulary (ρ = -.529, adjusted P = .036) and verbal fluency (ρ = -.608, adjusted P = .022). Attention was significantly positively correlated with receptive (ρ = .698, adjusted-p = .005) and expressive (ρ = .542, adjusted P = .027) vocabulary. Verbal working memory was significantly positively associated with receptive vocabulary (ρ = .585, adjusted P = .022) and verbal fluency (ρ = .737, adjusted P = .003). Finally, visuospatial working memory was significantly associated with receptive vocabulary (ρ = .562, adjusted P = .027).
CONCLUSIONS
Verbal and non-verbal measures of executive functioning skills had important associations with language ability in young adults with DS. Future translational research is needed to investigate causal pathways underlying these relationships. Research should explore if interventions aimed at increasing executive functioning skills (e.g. attention, inhibition and working memory) have the potential to lead to increases in language for young adults with DS.
Topics: Down Syndrome; Executive Function; Humans; Language; Memory, Short-Term; Vocabulary; Young Adult
PubMed: 34288180
DOI: 10.1111/jir.12868 -
Journal of Speech, Language, and... Sep 2023This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English.
PURPOSE
This study explored approaches for measuring vocabulary among bilingual children with varying levels of proficiency in Spanish and English.
METHOD
One hundred fifteen kindergarten and first-grade Spanish-English-speaking children completed measures of vocabulary and sentence repetition in Spanish and English. Scores were derived from their responses to the vocabulary measure: Spanish-only vocabulary, English-only vocabulary, conceptual vocabulary, and total vocabulary. Best language sentence repetition was also obtained. Using both visualization of data and statistical analysis, we tested for potential associations between children's relative language skills in Spanish and English and the scores they received on each of the vocabulary metrics.
RESULTS
Participants' single-language vocabulary scores were linearly associated with their relative language scores. Higher relative Spanish language skills corresponded with higher Spanish-only vocabulary scores, and higher English language skills corresponded with higher English-only vocabulary scores. A quadratic association between children's relative language and their conceptual vocabulary scores was observed. Children with more balanced skills in Spanish and English received lower scores for conceptual vocabulary. No association between total vocabulary and relative language was observed.
CONCLUSIONS
Results revealed evidence of differential test bias for single-language vocabulary scores and conceptual vocabulary scores. Spanish-only vocabulary underestimated knowledge of participants with higher English proficiency, whereas English-only vocabulary underestimated knowledge of participants with higher Spanish proficiency. Conceptual scoring yielded lower values for participants with relatively balanced proficiency in Spanish and English. There is need for further consideration of score and test functioning across the full continuum of bilinguals with dynamic proficiencies in each of their languages.
SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL
https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.23796330.
Topics: Child; Humans; Vocabulary; Multilingualism; Hispanic or Latino; Language Tests; Language
PubMed: 37541317
DOI: 10.1044/2023_JSLHR-22-00573 -
Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) Jul 2022Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) can significantly improve performance over audio-only recognition for small or medium vocabularies. However, current AVSR, whether...
Audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR) can significantly improve performance over audio-only recognition for small or medium vocabularies. However, current AVSR, whether hybrid or end-to-end (E2E), still does not appear to make optimal use of this secondary information stream as the performance is still clearly diminished in noisy conditions for large-vocabulary systems. We, therefore, propose a new fusion architecture-the decision fusion net (DFN). A broad range of time-variant reliability measures are used as an auxiliary input to improve performance. The DFN is used in both hybrid and E2E models. Our experiments on two large-vocabulary datasets, the Lip Reading Sentences 2 and 3 (LRS2 and LRS3) corpora, show highly significant improvements in performance over previous AVSR systems for large-vocabulary datasets. The hybrid model with the proposed DFN integration component even outperforms dynamic stream-weighting, which is considered to be the theoretical upper bound for conventional dynamic stream-weighting approaches. Compared to the hybrid audio-only model, the proposed DFN achieves a relative word-error-rate reduction of 51% on average, while the E2E-DFN model, with its more competitive audio-only baseline system, achieves a relative word error rate reduction of 43%, both showing the efficacy of our proposed fusion architecture.
Topics: Recognition, Psychology; Reproducibility of Results; Speech; Speech Perception; Vocabulary
PubMed: 35898005
DOI: 10.3390/s22155501 -
CoDAS 2021to identify linguistic performance (expressive vocabulary, phonology and narrative) and cognitive performance (Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM)) of preschoolers living in...
PURPOSE
to identify linguistic performance (expressive vocabulary, phonology and narrative) and cognitive performance (Verbal Short-Term Memory (VSTM)) of preschoolers living in a quilombola community.
METHODS
Twenty-four quilombola preschoolers aged four (4) and five (5) years with no complaints in language development participated in the study. Most families were in the D-E class and maternal and paternal education was lower than high school. Their guardians answered a questionnaire about their previous development, family practices and socioeconomic aspects, while the assessment included tests of expressive vocabulary, phonology, narrative and verbal short-term memory. The data collected were subjected to descriptive statistical analysis to characterize family practices, socioeconomic aspects and linguistic and cognitive performance, inferential analysis used Fisher's exact test to compare performance between subjects aged 4 and 5 years and also to compare performance according to family practices.
RESULTS
78.3% of preschoolers performed adequately in vocabulary and 79.2% in phonology; and 63.6% had the narrative classified as descriptive. 82.6% had a VSTM task performance below the expected for age.
CONCLUSION
Although the preschoolers in this study had functional communication, their profile of language development and cognitive skills was more vulnerable and may have an impact on their school trajectory.
Topics: Child; Humans; Language; Language Development; Language Tests; Memory, Short-Term; Vocabulary
PubMed: 34932656
DOI: 10.1590/2317-1782/20212020048 -
AMIA ... Annual Symposium Proceedings.... 2021Finding concepts in large clinical ontologies can be challenging when queries use different vocabularies. A search algorithm that overcomes this problem is useful in...
Finding concepts in large clinical ontologies can be challenging when queries use different vocabularies. A search algorithm that overcomes this problem is useful in applications such as concept normalisation and ontology matching, where concepts can be referred to in different ways, using different synonyms. In this paper, we present a deep learning based approach to build a semantic search system for large clinical ontologies. We propose a Triplet-BERT model and a method that generates training data directly from the ontologies. The model is evaluated using five real benchmark data sets and the results show that our approach achieves high results on both free text to concept and concept to concept searching tasks, and outperforms all baseline methods.
Topics: Algorithms; Biological Ontologies; Humans; Semantics; Vocabulary; Vocabulary, Controlled
PubMed: 35308904
DOI: No ID Found -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Jan 2023In the second year of life, infants begin to rapidly acquire the lexicon of their native language. A key learning mechanism underlying this acceleration is syntactic...
In the second year of life, infants begin to rapidly acquire the lexicon of their native language. A key learning mechanism underlying this acceleration is syntactic bootstrapping: the use of hidden cues in grammar to facilitate vocabulary learning. How infants forge the syntactic-semantic links that underlie this mechanism, however, remains speculative. A hurdle for theories is identifying computationally light strategies that have high precision within the complexity of the linguistic signal. Here, we presented 20-mo-old infants with novel grammatical elements in a complex natural language environment and measured their resultant vocabulary expansion. We found that infants can learn and exploit a natural language syntactic-semantic link in less than 30 min. The rapid speed of acquisition of a new syntactic bootstrap indicates that even emergent syntactic-semantic links can accelerate language learning. The results suggest that infants employ a cognitive network of efficient learning strategies to self-supervise language development.
Topics: Humans; Infant; Semantics; Learning; Language; Vocabulary; Linguistics; Language Development
PubMed: 36574655
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2209153119 -
The British Journal of Educational... Mar 2021Executive functions have been proposed to account for individual variation in reading comprehension beyond the contributions of decoding skills and language skills....
BACKGROUND
Executive functions have been proposed to account for individual variation in reading comprehension beyond the contributions of decoding skills and language skills. However, insight into the direct and indirect effects of multiple executive functions on fifth-grade reading comprehension, while accounting for decoding and language skills, is limited.
AIM
The present study investigated the direct and indirect effects of fourth-grade executive functions (i.e., working memory, inhibition, and planning) on fifth-grade reading comprehension, after accounting for decoding and language skills.
SAMPLE
The sample included 113 fourth-grade children (including 65 boys and 48 girls; Age M = 9.89; SD = .44 years).
METHODS
The participants were tested on their executive functions (working memory, inhibition and planning), and their decoding skills, language skills (vocabulary and syntax knowledge) and reading comprehension, one year later.
RESULTS
Using structural equation modelling, the results indicated direct effects of working memory and planning on reading comprehension, as well as indirect effects of working memory and inhibition via decoding (χ = 2.46).
CONCLUSIONS
The results of the present study highlight the importance of executive functions for reading comprehension after taking variance in decoding and language skills into account: Both working memory and planning uniquely contributed to reading comprehension. In addition, working memory and inhibition also supported decoding. As a practical implication, educational professionals should not only consider the decoding and language skills children bring into the classroom, but their executive functions as well.
Topics: Child; Comprehension; Executive Function; Female; Humans; Male; Memory, Short-Term; Reading; Vocabulary
PubMed: 32441782
DOI: 10.1111/bjep.12355 -
International Journal of Environmental... Jan 2021Children from low-SES (socioeconomic status) and minority language immigrant families are at risk of vocabulary difficulties due to the less varied and complex language...
Children from low-SES (socioeconomic status) and minority language immigrant families are at risk of vocabulary difficulties due to the less varied and complex language in the home environment. Children are less likely to be involved in home language activities (HLA) in interaction with adults in low-SES than in higher-SES families. However, few studies have investigated the HLA variability among low-SES, minority language bilingual immigrant families. This longitudinal study analyzes the frequency and duration of HLA and their predictive roles for expressive vocabulary acquisition in 70 equivalent low-SES monolingual and bilingual toddlers from minority contexts. HLA and vocabulary were assessed at 24 and 30 months in the majority language (Italian) and in total (majority+minority language) using parent and teacher reports. The frequency and duration of HLA in interaction with adults in total, but not in the majority language, at 24 months were similar for the two groups. These activities uniquely accounted for expressive vocabulary at 30 months, after accounting for total vocabulary at 24 months, in both groups. In conclusion, a minority-majority language context is not an additional risk factor for vocabulary acquisition if HLA is considered in interaction with adults in both languages. HLA are proximal environmental protective factors for vocabulary acquisition.
Topics: Emigrants and Immigrants; Female; Humans; Infant; Italy; Language; Language Development; Longitudinal Studies; Male; Multilingualism; Poverty; Vocabulary
PubMed: 33401547
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph18010296