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INTRODUCTION: Patients with Alzheimer's disease present with difficulty in lexical retrieval and reversal of the concreteness effect in nouns. Little is known about the phenomena before the onset of symptoms. We anticipate early linguistic signs in the speech of people who suffer from amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Here, we report the results of a corpus‐linguistic approach to the early detection of cognitive impairment. METHODS: One hundred forty‐eight English‐speaking Singaporeans provided natural speech data, on topics of their choice; 74 were diagnosed with single‐domain MCI (38 amnestic, 36 non‐amnestic), 74 cognitively healthy. The recordings yield 267,310 words, which are tagged for parts of speech. We calculate the per‐minute word counts and concreteness scores of all tagged words, nouns, and verbs in the dataset. RESULTS: Compared to controls, subjects with amnestic MCI produce fewer but more abstract nouns. Verbs are not affected. DISCUSSION: Slower retrieval of nouns and the reversal of the concreteness effect in nouns are manifested in natural speech and can be detected early through corpus‐based analysis. Highlights: Reversal of the concreteness effect is manifested in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and semantic dementia.The paper reports a corpus‐based analysis of natural speech by people with amnestic and non‐amnestic mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and cognitively healthy controls.People with amnestic MCI produce fewer and more abstract nouns than people with non‐amnestic MCI and healthy controls. Verbs appear to be unaffected.The imageability problem can be detected in natural everyday speech by people with amnestic MCI, which carries a higher risk of conversion to AD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sought to obtain comprehensive data on the difficulty level of kun‐reading (native Japanese reading) of Japanese kanji (Chinese characters adapted for Japanese) learned in junior high and high school. Drawing from an item‐based analysis, it explored the word variables related to the difficulty level of kun‐reading. A reading test comprising 645 kun‐readings of common kanji learned in junior high and high school was administered to 123 university students. Tobit regressions were conducted for the total, okurigana (phonetic kana letters suffix written after kanji), and single kanji items, using the word variables as independent variables and the reading accuracy as the dependent variable. Significant positive contributions were observed for imageability and word frequency for all item categories, kun‐reading ratio for the single kanji items, and okurigana ratio for the total items. A significant negative contribution was observed for okurigana neighborhood size for the okurigana items. The results highlighted the need for education focusing on the meanings of kanji characters, and for a language policy for the use of the okurigana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In opaque orthographies, such as English, children with low reading skills tend to rely more on semantic information due to their inadequate acquisition of sub‐lexical knowledge. This tendency has also been reported for kanji, a non‐alphabetic and opaque Japanese orthography. However, previous studies on this phenomenon have had methodological limitations, such as a small number of stimuli in reading tests and insufficient investigation of a consistency effect. This study addressed these limitations and aimed to clarify whether Japanese children with low reading accuracy are characterised by a stronger reliance on semantic information and a smaller contribution to the reading process based on character‐to‐sound correspondences to the kanji word‐reading performance than children with high reading accuracy in reading kanji words. Methods: A total of 129 Japanese students in the fifth and sixth grades participated in this study, and 11 of them had been previously diagnosed with developmental dyslexia. They read an experimenter‐created list of kanji words. We tested how frequency, imageability and consistency of character‐to‐sound correspondences affected children's reading accuracy and error types and how the effects of these variables were modulated by reading accuracy level. Results: For children with lower reading accuracy, the frequency and consistency effects on reading accuracy decreased, whereas the imageability effect was stronger. Children with low reading accuracy frequently did not respond, whereas children with high reading accuracy made word substitution and legitimate alternative reading of component (LARC) errors frequently. Conclusions: The reading processing of children with low reading accuracy is characterised by a stronger reliance on semantic information and a smaller contribution of a reading process based on character‐to‐sound correspondences to reading performance than that of children with high reading accuracy. Reading characteristics of children with low reading accuracy might be due to their inadequate lexical and sub‐word knowledge. Highlights: What is already known about this topicJapanese children with developmental dyslexia show a larger imageability effect than children without reading deficits, thus suggesting a heavier reliance on semantic information when reading kanji words (Akashi et al., 2013).Compared with Japanese children without reading deficits, Japanese children with developmental dyslexia frequently make two types of errors: word substitution errors (i.e. reading a target word as another word) and no response (Akashi et al., 2013).The percentage of legitimate alternative reading of component (LARC) errors in Japanese children with developmental dyslexia was lower compared with their peers without reading deficits, which suggests a lack of sub‐word knowledge, that is, character‐to‐sound correspondences (Akashi et al., 2013). What this paper addsIn addition to a larger imageability effect and fewer LARC errors, the reading performance of children with low reading scores was characterised by smaller effects of frequency and consistency on reading accuracy compared with children with high reading scores.In addition to LARC errors, children with high reading scores made word substitution errors more frequently than those with low reading scores, which is inconsistent with Akashi et al. (2013).This study showed that a process using semantic information and one based on character‐to‐sound correspondences could affect reading accuracy in Japanese children. Implications for theory, policy or practiceThis study elucidated the kanji word‐reading characteristics of children with low reading scores. The results will enable teachers to identify children who have difficulty reading kanji words based on their reading characteristics.Our findings suggest that we should develop kanji word‐reading interventions to improve sub‐word and lexical reading skills in Japanese children with low reading accuracy because their reading characteristics are mostly affected by a lack of orthography–phonology correspondences at the word and sub‐word levels. To improve sub‐word reading skills, teachers can teach multiple pronunciations of each character and which pronunciation of a character is the most frequent among compound words with the character. To improve lexical reading skills, focusing on orthography–phonology and orthography–semantics associations at the word level by looking at a printed word, pronouncing it and saying its meaning multiple times may be helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyzed a Japanese lexical database to investigate the structure of the lexical environment based on the hypothesis that the lexical environment is optimized for the functioning of verbal working memory. Our prediction was that, as a consequence of the cultural transmission of language, low‐imageable meanings tend to be represented by frequent phonological patterns in the current vocabulary rather than infrequent phonological patterns. This prediction was based on two findings of previous laboratory studies on verbal working memory. (1) The quality of phonological (phonemic and accent) representations in verbal working memory depends on phonological regularity knowledge; therefore, short‐term phonological representations are less robust for words with infrequent phonological patterns. (2) Phonological representations are underpinned by contributions from semantic knowledge; therefore, phonological representations of highly imageable words are more robust than those for low‐imageable words. Our database analyses show that nouns with less imageable meanings tend to be associated with more frequent phonological patterns in Japanese vocabulary. This lexical structure can maintain the quality of phonological representations in verbal working memory through contributions of semantic and phonological regularity knowledge. Larger semantic contributions compensate for the less robust phonological representations of infrequent phonological forms. The quality of phonological representations is preserved by phonological regularity knowledge when larger semantic contributions are not expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbal fluency is a cognitive function reflecting executive functions and the ability to retrieve the appropriate information from memory quickly. Previous studies reported conflicting results—impaired and intact verbal fluency—in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Most studies concentrate on overall word productivity, errors, perseverations, clustering, or switching. We used a comprehensive approach to evaluate the reported discrepancy in the literature and introduced a new angle using the concept of word abstraction and imageability. Moreover, we analyzed the performance in two‐time intervals (0–30 s and 31–60 s) to assess the temporal dynamics of verbal fluency and a possible activation or initiation deficit in autism. Sixteen adults with ASD and 16 neurotypical control participants, matched by gender, age, and education level, participated in our study. Contrary to our expectations, we did not find a significant difference between groups in word productivity, the number of errors, clustering, or temporal dynamics, neither in semantic nor in phonemic fluency tasks. Surprisingly, the two study groups' performance did not differ in terms of imageability or concreteness characteristics either. Our results raise the possibility that verbal fluency performance is intact in autism. We also suggest using a comprehensive approach when measuring fluency in autism. Lay summary: People with autism tend to think and communicate differently. In our study, we tested whether people with autism come up with more concrete or imageable words and whether their performance is better compared with neurotypicals in the beginning or in the later phase of a task measuring how many words they can produce in a minute. We did not detect any difference between the two groups; however, we recommend studying verbal fluency in autism from more and different angles in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic differences, abstract and concrete words are also marked by distinct morphophonological structures such as length and morphological complexity. Native English speakers show sensitivity to these markers in tasks such as auditory word recognition and naming. One unanswered question is whether this violation of arbitrariness reflects an idiosyncratic property of the English lexicon or whether word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across other natural languages. We isolated concrete and abstract English nouns ( N = 400), and translated each into Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Mandarin, Hindi, Korean, Hebrew, and American Sign Language. We conducted offline acoustic analyses of abstract and concrete word length discrepancies across languages. In a separate experiment, native English speakers ( N = 56) with no prior knowledge of these foreign languages judged concreteness of these nouns (e.g., Can you see, hear, feel, or touch this? Yes/No). Each naïve participant heard pre-recorded words presented in randomized blocks of three foreign languages following a brief listening exposure to a narrative sample from each respective language. Concrete and abstract words differed by length across five of eight languages, and prediction accuracy exceeded chance for four of eight languages. These results suggest that word concreteness is a marked phenomenon across several of the world's most widely spoken languages. We interpret these findings as supportive of an adaptive cognitive heuristic that allows listeners to exploit non-arbitrary mappings of word form to word meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Impairments of word recognition in Alzheimer's disease ( AD) have been less widely investigated than impairments affecting word retrieval and production. In particular, we know little about what makes individual words easier or harder for patients with AD to recognize. We used a lexical selection task in which participants were shown sets of four items, each set consisting of one word and three non-words. The task was simply to point to the word on each trial. Forty patients with mild-to-moderate AD were significantly impaired on this task relative to matched controls who made very few errors. The number of patients with AD able to recognize each word correctly was predicted by the frequency, age of acquisition, and imageability of the words, but not by their length or number of orthographic neighbours. Patient Mini-Mental State Examination and phonological fluency scores also predicted the number of words recognized. We propose that progressive degradation of central semantic representations in AD differentially affects the ability to recognize low-imageability, low-frequency, late-acquired words, with the same factors affecting word recognition as affecting word retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are a number of long-standing theories on how the cognitive processing of abstract words, like 'life', differs from that of concrete words, like 'knife'. This review considers current perspectives on this debate, focusing particularly on insights obtained from patients with language disorders and integrating these with evidence from functional neuroimaging studies. The evidence supports three distinct and mutually compatible hypotheses. (1) Concrete and abstract words differ in their representational substrates, with concrete words depending particularly on sensory experiences and abstract words on linguistic, emotional, and magnitude-based information. Differential dependence on visual versus verbal experience is supported by the evidence for graded specialization in the anterior temporal lobes for concrete versus abstract words. In addition, concrete words have richer representations, in line with better processing of these words in most aphasic patients and, in particular, patients with semantic dementia. (2) Abstract words place greater demands on executive regulation processes because they have variable meanings that change with context. This theory explains abstract word impairments in patients with semantic-executive deficits and is supported by neuroimaging studies showing greater response to abstract words in inferior prefrontal cortex. (3) The relationships between concrete words are governed primarily by conceptual similarity, while those of abstract words depend on association to a greater degree. This theory, based primarily on interference and priming effects in aphasic patients, is the most recent to emerge and the least well understood. I present analyses indicating that patterns of lexical co-occurrence may be important in understanding these effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical-semantic variables (such as word frequency, imageability and age of acquisition) have been studied extensively in neuropsychology to address the structure of the word production system. The evidence available on this issue is still rather controversial, mainly because of the very complex interrelations between lexical-semantic variables. Moreover, it is not clear whether the results obtained in Indo-European languages also hold in languages with a completely different structure and script, such as Chinese. The objective of the present study is to investigate this specific issue by studying the effect of word frequency, imageability, age of acquisition, visual complexity of the stimuli, grammatical class and morphological structure in word and picture naming in Chinese. The effect of these variables on naming and reading accuracy of healthy and brain-damaged individuals is evaluated using mixed-effect models, a statistical technique that allows to model both fixed and random effects; this feature substantially enhances the statistical power of the technique, so that several variables - and their complex interrelations - can be handled effectively in a unique analysis. We found that grammatical class interacts consistently across tasks with morphological structure: all participants, both healthy and brain-damaged, found simple nouns significantly easier to read and name than complex nouns, whereas simple and complex verbs were of comparable difficulty. We also found that imageability was a strong predictor in picture naming, but not in word naming, whereas the contrary held true for age of acquisition. These results are taken to indicate the existence of a morphological level of processing in the Chinese word production system, and that reading aloud may occur along a non-semantic route (either lexical or sub-lexical) in this language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Category-specific brain activation distinguishing between semantic word types has imposed challenges on theories of semantic representations and processes. However, existing metabolic imaging data are still ambiguous about whether these category-specific activations reflect processes involved in accessing the semantic representation of the stimuli, or secondary processes such as deliberate mental imagery. Further information about the response characteristics of category-specific activation is still required. Our study for the first time investigated the differential impact of word frequency on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) responses to action-related words and visually related words, respectively. First, we corroborated previous results showing that action-relatedness modulates neural responses in action-related areas, while word imageability modulates activation in object processing areas. Second, we provide novel results showing that activation negatively correlated with word frequency in the left fusiform gyrus was specific for visually related words, while in the left middle temporal gyrus word frequency effects emerged only for action-related words. Following the dominant view in the literature that effects of word frequency mainly reflect access to lexico-semantic information, we suggest that category-specific brain activation reflects distributed neuronal ensembles, which ground language and concepts in perception-action systems of the human brain. Our approach can be applied to any event-related data using single-stimulus presentation, and allows a detailed characterization of the functional role of category-specific activation patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words associated with perceptually salient, highly imageable concepts are learned earlier in life, more accurately recalled, and more rapidly named than abstract words (R. W. Brown, 1976; Walker & Hulme, 1999). Theories accounting for this concreteness effect have focused exclusively on semantic properties of word referents. A novel possibility is that word structure may also contribute to the effect. We report a corpus‐based analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of a large set of nouns with imageability ratings (N = 2,023). High‐ and low‐imageability nouns differed by length, etymology, prosody, affixation, phonological neighborhood density, and rates of consonant clustering. On average, nouns denoting abstract concepts were longer, more derivationally complex, and emerged in English from a different distribution of languages than did concrete nouns. We address implications for interactivity of word form and meaning as pertain to theories of word concreteness, lexical acquisition, and word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we make a fundamental distinction between literacy attainment scores and the actual process of learning to read, and examine these two aspects of reading in atypical development. Reading skills in a group of children and adults with the genetic disorder Williams syndrome (WS) were compared to a group of typically developing children matched for reading age and receptive vocabulary scores. Study 1 focused on the product of reading and explored the relationship between reading, general cognition, and phonological skills. Phonological skills were shown to be related to individual differences in reading attainment in both groups, although more weakly in the WS group. Experiment 2 examined the process of learning to read. The two groups were taught to associate abbreviated spellings (cues) with spoken words. The cues differed in their phonetic closeness to the target words, whereas the target words differed on the semantic variable of imageability. Compared to controls, the WS group showed slower learning, less sensitivity to the phonetic quality of the cue, and reduced influence from the imageability of words. The results support the hypothesis that although reading levels in WS depend on phonological skills, the full development of their reading is compromised by weak semantics. The studies highlight the importance in atypical populations of examining both reading levels and the actual process of learning to read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]