Differentiating between early-onset bipolar disorder (BD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can be difficult. Memory problems are commonly reported in BD, and forgetfulness is among the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. We compared children and adolescents with BD (n = 23), ADHD combined type (ADHD-C; n = 26), BD + ADHD-C (n = 15),…

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word…

The current study tested the assumption that bilinguals with dementia regress to using primarily the dominant language. Spanish-English bilinguals with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD; n = 29), and matched bilingual controls (n = 42) named Boston Naming Test pictures in their dominant and nondominant languages. Surprisingly, differences between…

Williams syndrome (WS), a neurodevelopmental genetic disorder due to a microdeletion in chromosome 7, is described as displaying an intriguing socio-cognitive phenotype. Deficits in prosody production and comprehension have been consistently reported in behavioral studies. It remains, however, to be clarified the neurobiological processes…

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of an intervention program aimed to improve reading and spelling ability through instruction in morphological awareness together with other forms of linguistic awareness, including knowledge of phonology, orthography, syntax, and semantics. Method: Sixteen children aged between 8;07 (years;months) and…

This study investigated the effects of an instructional procedure which incorporated lexical cohesion and macrorules to promote main idea comprehension of Thai EFL students. One hundred and six undergraduate students taking a reading module were randomly assigned to one of three teaching conditions: the combined use of lexical cohesion and…

In order to explore the impact of a degraded semantic system on the structure of language production, we analysed transcripts from autobiographical memory interviews to identify naturally-occurring speech errors by eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched normal speakers. Relative to controls, patients were significantly…

A decrease in verbal short-term memory (STM) capacity is consistently observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Although this impairment has been mainly attributed to attentional deficits during encoding and maintenance, the progressive deterioration of semantic knowledge in early stages of AD may also be an important determinant of poor…

Developmental dyslexia is a highly prevalent and specific disorder of reading acquisition characterised by impaired reading fluency and comprehension. We have previously identified fMRI- and ERP-based neural markers of impaired sentence reading in dyslexia that indicated both deviant basic word processing and deviant semantic incongruency…

Clinical and imaging studies suggest that the cerebellum is involved in language tasks, but the extent to which slowed language production in cerebellar patients contributes to their poor performance on these tasks is not clear. We explored this relationship in 18 patients with cerebellar degeneration and 16 healthy controls who completed measures…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether a physiological measure of impaired use of context could be obtained in people with Asperger's Syndrome (AS). The experimental paradigm employed was the use of electroencephalography to measure the detection of semantic incongruity within written sentences, as indexed by an N400 event-related…

It has been hypothesized that nouns and verbs are processed within relatively separable semantic memory networks. Although abnormal semantic processing is a common feature of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, no prior studies have specifically examined the comparability of noun and verb generation deficits in schizophrenia. In the current study,…

The paper first describes a web-based essay critiquing system developed by the authors using latent semantic analysis (LSA), an automatic text analysis technique, to provide students with immediate feedback on content and organisation for revision whenever there is an internet connection. It reports on its effectiveness in enhancing adult EFL…

There is a consensus that Alzheimer's disease (AD) impairs semantic information, with one of the first markers being anomia i.e. an impaired ability to name items. Doubts remain, however, about whether this naming impairment differentially affects items from the living and nonliving knowledge domains. Most studies have reported an impairment for…

Free recall in adults with Asperger's Syndrome (AS) was compared with that in matched controls in an experiment including semantically similar, phonologically similar and unrelated word lists. Without supportive instructions, adults with AS were significantly impaired in their recall of phonologically and semantically related lists, but not…