Agnes Lukacs

Abstract: Williams syndrome (WS) is a rare genetic disorder accompanied by serious damage to numerical abilities. The working of two numerical systems, the analogue amount system and the verbal system, were investigated in Williams syndrome. Three different ...

Ez a kötet kísérletes nyelvészeti tanulmányokat tartalmaz, azaz olyan kutatások eredményeit ismerteti, amelyek egy tág értelemben vett „laboratóriumban" végzett kísérletek eredményein alapulnak. A kötet koncepciója szerint mind a legmodernebb technikai eszközrendszerekkel felszerelt kísérleti laboratóriumi struktúra, mind valamilyen speciális terep (óvoda, iskola, rehabilitációs intézet), mind pedig az internet, például a Facebook is szolgálhat kísérlet lefuttatásának kereteként. A nyelvészetben alkalmazott kísérletek módszertana természetesen követi a tudományos kísérletek általános paradigmáját és megőrzi annak lényeges jegyét: hogy megismételhető, objektív legyen. Amíg számos interdiszciplináris területen, így például a neurolingvisztikában és a pszicholingvisztikában, a tudományos kísérleteket a 19. század óta alkalmazzák, addig az olyan nyelvészeti témákban, mint a nyelvtan készítése, a nyelvleírás, viszonylag újabb fejlemény a kísérletes módszertan alkalmazása. Ezt sok mi...

Purpose:Studies on the interface between statistical learning and language are dominated by its role in word segmentation and association with grammar skills, while research on its role in lexical development is scarce. The current study is aimed at exploring whether and how statistical learning and verbal short-term memory are associated with lexical skills in typically developing German-speaker primary school children (Experiment 1) and Hungarian-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD, Experiment 2).Methods:We used the language-relevant Peabody Picture Vocabulary Tests to measure individual differences in vocabulary. Statistical learning skills were assessed with the Weather Prediction task, in which participants learn probabilistic cue-outcome associations based on item-based feedback. Verbal short-term memory span was assessed with the Forward digit span task.Results:Hierarchical linear regression modelling was used to test the contribution of different func...

Abstract: Williams-syndrome is a rare genetic disorder characterized by a specific developmental profile following damage to a sequence on chromosome 7. A basic feature of the WS cognitive profile is assumed to be a dissociation between verbal and spatial ...

The contrast between regular and irregular inflectional morphology has been useful in investigating the functional and neural architecture of language. However, most studies have examined the regular/irregular distinction in non-agglutinative Indo-European languages (primarily English) with relatively simple morphology. Additionally, the majority of research has focused on verbal rather than nominal inflectional morphology. The present study attempts to address these gaps by introducing both plural and past tense production tasks in Hungarian, an agglutinative non-Indo-European language with complex morphology. Here we report results on these tasks from healthy Hungarian native-speaking adults, in whom we examine regular and irregular nominal and verbal inflection in a within-subjects design. Regular and irregular nouns and verbs were stem on frequency, word length, and phonological structure, and both accuracy and response times were acquired. The results revealed that the regular/...

Research has described several features shared between musical rhythm and speech or language, and experimental studies consistently show associations between performance on tasks in the two domains as well as impaired rhythm processing in children with language disorders. Motivated by these results, in the current study our first aim was to explore whether the activation of the shared system underlying rhythm and language processing with a regular musical rhythm can improve subsequent grammatical processing in preschool-aged Hungarianspeaking children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Second, we investigated whether rhythmic priming is specific to grammar processing by assessing priming in two additional domains: a linguistic but non-grammatical task (picture naming) and a non-linguistic task (nonverbal Stroop task). Third, to confirm that the rhythmic priming effect originates from the facilitating effect of the regular rhythm and not the negative effect of th...

Language in Hungarian children with Williams syndrome Agnes Lukacs*^, Csaba Pleh**, and Mihaly Racsmany** Research Group on Neuropsychology and Psycholinguistics*/ Reseach Institute of Linguisticsf/Budapest University of Technology and Economics*/University of ...

ABSTRACT A magyar nyelv mentális reprezentációjának feltárására irányuló kutatások legfontosabb eredményei a következők: -A kulcskérdését jelentő szabály-elem vitához új adalék, hogy a szabályos és kivételes alakok is előfeszítik egymást; a szabályos alakok előfeszítik a szabálytalan alakokat és ez fordítva is igaz. -A morfológiai komplexitás (a ragok jelenléte) csökkenti a verbális munkamemória-terjedelmet. -A szórend és az esetrag egyformán fontos a cselekvő kiválasztásában 2,5 éveseknél, míg 3,5 éves korra az esetrag lesz a domináns. -A kétnyelvű 12 hónaposok, feltehetően a figyelmi mechanizmusok gyorsabb fejlődésének köszönhetően, a nyelvi ingerekben fellelhető több komplex struktúrát is képesek általánosítani. -A morfológiai produktivitás 2,5 éves gyerekeknél új főneveknél azonnal megmutatkozik, korábban nem hallott ragokkal is; az új igéket csak már hallott alakban tudták jól használni. -A nyelvi fejlődés speciális zavarában még iskoláskorban is jelentős, de feladatfüggő egyeztetésbeli elmaradást tapasztaltunk; valószínűleg feldolgozási nehézség áll a zavar hátterében. -Az új vizsgálóeszközök eredményei szerint a tudatelméleti képesség verbális és nem-nyelvi manifesztációja viszonylag szoros a kapcsolat autizmusban, ám a nem nyelvi szorosabban jelzi előre a szociális és kommunikatív-pragmatikai kompetenciát. -Elkészült a Magyar Webkorpusz gyakorisági keresője és az ehhez tartozó webfelület. -Elkészültek a Magyar Pszicholingvisztika Kézikönyv kéziratai, a kötet szerkesztés alatt áll. | The main results of the research on the mental representation of Hungarian are the following: -A new result in the central theme of rules versus items debate is that in Hungarian, regular and irregular forms prime each other; regulars prime irregulars and vice versa -Verbal working memory span is reduced by morphological complexity (by the presence of inflectional suffixes) -Word order and case markers are equally important in selecting the agent in 2.5-year-olds; by 3.5 years case marking becomes the dominant cue -Bilingual 12 month olds, probably due to faster development of attentional mechanisms, are able to generalize more than one complex structure from the linguistic input -Morphological productivity is evident in 2.5 year olds with novel nouns, even with novel suffixes; they can only use novel verbs in forms they heard them during the experimental session -We observe a significant, but task-specific delay in agreement performance in Specific Language Impairment even in school years; the delay is probably due to a processing difficulty -New tests show that there is a relatively strong relationship between verbal and non-verbal manifestations of theory of mind abilities in autism, but non-verbal performance is a better predictor of social and communicative-pragmatic competence -We developed a web-based search engine for frequencies in the Hungarian Webcorpus -The manuscripts of the Handbook of Hungarian Psycholinguistics are collected for editorial work

A verbális munkamemória feladata a „beszédszerű”információk átmeneti tárolása és frissítése, kapacitásában jelentős egyéni különbségek figyelhetőek meg, amelyek egy sor kognitív funkció működését modulálják. A verbális munkamemória kapacitásának felmérésére számos diagnosztikai eszköz vált széles körben alkalmazottá, de ezek magyar nyelvű változatai eddig csak szórványos kísérleti vizsgálatokban láttak napvilágot. A verbális munkamemória-tárolási és -frissítési komponensei rendkívüli módon érzékenyek az adott információ hosszúságára, kimondási idejére, fonológiai szerveződésére, így az elsősorban angol nyelvű eszközök mutatói csak korlátozottan voltak használhatóak a magyar nyelvű vizsgálatok számára. Kutatócsoportunk ezt a hiányt pótolta, amikor elkészítette a három legismertebb verbális munkamemória-feladat: a számterjedelmi teszt, az álszóteszt és az olvasásterjedelmi teszt magyar nyelvű változatait. Ebben a tanulmányban a feladatsorokkal együtt közreadjuk a feladatokkal kapcsola...

One of the intriguing and sometimes controversial findings in figurative language research is a right-hemisphere processing advantage for novel metaphors. The current divided visual field study introduced novel literal expressions as a control condition to assess processing novelty independent of figurativeness. Participants evaluated word pairs belonging to one of the five categories: (1) conventional metaphorical, (2) conventional literal, (3) novel metaphorical, (4) novel literal, and (5) unrelated expressions in a semantic decision task. We presented expressions without sentence context and controlled for additional factors including emotional valence, arousal, and imageability that could potentially influence hemispheric processing. We also utilized an eye-tracker to ensure lateralized presentation. We did not find the previously reported right-hemispherical processing advantage for novel metaphors. Processing was faster in the left hemisphere for all types of word pairs, and accuracy was also higher in the right visual field - left hemisphere. Novel metaphors were processed just as fast as novel literal expressions, suggesting that the primary challenge during the comprehension of novel expressions is not a serial processing of salience, but perhaps a more left hemisphere weighted semantic integration. Our results cast doubt on the right-hemisphere theory of metaphors, and raise the possibility that other uncontrolled variables were responsible for previous results. The lateralization of processing of two word expressions seems to be more contingent on the specific task at hand than their figurativeness or saliency.

Purpose Hungarian is a null-subject language with both agglutinating and fusional elements in its verb inflection system, and agreement between the verb and object as well as between the verb and subject. These characteristics make this language a good test case for alternative accounts of the grammatical deficits of children with language impairment (LI). Method Twenty-five children with LI and 25 younger children serving as vocabulary controls (VC) repeated sentences whose verb inflections were masked by a cough. The verb inflections marked distinctions according to tense, person, number, and definiteness of the object. Results The children with LI were significantly less accurate than the VC children but generally showed the same performance profile across the inflection types. For both groups of children, the frequency of occurrence of the inflection in the language was a significant predictor of accuracy level. The two groups of children were also similar in their pattern of er...

Williams syndrome (WMS), a rare neurogenetic disorder, has been inthe forefront of research in cognitive psychology for the last ten years.WMS is characterized by a distinctive cognitive prole: mild to moderate mentalretardation with relatively and surprisingly good linguistic abilities, whileperformance on spatial tasks is extremely poor. Concentrating on the linguisticabilities of children and adolescents with WMS, studies of vocabulary developmentand

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8;0 and 21;11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension of spatial terms; and (2) a sentence completion task on case markers in their spatial and non-spatial use. The first study showed poorer performance in the WS group, but similar performance patterns and a special difficulty of SOURCE terms in both groups. We did not find overall group differences in the second study. We argue that WS performance patterns reflect WS spatial abilities and seem to be constrained by the same factors in WS as in TD. Results also lead us to conclude that, contrary to most previous claims, there is no selective deficit of spatial terms within WS language, and they also suggest that not all uses of spatial terms r...

This study examines whether children with specific language impairment (SLI) acquiring a language with a rich case marking system (Hungarian) have difficulty with case, and, if so, whether the difficulty is comparable for spatial and nonspatial meanings. Data were drawn from narrative samples and from a sentence repetition task. Suffixes were tested both in their spatial and nonspatial meanings. Participants with SLI were compared to same-age peers and younger typically developing children matched on receptive vocabulary scores (VC children). Results show that although case marking errors are very rare in spontaneous speech in Hungarian children with SLI, the number of case-marked nouns and of different case markers is significantly lower in children with SLI. In the elicited production task, overall performance of the children with SLI was significantly below that of VC children, but children with SLI and VC children scored higher with spatial than with nonspatial meanings. The res...

Hungarian data provide support for differences in processing regular and irregular morphologies. Stronger priming was observed with “regular” stem types compared to “irregular” ones. Use of nonwords showed a reliance on the grammatical structure of the nonword: Analogical extension of “irregulars” can be observed only in “root” contexts; in other contexts all types were largely overregularized.

We propose that Bloom's focus on cognitive factors involved in word learning still lacks a broader perspective. We emphasize the crucial relevance of working memory in learning elements of language. Specifically, we demonstrate through our data that in impaired populations knowledge of some linguistic elements can be dissociated according to the subcomponent of working memory (visual or verbal) involved in a task. Further, although Bloom's concentration on theory of mind as a precondition for word learning is certainly correct, theory of mind being a necessary condition does not make it a sufficient one. On the basis of our studies we point out the importance of a theory of mind related goal preference in acquiring spatial language. In general, we claim that more specific cognitive preferences and constraints should be outlined in detail for the preconditions of acquiring linguistic elements.

ABSTRACTPrevious studies of children with language impairment (LI) reveal an insensitivity to aspect that may constitute part of the children's deficit. In this study, we examine aspect as well as tense in Hungarian-speaking children with LI. Twenty-one children with LI, 21 TD children matched for age, and 21 TD children matched for receptive vocabulary scores were tested on their comprehension and production of both imperfective and perfective verb forms in past tense contexts. Although the groups did not differ in their comprehension performance, the children with LI were less accurate than both comparison groups in producing both imperfective and perfective forms. Based on these results, it appears that children with LI have difficulties selecting the appropriate aspectual marking in past tense contexts.

A Williams-szindróma (WS) egy ritka genetikai fejlődési zavar, amely a numerikus képességek súlyos sérülésével jár együtt. Két numerikus rendszer, az analóg mennyiségi rendszer és a verbális rendszer működését vizsgáltuk meg Williams-szindrómában, három eltérő numerikus feladatban: egyszerű össz__

We examined learning and retention in nonverbal and verbal declarative memory in Hungarian children with (n = 21) and without (n = 21) SLI. Recognition memory was tested both 10 minutes and one day after encoding. On nonverbal items, only the children with SLI improved overnight, with no resulting group differences in performance. In the verbal domain, the children with SLI consistently showed worse performance than the typically-developing children, but the two groups showed similar overnight changes. The findings suggest the possibility of spared or even enhanced declarative memory consolidation in SLI.

We present data on the language of space in Hungarian individuals with Williams syndrome (WS; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 8; and 21; 11) and a verbal control (VC) group of typically developing (TD; 19 in the first, 15 in the second study, between 3;5 and 10;7) children from: (1) a study of elicited production and comprehension of spatial terms; and (2) a sentence completion task on case markers in their spatial and non-spatial use. The first study showed poorer performance in the WS group, but similar performance patterns and a special difficulty of SOURCE terms in both groups. We did not find overall group differences in the second study. We argue that WS performance patterns reflect WS spatial abilities and seem to be constrained by the same factors in WS as in TD. Results also lead us to conclude that, contrary to most previous claims, there is no selective deficit of spatial terms within WS language, and they also suggest that not all uses of spatial terms r...