Overuse of familiar phrases by individuals with Williams syndrome masks differences in language processing.

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Sederias I, Krakovitch A, Stojanovik V, Zimmerer VC (2024). Overuse of familiar phrases by individuals with Williams syndrome masks differences in language processing. Journal of Child Language. Published online 2024:1-15. doi:10.1017/S0305000924000436

This work has been fun on so many levels. First, it connects my current research with my very early experiences with language sciences. Williams syndrome was often used as an example to illustrate how language functions as an independent cognitive “module” - or, even better, an “organ” - which doesn’t always behave like other functions of the brain/mind. I was academically raised with that belief, and now it was time to scrutinize it.

Second, the people with whom I worked were fantastic. This paper is based on a secondary data analysis conducted by two then-final-year undergraduate students, Ioana Sederias and Ariane Krakovitch, who I supervised. These were the years of the Covid lockdowns - dark and stressful at least for me - and working with these two smart and fun students was one of the few bright spots during that time.

Finally, the project itself went remarkably smoothly. Our predictions came naturally from previous observations and the data supported them strongly. Some confused head-scratching is fairly typical when one first looks at results, but not here. The data tell a very clear story. And this is the story:

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Speech pauses in speakers with and without aphasia: A usage-based approach.

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Bello-Lepe, S., Mahmood, S., Varley, R., Zimmerer, V. (2024). Speech pauses in speakers with and without aphasia: A usage-based approach. Cortex, 178, 287-298. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2024.06.012

When we speak, we can make pauses to emphasize, to give the listener time to reflect, or for other pragmatic/conversational reasons. But most pauses in speech, whether filled (“um …”) or silent, are disruptions. We may struggle with finding a word, or with planning a sentence. We may even struggle to put together a thought. Most pauses happen when our cognition can’t keep pace with our speech rate.

For that reason, we investigate speech pauses to learn more about language as ias we produce it. The presence and duration of pauses reveal when we face additional processing demands, and can inform us about which properties of language matter. For example, we are more likely to make a pause before a complex sentence, or before a verb rather than a noun. Pauses also provide insights into language impairment, for example following stroke. This paper identifies a new relevant variable for understanding pauses in people with aphasia (a language disorder following brain damage) and healthy controls.

This is work carried out by Sebastián Bello-Lepe under my supervision. Putting the final touches on it after he died was extremely difficult for me. It also made me think more about the “bus factor”, about which I am going to talk later in this post.

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Interview for Dementia Action Week.

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University College London (my employer) sent me some interview questions for a profile posted as part of Dementia Action Week. If you want to read the interview, which focuses on my dementia-related research and teaching, click here. Click here to learn what UCL is doing to face the global challenge of dementia.

Thanks to my friend Magnus Long for taking the picture during a stroll through Highgate Wood.

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Automated profiling of spontaneous speech in primary progressive aphasia and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia: An approach based on usage-frequency.

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Zimmerer, V.C., Hardy, C.J.D., Eastman, J., Dutta, S., Varnet, L., Bond, R.L., Russell, L., Rohrer, J.D., Warren, J.D., Varley, R.A. (2020). Automated profiling of spontaneous speech in primary progressive aphasia and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia: An approach based on usage-frequency. Cortex, 133, 103-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2020.08.027

This one took ages to publish. Not only because we kept adding (post-hoc) analyses, but also because I thought the work should appeal to journals to which it ultimately did not.

We looked at language in rare dementias: Primary progressive aphasia, which mostly affects an individual’s ability to use language (we include the three major types, logopenic variant, semantic variant, and non-fluent variant), and behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia, which primarily causes behaviour and mood change. Data were provided by colleagues at UCL’s Dementia Research Centre.

The fascinating thing about dementia is that, ultimately, each kind has been associated with some language symptoms.

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#TrumpIsNotWell vs. Sleepy Joe: On the weaponization of dementia in politics, and its bleak future.

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When Ronald Reagan, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2004, ran for president at age 69 and a second time at 73, senility was part of the public debate. The Democratic Party used it in their campaign. After a presidential debate, a senior Democrat told the press: “Reagan showed his age”.

When dementia is mentioned today, the discourse is much more aggressive. The basic mental capacity of both candidates is under scrutiny.

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What do clinical populations tell us about the relationship between language and thought? It depends on which we examine.

Language in schizophrenia and aphasia: the relationship with non-verbal cognition and thought disorder. Little, B., Gallagher, P., Zimmerer, V., Varley, R., Douglas, M., Spencer, H., Çokal, D., Deamer, F., Turkington, D., Ferrier, I.N., Hinzen, W., Watson, S. (2019). Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 24(6), 389-405. https://doi.org/10.1080/13546805.2019.1668758

This is the first comparative paper from our project on language and cognition in aphasia and schizophrenia. As far as I know this work is unique. One large aim was to profile and compare the language of these two populations, for clinicial purposes as well as to approach one of the bigger questions in cognitive science: What is the relationship between language and thought, or to be a little more precise, verbal and (seemingly) non-verbal cognition?

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For people with a language or cognitive impairment, the difference between "know" and "think" can be the difference between understanding and not understanding a sentence.

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Zimmerer, V.C., Varley, R.A., Deamer, F., Hinzen, W. (2019). Factive and counterfactive interpretation of embedded clauses in aphasia and its relationship with lexical syntactic and general cognitive capacities. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 49, 29-44.

Çokal, D., Zimmerer, V., Varley, R., Watson, S., Hinzen W. (2019). Comprehension of embedded clauses in schizophrenia with and without formal thought disorder. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 207(5), 384-392.

You and your friend get ready for a day trip to the coast. You see your friend pack light clothing and sunscreen. “I know that it is sunny over there,” she says. You check the weather forecast. It is all clouds and rain. “No,” you say. “You just think that it is sunny.”

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Automated Language Analysis Post Christmas FAQ Special

Recently our research received some media coverage. Tom Whipple from The Times wrote an article about language in dementia, published on December 22nd. As a result of the article, Richard Hamilton contacted me to talk about our work for a piece for BBC World Service (follow this link and jump to the ten minute mark). We appreciate the attention not only to our project, but also to research on language in dementia in general (including its clinical potential). However, some more details and a bit of framing don’t hurt, so I put together this layman-friendly FAQ to add information and also credit colleagues who contributed but were not mentioned.

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Automated analysis of language production in aphasia and right hemisphere damage: Frequency and collocation strength.

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Zimmerer, V.C., Newman, L., Thomson, R., Coleman, M., & Varley, R.A. (2018). Automated analysis of language production in aphasia and right hemisphere damage: Frequency and collocation strength. Aphasiology, 32(11), 1267-1283. DOI: 10.1080/02687038.2018.1497138

People with aphasia rely on more common words, and more strongly collocated word combinations, in spontaneous language production.

In aphasia, the effects that make a word or sentence easier or harder to process become intensified. Words that take milliseconds longer for a healthy speaker may become out of reach after brain damage. Sentences that are a bit more taxing for grammatical systems may become uninterpretable.

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Trump's cognitive testing in context.

Descriptions of Donald Trump's mental capacities range from "stable genius" (his words, as everyone knows by now) to some kind of mad dementia. It takes intelligence to become a successful businessman and to win the presidency as a relative outsider, say some; just listen to what he says, say others: his lack of knowledge about policy and policy making, his way of putting words together that sometimes challenges the label "stream of thought". The great linguist George Lakoff described Trump's way of speaking as very New York, very common folksy, and therefore politically smart; the great linguist Georger Pullum simply called it "Trump's aphasia". After looking at one excerpt of a campaign speech, Pullum ranted that "this nasty, racist, golden-quiffed, self-publicizing nutcase has barely a coherent thought in his head" and suggested that there was no sentence structure to analyze (I think the majority of linguists will disagree with the latter). Since Michael Wolff's claim that every single person who works with Trump doubts his capacity to carry out his job, questions about Trump's mental health finally became front page material.

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Artificial grammar learning in Williams syndrome and in typical development: The role of rules, familiarity, and prosodic cues.

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Stojanovik, V., Zimmerer, V., Setter, J., Hudson, K., Poyraz-Bilgin, I., & Saddy, D. (2017). Artificial grammar learning in Williams syndrome and in typical development: The role of rules, familiarity, and prosodic cues. Applied Psycholinguistics, 1-27.

I heard about Williams syndrome (WS) for the first time when I was a linguistics student in Düsseldorf. The genetic disorder was interesting for one perceived dissociation: People with WS, so the view, had typical language capacities, but impairments of general cognitive abilities, demonstrating that the language system was independent, modular in the sense of (early) Chomsky and Jerry Fodor. Today we know this to be wrong. The language in WS may appear typical at a quick glance, but there are production as well as comprehension deficits, especially at a grammatical level. This study, led by Vesna Stojanovik at the University of Reading, aimed to understand what underlies the language profile in WS.

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"UCL Cognition and Grammar Lab"

In the past months I put together a website for our lab, now called "UCL Cognition and Grammar Lab". Our group has been active since late 2013, but finally decided to build up a stronger presence, especially in light of projects which we expect to involve more public engagement. The lab focuses on language in a range of pathologies (especially stroke and neurodegenerative diseases) and how it relates to other aspects of cognition.

The address is www.cognitionandgrammar.net

I again went with Squarespace since I am quite happy with it and it was easy to show other members how to upload content.

Deictic and propositional meaning – new perspectives on language in schizophrenia.

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Zimmerer, V.C., Watson, S., Turkington, D., Ferrier, I.N., & Hinzen, W. (2017). Deictic and propositional meaning – new perspectives on language in schizophrenia. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 8, 1-5.

While schizophrenia is generally considered a thought disorder, its symptoms are to a large degree observable through language. We learn via language about a person's thought disorder and delusions, and most hallucinations in schizophrenia concern hearing voices. Negative symptoms (for example lethargy, aphathy) as well go with changes in communication.

One question that may turn out to be important for understanding schizophrenia, and possibly clinical practice, is whether people with schizophrenia only differ in what they say (for example, if they claim that the Queen is their aunt), but whether they also differ in how they say it.

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"He is looking at Muslim pictures on his phone."

I spent a wonderful week at the Science of Aphasia conference on Lido di Venezia. I was looking forward to write a post about a number of great presentations and inspiring ideas, and about spending lunch breaks swimming in the Adriatic Sea. I would be writing this post now if, on the way back to London, I hadn't joined a sad little club.

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Language formulas - for your convenience.

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Let's say you know about 30,000 words in your language, which, according to some studies, makes you slightly above average. Some of these entries are everyday words, such as "you", "door", or "go". Others are more rare, like "aghast" and "triptychon". Some of these words are easy to access, usually those that we use often and have a more concrete ("dog") than abstract ("democracy") meaning. There is also an effect of "age of acquisition" in that words that we learned earlier in life seem cognitively more anchored. It is difficult to tell this effect apart from frequency of use, since children tend to learn everyday words first.

If your language system works like the majority of language models suggest, it is based on "words and rules". All words, or at least their roots, are stored in a mental lexicon, and when you utter a sentence your system retrieves each needed word and applies combinatorial ("grammatical") principles to generate the utterance. This needs to happen within fractions of a second. Our system must work like this at least to some degree since we can use our word and combinatorial knowledge to generate a virtually infinite number of sentences.

But how often do we need this procedure?

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